How Did Bobby Kennedy Jr. Become a Quack?

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2021 //
19

Much to the surprise of the millions of people who admired Robert Kennedy, his son who bears his name has become one of the nation’s leading anti-vaxxers, sometimes allying himself with the bottom fishers of the far right.

The AP reported:

While many nonprofits and businesses have struggled during the pandemic, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine group has thrived. An investigation by The Associated Press finds that Children’s Health Defense has raked in funding and followers as Kennedy used his star power as a member of one of America’s most famous families to open doors, raise money and lend his group credibility. Filings with charity regulators show revenue more than doubled in 2020, to $6.8 million.

Since the pandemic started, Children’s Health Defense has expanded the reach of its newsletter, which uses slanted information, cherry-picked facts and conspiracy theories to spread distrust of the COVID-19 vaccines. The group has also launched an internet TV channel and started a movie studio. CHD has global ambitions. In addition to opening new U.S. branches, it now boasts outposts in Canada, Europe and, most recently, Australia. It’s translating articles into French, German, Italian and Spanish, and it’s on a hiring spree…

As Children’s Health Defense has worked to expand its influence, experts said, it has targeted its false claims at groups that may be more prone to distrust the vaccine, including mothers and Black Americans. It’s a strategy that experts worry has deadly consequences during a pandemic that has killed more than 5 million people, when misinformation has been deemed a threat to public health. The death toll in the United States hit 800,000 this week, and nearly a third of those people have died since vaccines became available to all adults in the U.S. Unvaccinated people are 14 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than those who get the shot, according to the CDC.

As vaccines have become a wedge political issue, Kennedy’s opposition to the shot has at times brought him close to anti-democracy forces on the right who have made common cause with the anti-vaccine movement. The scion of the country’s most prominent Democratic family has appeared at events that pushed the lie that the 2020 election was stolen and associated with people who have celebrated or downplayed the violent Jan. 6. attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Encouraging people not to get vaccinated in the midst of a global pandemic that has killed more than 800,000 Americans and millions of people around the world is downright disgraceful. People who listen to this Kennedy are risking their lives.

Categories Health, Propaganda, Science

Missouri: A Report from the Front Lines

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2021 //
9

An educator in Missouri who is known to me wrote the following:

They drive us crazy.

The Governor is in favor of anything that allows people to do whatever they want when they want – even if it breaks a law or is uncivil. That has been the case for decades – except now things they all said only at dinner tables and the back rooms are expressed boldly in public… l

He and his allies have created and validated this “no one is going to tell me what to do” culture. And it is spreading regardless of politics. If you don’t get caught – it’s ok.

Even the legislature that cares less about civility and respect – including holding a hearing on CRT with only white invitees.

The latest is a child bringing a gun to school paired with the Michigan case. Blame the parents everyone says. Well – in Missouri, there is no law (they tried) requiring that guns be locked up in homes.

Then there’s masks! Eric Schmitt, the attorney general, sued every school district with a mandate and Republican judges supported it. The governor hid a scientific report that illustrated masks do save lives and severe illness. And the list goes on and on.

Not only has it taken authority from local districts to enact a mandate, he issued “cease and desist” orders to districts with mandates AND he is tweeting and encouraging parents to sue their districts. With all of the anti-mandate stuff, to encourage parents to sue their local government is actually treasonous as well as worthy of a hot line call.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote an editorial excoriating Schmitt. The editors titled it: “How Many Missouri Lives Will Eric Schmitt Endanger to Win a Senate Seat?”

“As Missouri’s attorney general, Eric Schmitt’s job on paper is primarily to defend the state’s interests in legal matters. But to watch how he has approached that job in recent months, Missourians would think his main duty is to stamp out medically valid pandemic safety policies wherever they might sprout. Whether it’s a school board member trying to protect students, a city leader trying to protect the local citizenry, or a medical patient whose life could be put at risk by an unvaccinated health care worker, Schmitt has sided against them in court, using Missourians’ tax dollars to do it.null

“Schmitt says he is standing up to big-government intrusion by Washington regarding vaccine mandates — but then he turns around and wields the power of the state to overrule local leaders and school officials on mask mandates, imposing his own judgment (and his own political interests) in place of both local decision-making and medical science. There is nothing conservative about this litigious campaign of anti-science demagoguery. Schmitt is pandering to the irrational right, pure and simple, in his attempt to win next year’s Republican U.S. Senate primary.

“Schmitt reached a new low last week, directly appealing to parents to report to his office any school districts that enforce mask policies, which he unilaterally decrees to be in violation of a court order. This extralegal stunt — reminiscent of the tactics of dictatorial strongmen who pit their citizens as informants against one another — ignores the fact that it’s not at all clear that the court’s order applies to mask policies imposed by elected school boards.”

