Here is the latest ad from Mothers Against Greg Abbott.
It is powerful.
This is a reason to sign up for Twitter.
Fiona Hill has studied the words and actions of Vladimir Putin for years as a Russia expert on the National Security Council. Since Trump fired her, she has been at the Brookings Institurion and is free to speak in public.
I think you will find this interview in Foreign Policy interesting.
She thinks Putin is playing mind games with the West.
What a liar he is. He just signed a “historic” deal with Ukraine to allow Ukrainian wheat to reach global markets and ease world hunger. One day later, Russian missiles struck the port of Odessa, where the grain was supposed to be shipped out.
Governor Kevin Stitt played fast and loose with federal COVID relief funds. He tried to convert them to vouchers, which was not their purpose. Although the federal government was slipshod in handing out Payroll Protection Program (PPP) billions, it paid attention to misuse of state relief funds.
U.S. Department of Education auditors recommended clawing back more than $650,000 in misspent federal coronavirus relief funds from Gov. Kevin Stitt and reviewing an additional $5.5 million in purchases, according to a federal audit released Tuesday.
The questioned spending came from Stitt’s Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program, which gave $1,500 grants to low-income families for educational purchases like computers and school supplies during the pandemic.
Auditors pinpointed questionable expenditures like arcade games, Christmas trees, smart watches, sofas, televisions and refrigerators totaling $652,720. The extraneous items made up more than 10% of all purchases. The $5.5 million is the total of purchases the auditors did not analyze and could contain unauthorized items.
The tally of noneducational items families purchased with program funds was higher than previously reported in a joint investigation The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch published in May.
The auditors also found poor record keeping for another relief program managed by ClassWallet called Stay in School. The program distributed tuition grants for up to $6,500 to students already attending private schools during the pandemic.
Auditors also found Oklahoma failed to follow federal guidelines for four of Stitt’s five educational relief programs, the report shows.
State officials gave the Florida-based company ClassWallet a no-bid contract to administer the Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet program and distribute grants to families.
Oklahoma could not provide supporting documentation that students who received grants were actually enrolled and registered at private schools, according to the audit.
Keep reading for more details.
CNN posted an important article about two billionaires in Texas who are spending heavily to push state politics to the extreme right fringes on social issues. Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks despise gays, love guns, and preach a version of Christianity that is suffused with hate, not love or charity or kindness. Above all, they aim to destroy public education, which they see as the root of America’s cultural decline.
If you read one article today, make it this one. It explains the drive for vouchers for religious schools. What Dunn and Wilks want is not “choice,” but indoctrination into their selfish, bumigored world view.
CNN’s investigative team writes:
Gun owners allowed to carry handguns without permits or training. Parents of transgender children facing investigation by state officials. Women forced to drive hours out-of-state to access abortion.
This is Texas now: While the Lone Star State has long been a bastion of Republican politics, new laws and policies have taken Texas further to the right in recent years than it has been in decades.
Elected officials and political observers in the state say a major factor in the transformation can be traced back to West Texas. Two billionaire oil and fracking magnates from the region, Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, have quietly bankrolled some of Texas’ most far-right political candidates — helping reshape the state’s Republican Party in their worldview…
Critics, and even some former associates, say that Dunn and Wilks demand loyalty from the candidates they back, punishing even deeply conservative legislators who cross them by bankrolling primary challengers. Kel Seliger, a longtime Republican state senator from Amarillo who has clashed with the billionaires, said their influence has made Austin feel a little like Moscow.
“It is a Russian-style oligarchy, pure and simple,” Seliger said. “Really, really wealthy people who are willing to spend a lot of money to get policy made the way they want it — and they get it…”
Former associates of Dunn and Wilks who spoke to CNN said the billionaires are both especially focused on education issues, and their ultimate goal is to replace public education with private, Christian schooling. Wilks is a pastor at the church his father founded, and Dunn preaches at the church his family attends. In their sermons, they paint a picture of a nation under siege from liberal ideas…
Dunn and Wilks have been less successful in the 2022 primary elections than in past years: Almost all of the GOP legislative incumbents opposed by Defend Texas Liberty, a political action committee primarily funded by the duo, won their primaries this spring, and the group spent millions of dollars supporting a far-right opponent to Gov. Greg Abbott who lost by a wide margin.
