In a blow to privatization of education, the World bank has withdrawn its support for Bridge International Academies. BIA has been opening for-profit schools in African nations, which discourages public support for public schools.
Civil society organizations and teachers’ unions in Africa have warned of the dangers of allowing a for-profit company to take over education in impoverished nations.
Bridge operates 405 schools in Kenya, educating children from preschool through eighth grade, for a fee of between $54 and $126 per year, depending on the location of the school. It was founded in 2007 by May and her husband, Jay Kimmelman, along with a friend, Phil Frei. From early on, the founders’ plans for the world’s poor were audacious. ‘‘An aggressive start-up company that could figure out how to profitably deliver education at a high quality for less than $5 a month could radically disrupt the status quo in education for these 700 million children and ultimately create what could be a billion-dollar new global education company,’’ Kimmelman said in 2014. Just as titans in Silicon Valley were remaking communication and commerce, Bridge founders promised to revolutionize primary-school education. ‘‘It’s the Tesla of education companies,’’ says Whitney Tilson, a Bridge investor and hedge-fund manager in New York who helped found Teach for America and is a vocal supporter of charter schools.
The Bridge concept — low-cost private schools for the world’s poorest children — has galvanized many of the Western investors and Silicon Valley moguls who learn about the project. Bill Gates, the Omidyar Network, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the World Bank have all invested in the company; Pearson, the multinational textbook-and-assessment company, has done so through a venture-capital fund. Tilson talked about the company to Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund manager of Pershing Square, which ultimately invested $5.8 million through its foundation. By early 2015, Bridge had secured more than $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Apparently, some of the original board—Gates, CZI, and Tilson—already left the board. The endorsement of the World Bank was important to the credibility of BIA, especially as its efforts to monetize African education expanded. That endorsement helped to neutralize the objections of local organizations that lacked the resources of the investors.
Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter for Salon, has written a three-part series for Salon about Hillsdale College, the ultra-conservative Christian college that has entered the charter industry. This is first in the series. Hillsdale was originally founded to preserve the classical tradition in education, but it evolved into a far-right incubator of ideas and officials for the Trump administration.
Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee has already made a deal with Hillsdale to launch 50 Christian-themed charter schools in his state. The fact that this usurps local control of schools in Tennessee doesn’t bother the governor because the state will supply a politically sanitized, Christian school at public expense.
Hillsdale leaders, Joyce explains, were deeply involved in Trump’s so-called “1776 Commission,” which was supposed to be a call for “patriotic education” as a counter to “The 1619 Project.” The college “has quietly become one of the most influential entities in conservative politics.”
Joyce describes in detail a Hillsdale charter school in Orange County led by a powerful ultra-conservative couple: the wife is president of the Orange County Board of Education and the husband is a physician who opposes COVID vaccines and any effort to combat climate change.
Joyce writes:
In an era of book bans, crusades against teaching about racism, and ever-widening proposals to punish teachers and librarians, Hillsdale is not just a central player, but a ready-made solution for conservatives who seek to reclaim an educational system they believe was ceded decades ago to liberal interests. The college has become a leading force in promoting a conservative and overtly Christian reading of American history and the U.S. Constitution. It opposes progressive education reforms in general and contemporary scholarship on inequality in particular. It has featured lectures describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a hoax and Vladimir Putin as a “hero to populist conservatives around the world.” [Diane’s note: They got that right!]
If you thought that Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission — a jingoistic alternative to the New York Times’ “1619 Project” that was roundly panned by historians — died with his presidency, that effort is now being amplified and exported, on a massive scale, around the country. If you wonder what conservatives hope to install in place of the books they’re trying to ban, the answer often lies in Hillsdale’s freely-licensed curricula.
And as Republicans move into a new phase of their long-game efforts to privatize public education, Hillsdale has become a key resource. Across the nation, conservative officials from state leaders to insurgent school board members are clamoring to implement Hillsdale’s proudly anti-woke lesson plans, including the “patriotic education” premises of its recently released 1776 Curriculum, or add to its growing network of affiliated classical charter schools.
Please finish reading this excellent and alarming article by opening the link.