Missourians will die because of Schmitt’s unreasonable opposition to public health measures.

Categories Education Industry, Missouri, School Choice

Adam Laats: History Offers Hope for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2021 //
66

Adam Laats is a historian of education at the State University of New York in Binghamton. He recently wrote a hopeful article in The Atlantic about the future, which I posted here, while disagreeing with his optimism. As the Supreme Court seems poised to tear down the wall of separaration, as the charter industry grows despite its multiple failures, as Republicans embrace privatization of schools, I’m not able to share his optimism. I hope he is right, and I am wrong.

He writes:

Things in the world of public education are grim. Texas politicians are banning books. GOP leaders continue their attacks on teachers and curriculum. And teachers are left, in one case at least, literally scrambling for dollars to fund their classroom essentials. 

And for those who know the history, none of this is new. As I argued in my book The Other School Reformers(Harvard University Press, 2015), for a hundred years, politicians and activists have attacked public schools, humiliated teachers, and frightened administrators into purging good science, history, and literature from their classrooms.

In this environment, it might seem ridiculous to suggest that public schools are winning, in the long term. Yet that’s what I argued recently in the pages of The Atlantic. Yes, conservatives seem to be mounting a vigorous assault on public education, a series of mini-January 6ths at school board meetings. In the end, though, those assaults only amount to what I’ve called a “politics of petulance,” more about political theater than actual ed policy. In the end, I think, the widespread demand for public education will outweigh any short-sighted partisan rancor. As I wrote,

Politicians willing to stand in the schoolhouse door to keep out troubling ideas will not be willing to stand there forever. Sooner or later, the cameras will leave, and parents will demand that schools give their children the best available education.

On this blog, Diane asked fair questions about my optimism. As Diane put it,

If parents really cared about high-quality education, wouldn’t they demand higher teacher salaries, reduced class sizes, and better physical care of schools?

I appreciate the opportunity to respond. In my current book, I’m exploring the earliest history of public schools in American cities, a topic Diane knows very well from her research into the history of New York’s schools. That history shows exactly those trends Diane mentioned, leading to the birth of urban public education. Parents DID demand higher teacher salaries, reduced class sizes, and better school facilities.

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, History

West Virginia: The Battle of Blair Mountain

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2021 //
38

Thanks to G.F. Brandenburg, who posted this very important report about The Battle of Blair Mountain, a largely forgotten milestone in the history of unionism.

Brandenburg opens his post by reminding us that the rich and powerful usually control history and write the narrative.

He adds this dramatic story of The Battle of Blair Mountain, which is unknown to most people and barely remembered in the state where it happpened. The famous but almost-forgotten battle pitted underpaid, impoverished miners against the coal industry’s hired and well-armed detectives and union-busters. After several days of fighting, federal troops were sent in to stop the combat.

The story was written by Irina Zhorov and appeared on PBS WHYY.

The site of the conflict is marked by an inconspicuous plaque. The land is inaccessible because its owned by a coal company.

Here is the lead-up to the Battle of Blair Mountain:

In early 20th-century Appalachia, miners in the southern West Virginia coal fields lived in company towns. They were dependent on their bosses for every necessity, including their homes and food. Pay was low. Living and working conditions were deplorable.

The United Mine Workers union attempted to organize miners in the region, but the coal companies fought back, often violently. In a series of clashes now called the Mine Wars, both union and company supporters were killed.

By 1921, tensions were coming to a head. Miners in Mingo County, south of Blair, had joined the union. In retaliation, the company had evicted them from their homes. The miners had been rounded up and were being kept in pens. State police had cut off food supplies, so families were starving.

Then private detectives who worked for the coal companies brazenly murdered a union sympathizer named Sid Hatfield, a hero to the miners. It was broad daylight, and Hatfield’s wife was by his side. Tensions boiled over.

One week after the murder, Frank Keeney, the leader of West Virginia’s United Mine Workers chapter — and Chuck Keeney’s great-grandfather — gave a series of speeches to rally miners in the coal fields.

Miners—10,000-15,000 of them—marched 50 miles to Blair Mountain to protest and fight.

Clearly, there are many people in West Virginia today whose parents or grandparents took up arms against the tyrannous coal companies. They know the history because it’s personal.

Yet this legacy of labor militancy does not seem to have any role in today’s politics. West Virginia is a red state with a Republican-controlled legislature. The Governor, Jim Justice, was a Republican who became a Democrat for his election in 2016. Seven months after his election, he reverted back to being a Republican, at a political rally with Trump by his side. Governor Justice is a billionaire who controls many businesses, mostly in agriculture and coal mining.

