Nevada: Supreme Court Rejects Private School Vouchers Again!

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2022 //
8

Good news from Nevada, conveyed by the Rogers Foundation, which supports public schools.

Las Vegas, NV – Beverly Rogers and Rory Reid, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of The Rogers Foundation, are celebrating a Nevada Supreme Court decision that has once again halted a constitutional initiative attempting to establish an extreme and unprecedented school voucher scheme in Nevada.

“This is a huge win for students and Nevada families,” said Beverly Rogers, “This would have been detrimental for the public schools our community relies on, leading to even bigger class sizes and massive cuts. It’s a shame these groups want to sacrifice our public schools in favor of discriminatory and unaccountable vouchers. We are glad the courts once again ruled in our favor.”

The Nevada Supreme Court held, in Education Freedom PAC v. Reid, that the PAC’s voucher scheme failed in several key ways. It failed to propose a revenue source to fund the scheme’s substantial costs to taxpayers. Its description of effect was “deceptive and misleading,” failing to inform voters of the impact on the state’s budget and underestimating the cost of the scheme. Lastly, the initiative attempted to improperly direct future legislatures to enact certain laws, impeding their authority. The Court enjoined the PAC from moving forward with the initiative.

“It’s clear this group was trying to push its controversial scheme by deceptively mischaracterizing its impact on our public schools,” said Rory Reid, “Nevada’s highest court has halted their effort, rightly finding the public deserved to know the full truth.”

This failed constitutional initiative would have been one of the most extreme voucher measures in the country, putting taxpayers on the hook for at least $300 million to support the wealthy already enrolled in private schools. This would have resulted in a significant tax hike, deep cuts to public district and charter schools, and the reduction of critical community services.

“These groups will never stop and neither can we. There is a clear effort to destroy our public schools, the only system dedicated to serving all students. We cannot let them. We will not let them. And we will continue to fight on behalf of Nevada’s students and their families,” said Mrs. Rogers.

About Educate Nevada Now

The Rogers Foundation, a Nevada leader in support of public education, joined with local, state and national partners to launch Educate Nevada Now (ENN) in 2015. The organization is committed to school finance reform and improved educational opportunities and outcomes for all Nevada public school children, especially English language learners, gifted and talented students, students with disabilities or other special needs, and low-income students.

More information about ENN can be found athttp://www.educatenevadanow.com

Our mailing address is:
701 S. 9th Street
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Nevada, Privatization, Vouchers

South Carolina: Republicans Choose Unqualified Foe of Public Schools and Teachers for State Superintendent Race

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2022 //
9

South Carolina’s public schools, teachers, and students are in for some tough times. Republicans went to the polls and selected a rightwing ideologue as their candidate for state superintendent. Ellen Weaver does not have the master’s degree that state law requires the state chief to have. She has signed up to get a master’s in “Christian Leadership” at Bob Jones University and expects to get her degree in eight months.

Weaver has made her hostility to public schools and professional teachers clear. She (and the SC media) refer to education professionals as “the education establishment.”

Ellen Weaver, president and CEO of the Palmetto Promise Institute, handily defeated teachers advocate Kathy Maness in Tuesday’s GOP primary runoff, a development with potentially major implications for the state’s public schools…

Weaver, who does not currently meet the statutory requirements to hold officebecause she lacks an advanced degree, has cast herself as a bold reformer fighting to eradicate liberal ideologies like so-called critical race theory that she claims are seeping into public education.

“The fight to save our schools is a fight to save that American dream for the next generation,” she said at a debate last week. “If we don’t stand in the gap for our kids and against the wokeism and sexualization agendas that are coming out of Washington, we have lost our country.”

Weaver will face Democrat Lisa Ellis, a Richland 2 teacher and student activities director, in the general election. Ellis, who is best known for founding the grassroots teachers organization SC for Ed, won the Democratic primary outright earlier this month.