New Coalition Forms to Stop DeVos Voucher Proposal
For MI Kids, For Our Schools launches campaign to oppose DeVos voucher effort to take hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools
MICHIGAN – On Wednesday, March 16 at 1 p.m. EST, a coalition of organizations will announce the launch of the For MI Kids, For Our Schools ballot question committee (For MI Kids, for short) during a Zoom press call. For MI Kids is focused on defeating the DeVos-backed “Let MI Kids Learn” voucher proposal that would rip hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools across Michigan.
The coalition that makes up For MI Kids includes: 482Forward, American Federation of Teachers Michigan, K-12 Alliance of Michigan, Michigan Association of School Boards, Michigan Association of Superintendents & Administrators, Michigan Education Association, Michigan Education Justice Coalition, Michigan Parent Teacher Association, and the Middle Cities Education Association.
WHO: For MI Kids, For Our Schools
Casandra Ulbrich, PhD, who serves as the president of the State Board of Education
Andrew Brodie, Superintendent, Flat Rock Community Schools and MASA Board President
Arlyssa Heard, a Detroit schools special education parent, 482Forward education organizer
Twanda Bailey, a retired educator from Detroit with 30 years of teaching experience
Owen Goslin, a Cheboygan schools parent
Rick Catherman, a retired educator from South Haven with 30 years of teaching experience
WHY: For MI Kids, For Our Schools is a ballot committee opposing the Let MI Kids Learn voucher proposal because it would take hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools, hurting every public school across Michigan during a historic teacher shortage. The coalition is made up of parents, educators, support staff, administrators, and community-minded folks who love our public schools and want to see them improve and thrive so every student can get a great education.
Gary Rubinstein was part of the earliest cohorts of Teach for America. He became friends with many of the pioneers of TFA and the charter movement. Many years later, he became disillusioned and became a friendly critic. Over time, his criticism became sharper as he realized that TFA and the charter leaders were making unsupportable claims. He is now an experienced math teacher at one of New York City’s selective high schools. When he learned that the applications for TFA were steadily declining, he thought hard about how TFA lost its luster.
What happened? Certainly it was not financial woes. It has an operating budget of $300 million. Its CEO is paid $450,000 a year.
Rubinstein attributes the declining attraction of TFA to three factors:
Failure to properly train corps members.
Ineffective leadership.
Alliance with teacher-bashing reformers.
The root cause of these factors is, he says, ”arrogance.” TFA never saw a need to improve their training. They made audacious claims about their success. They believed their own press releases. They kept raking in millions every year from foundations, corporations, and the federal government. It didn’t matter that there was no there there.
The Georgia Senate on Tuesday again rejected private school voucher legislation that would have offered annual subsidies to students who switched from public schools.
The new bill would have set aside $6,000 per year toward the private education of students who leave public school. The money, which would no longer have gone to the public school, could have been used to offset the student’s private school tuition or pay for associated private or home-school costs, such as fees, tutoring, curriculum, therapy, transportation or a computer.
“This is an opportunity for us to give students that are trapped in school systems that are underperforming an opportunity to move forward,” Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, R-Gainesville, said while presenting his bill on the Senate floor.
He introduced it despite House Speaker David Ralston’s announcement last month that he was blocking two similar House voucher bills. The Blue Ridge Republican was angered by a national voucher advocacy group that bombarded conservative voters with political mailers likening Republicans to liberals if they didn’t support the measures.
Georgia currently has a tax credit voucher program. House Republicans wanted to double the funding for this program to $200 million, but the Senate blocked that measure.
Jennifer Berkshire is on a roll. It seems she writes a great article every other day–or is it every day? She has a new article in The Nation about the New Hampshire school board elections. It is titled “How Progressives Won the School Culture War,” but I doubt that the people who won the school board races call themselves “progressives.” I would say they are sane, rational, intelligent citizens who did not want rightwing extremists in charge of their public schools.
She begins:
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. For months now, Republican Party leaders have trumpeted their intention to run hard on parent grievances en route to routing the Democrats in the midterms. According to this narrative—partially based on the 2021 elections in Virginia, then endlessly echoed by Democratic pundits—parents frustrated over school shutdowns, Covid restrictions and the focus on race and social justice in schools are the new swing voters, poised to flee the Democratic Party.