Why do West Virginians keep electing and re-electing Republicans who are hostile to the interests of poor and working-class people?

Categories History, Unions, West Virginia

Nora de la Cour: The Great American Teacher Exodus

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2021 //
82

Nora de la Cour is a high school social worker and a former teacher. In this article, which appeared in Jacobin, she provides a trenchant overview of the strains and pressures that drive dedicated teachers away from a profession they love.
She writes:

This school year has been marked by a flood of reports of dire school staffing shortages, including stories about schools shutting down because there are simply not enough adults in the building to keep kids safe. The seemingly ubiquitous theme of educators resigning mid-year has even become its own TikTok genre.

Kristin Colucci, who teaches English in Lawrence Public Schools in Massachusetts, described the situation at her high school to Jacobin: “One teacher quit, another retired, and there have been no teachers assigned to those classes. Students are literally sitting there by themselves. The message being sent: the class and the students are not worthy of this education.”

Edu-conomists who warn against teacher pay increases like to point out that shortages are district-specific and that overall teacher turnover may actually be lower right now than in recent years. That’s not saying much.

Teacher turnover has been on the rise in the United States since the mid-1980s. In the last decade, we’ve seen a growing crisis of teacher vacancies and declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs. Due to racialized problems like high student debt and poor working conditions, people who are not white are less likely to enter the profession and more likely to leave it, meaning students are deprived of the significant benefits of exposure to a diverse teaching workforce.

Shortages of qualified teachers interfere with learning, inflicting outsize harm on special education students and students in high-poverty districts and racially isolated schools. But the hardships that disproportionately impact marginalized groups of students and teachers are indicative of broad underlying ills that make it harder for all kids to experience the learning conditions they deserve.

When educators accumulate years on the job, they acquire invaluable knowledge about how to gain students’ respect and make high-level scholarship possible. Unfortunately, circumstances stemming from chronic disinvestment and a corporate reform model that punishes poverty make it untenable for many teachers to remain in the classroom.

Teaching is a hard job. Planning and executing lessons that will motivate students with divergent interests and skill sets takes a great deal of time, research, and imagination. Then there’s the labor of evaluating and thoughtfully responding to work from up to ninety students across multiple different classes, providing tailored instruction for English learners and special education students, building rapport with shy or angry kids, fairly dividing one’s attention, maintaining order and ensuring safety, collaborating with colleagues and families, and staying abreast of new developments in the subjects one teaches and the field of education generally.

Nevertheless, many teachers are eager to meet these challenges. The very fact that anyone pursues teaching when, with comparable education, they can earn significantly more money in other fields demonstrates that people are willing to give up a great deal because they are drawn to the vocation of nurturing young minds.Every step of the way, teachers are prevented from actually performing their vocation.

The trouble is that, at every step of the way, teachers are prevented from actually performing this vocation. Their “other duties as assigned” include playing nonteaching roles like bus and lunch cop, because districts are unable or unwilling to hire more staff. Teachers are required to attend meetings at which they playicebreaker games and watch clips of cartoon animals so their administrators can get credit for giving professional development. They may have a single forty-minute preparation period in which to plan and grade for four or five different classes (which is laughable). But they frequently find they can’t use that time for planning and grading because paperwork is piled on them, often at the last minute. In addition to myriad clerical and administrative tasks, they must document instructional interventions and, at many schools, submit detailed weekly lesson plans designed to satisfy their bosses’ checklists rather than excite and challenge learners.

The teacher exodus has coincided with the rise of a culture of micromanagement, as government presses administrators to watch teachers, measure their output, collect data about them, and see if they meet goals. District leaders, state leaders, federal leaders send teachers a demoralizing message: we don’t trust you. If no one watches, you might be a shirker. If kids get low test scores, it’s not because they were absent or didn’t do their homework, but because they have bad teachers. You.

All that data collection moves up the chain of command, to be reviewed by someone who never was a teacher.

I became an English teacher because I wanted to help students explore thrilling story-worlds, weave airtight arguments, and unravel sophistical rhetoric. Like an alarming number of my peers, I left the profession after just five years, finding I wasn’t allowed to teach in a way that could inspire my students. Instead of facilitating deep inquiry and lively debate, I was forced to make rushed deposits of scripted curriculum in order to meet standards written by Bill and Melinda Gates–funded reformers.Like an alarming number of my peers, I left the profession because I wasn’t allowed to teach in a way that could inspire my students.

I was willing to work weekends and ten-hour weekdays for shabby pay in the service of my students — but not in the service of my administrator’s need to convince her bosses we’d “covered” RI.11-12.1 through SL.11-12.6. I was told it didn’t matter if my classes only got to experience fiction through decontextualized excerpts; my job was to “teach the standard, not the book.” But I wanted to teach the books: whole, breathing texts can fascinate young people and ignite their genius. State standards grids make them yawn and pull out their phones, or boil over with justified indignation.

