U.S. Department of Education Invites Astroturf “Parent” Groups to Join Advisory Council

By dianeravitch
August 31, 2022 //
16

Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts, is a specialist on the subject of Dark Money. That’s money given to a group or campaign where the donor’s name is hidden. His most recent book is Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.

Cunningham was instrumental in the defeat of a referendum in Massachusetts in 2016 to expand the number of charter schools. Early polling showed it would pass easily. But Cunningham dug into the funders and discovered that the proposition was funded by billionaires, including the Waltons and Bloomberg. He learned of an astroturf parent group called the National Parents Union, funded by the Waltons to promote charters and pretend there was a huge parent demand for them. The proposition was overwhelmingly defeated.

Imagine his surprise when he learned recently that the U.S. Department of Education was creating a Nation Parents & Families Council, and the National Parents Union was a member. He wrote to Secretary Miguel Cardona to express his concern that NPU was a Walton-funded astroturf group whose goal was to discredit public schools and promote charter schools.

He received a boilerplate response from the U.S. Department of Education’s communications office, dismissing his concerns.

Maurice T. Cunningham Maurice.Cunningham153@gmail.com


Dear Mr. Cunningham,
August 1, 2022


Thank you for your email to Secretary Miguel Cardona regarding National Parents Union (NPU) representation on the Department of Education’s (the Department) National Parents & Families Engagement Council (the Council). Your letter has been forwarded to the Office of Communications and Outreach and I am pleased to respond.
The Department acknowledges your concern and appreciates the in-depth information shared from your research regarding NPU. The Council is an opportunity for the Department to listen, learn and engage families and caregivers and will be a channel for parents and families to constructively participate in their children’s education. The goal of the Council is to be reflective of the diversity of the country and our public schools and the Department is open and accepting of all parent voices.
Again, thank you for your concern regarding organizations participating on the Council. Please know that the Department’s commitment to all parents, and their crucial role in their children’s education, is unwavering. The Secretary and staff here at the Department will continue to not just listen to parents but seek out their counsel and feedback because a school community works best when parents and educators are working together.
Sincerely,
/S/
Kelly Leon
Press Secretary, Office of Communications and Outreach, Delegated the Authority to Perform the
Functions and Duties of the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Communications and Outreach

Undeterred, Cunningham wrote another letter, going into greater detail.

MAURICE T. CUNNINGHAM, PhD, JD

August 16, 2022

The Honorable Miguel Cardona

Secretary of Education
U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202

Ms. Kelly Leon, Press Secretary, Office of Communications and Outreach

U.S. Department of Education
400 Maryland Avenue SW
Washington, DC 20202

Dear Secretary Cardona and Ms. Leon:

I am in receipt of Ms. Leon’s August 1, 2022 reply to my letter to Secretary Cardona of June 28, 2022 in which I detail some of my research showing that National Parents Union does not belong on the Department of Education’s National Parents and Families Engagement Council. Ms. Leon’s response, which simply recites boilerplate about the council seeking to solicit the views of parent, is disappointing and inadequate. National Parents Union is not a parents’ organization at all. That’s the point.

I would have thought that an organization like NPU that was founded in 2020 and almost immediately received $700,000 in funding from the Vela Education Fund, a joint venture of the Charles Koch Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, might elicit DOE’s curiosity as to NPU’s authenticity. The WFF and individual Walton family members have been involved in school privatization efforts for years. WalMart, the company inherited by the family, is one of the most virulently anti-labor corporations in the world. As the labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein writes, WFF is “the single largest source of funding for the ‘school choice’ movement and a powerful advocate of charter schools and voucher initiatives.” The Waltons’ support for privatization is an entirely ideological project, based on a desire to enhance the social and cultural value of a free market in which government is weak while public goods like . . . education . . . are the fodder for entrepreneurial transformation. . . . Since public schools are by far the most pervasive of public institutions, and highly unionized to boot, this “$700-plus-billion-a-year industry”—John Walton’s phrase—has been a good place to start.