But in New Hampshire, where bitter debates over school masks and “critical race theory” (CRT) have dominated local politics for more than a year, the season of parent rage ended in a stunning sweep of school board elections last week by progressive public school advocates. “It was a complete repudiation of the GOP’s attempt to drive a wedge between parents and schools,” says Zandra Rice Hawkins, executive director of Granite State Progress. Of 30 candidates designated by the group as “pro–public education,” 29 won their races—many in traditionally “red” regions of New Hampshire. Across the state, culture warriors and advocates of school privatization lost to candidates who pledged to protect and support public education.
Instead of resonating with voters, the right’s efforts to weaponize cultural grievances appears to have alienated them. With the GOP poised to make the education culture wars a central focus of its midterm appeal, New Hampshire offers some clear lessons for Democrats.
Michael Boucher chalks up his decision to run for the school board in the southern New Hampshire town of Atkinson to a single word: extremism. Last year, he watched as the debate over local schools grew steadily more rancorous, first over CRT, then masks. Boucher became a regular presence at board meetings, where he noticed that many of the loudest voices weren’t actually from the district. “Suddenly there were all of these groups coming in—the Government Integrity Project, Moms for Liberty, Americans for Prosperity. I realized that if I didn’t step up, one of their people would,” says Boucher.
Boucher, who works as a data analyst for a government contractor, says that he set a goal of talking to as many people in Atkinson as possible about the rising climate of extremism. He found a receptive audience. While the community has long leaned Republican, many voters remain what Boucher calls “classic” GOP. “They want to see tight budgets—but they also want to see opportunities for all kids and a welcoming culture in the schools. There are actually a lot of people who feel that way,” says Boucher.
He campaigned on the need to teach history honestly against a candidate who ran on opposition to CRT. Boucher won resoundingly, claiming nearly three-quarters of the vote.
And Boucher wasn’t alone. Thirty miles north, in Bow, first-time candidate Angela Brennan, the subject of a Republican mailer calling her “anti-parent” and a “Biden-like progressive,” was the top vote getter in a five-person contest for two seats on the school board.
“All of these attacks on public education really backfired at the local level,” says Molly Cowen, a member of the select board in Exeter, which has also seen acrimonious debates over mask and vaccine mandates and school district diversity policies. In the lead-up to the election, a conservative parents’ PAC spent an estimated $20,000 on mailers making the case that the district’s focus on racial equity had led to a precipitous decline in academic achievement.
Voters in the district, which covers five towns, responded by booting two conservative members off the board and electing a number of pro–public education candidates.
Please open the link and learn how extremism was defeated in New Hampshire.
It is deeply upsetting to sit at home in a warm place, with plenty of food and water, and to read the stories from cities under siege in Ukraine. If Putin thought that Russian forces would get a warm welcome, he was badly misinformed. If he thought he was “liberating” the people of Ukraine, he was badly misinformed. Most of us were unprepared to believe that there would be another ground war in Europe in our lifetimes.
LVIV, Ukraine — After helping a friend stanch the bleeding from a shrapnel wound on Tuesday morning during a renewed shelling in Mariupol, Anastasia Kushnir and her family decided it was time to take the opportunity to get out of the besieged coastal city, where they had been struggling to stay alive for the past three weeks.
“There was heavy shelling and aerial bombardment,’’ said Ms. Kushnir, who is 21. “But we made it out, fortunately.”
Ms. Kushnir and her family members made it as far as Urzuf, a small beachside town on the Sea of Azov 28 miles from Mariupol, a way station on their way further north and west, to safety. A drive that usually takes 30 minutes took five hours, as their car joined a convoy of thousands of others trying to leave after waiting weeks for a humanitarian corridor to open.
About 160 cars left on Monday, and an estimated 4,000 cars, or 20,000 people, left the city on Tuesday, city officials said. Ms. Kushnir said she saw cars broken down along the road: many had run out of gasoline, which she said was nearly impossible to find in the region.
But still, she said in an interview, she was relieved to be out of Mariupol and away from the constant shelling.
“Humanitarian corridors have been partially opened today,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky in a speech on Tuesday. “Little by little people are leaving the besieged city by private transport.” However, he lamented that “a convoy with humanitarian cargo for Mariupol remains blocked. For several days in a row.”
About 2,000 vehicles had managed to escape the city by Tuesday afternoon, and another 2,000 were packed to leave before nightfall, Pyotr Andryushchenko, an assistant to Mariupol’s mayor, told The New York Times in a phone interview.
Officials told civilians hoping to leave to “delete all messengers and photos from phones” in case Russian soldiers tried to search them for signs of support for Ukrainian forces.