The pressure to raise test scores has undermined teaching and learning. It has produced ”play deprivation,” which is not developmentally appropriate and leads to students acting out. Over-testing has driven joy out of the classroom.

President Joe Biden’s Department of Education could address this problem by attempting to follow through on Biden’s campaign commitment to end the use of standardized testing in public schools. Instead, the department has opted for business as usual. Never mind that under corporate education reform and state disinvestment, business as usual has been steadily draining K-12 classrooms of the vibrant, beautiful things that make students and teachers want to wake up in the morning and come to school.

De la Cour insists that the teaching profession could be revived and restored. She summarizes the few but vital steps that are necessary to restore the dignity and prestige of teaching.
Open the link to find out what they are.

Categories Education Reform

Thank You, Karen Francisco!

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2021 //
5

Karen Francisco is editorial page editor of The Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. Before that, she was a member of the editorial board. After 40 years in journalism, she is retiring.

Francisco has been a stalwart supporter of public schools and an eloquent critic of privatization.

Indiana was once a state known for its devotion to its public schools, which are the heart of their communities.

Karen Francisco upheld that proud tradition when she exposed entrepreneurs, grifters, religious groups eager for public funding, and other looters of public funding.

Although it is a small gesture, I add Karen Francisco to the blog’s Honor Roll.

I met her when I visited Fort Wayne about ten years ago, and we sat down for a long and animated conversation about the invasion of Indiana by privatizers intent on ripping off taxpayers and communities. My dear friends, retired teachers Phyllis Bush and Donna Roof, first brought us together.

In her last editorial, she urged readers not to fall for the extremists running for office, but to vote for “the quiet and thoughtful voices” that want to bring people together.

Indianans will miss her.

All of us who believe that public schools belong to the public will miss her too!

In April, when I was scheduled to have open heart surgery, I asked a number of friends to write something original for the blog to keep it alive in my absence.

Karen Francisco wrote this one, which I scheduled on the day of my surgery, April 8, called “Why I Fight to Save Public Schools.”

Why I fight to save public schools

Karen Francisco, editorial page editor, The Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette

There’s an episode of “The Twilight Zone” in which an airplane passenger looks out the window to see a monster dismantling the aircraft engine. His terror escalates when he realizes he’s the only one who can see it happening.

There have been many occasions over the past two decades where I have felt like William Shatner’s character in that classic episode: Why don’t people realize public education is being dismantled in front of their own eyes?  

That’s my motivation for fighting for public schools.  People must understand what’s at risk.

It was as a parent that I had my first glimpse of the destruction underway. On a back-to-school night in September of 2000, I listened as a middle school math teacher complained that he would not be introducing any new material until the state’s standardized tests were administered.  He had been instructed by the administration to spend the first six weeks of the school year reviewing fifth-grade math lessons to bolster performance on the tests.  I instantly knew why my then-sixth-grader was, for the first time ever, complaining he was bored in school.

As an opinion journalist, I have opportunities other parents don’t have to question elected officials. When our editorial board met the next week with the Indiana superintendent of public instruction, I recounted how my children were spending so much time reviewing past lessons, and I asked Dr. Suellen Reed why so much emphasis was being placed on standardized testing.  

She launched into the accountability talking points I could eventually recite by heart. It was my first clue that not everyone saw the damage I sensed was beginning to occur. A costly scheme to label public schools with failing grades would help convince taxpayers and parents that children from low-income households needed vouchers to escape those schools. 

To her credit, Reed would be among the first of Indiana’s elected officials to acknowledge where high-stakes testing was headed, but her resistance cost her the position she held for four terms.  The governor wanted a superintendent supportive of his privatization agenda, so he tapped Tony Bennett, an affable high school basketball coach with a newly earned superintendent’s license. Together, they pushed through massive charter school expansion and a voucher school program. When he signed the bill, Gov. Mitch Daniels literally gave it a kiss.

I am fortunate to work for a publisher who is a strong supporter of public education, so our editorial pages became a persistent voice challenging Indiana’s unbridled rush to privatization, and I was eager to write editorials and bylined columns about what was happening all around us. The governor’s press secretary called my editor to complain after I served on a panel at a public education advocacy event. On a visit to our newsroom, Bennett told me he thought of me as one of those angry parents screaming at the coach from the stands. 

Unfortunately, our editorial voice was about as effective as one of those basketball parents. The vast majority of our readers and area lawmakers were either supportive of the far-ranging privatization effort or silent.  It would have been easy to give in to the complaints from some readers that our editorial board was wrong to oppose school vouchers, if not for the voices of educators and academics.  