But experts say the billionaires’ recent struggles are in part a symptom of their past success: Many of the candidates they’re challenging from the right, from Abbott down, have embraced more and more conservative positions, on issues from transgender rights to guns to voting.
“They dragged all the moderate candidates to the hard right in order to keep from losing,” said Bud Kennedy, a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper who’s covered 18 sessions of the Texas legislature…
People who’ve worked with Wilks and Dunn say they share an ultimate goal: replacing much of public education in Texas with private Christian schools. Now, educators and students are feeling the impact of that conservative ideology on the state’s school system.
Dorothy Burton, a former GOP activist and religious scholar, joined Farris Wilks on a 2015 Christian speaking tour organized by his brother-in-law and said she spoke at events he attended. She described the fracking magnate as “very quiet” but approachable: “You would look at him and you would never think that he was a billionaire,” she said.
But Burton said that after a year of hearing Wilks’ ideology on the speaking circuit, she became disillusioned by the single-mindedness of his conservatism.
“The goal is to tear up, tear down public education to nothing and rebuild it,” she said of Wilks. “And rebuild it the way God intended education to be.”
In sermons, Dunn and Wilks have advocated for religious influence in schooling. “When the Bible plainly teaches one thing and our culture teaches another, what do our children need to know what to do?” Wilks asks in one sermon from 2013.
Dunn, Wilks and the groups and politicians they both fund have been raising alarms about liberal ideas in the classroom, targeting teachers and school administrators they see as too progressive. The billionaires have especially focused on critical race theory, in what critics see as an attempt to use it as a scapegoat to break voters’ trust in public schooling.
In the summer of 2020, James Whitfield, the first Black principal of the mostly White Colleyville Heritage High School in the Dallas suburbs, penned a heartfelt, early-morning email in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, encouraging his school to “not grow weary in the battle against systemic racism.”
The backlash came months later. Stetson Clark, a former school board candidate whose campaign had been backed by a group that received its largest donations from Dunn and organizations he funded, accused Whitfield during a school board meeting last year of “encouraging all members of our community to become revolutionaries” and “encouraging the destruction and disruption of our district.” The board placed Whitfield on leave, and later voted not to renew his contract. He agreed to resign after coming to a settlement with the district. Clark did not respond to a request for comment.
Whitfield said he saw the rhetoric pushed by Dunn and Wilks as a major cause of his being pushed out.
“They want to disrupt and destroy public schools, because they would much rather have schools that are faith-based,” Whitfield said. “We know what has happened over the course of history in our country, and if we can’t teach that, then what do you want me to do?”
Meanwhile, the legislature has also been taking on the discussion of race in classrooms, passing a bill last year that bans schools from making teachers “discuss a widely debated and currently controversial issue of public policy or social affairs.” The legislation was designed to keep critical race theory out of the classroom, according to Abbott, who signed the bill into law.
Some of the co-authors and sponsors of the bill and previous versions of the legislation received significant funding from Dunn and Wilks.
The billionaires “want to destroy the public school system as we know it and, in its place, see more home-schooling and more private Christian schools,” said Deuell, the former senator.
By the power of their money, these two billionaires are reshaping public policy in Texas to make it as narrow-minded and bigoted as they are. Their reactionary vision will indoctrinate students and crush the freedom to teach and the freedom to learn.
If you live in Texas, vote for Beto O’Rourke for Governor, Mike Collier for Lt. Governor, and for legislators who support public schools.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes today about some recent votes in Congress that defined what Republicans are against.
Republicans believe that states should control which rights are protected inside their borders. They do not believe in abortion rights. They do not believe in the right to have access to contraception. They do not believe in marriage equality. They do not believe that women have the right to cross state lines if they are pregnant. (How Will states enforce that last belief? By administering pregnancy tests to every woman under 50 who is attempting to leave a state where abortion is illegal?)
What do they believe in? Not freedom or liberty, since they legislate constraints on private action. They do believe in censorship, bans on behavior in the privacy of your bedroom, bans on topics that may be discussed in the classroom. Republicans want to restore a mythical world of white male supremacy.
Richardson writes:
Far from rejecting the idea of minority rule after seeing where it led, Republican Party lawmakers have doubled down.