Ms. Kushnir said she and her family had tried to leave before, but the locations where a convoy was being organized were being shelled. While they waited, she said, she and her family slept on the floor of a room with no electricity, no lights, no windows and no heating.
“There is not a single residential building left with windows in my neighborhood,” she said. After five days, they started to run out of food. Residents organized into groups, with men walking amid the shelling to find water, and women improvising outdoor cook stoves to make watery vegetable soups.
Temperatures dropped to as low as 16 degrees Fahrenheit, Ms. Kushnir said. “We had to drink tea constantly to keep warm,” she said, adding that some elderly people had died of cold and hunger.
As she left her city by car, she saw bodies lying in the street, which the authorities had not managed to collect or bury.
“People who died are not buried, they just lie where they died,” she said. “There is an enormous number of them.”
With some residents crushed in the rubble from the relentless Russian onslaught and others dying in freezing conditions with no heat, food or clean water, officials in the besieged coastal city of Mariupol are struggling to account for the number of dead and missing.
Officially, 2,400 civilians killed in the city have been identified, but Mr. Andryushchenko said he believed the toll was far higher.
“We have inaccurate data on civilians killed,” he said in an interview with Current Time, a Ukrainian radio station. He said the official figure represented a “small handful” of those killed and estimated that the actual total could be as high as 20,000.
A battleground since the first hours of the war, Mariupol is under an increasingly relentless assault that is taking an unspeakable toll. Ukrainian estimates for the number of civilians trapped in the city have ranged from 200,000 to 400,000, with the latest estimate being 300,000.
The region’s top official, Pavlo Kyrylenko, who until martial law was declared was its governor, announced that the Russians were also holding doctors and patients of the main intensive care hospital hostage. An estimated 400 people are inside.
“It is impossible to get out of the hospital,” Mr. Kyrylenko wrote on Telegram, quoting a message from one of the facility’s employees. “They shoot hard, we sit in the basement. Cars have not been able to drive to the hospital for two days. High-rise buildings are burning around.”
Battered by Russian shelling, the city has been overwhelmed by the wounded and dead. Videos shared on Telegram showed residents of the Cheryomushki neighborhood burying a body in a courtyard. Another video showed how local people had turned a post office building into a makeshift morgue, with “MORGUE” spray-painted in large Cyrillic letters on the outside of the ground floor of the building.
“Here, in this building of the New Post Office on Cheryomushki, they stack corpses, which in the future they themselves will bury,” a man can be heard saying in the video, which he posted to the Telegram channel Mariupol Now.
Russian forces have dropped more than 100 bombs within the city limits, according to a Telegram post by the Mariupol city council, destroying nearly all basic services, even as they battle Ukrainian forces on the outskirts of the metropolis.
The Kremlin has said that it is Ukrainian forces that are keeping people trapped in the city. The Ukrainian government says that repeated attempts at mass evacuation have failed as they came under attack by Russian forces.
The Ukrainian Army’s high command said on Tuesday that its forces had managed to repel the latest Russian attempt to move into the city, claiming to have destroyed two tanks, seven infantry fighting vehicles and one armored personnel carrier. “After the losses, the occupiers stopped the offensive and retreated,” the Ukrainian military said.
The Ukrainians noted that their forces had also suffered losses. It is nearly impossible to independently verify almost any information out of Mariupol, as nearly all lines of communication have been severed.
Mr. Andryushchenko, the adviser to the city government, declined to comment in his phone interview with The Times on whether he and the mayor would be evacuating from the city. The mayor’s security would likely be of concern: Russian forces kidnapped the mayor of nearby Melitopol and installed a replacement.
“We sincerely hope for the safety of our mayor and that our defenders will help ensure it,” Mr. Andryushchenko said. “We know for sure that he will not accept the Russian occupation under any circumstances, will not cooperate with the occupiers and will not recognize any occupation authority.”
But he was also at a loss for words thinking about the city’s future. He has estimated that 80 percent of the residential housing stock has been destroyed. “What kind of city can it be?”
Ms. Kushnir, a model, described the persistent fear of being there for the last three weeks: “Every day is like a new birth. That is, you do not know whether you make it home or not.”
After she arrived to Urzuf, she had her first proper meal in weeks. But her mind was occupied with new pressing questions, she said:
“How will it be possible to get somehow to a safe place in Ukraine? Where is it safe in this country? How it will be possible to go abroad, where it can be safe for us?”