Charles Koch came to K-12 privatization only in recent years, announcing his intentions in a 2018 Koch Seminar in which another Koch network member ($100,000 required simply to attend) called K-12 privatization “low-hanging fruit.” As reported by the Washington Post’s James Hohmann, “Making a long-term play, the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his like-minded friends on the right are increasingly focused on melding the minds of the next generation by making massive, targeted investments in both K-12 and higher education.” The Koch network “dreamed . . . of breaking the teachers unions.” Charles Koch, skeptical for years about impacting K-12, had a Koch Industries vice-president named Meredith Olson investigate, and her strategic scheme spurred him on.

Meredith Olson is also important because by June 2019 Koch and WFF (both members of Stand Together) were announcing matching $5 million investments in a joint venture named “4.0”to “transform America’s education system” in their corporate image. Ms. Olson was K-12 Initiative Vice President at Stand Together. More importantly for considering the legitimacy of NPU, Ms. Olson is CEO and a board member of Vela Education Foundation. As her LinkedIn page shows, Ms. Olson is an oil and gas executive. She has no background in or understanding of education. She would have been responsible for the $700,000grant Vela made in August 2020 to NPU—an eight month old organization with no track record in grants administration.

Charles Koch’s “interest” in education was discussed on the podcast “Have You Heard” by Christopher Leonard, author of the best-selling Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America. Leonard described Charles Koch, like the Waltons, as an ideological libertarian. Leonard confirmed Koch’s intense anti-unionism and continued: “when you have public education … one of the biggest problems for the libertarians is that it’s funded through taxes. . . they see taxation truly as a form of of (sic) theft and robbery.” An extensive remark by Leonard is worth your careful consideration:

Know what the blueprint is. The Koch influence machine is multifaceted and complex and I am just telling you in a very honest way, there’s a huge difference between the marketing materials produced by Americans for Prosperity (Koch’s political organization, a parallel to NPU) and the behind the scenes actual politicalphilosophy. There’s a huge difference. And here’s the actual political philosophy. Government is bad. Public education must be destroyed for the good of all American citizens in this view.

So the ultimate goal is to dismantle the public education system entirely and replace it with a privately run education system, which the operatives in this group believe in a sincere way is better for everybody. Now, whether you agree with that or not as the big question, but we cannot have any doubt, there’s going to be a lot of glossy marketing materials about opportunity, innovation, efficiency. At its core though the the (sic) network seeks to dismantle the public education system because they see it as destructive. So that is what’s the actual aim of this group. And don’t let them tell you anything different.

One person who is not fooled by the Koch network’s PR machine is Charles Siler and that is because he was once part of it as a lobbyist and communications expert for the Goldwater Institute and Foundation for Government Accountability. Siler describes his former bosses: “Their ideal is a world with as minimal public infrastructure and investment as possible. They want the weakest and leanest government possible in order to protect the interests of a few wealthy individuals and families . . .” Siler describes one public relations technique as the “human shield.” Privatizers front a vulnerable and politically sympathetic population to protect them from progressive criticisms. They also understand that public schools are enormously popular. Thus, their proxies employ a steady drumbeat of messaging about “failing schools.” The goals are the same: destroy unions, strangle public schools, and privatizeeducation.

National Parents Union is a vehicle for the plans of the Waltons and Charles Koch. It presents as representing parents of color in search of a better life for their children, right out of the playbook Siler describes. The NPU team is drawn from alumni of the failed Families for Excellent Schools/Great Schools Massachusetts operations in New York and Massachusetts and as I explain in Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization FES was in reality the surrogate for Boston hedge funders and yes, the Waltons. NPU has used the Vela money to fund homeschooling pods that weaken public schools. At nearly every media opportunity, NPU spokespersons parrot the “failing schools” script.

Is there any conceivable reason to believe that National Parents Union is the blessed exception to the Waltons’ and Charles Koch’s laser-like focus on destroying public education? As Siler and Leonard teach us, DOE must ignore the elaborate marketing blitz that NPU can deploy and recognize NPU for what it is: an agent of wealthy libertarians with a wildly different and unpopular prescription for what is good for parents and children.

I understand that the council is on hold pending litigation brought by among others Parents Defending Education. As I explained in my letter of June 28, PDE is also a franchise in Charles Koch’s attack on public education. It is in alliance with Moms for Liberty, created by the right wing directorate Council for National Policy; and with Fight for Schools and Families, also a plaintiff in the litigation and headed by a former Trump administration and Republican Party communications executive. Should PDE prevail in its lawsuit and gain a seat on the council that would give Koch two seats on it. Even Betsy DeVos would blush.