They have embraced the idea that state legislatures should dominate our political system, and so in 2021, at least 19 states passed 34 laws to restrict access to voting. On June 24, in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision, the Supreme Court said that the federal government did not have the power, under the Fourteenth Amendment, to protect the constitutional right to abortion, bringing the other rights that amendment protects into question. When Democrats set out to protect some of those rights through federal legislation, Republicans in Congress overwhelmingly voted to oppose such laws.
In the House, Republicans voted against federal protection of an individual’s right to choose whether to continue or end a pregnancy and to protect a health care provider’s ability to provide abortion services: 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 99% of House Republicans.
They voted against the right to use contraception: 195 out of 209 Republicans voted no; 2 didn’t vote. That’s 96% of House Republicans.
They voted against marriage equality: 157 out of 204 Republicans voted no; 7 didn’t vote. That’s 77% of House Republicans.
They voted against a bill guaranteeing a woman’s right to travel across state lines to obtain abortion services: 205 out of 208 Republicans voted no; 3 didn’t vote. That’s 97% of House Republicans.
Sixty-two percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal. Seventy percent support gay marriage. More than 90% of Americans believe birth control should be legal. I can’t find polling on whether Americans support the idea of women being able to cross state lines without restrictions, but one would hope that concept is also popular. And yet, Republican lawmakers are comfortable standing firmly against the firm will of the people. The laws protecting these rights passed through the House thanks to overwhelming Democratic support but will have trouble getting past a Republican filibuster in the Senate.
Maureen Downey of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posted a guest column by two university scholars in Georgia, warning about the dangerous legislation now under consideration.
T. Jameson Brewer is an assistant professor of social foundations of education at the University of North Georgia. Brandon Haas is an associate professor of social foundations and leadership education at the University of North Georgia.
Brewer and Haas write:
At present, several bills in the state Legislature — including House Bill 1084 and Senate Bill 377 — weaponize grievance politics in the culture wars during a Georgia election year. These bills are our state’s iteration of “anti-critical race theory” proposals across the nation.
In Florida, lawmakers are seeking to make it illegal for white students to feel discomfort. In Oklahoma, a recent proposed bill would allow parents to sue teachers for $10,000 per day if they discuss any topic that does not perfectly align with a student’s closely held religious belief.
The House and Senate bills here in Georgia do not mention critical race theory by name. But they are part of this growing ideological trendto manufacture and capitalize on outrage as it relates to what students are taught or not taught in schools — the front line, as it were, of the nation’s culture war.
While there have long been efforts from the political right to censor curriculum and ban books in U.S. schools, these efforts have reached a fever pitch over the past two years. First, parents shouted at local school boards to ignore medical science and reopen schools as well as remove mask mandates during the height of the pandemic. Then, concerns over the teaching of CRT began to spring up across the country.
The simmering perception that K-12 schools and universities are engaged in teaching students to hate the United States or themselves was captured in the Trump administration’s 1776 Report. That report, not penned by historians, is full of inaccuracies in its attempt to promote fascist-like indoctrination that the United States is without historical or contemporary issues. Among many concerns, the 1776 Report attempts to suggest that George Washington freed his slaves and, thus, the United States does not have a legacy of racial oppression. Those with an accurate understanding of history know Martha Washington freed one of approximately 123 slaves.
Recently, the Heritage Action group tweeted about “uncovering” the teaching of CRT in Gwinnett County Public Schools despite K-12 districts suggesting that they do not teach CRT. Yet, this tweet was not the “gotcha” that Heritage may think it was for a few reasons: (1) The course in question was an Advanced Placement language and research course (that is, a college-level course), (2) students learn myriad frameworks for examining and critiquing issues, and (3) this type of critical thinking is precisely what we should want education to teach our students. All of that said, Superintendent Calvin Watts, noted that the syllabus in question was never used in classes. A district spokeswoman said it was a sample syllabus submitted to the organization that provides AP curriculum.
Georgia’s proposed bills seek to establish that racial injustice is an artifact of the past that no longer exists. They state that educators cannot suggest that the United States or Georgia is fundamentally biased based on race. Yet, any examination will clearly show that racial bias was a fundamental component of our legal, social, and educational system — from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarcerations. The question, then, is whether or not these inequalities still persist. For this, students need to develop the ability to examine, evaluate and critique myriad forms of data and generate their own fact-based conclusion.