Weaver refers to a master’s degree as “letters behind your name.” Presumably, at a better time, when politicians weren’t putting a wrecking ball to public education, they set that qualification there to assure that the state superintendent was an experienced educator, not an ideologue who is contemptuous of the state’s most important public institution.

Sadly, South Carolina got the kind of leader that the law was supposed to bar. Teachers are upset about what happens next, as well they should be.

South Carolina needs a leader who will fight for more funding, especially for its most vulnerable children. If Weaver beats her Democratic opponent, the state will have a leader who dabbles in nonsense about race and gender instead of improving the schools.

If you are a parent, a teacher, or a concerned citizen, help elect Lisa Ellis. She’s a teacher, she has experience, she knows what students need and will fight for it.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Censorship, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, School Choice, South Carolina, Teachers, Vouchers

Mercedes Schneider: The Coach’s Prayer Was Neither “Personal” Nor “Private”

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2022 //
59

Mercedes Schneider writes about Neil Gorsuch’s opinion on behalf of the Supreme Court’s extremist supermajority, upholding a coach’s right to engage in “personal” and “private” prayer.

The problem, she points out, is that his prayer was neither personal nor private.

Why did Gorsuch distort/PREVARICATE/LIE ABOUT the facts? My guess is that he is advancing an incremental plan by the Court’s extremists to restore prayer in the schools and overturn the 1962 decision that banned it (Engel v. Vitale).

Mercedes S. does something unusual but necessary. She goes beyond the Gorsuch opinion and reads the rulings against the coach in the appellate court, which show how Gorsuch simply ignored the facts of the case.

The appellate court rejected Coach Kennedy’s claim that he was engaged in personal, private prayer:

Below is the Kennedy backstory as detailed by Ninth Circuit Judge Milan Smith (beginning at page 9), who calls Appellant Kennedy’s supposed silent, private prayer narrative “false.” Smith begins by calling out a colleague on the bench, Judge O’Scannlain, for being taken in by it:

Unlike Odysseus, who was able to resist the seductive song of the Sirens by being tied to a mast and having his shipmates stop their ears with bees’ wax, our colleague, Judge O’Scannlain, appears to have succumbed to the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel for Appellant, to the effect that Joseph Kennedy, a Bremerton High School (BHS) football coach, was disciplined for holding silent, private prayers. That narrative is false.

Although I discuss the events in greater detail below, the reader should know the following basic truth ab initio: Kennedy was never disciplined by BHS for offering silent, private prayers. In fact, the record shows clearly that Kennedy initially offered silent, private prayers while on the job from the time he began working at BHS, but added an increasingly public and audible element to his prayers over the next approximately seven years before the Bremerton School District (BSD) leadership became aware that he had invited the players and a coach from another school to join him and his players in prayer at the fifty-yard line after the conclusion of a football game. He was disciplined only after BSD tried in vain to reach an accommodation with him after he (in a letter from his counsel) demanded the right to pray in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of games while the players were on the field, and the crowd was still in the stands. He advertised in the area’s largest newspaper, and local and national TV stations, that he intended to defy BSD’s instructions not to publicly pray with his players while still on duty even though he said he might lose his job as a result.

As he said he would, Kennedy prayed out loud in the middle of the football field immediately after the conclusion of the first game after his lawyer’s letter was sent, surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician, and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.

She adds additional details, all of which demonstrate that Justice Gorsuch and his colleagues bought a fictional tale to advance their zeal to restore prayer in the schools.

Categories Accountability, Lies, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state

Boston Picks Experienced Educator as New Superintendent

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
7

The Boston Public School board selected a new superintendent. She is Mary Skipper, who has had many years of teaching experience in Boston and is currently superintendent of the Somerville, Mass., district.

Currently the head of Somerville Public Schools, Skipper will take over at a crucial juncture for Boston, which only days ago fended off a state takeover by agreeing to a long list of improvements that she will now be charged with seeing through. She narrowly edged out the other finalist, BPS regional superintendent Tommy Welch, in a 4-3 vote.