The Department of Education should rescind its offer to National Parents Union to join the National Parents and Families Engagement Council.

Respectfully submitted,

Maurice T. Cunningham

Associate Professor (retired)

Department of Political Science

University of Massachusetts at Boston

cc: The Honorable Martin J. Walsh

Secretary of Labor

You can see the writing on the wall. All the astroturf parent groups will demand a place at the table. They fought masking, they fought vaccines, now they fight teaching about racism and gender, and they demand gag orders and book banning.

Will Secretary Cardona invite them to join his Council?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Dark Money, Education Industry, Fake, Koch Brothers, Massachusetts, Parent Groups, U.S. Department of Education

Heather Cox Richardson Remembers When Republicans Fought for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2022 //
14

Historian Heather Cox Richardson reminds us of a time long ago when Republicans were champions of public schools. long, long ago.

On August 21, 1831, enslaved American Nat Turner led about 70 of his enslaved and free Black neighbors in a rebellion to awaken his white neighbors to the inherent brutality of slaveholding and the dangers it presented to their own safety. Turner and his friends traveled from house to house in their neighborhood in Southampton County, Virginia, freeing enslaved people and murdering about 60 of the white men, women, and children they encountered. Their goal, Turner later told an interviewer, was “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went.”

State militia put down the rebellion in a couple of days, and both the legal system and white vigilantes killed at least 200 Black Virginians, many of whom were not involved in Turner’s bid to end enslavement. Turner himself was captured in October, tried in November, sentenced to death, and hanged.

But white Virginians, and white folks in neighboring southern states, remained frightened. Turner had been, in their minds, a well-treated, educated enslaved man, who knew his Bible well and seemed the very last sort of person they would have expected to revolt. And so they responded to the rebellion in two ways. They turned against the idea that enslavement was a bad thing and instead began to argue that human enslavement was a positive good.

And states across the South passed laws making it a crime to teach enslaved Americans to read and write.

Denying enslaved Black Americans access to education exiled them from a place in the nation. The Framers had quite explicitly organized the United States not on the principles of religion or tradition, but rather on the principles of the Enlightenment: the idea that, by applying knowledge and reasoning to the natural world, men could figure out the best way to order society. Someone excluded from access to education could not participate in that national project. Instead, that person was read out of society, doomed to be controlled by leaders who marshaled propaganda and religion to defend their dominance.

In 1858, South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond explained that society needed “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill.”

But when they organized in the 1850s to push back against the efforts of elite enslavers like Hammond to take over the national government, members of the fledgling Republican Party recognized the importance of education. In 1859, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln explained that those who adhered to the “mud-sill” theory “assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible…. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous.”

Lincoln argued that workers were not simply drudges but rather were the heart of the economy. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him.” He tied the political vision of the Framers to this economic vision. In order to prosper, he argued, men needed “book-learning,” and he called for universal education. An educated community, he said, “will be alike independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings.”

When they were in control of the federal government in the 1860s, Republicans passed the Land Grant College Act, funding public universities so that men without wealthy fathers might have access to higher education. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans also tried to use the federal government to fund public schools for poor Black and white Americans, dividing money up according to illiteracy rates.

But President Andrew Johnson vetoed that bill on the grounds that the federal government had no business protecting Black education; that process, he said, belonged to the states—which for the next century denied Black and Brown people equal access to schools, excluding them from full participation in American society and condemning them to menial labor.

Then, in 1954, after decades of pressure from Black and Brown Americans for equal access to public schools, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former Republican governor of California, unanimously agreed that separate schools were inherently unequal, and thus unconstitutional. The federal government stepped in to make sure the states could not deny education to the children who lived within their boundaries.

And now, in 2022, we are in a new educational moment. Between January 2021 and January 2022, the legislatures of 35 states introduced 137 bills to keep students from learning about issues of race, LBGTQ+ issues, politics, and American history. More recently, the Republican-dominated legislature of Florida passed the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act, tightly controlling how schools and employee training can talk about race or gender discrimination.