While part of any learning process is extending beyond our comfort zones, that discomfort is not what is at stake with these bills in Georgia, Florida and a dozen other states. It is uncomfortable to admit that white schools receive so much more in funding than nonwhite schools. Admitting this reality begs action. If we claim that the U.S. affords all children with a level playing field, the receipts showing that the field is structurally uneven suggests that we either forfeit the claim of equality or seek to remedy the inequality…
The larger problem created by SB 226 is that it creates a slippery slope of giving power to those who lack training in curriculum, instruction, and library media. This trend should alarm anyone who does not fancy a Nazi Germany-style authoritarian government over a democratic republic. In fact, one of the initial steps taken in Nazi Germany was banning of books, control of school curriculum and requirements of “loyalty oaths” and coerced patriotism as we are seeing in a variety of proposed laws across the country.
The United States has a checkered past that is troubling for all citizens. This is known as difficult history and provides students with an opportunity to understand how the past shapes the present so that they can be thoughtful and effective citizens. As novelist and essayist James Baldwin said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
Will Georgia codify lying to students? Will we ban or burn books? While the next political outrage may find another arena to target and destroy for political gain, there are real harmful implications of the one currently targeting schools and books in an effort to satiate the public’s broad ignorance about buzzwords such as critical race theory. These bills are not anti-CRT, whatever that may mean. They are explicitly anti-education.
Mercedes Schneider writes here about the decision by Willie Carver, Kentucky’s 2022 Teacher of the Year, to resign.
Carver testified before Congress and described the indignities he endured because he is gay. Carver is a highly qualified, highly experienced teacher. He loves teaching. But he is afraid to return to the classroom because of the state-sponsored bigotry that threatens teachers and students like him.
Carver told members of Congress (in part, open the link):
Identity is rarely discussed by direct means. No teachers come out as straight. They are married to opposite sex spouses whose pictures sit on their desks or whose names come up in stories about vacations or weekend trips to the grocery store.
LGBTQ teachers and students will not be afforded this freedom. They will be required to deny their existence and edit the most basic aspects of their stories, unlike their classmates and colleagues.
Few LGBTQ teachers will survive this current storm. Politicizing our existence has already darkened our schools.
I’m made invisible. When we lost our textbooks during lockdown, I co-wrote two free textbooks
with a university professor, made them free to anyone who wanted them, and found sponsors to print them. I wasn’t allowed to share them at my school. Other schools in Kentucky celebrate similar work by teachers, but my name is a liability.
I’m from the small town of Mt. Sterling, KY and I was invited to meet the President of the United States. It was not advertised to my students and colleagues. My school didn’t even mention it in an email or morning announcement.
This invisibility extends to all newly politicized identities. Our administrators’ new directive about books and lessons is “nothing racial.”
We all know how to interpret this.
Works by white people living lives as white people are never called racial.
Works by Black and brown people living lives as Black and brown people are always called racial.
The politicization of identity erases their identities.
Parents now demand alternative assignments when authors of texts or materials are Black or LGBTQ; we teachers are told to accommodate them, but I cannot ethically erase Black or queer voices.
We ban materials by marginalized authors, ignoring official processes. One parent complaint removes all students’ books overnight.
Endangered educators
My Gay Straight Alliance (GSA), a campus group dedicated to discussing and helping make schools safe for LGBTQ students, couldn’t share an optional campus climate survey with classmates. I was told it might make straight students uncomfortable.
Students now use anti-LGBTQ or racist slurs without consequence. Hatred is politically protected now.
When my GSA’s posters were torn from walls, my principal’s response was that people think LGBTQ advocacy is “being shoved down their throats.”
Inclusive teachers are thrown under the bus by the people driving it.
During a national teacher shortage crisis, I know gay educators with perfect records dismissed this year.
A Kentucky teacher’s whiteboard message of “You are free to be yourself with me. You matter” with pride flags resulted in wild accusations and violent threats. During this madness, his superintendent wrote to a parent, “This incident … is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.” The situation became unimaginably unsafe. He resigned.
Last month, a parent’s dangerous, false allegations that my GSA was “grooming” students were shared 65 times on Facebook. I felt my students and I were unsafe. Multiple parents and I asked the school to defend us. One father wrote simply, “Please do something!” The school refused to support us.
There are 10,000 people in my town; one fringe parent doesn’t represent most parents, who trust us.
Student suicides
School is traumatic; LGBTQ students are trying to survive it. They often don’t. Year after year, I receive suicidal goodbye texts from students at night. We’ve always saved them, but now I panic when my phone goes off after 10:00.