The 55-year-old Skipper previously worked in Boston for nearly two decades, teaching Latin at Boston Latin Academy before working her way from principal to district administrator overseeing three dozen high schools. She earned a reputation for innovations at a high school she previously led. A decade ago, then-president Barack Obama held up Skipper’s school, TechBoston Academy, as a national model when he delivered a speech there.

She’s been superintendent of the roughly 4,700-student Somerville district since 2015.

Skipper was not available for comment after the vote. But she previously has said that teachers were surrogate parents to her, playing a deep role in her life, so she felt teaching was something she needed to do.

The job she’s stepping into has already been largely redefined by an agreement finalized this week between Mayor Michelle Wu and state Education Commissioner Jeff Riley, who had threatened to label the district as “underperforming.” In exchange for maintaining autonomy and the district’s reputation, Skipper will have to carry out a long list of mandates from a district improvement plan agreed upon Monday that aims to overhaul special education, services for English learners, and transportation, among other things…

Skipper’s selection could carry some risk for the district, since she’s not available to take over full time in Boston until late September, after the deadline for completing 10 of 24 action steps required by the joint agreement for improving Boston’s schools…

Skipper will also have to overcome frustration from some community members that the superintendent search did not yield Black or Latino finalists. Civil rights leaders and education advocates called on district leaders to halt the vote or extend the process after the search committee presented only two finalists; Skipper is white and Welch is an Asian American.

Two other would-be finalists, a Black woman and a Latina, withdrew before the list was finalized and made public. The panel overseeing the search selected Skipper and Welch from a field of 34 applicants.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Boston, Education Reform, Massachusetts

Rep. Boebert: “I’m Tired of This Separation of Church and State Junk”

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
129

Rep. Lauren Boebert, a Trump Republican from Colorado, apparently never took a class in civics, government or history and is an embarrassment to the Congress in which she serves. She won her primary on Tuesday. Boebert is a high school dropout who earned her GED in 2020, according to Wikipedia. She is a born-again Christian and a strident advocate of guns; she and her husband own a restaurant—Shooters Grill in Rifle, Colorado,where staff are encouraged to carry guns. From the following report, which appeared in the Washington Post, it is certain that she is ignorant about the Constitution and the Founding Fathers.

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.)…says she is “tired” of the U.S. separation of church and state, a long-standing concept stemming from a “stinking letter” penned by one of the Founding Fathers.

Speaking at a religious service Sunday in Colorado, she told worshipers: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church. That is not how our Founding Fathers intended it.”

She added: “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk that’s not in the Constitution. It was in a stinking letter, and it means nothing like what they say it does.” Her comments were first reported by the Denver Post.

The Constitution’s First Amendment, which states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” has been widely interpreted to mean the separation of church and state — although the phrase is not explicitly used.


Gwen Calais-Haase, a political scientist at Harvard University, told The Washington Post that Boebert’s interpretation of the Constitution was “false, misleading and dangerous.” Calais-Haase said she was “extremely worried about the environment of misinformation that extremist politicians take advantage of for their own gains.”

Steven K. Green, a professor of law and affiliated professor of history and religious studies at Willamette University, agreed, saying, “Rep. Boebert is wrong on both matters.”


“While the phrase separation of church and state does not appear verbatim in the Constitution, neither do many accepted constitutional principles such as separation of powers, judicial review, executive privilege, or the right to marry and parental rights, no doubt rights that Rep. Boebert cherishes,” wrote Green, the author of “Separating Church and State: A History.”

Categories Colorado, Elections, Extremism, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Stupid

Georgia: Voters in Two Counties Reject Anti-CRT School Board Candidates

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
13

Voters are not buying the phony claims of the candidates running on platforms against “critical race theory,” not even in conservative counties in Georgia. Thanks to Jennifer Berkshire for this story.

The Georgia Recorder reports on two elections:

Voters in Cherokee and Coweta counties rejected three school board candidates backed by a right-wing federal PAC Tuesday, following similar losses in last month’s primary.