Republican-dominated legislatures and school districts are also purging books from school libraries and notifying parents each time a child checks out a book. Most of the books removed are by or about Black people, people of color, or LGBTQ+ individuals.

Both sets of laws are likely to result in teachers censoring themselves or leaving the profession out of concern they will inadvertently run afoul of the new laws, a disastrous outcome when the nation’s teaching profession is already in crisis. School districts facing catastrophic teacher shortages are trying to keep classrooms open by doubling up classes, cutting the school week down to four days, and permitting veterans without educational training to teach—all of which will likely hurt students trying to regain their educational footing after the worst of the pandemic.

This, in turn, adds weight to the move to divert public money from the public schools into private schools that are not overseen by state authorities. In Florida, the Republican-controlled legislature has dramatically expanded the state’s use of vouchers recently, arguing that tying money to students rather than schools expands parents’ choices while leaving unspoken that defunded public schools will be less and less attractive. In June, in Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court expanded the voucher system to include religious schools, ruling that Maine, which provides vouchers in towns that don’t have public high schools, must allow those vouchers to go to religious schools as well as secular ones. Thus tax dollars will support religious schools.

In 2022, it seems worth remembering that in 1831, lawmakers afraid that Black Americans exposed to the ideas in books and schools would claim the equality that was their birthright under the Declaration of Independence made sure their Black neighbors could not get an education.

—

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/21/politics/supreme-court-religious-schools/index.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-blocks-floridas-stop-woke-act-pushed-gov-desantis-rcna43908
https://www.flsenate.gov/Committees/BillSummaries/2022/html/2809
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/17/book-ban-restriction-access-lgbtq/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2022/08/03/school-teacher-shortage/
https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/education/2022/08/12/sarasota-schools-library-book-purchases-donations-frozen/10307632002/
Categories Education Reform, History, Republicans, Supporting public schools

John Merrow: Don’t Read Banned Books and Don’t Vote!

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2022 //
10

John Merrow’s title is sarcastic. Of course he wants you to read banned books, and he is deeply concerned about the large number of eligible voters—especially young people—who don’t bother to vote.

When someone on Twitter posted a list of 25 popular books that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis had supposedly banned from the state’s public schools, people went crazy. The list included Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” and Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.”

Below is a screenshot of the list. How many of these books have you read? Have your children read most of them? What on earth is going on in Florida?

People familiar with DeSantis’s efforts to restrict classroom discussion of controversial topics had no trouble believing that he would try to prevent young people from reading controversial or challenging books. If DeSantis did draw up a list, these books might well be on it.

But the list is a fake, a clever satire.

Many people were fooled, including teacher union President Randi Weingarten and “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill. Hamill’s screenshot of the list amassed more than 100,000 likes and 24,000 retweets.

(Add my name to the list of those who were taken in.)

Like all good satire, that fake list of banned books is rooted in truth, because book banning is real and growing. Florida school districts have banned around 200 books, according to a report published by PEN America, a nonprofit that tracks book banning in the U.S. Pen America ranks Florida third among US states for banning books, trailing only Texas and Pennsylvania.

We are in the midst of a pandemic of book banning, so it’s hard to imagine any title that would never be banned by some zealous or timid school board or ignorant legislator.

One way to stop this outbreak of censorship is to get active, vote, attend school board meetings, run for school board. Passivity and complaining is a losing strategy.

Time to turn back the rising tide of incipient fascism.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Civics, Democracy, Education Industry, Fascism, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press

Tom Ultican: The Best Book of the Year: How Democrats Abandoned Public Schools

By dianeravitch
August 30, 2022 //
49

Tom Ultican is one of the very best chroniclers of the “Destroy Public Education” movement. He was thrilled to discover a new book that explains the origins of the attack on public schools and calls out its founding figures. Lily Geismar’s Left Behind is a book you should read and share. It helps explain how Democrats got on board with policies that conservative Republicans like Charles Koch, the Waltons, and Betsy DeVos loved. This bipartisan agreement that public schools needed to be reinvented and disrupted brought havoc to the schools, demoralized teachers, and glorified flawed standardized tests, making them the goal of schooling.