Meryl, a gentle trans girl from Owen County High, took her life in 2020. She always wanted a GSA. Her friends tried to establish one, but the teachers who wanted to help were afraid to sponsor it. Meryl’s mother Rachelle runs an unofficial GSA, PRISM, from the local library.
45% of LGBTQ youth seriously considered suicide this year. We chip away at their dignity and spaces to exist. The systems meant to protect them won’t even acknowledge them.
I recently attended Becky Oglesby’s TED Talk. She described surviving a tornado with first graders, how they huddled, her arms around them, as their school walls lifted into the darkness.
I sobbed uncontrollably. I realized that for fifteen years, I have huddled around students, protecting them from the winds, and now the tornado’s here. As the walls rip away, I feel I’m abandoning them.
But I’m tired. I’ve been fighting since my first day in a classroom. Fighting for kids to feel human. Fighting for kids to be safe. Fighting to stop the fear by changing hearts and minds.
I’m tired. I don’t know how much longer I can do it.
It is not safe to be gay in Kentucky or Florida or most states in the South and Midwest. Nor is it safe to be Black or Brown in the many states that have banned teaching about the history of racism.
Willie Carver has accepted a position at the University of Kentucky where he will work in student services.
Censorship and harassment does eliminate homosexuality. Nor does it turn all students white.
Lying about history doesn’t change history. It just spreads ignorance.
The New York Post, the flagship of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire lambasted Donald Trump for his failure to stop the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The 1/6 Committee is making a difference! Just think. If Trump’s theory that the Vice-President can decide the election, then Al Gore could have thrown out Florida’s votes in 2000 and declared himself President. And in 2024, Kamala Harris can choose the next President.
The New York Post editorial board wrote:
As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling on his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing.
For three hours, seven minutes.
There has been much debate over whether Trump’s rally speech on Jan. 6, 2021, constituted “incitement.” That’s somewhat of a red herring. What matters more — and has become crystal clear in recent days — is that Trump didn’t lift a finger to stop the violence that followed.
And he was the only person who could stop what was happening. He was the only one the crowd was listening to. It was incitement by silence.
Trump only wanted one thing during that infamous afternoon: to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to decertify the election of Joe Biden.
He thought the violence of his loyal followers would make Pence crack, or delay the vote altogether.
To his eternal shame, as appalled aides implored him to publicly call on his followers to go home, he instead further fanned the flames by tweeting: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
His only focus was to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.
It’s up to the Justice Department to decide if this is a crime. But as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.
Please watch this fascinating series (part one and part two) by Australian television on the rank cynicism of Rupert Murdoch and FOX News.
Under his leadership, FOX turned into a propaganda machine for Trump. Its leading correspondents (Sean Hannity and Judge Jeanine) joined his rallies, urged people to vote for him. They ceased to be journalists.
The two parts are gripping and well worth watching. There are pending lawsuits against FOX, Rudy Guiliani, and Sidney Powell for slandering Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, another voting machine used only in Los Angeles.
Powell and Guiliani both said numerous times that the voting systems were used to hack the vote and steal the election. Powell has since said that her claims were so ridiculous that no one took them seriously.
A must watch.
Veteran educator Arnold Hillman and his wife Carol retired to South Carolina. But instead of golfing, they devoted themselves to a high-poverty high school and worked directly with the students to encourage them to aspire them to go to college.
Arnold writes here about what he has learned about South Carolina:
As with the beginning of any sports season, odds makers, fans, team owners, managers and coaches and players look forward to the onset of the games. In single person sports like golf, tennis, combat sports such as real wrestling, boxing, UFC, and the martial arts, expectations are even greater.
How do successful teams, individuals and those who are in charge, manage to rise above others? Why are certain teams and individuals levels of expectations so very high? Why is it that former doormats become champions in a few short years?
There are many examples of those kind or turnarounds. How about Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali) destroying the world champion Sonny Liston? How did the 1980 USA hockey team come from obscurity to defeat the greatest teams in the world?. For pitysake, how did the New York Mets go from nothingness to World Series Champs in 1969?
There are so many examples of these kind of things that apply to what is happening in education here in South Carolina. Let’s go back to sports for a moment. Certainly, individuals have their own expectations of how they will succeed. Whether nature or nurture, is always a question. If a group of players on a football team have their own beliefs, and they are not shared by the coach, there will be little success.