It’s uncommon for political action committees to weigh in on local races, so voters were surprised to open up their mailboxes and find flyers from the 1776 Project PAC endorsing a slate of candidates ahead of the primary.

The PAC is a response to the 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative examining the lingering effects of slavery throughout U.S. history.

The 1619 Project; critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion and social and emotional learning have become rallying points for white, conservative parents who say their children are being made to feel guilty for racial injustice.

On its website, the committee describes itself as “dedicated to electing school board members nationwide who want to reform our public education system by promoting patriotism and pride in American history. We are committed to abolishing critical race theory and ‘The 1619 Project’ from the public school curriculum.”

Among the PAC’s endorsees were Cherokee County’s Sean Kaufman, a small business owner, and Ray Lynch, a physician.

Cherokee

The two previously teamed up with fellow 1776 Project endorsees Cam Waters, who works for the Georgia Association of Health Underwriters, and accountant Chris Gregory, styling themselves as 4CanDoMore, a slate for parents who “have been silenced, ignored and belittled.”

“With 4CanDoMore we can have a board majority that asks questions, a board that is transparent and unafraid, a board that reflects the family values of Cherokee County,” reads a statement on their website.

Their goal was to create a majority on the seven-member board to prevent policies they view as divisive, especially critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The district had plans to hire Cecelia Lewis, a Black principal from Maryland to serve as its first diversity, equity and inclusion administrator, but she decided not to take the offer after watching a raucous meeting in which parents railed against her hiring.

The 4CanDoMore team offered Lewis’ planned hiring as evidence that the board did not consider the desires of parents.

Lewis has said she did not know what critical race theory was at the time and had no plans to incorporate it in her role. Cherokee County has never included the concept, which is typically reserved for higher-education graduate studies, in its curriculum, but the school board approved a resolution to ban it anyway. The state school board went on to impose its own ban on lessons teaching that the United States is racist, and Gov. Brian Kemp signed a bill into law further banning “divisive concepts” regarding racial history. Teachers and administrators have largely said such measures were unnecessary.

Cherokee is a conservative county — nearly 70% of voters there chose Donald Trump in 2020, but their rejection of the 4CanDoMore squad suggests local issues can still trump national culture war arguments, said Jamie Chambers, a writer and Cherokee County resident who opposed the four candidates.

“In my area, Ray Lynch was running against Susan Padget-Harrison, and unlike him, where he came from out of state and was just kind of attacking, she has experience. She has been a teacher. She’s been involved with our school system for decades and has ties to our community,” he said. “And I think, ultimately, that’s the thing that carried the day with voters, people who were connected, that were actually talking about real issues within our schools and not just repeating talking points that don’t apply to us. While we live in a very conservative area, I don’t think that the kind of people who were protesting the hiring of Lewis, who were banging on the windows and doors of the superintendent’s office, those aren’t representative of the voters around here.”

Kaufman lost to Erin Ragsdale, a businesswoman and educator, and Lynch was defeated by Padgett-Harrison, a professor of education at Piedmont College.

In last month’s primary, Waters and Gregory were both defeated by incumbent board members by significant margins.

Coweta

In Coweta, incumbent school board member Linda Menk was ousted by baseball coach Rob DuBose, who received nearly 80% of the vote in the runoff.

Menk received calls for her resignation after she attended the Jan. 6, 2021 rally in Washington that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Critics also offered a list of insensitive and conspiratorial social media posts as evidence of her unfitness.

She also raised hackles on the board in 2019 for contacting the FBI, allegedly in an attempt to set up colleagues in a non-existent bid-rigging scandal.

Menk said she did not breach the Capitol and was simply expressing her First Amendment right to protest.

She offered no apologies in a school board meeting days after the riot.

“It was not sedition, it was not insurrection,” she said. “I attended a very peaceful rally, one of the most meaningful things that I actually had the privilege of engaging in was a large percentage of the attendees were there who had escaped communist China and had emigrated to this country, and the stories that they told me, basically, the United States was the last hope, it was the last place that they had to go.”