“The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” by the esteemed proprietor of this blog, was a revelation. I had the opportunity to interview Diane about the book and later to meet with her when she delivered a lecture at our regional university campus. Her address energized a growing community of ed reform critics. including Phyllis Bush, a retired Fort Wayne teacher who galvanized a group of educators under the Northeast Indiana Friends of Public Education. In West Lafayette, Indiana, Superintendent Rocky Killion teamed with Steve Klink, a staunch public education supporter, to produce  “Rise Above the Mark,” a 2014 documentary that was an early warning cry about the growing obsession with testing and its detrimental effects on education. The Indiana Coalition for Public Education joined the fight. Its board now includes three of the four former Indiana state superintendents, with Bennett being the exception.

I wish I could say Indiana has seen some success in fighting off the privatization monster, but that’s far from the truth. More than $1 billion has now flowed to private and parochial schools through the voucher program, with no accountability.  A scandal involving a virtual charter school cost taxpayers at least $85 million, with seemingly no concern from lawmakers or taxpayers. In the current legislative session, the Republican supermajority is throwing everything at school choice: income limits that make vouchers available to wealthy families, ESAs, full funding for online-only schools and more.

There was a time when newspaper editorial boards could move mountains. As my industry has withered, that is no longer the case. But I’m taking heart this year in a growing number of voices questioning the support of private and parochial schools at the expense of Indiana public schools. It seems like there are now many of us aware of the destruction and determined to stop the monster before it sends public education crashing to the ground. 

Categories Education Industry, Honor Roll, Indiana, Privatization, Supporting public schools

Maurice Cunningham: Beware the Koch-Funded “Parents Groups”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2021 //
34

Maurice Cunningham is a retired professor of political science in Massachusetts who specializes in following the trail of Dark Money into school issues. He was a major influence in turning the public against a state referendum to expand charters in 2016; he revealed the Dark Money behind the charter advocacy and that revealed the lies behind the rosy rhetoric.

In this post, he describes the role of Koch money behind “parent groups” harassing educators in Newton, Mass.

He writes:

On Friday Travis Anderson of the Boston Globe reported that two Black principals in Newton had received “racist and confrontational” messages for doing their jobs: to help their students process the verdicts in the Kyle Rittenhouse and Tracy McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William Bryan Jr. (murderers of Ahmaud Arbery) trials. The hate came rolling in after the educators’ teaching methods were blown up in the right wing media network. Yes it’s terrible but it’s also deliberate.

The Globe reported that the hateful messages came after the radical right Breitbart News ran a heated misrepresentation about the Newton educators. Similar bulldust was published by conservative provocateurs Daily Caller, Washington Examiner, and The Federalist.

The generator of the story to the right wing propaganda network was Parents Defending Education. PDE is run by veteran Koch operative Nicole Neily, who refuses to discuss who funds the outfit (she can’t; it’s bad for business). PDE has ties to the Council for National Policy (CNP) which, as Anne Nelson has shown in Shadow Network, manages and coordinates strategy and tactics for an array of radical billionaire funders and Christian nationalist activists.

PDE is working on a model Koch and CNP have long used to attack college professors. Isaac Kamola explains how it’s done in “Dear Administrators: To Protect Your Faculty from Right Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.” Some information is received (PDE encourages anonymous tipsters) and then twisted or taken out of context. This works best if the educator is a woman, person of color (like the Newton principals), or LGBTQ. Then fringe outlets like Breitbart, Daily Caller, Federalist pick it up and publicize it. (With a little luck and the CNP’s connections, it might get on Fox). Post it online for the lip reading haters who act on this garbage and just sit back. The racist hate mail, phone calls, and social media posts will flow.

It’s depressing right? But it’s also intentional. This is part of a coordinated right wing attack on public schools (Critical Race Theory, anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, billionaire funded “parent” groups) and an assault on our government and American democracy. Parents Defending Education, Campus Reform, Moms for Liberty, Breitbart, Federalist—they all know what they’re doing and they know the results that eventuate from their tactics.

This is a hard story for daily journalism to tell, but it has to find a way. American democracy doesn’t have much time left.

We all need to stand up for our democracy and our public schools.

Cunningham recently published a new book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization.

Categories Accountability, Fake, Fraud, Koch Brothers, Massachusetts, Parent Groups

The Proud Boys Are Menacing School Boards, Town Councils

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2021 //
17

The New York Times reports that the Proud Boys, the white nationalist group of the far-right, is now using its members to protest mask mandates at local school board meetings and other local events. Their presence will probably cause some people to leave their school board position or not to run. But their presence makes it all the more imperative that concerned parents and other citizens run for school board, show up for school board meetings, and support candidates who want to make local schools better.