Ultican writes:

Lily Geismer has performed a great service to America. The Claremont McKenna College associate professor of history has documented the neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party in the 1980’s and 1990’s. In her book, Left Behind: The Democrats Failed Attempt to Solve Inequalityshe demonstrates how Bill Clinton “ultimately did more to sell free-market thinking than even Friedman and his acolytes.” (Left Behind Page 13)

When in the 1970’s, Gary Hart, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, Paul Tsongas, and Tim Wirth arrived on the scene in Washington DC they were dubbed “Watergate Babies.” By the 1980’s Tip O’Neill’s aid Chris Mathews labeled them “Atari Democrats” an illusion to the popular video game company because of their relentless hi-tech focus. Geismer reports.

“Journalist Charles Peters averred that ‘neoliberal’ was a better descriptor. Peters meant it not as a pejorative but as a positive. … Neoliberals, he observed, ‘still believe in liberty and justice and a fair chance for all, in mercy for the afflicted and help for the down and out,’ but ‘no longer automatically favor unions and big government.’” (Left Behind Pages 17-18) [Emphasis added]

Democrats in search of a “third way” formed the Democratic Leadership Council to formulate policies that moved them away from unions, “big government,” and traditional liberalism.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger labeled the DLC “a quasi-Reaganite formation” and accused them of “worshiping at the shrine of the free market.”

Union pollster Victor Fingerhut called them “crypto-Republicans.”

Douglas Wilder a black Virginia politician criticized their “demeaning appeal to Southern white males.”

Others called them the “conservative white caucus” or the “southern white boys’ caucus.”

Jesse Jackson said its members “didn’t march in the ‘60s and won’t stand up in the ‘80s.” (Left Behind Pages 46-47)

In 1989, From convinced Bill Clinton to become the chairman of the DLC. That same year the DLC founded the Progressive Policy Institute to be their think tank competing with the Heritage Foundation and the CATO Institute. Today, it still spreads the neoliberal gospel.

This is an important book that explains how the Democratic Party lost its way.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Clinton, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, History, Hoax, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Republicans

Texas: Conservative Activists Attack Social Studies Standards for CRT and References to Gay Rights

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2022 //
16

Conservative activists in Texas are ready to fight for changes in the social studies standards because they smell “critical race theory” (I.e., any reference to racism in the past or present), and they are hopping mad that the standards refer to the gay rights movement. Apparently, they want a deletion of any standards that refer to racism or the existence of gay people.

The Houston Chronicle describes disagreement among rightwing extremists about whether to revise the standards now, in response to angry parents, or wait until 2023, when three new rightwing extremists join the state board. One of the new members participated in the January 6 insurrection.

The board is already controlled by Republicans. After January, it will shift even farther right into extremist territory. One sane Republican, Matt Robinson, lost his re-election to the far-right insurrectionist because he refused to support the MAGA love for charter expansion.

Conservative education activists are accusing the Republican-controlled State Board of Education of helping liberals smuggle bits of Critical Race Theory into social studies standards that were expected to be up for an initial vote next week.

But the vote is conspicuously absent from the agenda for Tuesday’s meeting, as a faction on the board calls for delaying them into next year, when 3 current GOP members are expected to be replaced by new members who lean more to the right…

Their frustrations with the early drafts of the standards included: the inclusion of LGTBQ activism alongside civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, a requirement for students to define “sexual orientation,” non inclusion of Moses as a historical figure, supposed inclusion of Critical Race Theory in ethnic studies courses and the lack of a requirement for history students to learn the U.S. motto, “In God We Trust.”

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Extremism, History, Racism, Texas

Dana Milbank: Call MAGA Extremists What They Are: Fascists

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2022 //
85

Dana Milbank is my favorite columnist in the Washington Post. He is outspoken and documents what he says. I am always informed by reading his work. This is a good one.

He writes:

President Biden on Thursday offered some harsh words about those of the “extreme MAGA philosophy” currently hacking away at our democracy.


“It’s not just Trump,” he said at a fundraiser. “It’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something: It’s like semi-fascism.”


He expanded on the theme later at a rally. “The MAGA Republicans,” he said, are “a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace — embrace — political violence.”