At the same meeting, then-board chair Amy Dees castigated Menk for distracting from the job of supporting students.

“We do have First Amendment rights as board members, but as an elected official, there are consequences for what we post and say,” she said. “Tonight, three board members took an oath of office. That oath of office means something, it means something to me. I uphold that with the utmost of integrity. It saddens me that we are here again and again and again, and it seems to me, Miss Menk, that you’re in the center of that.”

Other Coweta candidates endorsed by the 1776 Project PAC, Maxwell Britton, Megan Smith and Cory Gambardella, fell to board incumbents in the May primary.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Extremism, Georgia, Race

Georgia: Protestors Drove This Black Educator Out of Her Job and Pursued Her

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
6

ProPublica wrote about a campaign to destroy the reputation of a black educator and their pursuit of her to another district. The white agitators accused her of being an advocate of “critical race theory,” but she didn’t know what it was. That didn’t deter the vigilantes.

In April of 2021, Cecelia Lewis had just returned to Maryland from a house-hunting trip in Georgia when she received the first red flag about her new job.

The trip itself had gone well. Lewis and her husband had settled on a rental home in Woodstock, a small city with a charming downtown and a regular presence on best places to live lists. It was a short drive to her soon-to-be office at the Cherokee County School District and less than a half hour to her husband’s new corporate assignment. While the north Georgia county was new to the couple, the Atlanta area was not. They’d visited several times in recent years to see their son, who attended Georgia Tech.

Lewis, a middle school principal, initially applied for a position that would bring her closer to the classroom as a coach for teachers. But district leaders were so impressed by her interview that they encouraged her to apply instead for a new opening they’d created: their first administrator focused on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives…

At first, the scope of the role gave Lewis pause. In her current district, these responsibilities were split among several people, and she’d never held a position dedicated to anything as specific as that before. But she had served on the District Equity Leadership Team in her Maryland county and felt prepared for this new challenge. She believed the job would allow her, as she put it, to analyze the district’s “systemic and instructional practices” in order to better support “the whole child.”

“We’re so excited to add Cecelia to the CCSD family,” Superintendent Brian Hightower said in the district’s March 2021 announcement about all of its new hires. (The announcement noted that the creation of the DEI administrator role “stems from input from parents, employees and students of color who are serving on Dr. Hightower’s ad hoc committees formed this school year to focus on the topic.”) Hightower acknowledged “both her impressive credentials and enthusiasm for the role” and pointed out that, “In four days, she had a DEI action plan for us.”

But then a group of white parents decided that Lewis planned to bring “critical race theory” to their district. And they decided to hound her out of her job and out of Georgia.

Categories Accountability, Extremism, Georgia, Race, Racism

Thoughts on The Latest 1/6 Hearing

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2022 //
41

The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to Mark Meadows (chief of staff to Trump) was riveting. If you didn’t see it, find it on the Internet and watch in full.

What she described was a conspiracy to overthrow the results of the election, a last-ditch effort to keep Trump in power by any means necessary.

Trump was speaking at the Ellipse and was disappointed by the crowd size (again!). When he realized that many of his supporters were excluded because they were carrying guns, he wanted the metal detectors removed so all his supporters could join the crowd because they weren’t gunning for him.

Trump expected to join an armed mob marching to the Capitol. That was the plan. But his own Secret Service guards wouldn’t let him go there because he might be in danger. He tried to grab the steering wheel of the SUV, but was thwarted by his personal guard, whom he tried to throttle. Personally, I regret that his security detail did not take him to the Capitol. Imagine the scene. The president in the midst of a mob, smashing windows, banging on the doors of the Senate Chamber, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” perhaps putting his feet on Pelosi’s desk. If that had happened, not only would he have been disgraced in the eyes of the world, but he would have to abandon his phony protestations of innocence.