They showed up last month outside the school board building in Beloit, Wis., to protest school masking requirements.

They turned up days later at a school board meeting in New Hanover County, N.C., before a vote on a mask mandate.

They also attended a gathering in Downers Grove, Ill., where parents were trying to remove a nonbinary author’s graphic novel from public school libraries.

Members of the Proud Boys, the far-right nationalist group, have increasingly appeared in recent months at town council gatherings, school board presentations and health department question-and-answer sessions across the country. Their presence at the events is part of a strategy shift by the militia organization toward a larger goal: to bring their brand of menacing politics to the local level.

Categories Education Reform

Michael Moore: Mothers, Sons, Guns

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2021 //
55

Michael Moore grew up in Michigan, not far from Oxford, the site of the most recent school shootings. He writes in this post about what happened there, and he includes the full text of the fan letter that Ethan Crumbley sent to President Trump when he was elected. Reading it provides some insight into the climate in which Ethan was raised.
He begins:

In a nation born and built on violence, where there are now more guns in homes than there are people, a parent buys the son a gun as a gift. A Sig Sauer 9mm.

But the son is disturbed. Nonetheless, she takes him to the gun range. She wants him to be a good shot. She wants to spend time with him. She loves these mom-and-son days shooting guns. 

Then he wakes up one December morning, walks into his mother’s bedroom and blows her head off. He has four of her guns including the Sig Sauer 9mm she gave him as a gift. 

That did not happen this past week in Oxford, Michigan (about 19 miles as the crow flies from where I went to high school). It’s what took place on December 14, 2012, when the 20-year-old Adam Lanza took those guns his mother gave him to use when they went to the gun range together in Newtown, Connecticut — and after he killed her, he took them to Sandy Hook Elementary School, where he murdered 20 first-graders and 6 teachers and staff before he killed himself. The only gun he didn’t use in this bloody massacre was the Sig Sauer 9mm.

Open the link to read what Mrs. Crumbley wrote to Trump. She’s thrilled to have someone in the White House who supports her rights as a gun owner. But that’s not all.

Categories Education Reform

Holding Parents Accountable When Their Children Kill

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2021 //
51

This very important story appeared in the Washington Post.

She had seen her grandson’s red, spiral-bound notebook before that night, but now, as Catherine O’Connor sifted through its pages for the first time, what she read astonished her.

“School Shootings,” Joshua O’Connor had titled the first page, above a reconstruction of the Columbine High School massacre that left 13 people dead. In the pages that followed, Joshua, who’d just turned 18, described a detailed plan to carry out his own massacre: the shotguns, pistols, assault rifle and ammunition he would buy and the bombs he would build; the doors he would zip-tie “so bitches can’t escape”; the spot by the bleachers where he would set off the first explosion; the route he would take on his killing spree; the moment, when it was over, that he would end his own life.

“I Need to make this shooting/ bombing… infamous,” he wrote in early 2018. “I Need to get the biggest fatality number I possibly can.”
Catherine O’Connor, a retired probation officer who was Joshua’s guardian, showed the journal to her husband, who was equally disturbed. The next day, after O’Connor dropped her grandson off at school, she searched his room and found a semiautomatic rifle in a guitar case. Then she did what many parents of school shooters never do: called the police to report that a child she loved posed a threat to his classmates, his community and himself.

Last week’s shooting at Oxford High School in Michigan, which left four students dead and seven other people wounded, has focused unprecedented attention on the responsibility parents bear when their children fire shots on campuses.

For decades, mothers and fathers have overlooked clear warning signs that their teens were capable of violence, but adults are almost never held accountable when their negligence leads to bloodshed. That’s what makes Jennifer and James Crumbley, the parents of the 15-year-old charged with the shooting, so unusual. They each face four counts of involuntary manslaughter, almost certainly the most serious charges ever brought against an alleged school shooter’s mother or father.

Since 1999, children have committed at least 175 school shootings, according to a new Washington Post analysis. Among the 114 cases in which the weapon’s source was identified by police, 77 percent were taken from the child’s home or those of relatives or friends. And yet, The Post discovered just five instances when the adult owners of the weapons were criminally punished because they failed to lock them up. Another three cases in which adults were charged, including the one against the Crumbleys, are pending.
[More than 278,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine)

In Michigan, Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald has argued that the facts justify the felony charges against the couple, alleging “unconscionable” negligence.

Four days before the shooting, McDonald said, James Crumbley bought a 9mm Sig Sauer, which their son, Ethan, later posted a photo of on Instagram, writing, “Just got my new beauty today.” Three days before the shooting, Jennifer Crumbley posted that she and Ethan were at the gun range “testing out his new Christmas present.”