Try and explain the success of the New England Patriots and then the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. In the case of New England, players wanted to be traded there because of the level of expectations the teams always had of themselves. Tom Brady and Bill Belicheck knew how to win and how to inspire others. Mediocre players who migrated to the Pats soon became integral parts of the success of the team.
Now that Tom Brady is with the Bucs and Bruce Arians, the Coach, there is also an expectation of victories. So, they win the Super Bowl in their first year together. On the other end is the Jacksonville Jaguars, with a super quarterback and a coach who had no level of expectations.
What does this have to do with education in South Carolina? Do we ever wonder why our state is always at the bottom of any ranking list in education? The history is long and continual. Here is a site that will take you a while to read. It is, however, a clear picture of why education has not flourished in our state.
Now that you understand our history, you can see why the level of expectation for our children is so low. Pat Conroy and his “Corridor of Shame,” described the situation in many of our poor and rural school districts. He taught in one of those districts. He understood.
For some reason, it appears that those in charge of education at the state level continue to treat parts of our state in a way that encourages low expectations. Here are some historical reasons why South Carolina’s education system has floundered though the years:
“1. A strong tradition brought from England that public support for education should be limited to the poor
2. Education seen as more of the responsibility of the Church than the State
3. Attitudes of those outside the wealthy class that worked against a unified system, including low regard for learning, reluctance to accept charity through free tuition, and the need to keep children in the family labor force
4. The very high cost in the 1700s and 1800s to provide quality schools outside the citiesand coastal areas, population was sparse and transportation poor
5. Strong resistance to local taxation for schools until the late 1800s
6. Interruption of a burgeoning “common school movement” in South Carolina by the CivilWar, and the subsequent disruption of a tax base
7. Increased white resistance to the public school idea following the Reconstruction government’s attempts to open schools to all races
8. An attitude on the part of some 20th century leaders that too much education would damage the state’s cheap labor force
9. The slow growth of state supervision of the schools due to strong sentiments toward local control
10. The financial burden of operating a racially segregated system, and the social and educational impact of combining two unequal systems”
(The History of South Carolina Schools
Edited by Virginia B. Bartels
Study commissioned by the Center for Educator Recruitment, Retention, and Advancement)
(CERRA–SC)
These historical happenings still are partially responsible for our current education system. Low test scores in the poor and rural sections of the state confound state leadership. Therefore, they have come to expect these outcomes year after year.
Yet, in travels across the state, SCORS (South Carolina Organization of Rural Schools) has seen how those school districts and their children make huge efforts to improve education. We have worked with these children in one local high school and seen the lack of resources, lack of quality of instruction, and actual lack of teachers in math and sciences.
In many of the rural and poor school districts, there has been “white flight” to private schools, charter schools, religious schools and home schoolings. Once again the wealthier the school district, the higher they are in the rankings of school districts in the state.
So, what is left- a lack of expectations for those left in the public schools. Why, say the talking heads and misunderstanders, aren’t these schools doing better. The system is really stacked against those poor and rural folks. However, are the children really unable to learn or compete, on any level, with the lighthouse districts? You bet they can. I have seen it.
Let me give you some anecdotal evidence. Dr. Vernon (not her real name) was the superintendent of a rural school district in South Carolina. She was, in fact, a product of the public schools in SC. She came from humble beginings and rose to her position as superintendent with some help from people and a great desire to help youngsters like herself.
After 5 years as superintendent, her board changed dramatically. One of her board members said that the students test scores on certain state tests were not true and that she had elevated those test scores. The Department of Education was called in and found none of those charges to be true. Board members could not believe that the children could be this good. By the way the superintendent and board parted ways with much acrimony.
Certainly there was much politics in her leaving. She also sued the board for defamation of character and won. Was all this because the level of expectations for the poor, minority and rural children were unable to improve on their test scores?
Another anecdote centers about a student (and an excellent basketball player) was placed in a prep school outside of Philadelphia. He spent a year there as a post graduate. After the first four weeks of school, he retook the SATs and got 120 more points than he had at his old school. He got an athletic scholarship from a prestigious university.
So what does all that mean? We can tell you from my 61 years in education that there is a blanket on our poor and rural children that leads to a lack of expectations and a lack of will to help these children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 