But his security detail protected him from himself.

Back at the White House, he watched the mob deface the Capitol and ignored pleas by friends like Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, even Ivanka and Don Jr. to call off the marauders. He did nothing. Meadows did nothing.

Hutchinson went on to describe his reaction when Trump learned in December that Bill Barr had told the AP that the Justice Department had not found fraud of a size that would change the election result: he threw his plate against the wall of the White House private dining room, smearing the walls with catsup and the floor with broken porcelain. This was not the only time this happened, she testified under oath. Trump was also known to pull the tablecloth off the table, sending the food and dishes to the floor. (Was he trying that magic trick where the magician pulls the cloth and all the dishes remain in place?)

After hours of violence in the Capitol, Trump finally made a video calling on his supporters to go home. He said “I love you.”

Not long afterwards, his political allies ludicrously claimed that the invasion of the Capitol had been staged by Antifa. Why did Trump tell Antifa “I love you”? If they were Antifa, why did he want so badly to join them as they rioted? If they were Antifa, why didn’t he tell them to go home immediately? Why were so many Proud Boys and Oathkeepers and other militant crackpots leading the crowd if they were Antifa?

The corpulent man-baby was a sore loser. He preferred to destroy our system of government and unleash violence and mayhem in the Capitol rather than admit defeat. He sent a mob that he knew was armed to wreak maximum damage on the Natuon’s Capitol. He would have been satisfied to see his servile Vice-President Mike Pence hung by the mob, to see Nancy Pelosi beaten to death by the mob, to see Senators and members of the House brutalized, and to unleash the raging horde on all his political enemies rather than admit that he lost the election.

The Republican Party and its elected leaders has embraced the bully who has dragged them into the muck of rebellion, violence, and contempt for the Constitution. As Liz Cheney memorably said to her colleagues at the first meeting of the 1/6 Commission: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

Honor? When did we last hear that word mentioned in the same breath with the name of President 45? Will the Republican Party survive its servile embrace of the Malevolent Fool who would be King?

What, if any consequences, will there be for a man who attempted to overthrow the government and shred the Constitution? And for those who aided and abetted his treason?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Republicans, Trump

Christine Langhoff: A Victory for Boston Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2022 //
17

Yesterday, the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education and the Mayor of Boston reached an agreement not to label the Boston Public Schools “underperforming” and the state backed away from taking control of the district. Perhaps they realized that state takeovers typically make things worse, not better.

Our reader Christine Langhoff is a retired teacher in Boston. She added the following informed comment.

Christine Langhoff writes:

Despite the Boston Globe’s heartfelt desire for privatization – its education reporting is outsourced to privatizers and charteristas at The Barr Foundation – public pushback had an impact. The state has had zero success in the school systems where it intervened, when measured by the metric the state board loves: test scores. Boston scores, even during the virtual schooling of the pandemic, have been higher than in Lawrence, Springfield, Holyoke and Southbridge, where the state is in charge. They failed to get this done before Governor Charlie Baker – funded by the Kochs and the Waltons – leaves office this year.

Our newly elected mayor, Michelle Wu, has her own two young sons in BPS and is committed to public education. She has refused to back away from her advocacy for the schools. Her predecessor, Marty Walsh (now Biden’s Secretary of Labor), was himself a founder of a charter school, and underfunded the schools during all seven years of his mayoralty. He made no effort to solve the issues cited in the state’s report in his quest to defund, destabilize, and destroy the school system.

Wu has managed in a brief time to recruit two excellent finalists for the superintendent’s position. Both of them are true public school educators who live in Boston. Mary Skipper’s three children are BPS graduates and Tommy Welch’s kids are presently enrolled as well. Contrast with Laura Perille, who was named superintendent by Walsh, despite being completely unqualified save for the fact that she ran an umbrella group for the foundations bent on privatization. (Perille took over from Broadie Tommy Chang, who was responsible in LA for the disastrous rollout of laptops.)