One day before the shooting, a teacher caught Ethan searching online for ammunition, but when the school alerted his mother, authorities say she instead texted her son: “Lol. I’m not mad at you. You have to learn not to get caught.”On the day of the shooting, McDonald said, a teacher found a note on which Ethan drew a person shot dead, along with “blood everywhere” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” When his parents were summoned to the school, the prosecutor noted, they refused to take him home — nor did they search his backpack for the gun. Less than three hours later, his rampage began.

The Crumbleys have pleaded not guilty, and their attorney denied the prosecutor’s allegation that the 9mm was kept in an unlocked drawer, saying “that gun was actually locked.”

School administrators also deny they did anything wrong, but the parents of two sisters who survived the shooting filed a pair of lawsuits, in federal court Thursday, accusing the district of negligence, too.


Regardless of who’s at fault, research shows that such deadly outcomes are not inevitable. In a report issued earlier this year, the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center reviewed 67 “disrupted plots” targeting schools between 2006 and 2018. Every time, the report said, “tragedy was averted” when others came forward after seeing alarming behavior. In most cases, friends, classmates or other peers spoke up, but in eight instances — or about 1 in 9 — a parent or grandparent noticed and reported something, sometimes after going through a relative’s bedroom or, as O’Connor did, reading a journal.


She discovered that Joshua had scheduled the attack for April 19 — the day before Columbine’s anniversary. She found the list of his self-diagnosed mental illnesses and the pages with the will that he’d written, explaining what was to be done with his ashes. In the journal’s seventh entry, she read this: “So today I just bought a Hi-Point 9mm Carbine rifle. … I can’t wait for April, it will be a blast.”

The day after his arrest, on Feb. 14, 2018, O’Connor watched what happened when another attacker wasn’t stopped.

Just past 2 p.m., 3,300 miles away in Parkland, Fla., another angry teenager who had threatened to shoot up a campus did just that, killing 17 people during the deadliest high school shooting in American history.
‘Not impulsive acts’

She never feared her grandson, but Joshua’s horrifying plot made clear that he needed help she and her husband couldn’t give him.
“What’s the right next step?” she recalled thinking before alerting authorities. “I don’t know what other choice there was.”

Because she made that choice, her grandson never fired a shot or took a life. Police arrived soon after her 911 call and searched Joshua’s room, where they found a collection of bomb parts and confiscated his rifle and notebook. Within hours, he was taken into custody.

Four decades before the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas and two decades before the shooting at Columbine, a teenager named Brenda Spencer opened fire on a San Diego elementary school on Jan. 29, 1979, killing two adults and wounding eight children and a police officer.
Spencer was 16, and her father, Wallace, had given her the .22-caliber rifle a month earlier. It was, just like Ethan Crumbley’s handgun, a Christmas gift.

Prosecutors never charged the man with a crime.

His potential culpability garnered little attention in the press at a time when school shootings were considered disturbing anomalies rather than a national crisis that demanded intensive training, expensive technology and armed officers to deter.
[‘Scared to death’: More than 4 million children endured lockdowns in the 2017-18 school year]

Not much had changed by 1998, when Kip Kinkel shot 27 people, killing two, at Thurston High in Oregon. He used three guns from home, including a Glock his dad had bought for the firearm-obsessed 15-year-old as a way to strengthen their relationship.

Kinkel had access to the weapons despite being an angry, violent, depressed and deeply delusional ninth-grader who had twice been suspended for attacking other students and, another time, was caught by police trying to buy a stolen firearm. Whether prosecutors would have charged his parents for their negligence is impossible to know; Kinkel killed them both the day before the school shooting.

Much of the country would not awaken to the threat of school shootings until the next year, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and wounded more than 20 others at Columbine.

Klebold’s mother, Sue, has talked about her experience perhaps more than any other shooter’s parent, even writing a book about her son, the attack and its aftermath.

“Dylan did not learn violence in our home. He did not learn disconnection, or rage, or racism. He did not learn a callous indifference to human life,” she argued in “A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy.” “Dylan showed no clear and present danger, the way some children do.”


Harris’s parents, who have never given an interview, could not make the same claims, according to Peter Langman, a psychologist and the author of “Warning Signs: Identifying School Shooters Before They Strike.”
“Eric Harris’s parents knew he had anger management problems — they said he punched a wall about every four weeks — knew he had been suspended for hacking into the school’s computer system and stealing everyone’s locker combination, knew he had been arrested for breaking into an electrician’s van and stealing equipment, and also knew that he had built at least one pipe bomb,” Langman said. “They also knew he drank and smoked pot. This, of course, does not predict mass murder, but should have warranted at least conducting room searches to see what else might be going on.”