Good for him. Those who cherish democracy need to call out the proto-fascist tendencies now seizing the Trump-occupied GOP.


Republican candidates up and down the November ballot reject the legitimate outcome of the last election — and are making it easier to reject the will of the voters in the next. Violent anti-government rhetoric from party leaders targets the FBI, the Justice Department and the IRS. A systemic campaign of disinformation makes their supporters feel victimized by shadowy “elites.”

These are hallmarks of authoritarianism.


Americans are taking notice. A new NBC News poll finds that “threats to democracy” has become the top concern of voters, replacing the cost of living as the No. 1 concern. The 21 percent who cite it as the “most important issue facing the country” include 29 percent of Democrats, and even 17 percent of Republicans. (Many Republican voters have been deceived into believing there’s rampant voter fraud, but at least they care enough about democracy to be concerned.)

The Republican response to Biden’s warning? “Despicable,” Republican National Committee spokesman Nathan Brand said in a statement. “Biden forced Americans out of their jobs …” (For the record, the economy has added nearly 10 million jobs during Biden’s presidency, after losing 2.9 million during Trump’s.)
That’s emblematic of the GOP response generally when called out on its assaults on democracy: victimhood and fabrication.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) offered a classic of the genre this week. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, writing in The Post, had condemned Rubio’s contributions to “a culture of fakery,” saying the senator’s “fake populism and anti-intellectualism … are necessary ingredients of an authoritarian takeover.” Rubio, writing in the Federalist, a Trumpist publication, responded with more fakery, and by portraying himself as the victim. “This cisgender white male reeks of privilege,” Rubio wrote of Wilentz, borrowing the language of the woke left.
Rubio, misrepresenting a Post account of a Biden meeting with historians (including Wilentz), said that those warning about authoritarianism are “peddling … imaginary threats.” Rubio added: “If you’re looking for authoritarianism, look no further than what happened under the watch of Anthony Fauci and his allies in the elite establishment.”
The day after Rubio alleged that the true authoritarian threat is the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (a job Fauci has held since the Reagan administration), the senator joined Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at a campaign event. There, DeSantis said this about Fauci: “I’m just sick of seeing him. … Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.”

Dehumanizing a foe’s appearance and fantasizing about violence against him: Where have we seen this before?


Earlier this month, a man was sentenced to prison for threats against Fauci — including, as the Daily Beast reported, a wish to break every bone in his “disgusting elf skull.” It was one of countless violent threats against the scientist as Republican officials targeted him for, among other things, the “sweeping shutdown” during the pandemic, as Fox News’s Neil Cavuto put it to Fauci this week.
“I didn’t shut down anything,” Fauci replied.


That’s true. All Fauci could do was give advice. Some governors followed it. DeSantis didn’t. Instead, he fueled conspiracy theories, dubious treatments, and hostility to masks and vaccines. And Florida, after vaccines became available, had by far the highest covid-19 death rate among big states.


Since then, DeSantis has devoted himself to book banning, voter intimidation and restrictions on what schools can teach about race, history and sexuality — all while DeSantis, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, bashes “elites.”


Such relentless attacks on facts, expertise, learning and voting, like fantasies of violence against a nefarious elite, are tools of the authoritarian. But don’t take Biden’s word for it.


At DeSantis’s alma mater this week, Yale President Peter Salovey opened the academic year with a speech on the current “assault on truth,” in which he quoted Hannah Arendt, revered philosopher of the pre-Trump right: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”


This is where the MAGA Republicans are taking us. It’s past time to call it what it is.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Fascism, History, Republicans, Trump

Mom in Texas Shuts Down Extremists and Joins the Honor Roll

By dianeravitch
August 29, 2022 //
24

The superintendent of schools in Granbury, Texas, made clear that he didn’t want any books about LGBT characters or LGBT issues in the school library. He agreed with the angry conservatives who showed up at school board meetings to demand book-banning.

Superintendent Jeremy Glenn has previously emphasized to the district’s librarians that their community was “very, very conservative” and that any school employee who does not possess conservative beliefs “better hide it.” While he started by saying he didn’t care if the books were about homosexuality or heterosexuality, he spoke explicitly about banning books with LGBTQ content.