It’s a new day for public education in the city of Boston. The Waltons are somewhere, licking their wounds in defeat once again.

Categories Accountability, Boston, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Reform, Massachusetts, Supporting public schools, Walton Foundation

Peter Greene: Why SCOTUS Was Wrong About the Praying Football Coach

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2022 //
110

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a football coach who conducted prayers in the 50-yard line.

You read it here first: This case may be a prelude to overturning the Supreme Court’s ban on prayer in schools, a decision that evangelicals have complained about since it was issued. As we have seen in the past week, this Court is indifferent to precedent. They are rightwing ideologues who want to redraw the well-understood rights, freedoms, and boundaries of American life. No one knows what to expect: Will they outlaw contraception? Will they outlaw same-sex relationships and marriage? Will they outlaw interracial marriage? Will they overturn Brown v. Board of Education? Will they restore the power to impose racial segregation to the states? The Trump three plus Alito, Thomas, and Roberts are a supermajority; they are appointed for life. They will do whatever they want, with no accountability.

Peter Greene writes that the Court has no understanding of the duties of a school official.

It has become increasingly clear—blindingly obvious—that this Court will always favor religious expression over all competing claims. Six justices have completely abandoned the Founding Fathers’ explicit belief in separation of church and state and their determination to avoid any “establishment” of religion.

Greene writes:

I am absolutely gobsmacked. I expected that SCOTUS would okay school prayer via Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. I did not expect that their decision would be based on a disconnecting themselves from reality. 

The result is here. I’ll walk you through the highlights (sputtering as I go). Sorry. I don’t have time to make this short.

This is the case of the football coach who wanted to pray at the 50 yard line after games, and when the district told him to stop, decided he’d get his fifteen minutes of holy fame out of it. Full summary here.

Justice Gorsuch wrote this one, and he’s in an alternate reality in the very first paragraph.Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks.

Nope. Joseph Kennedy decided not to put in for the job for another season.

Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters.

This line of reasoning will be followed throughout. If you’re on the clock, but can get away with dividing your attention, that counts as personal time. Not for the last time, Gorsuch and the berobed conservative activists of the court will demonstrate no understanding of how school jobs work. As a teacher, if I’m on my computer or phone while I’m supposed to be supervising students, I’m asking for trouble. And if I’m a coach or activity advisor, and my students have not officially left the building for home, then I had better be doing my job, which is keeping an eye on them.

What follows is a glowing version of Coach Kennedy’s history with the school, putting emphasis on how quiet and personal and totally not while performing his duties as a government employee Kennedy’s praying was. We will have to wait for the dissent to get the full story from this planet. What Gorsuch gets semi-right is that this practice stayed below the radar for a while, until Kennedy had expanded it enough that word got back to district officials, who had a church-and-state-separation freakout. 

But Kennedy had an epiphany driving home one night, and felt “compelled” to do the prayer, and send a big letter to the district, in which he offered to do the prayer quietly “while students were busy with other activities–whether heading to the locker room, boarding the bus, or perhaps singing the school fight song” which–no! The offer of “I’ll just slip a prayer in when I’m supposed to be doing my job” is not a great offer!

On October 16, “some members of the community” joined him and “this event spurred media coverage.” Well, yes– as the dissent points out, Kennedy spurred, courted, welcomed and recruited media coverage, as well as (not for the first time) participation from the other team. The district continued to put pressure on, feeling that to not do so would suggest they were endorsing a school prayer, and that their understanding of the Constitution would be that such an endorsement was wrong. How very old school of them.

The district noted in their evaluation that Kennedy failed to supervise students after games and failed to follow district policy regarding religious expression. Kennedy decided not to put in for the job for the coming year….

Please open the link and read Greene’s post in full. Will students now have to put up with teachers opening and closing their classes with a prayer?

We have a Supreme Court that will privilege every form of prayer, in every setting, and will allow those with religious convictions to discriminate against those who do not share their views.

Is theocracy the right word?

Thomas Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Teachers
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