Mass shooters, experts have found, seldom kill without warning.
“These are definitely not impulsive acts,” said Matt Doherty, who used to run the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center. “They are planned in advance, and that planning can occur over days, weeks or months or years.”

In 2017, parents in Maryland discovered such a plan in their 18-year-old daughter’s journal, where she laid out a “Columbine-type attack” on her high school, said Frederick County Sheriff Charles A. Jenkins.


The teen’s father also found materials for explosive devices, shotgun shells and a shotgun she had purchased, Jenkins said. The parents contacted school officials, who called the sheriff’s office. She later pleaded guilty to possessing explosive material.


“I wonder how parents cannot see signs that are developing in a home and in a family situation,” Jenkins said. “There are always signs somewhere.”

Few school shooters offered more warning signs than Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland gunman who pleaded guilty to the murders.

On the first day that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission gathered, one of their investigators presented a slide breaking down nearly 50 instances of threatening behavior that people knew about but didn’t report or that authorities knew about and didn’t act on. Instances in which Cruz tortured or killed an animal: seven. Times he was seen with a bullet, knife or firearm: 19. Declarations of hatred he made toward a group or person: eight. References he made about wanting to hurt or kill someone: 11. Threats that he would shoot up a school: three.

The commission’s chair, Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, called Cruz’s mother, Lynda, an “enabler.” She died a few months prior to the Parkland shooting.

“There’s no question about it,” he said in an interview, noting that she had taken her son to get a state ID card when he was 18 so he could buy a gun, despite knowing he was violent. Investigators learned that Cruz had once knocked out three of her teeth and, at least once, pointed a gun at her.

“There is no way she should not have known” what her son was capable of, Gualtieri said. “There is no way a reasonable, prudent person wouldn’t have recognized and identified it.”


‘A wake-up call’

Twenty-one years ago, in a town just 40 miles from Oxford, Mich., a first-grader found a handgun in a shoe box, took it to school and used it to kill a 6-year-old classmate. The 19-year-old man who owned the weapon later pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and served 29 months behind bars.

No gun owners since have faced a harsher penalty for allowing their firearms to fall into the hands of a child school shooter.

Politics are often blamed for the lack of accountability. Three years ago, Commonwealth’s Attorney Mark Blankenship wanted to charge the stepfather of a 15-year-old boy who had used the man’s gun to kill two people and wound 14 more at Marshall County High, in a deeply conservative part of Kentucky.

But, just as in Michigan, state lawmakers in Kentucky had never passed a regulation mandating that adults prevent children from gaining access to their firearms, limiting Blankenship’s options. He lost reelection, blaming the failure, in part, on his comments about going after the stepfather.

Safety advocates now wonder whether the Crumbley case represents a broader shift in the way that the country assigns responsibility after school shootings. But its long-term impact may depend on the outcome. If the couple are convicted, will more prosecutors feel emboldened to go after negligent gun owners and, specifically, parents? If they’re exonerated, will the case have the opposite effect?

Regardless, some experts say, the charges could make a meaningful difference right away.


“My hope is that this will be a wake-up call for gun owners who are not safely storing their firearms,” said Allison Anderman, senior counsel at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “There are millions of teens and children who live in homes with unsecured guns.”

In fact, if the only change America had made after Columbine was to prevent children from obtaining firearms, hundreds of kids who accidentally shot themselves or each other would not have died or been maimed or suffered through the guilt of their mistake, at least 10,000 children might not have ended their own lives in suicide and more than half of the country’s school shootings wouldn’t have happened.

For Catherine O’Connor, the woman who reported her grandson to police in Washington state, doing the right thing came at a devastating cost. She pleaded with the court to show Joshua mercy, but he still received a 22-year prison term.


At a hearing, the judge called her a hero. O’Connor hated that. She just wanted to help her grandson.


The case has eroded her faith in the justice system, but she agreed with the Michigan prosecutor’s decision to charge the Crumbleys. O’Connor couldn’t comprehend why they hadn’t searched their son’s backpack during that meeting at the school.


“That’s so irresponsible, beyond belief,” she said. “That just outrages me.”
O’Connor said she had long been wary of allowing her grandson to go near unsecured firearms. She and her husband owned guns but said they were always hidden and equipped with trigger locks.

Of course, she could do nothing to stop Joshua from buying the semiautomatic rifle when he turned 18. But even her grandson came to a realization about America’s gun culture.


“Grandma,” he said the first time she saw him after this arrest, “guns are too easy to get.”

Categories Accountability, Guns, Guns in Schools, Parents
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