“And I’m going to take it a step further with you. There are two genders. There’s male, and there’s female. And I acknowledge that there are men that think they’re women. And there are women that think they’re men. And again, I don’t have any issues with what people want to believe, but there’s no place for it in our libraries.”

But then a parent with a child in the Granbury schools got up and pointed out that the folks who were complaining the loudest did not have any children in the schools. And she let them have it for their effort to impose their religion on her child’s public school.

Adrienne Quinn Martin went to the podium and let it rip.

“We know that books are continuing to be purged. We know student library aides have been banned. We know that a group of non-parents have pushed for these removals and continue to do so,” she began. “So, being a taxpayer does not grant special privileges over students, staff, and parents. I do not want random people with no education background or experience determining what books my child can read, what curriculum they learn, and what clubs they can join.”

“Just because you can get up at every meeting and rant and rave does not give you authority over my child’s education.”

“Your personal religious beliefs, people in this room and on this board, should not have an effect on my child’s education either. Our school are not to be used for personal political agendas and our children are here for education, not religious indoctrination,” she told the room as she looked various board members and attendees directly in the eye.

“I implore the board to put an end to attempts to appease these extremists. Focus on retaining staff, providing excellent public education and a safe and welcoming learning space for all students. The speakers speaking about what great Christians they are? Great. Go tell your pastor. Our schools are not your church.”

And as the room erupted in applause for her bold speech, Martin gathered up her papers and, with a nod, left the podium. The superintendent did not reply.

If you want to see her speech, it’s on her Twitter account @Mrsamartini

For her courage and common sense, I add her to the honor roll of this blog.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Courage, Equity, Extremism, Honor Roll, Texas

Billy Townsend: DeSantis Lost Polk County School Board

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2022 //
39

Sarasota, where DeSantis candidates won the school board, is a very conservative district.

Polk County went for Trump in the past; 52% of its voters are Republicans. But Ron DeSantis’ conservative slate lost.

Billy Townsend explains the surprising outcome.

And he concludes that if DeSantis can’t win Polk County, he’s in trouble.

To recap: Chief crank Ron DeSantis and his Polk GOP hench-cranks succeeded completely in making the Polk School Board elections partisan. In doing so, they lost basically every geographical engine of growth, commerce, creativity, and civic life in Polk County. And they added some functional chunk of Republican primary voters to the generic Polk County Democratic political coalition, at least for a night. Well played, GOP.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Republicans, Trump

Florida: MAGA Slate Wins Control of Sarasota School Board

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2022 //
12

A slate of rightwing extremists won control of the Sarasota school board. A group of Proud Boys celebrated with the winners. The right-wingers were endorsed by Governor Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis endorsed 29 candidates in school board races, 25 of them won. They share his goals of banning teaching about racism and gender identity.

VICE News wrote:

A trio of “anti-woke” GOP candidates claimed victory in elections for the Sarasota school board this week, boosted by endorsements from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and support from a far-right group founded by members of the Proud Boys.

During celebrations on Tuesday night, two of the newly-elected board members were photographed at the official victory party with two of the Proud Boys, one of whom posed flashing the OK sign, a known white-power dog whistle….

Ziegler and Marinelli did not immediately respond to VICE News’ request for comment on their links to the Proud Boys, but Sarasota Watchdogs, which Hoel and Radovich co-founded, denied the sign was racist.

“We are simply grass-root volunteers that pushed for a change from the tyrannical liberal school board,” the group told VICE News in a Facebook message.

As a result of the clean sweep on Tuesday night, the school board in Sarasota has gone from having a 3-2 liberal majority to having a 4-1 conservative majority. And Sarasota is not an outlier: It’s one of five school boards in Florida that flipped to conservative control this week. Another of those was the Miami-Dade school board, which is now the nation’s largest school district to be overseen by elected conservatives…

As well as securing the backing of the Proud Boys and DeSantis, the candidates were supported financially by rightwing activist groups like Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project PAC, which says it is “dedicated to electing school board members committed to abolishing CRT from the public school curriculum.”

Like many GOP candidates standing for school board positions this term, the ZEM candidates have focused their campaigns on hot-button GOP issues like critical race theory and anti-trans ideology.

Rolling Stone wrote that the school board races were a huge victory for DeSantis, who is ready to run for president if Trump steps aside.

DeSantis has made his mark on the national stage with his “parental rights” agenda that rejected Covid lockdowns, banned classroom discussions of systemic racism, and curbed lessons on sexuality in schools with the passage of the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The school board candidates he backed for Tuesday’s elections are all proud evangelists of his cultural crusade against any and all means of “wokeness” — a crusade detractors warn unfairly targets LBGTQ students and students of color.

“Parental rights” are to Ron DeSantis what election conspiracies are to Donald Trump: A signature issue reshaping his party. Tuesday’s races were the proving ground for Desantis’ shadow 2024 pitch, with results that showed some promise, if not conclusively so: 16 candidates won outright, while eight advanced to a runoff. As the national media focuses on the win-loss record of Trump-backed candidates, DeSantis has his own. And where Trump’s hand-picked winners are a harbinger of his continued potency among Republicans, DeSantis’ signify something else altogether: His ability to both grow and draft off of a movement.

To enter the Sarasota shriners’ hall on Sunday afternoon was to time travel to a not-so-distant future — one in which Ronald Dion DeSantis is running for president, should Trump allow it. Navy-colored DeSantis caps outnumbered Trump’s signature red ones, and the governor upped the score by tossing more with autographed bills from the stage. Some in the crowd promoted a decidedly DeSantis-focused strain of MAGAism: “Make America Florida,” their T-shirts read.

The “MAF” faithful listened, spellbound in a thick heat, as their governor railed against “woke” for nearly an hour. He warned that woke teachers “will change their [children’s] gender behind the parents’ backs” unless stopped by his agenda. He condemned woke school board candidates for “running on injecting sexuality into elementary school.” He said the line “educate, not indoctrinate” twice, both times to rapturous applause…

The rally in Sarasota was part of DeSantis’ four-stop sprint across the state to give his school board candidates a last-minute boost. It drew out the coalition they’d need to win: The mother of two who homeschools her children because, as she told me, “a lot of what’s going on is very scary — the school shootings, they’re getting the LBGTQ shoved down their throats.” The grandmother who confessed that she is “so concerned about our children being affected by pedophilia in the schools.” The high school teacher who praised how Sarasota interpreted the “Don’t Say Gay” bill’s parental consent requirements: “If my 10-year-old son wants to be called ‘Stephanie,’ I’d want to know,” she said.

DeSantis is a demagogue who figured out that the route to power is eased by attacking Blacks, denouncing those who teach the factual history of racism, and scaring the public about LGBT people. It’s fertile ground, he finds, to accuse teachers and liberals of being pedophiles who want to “groom” children and turn them gay or transgender.

Florida has a serious teacher shortage, and DeSantis wants to hire veterans and first responders, regardless of their lack of training or education or experience. DeSantis has no intention of improving education. He will demagogue the issues and demonize minorities and ride that program as far as it will take him.

Categories Censorship, DeSantis, Florida

Will the George Dawson School in Texas Ban the Biography of George Dawson?

By dianeravitch
August 28, 2022 //
16

The George Dawson Middle School in the Carroll Independent School District in Texas is named for a man who was enslaved, learned to read at the age of 98, and died at 103.

The school board is now reviewing whether Dawson’s biography should be read by students at the school. After all, its references to slavery and segregation might defy the state law against teaching “critical race theory.”

When Dawson’s book was published, it was hailed as an inspiring story. Its title: “Life Is So Good.”

A book about the grandson of a slave who learned to read when he was 98 years old is currently under review for use in the school named after him in Southlake.

The book, “Life is So Good,” tells the story of George Dawson’s life, from segregation and the civil rights movement to learning to read at 98. It’s one of about 10 under review by Carroll ISD….

Dawson gained worldwide attention for his 2000 memoir and was profiled on the Discovery Channel, Oprah, Nightline, and in People magazine. A grandson of slaves, he become a face for literacy before his death in 2001 at age 103.

The district insists that the book has not been banned…yet.

Others in the district say it has already been banned and the “administrative discussion” is a cover.

Categories Academic Freedom, Bigotry, Censorship, Racism
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