Leonard Pitts Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, opines that conservatives have always been on the wrong side of history. They fought the civil rights movement. They fought women’s rights. Now they’re fighting gay rights.
He writes:
They have never once been right.
Did you ever notice that? Do you ever think about it? Never once.
Oh, in matters of, say, foreign affairs or military strategy, one might contend that conservatives have had their moments, made arguments that, arguably, made sense. But on matters of social evolution, they’ve compiled a remarkable record: They’ve never been vindicated by history. Rather, they’ve always been repudiated by it, always been wrong…
Barry Goldwater once saying that he had nothing against a woman running for vice president, “just so she can cook and get home on time…”
Nor are the right’s wrongs limited to matters of human freedom. Every art form that ever dared deviate from status quo — music, film, books, comic books — has had to run a gauntlet of conservative opprobrium. As far back as the 1920s, they were up in arms over a new music called jazz.
It’s a history that provides a jaundiced context for the latest right wing crusade. Meaning the one against LGBTQ kids. Florida’s Legislature passed its obnoxious “Don’t Say Gay” bill last week. Gov. Ron DeSantis, evidently determined to leave no principle untrampled in his hoped-for march to the White House, is expected to sign it….
Which brings them into conflict with conservatism’s reflexive terror of anything that does not fit inside the white picket fence of its imagination. That tendency to look ever backward toward an imagined better past, that timorous inability to face the future — heck, to face the present — and the challenges of change, is what had conservatives at odds with everyone from Louis Armstrong to Martin Luther King to Gloria Steinem.
Now it has them standing between children and their teachers and doctors. It is cold comfort to know that these acts of invasive cruelty will one day stand condemned by history, but they will. We’ve seen this movie too many times to doubt it. You’d think that would matter to conservatives; you’d think they’d think about it. Then you remember that fear and thought are incompatible; it’s almost impossible for them to exist in the same space.
So LGBTQ kids and their allies can only put their heads down, work for change and take such satisfaction as they may find in the fact that, where social evolution is concerned, conservatives lost the 20th century.
Robert Regan is running for the Michigan House. At a recent live-stream event, he stunned his colleagues when he said that he tells his daughters to “lie back and enjoy it” if they are raped. His daughters are not in his corner. One of them urged people not to vote for him when he ran in 2020. He responded that his daughter had been brainwashed by going to the University of Colorado, which filled her with leftwing ideas.
A Republican candidate favored to win a seat in the Michigan House said he tells his daughters to “just lie back and enjoy it” if raped, as he attempted to make an analogy about abandoning efforts to decertify the results of the 2020 election.
Robert Regan, who is running to represent Michigan’s District 74 in the state legislature, made the comments during a Facebook live stream Sunday. The discussion was hosted by the Rescue Michigan Coalition, a conservative group that supports former president Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The Justice Department found no evidence to support Trump’s baseless allegations.
During the discussion, fellow panelist Amber Harris, a Republican strategist, told the group that it is “too late” to continue challenging the results of the 2020 election, suggesting Republicans should instead move on and focus on future races, to which Regan replied: “I tell my daughters, ‘Well, if rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it….’ ”
A shocked Harris, however, tried to cut in as Regan and the discussion’s host, Rescue Michigan Coalition founder Adam de Angeli, moved on. When de Angeli gave Harris the chance to speak, she said Regan’s comments were “shameful.”
“I’ve got advice to give to your daughters: Don’t do that,” Harris said. “Fight all the time.”
Regan’s three daughters urged voters not to elect him to office in a viral tweet during his 2020 bid for the state House.
“If you’re in Michigan and 18+ pls for the love of god do not vote for my dad for state rep. Tell everyone,” Stephanie Regan wrote on Twitter.…
During the discussion, Regan also said that, if elected, he’d push for the decertification of the results of the 2020 election in Michigan. Under both state and federal law, a state can’t decertify an election.
“We do want to decertify this election and we do want it returned to the rightful owner, just like if someone stole your car or stole your jewelry,” Regan said. “It goes back to the rightful owner. You decertify and you give it to the rightful owner, and that’s Donald Trump, and that’s what I’m pushing for and we’re going full-bore on that.”
“A lot of students when they go off to these liberal university campuses, like the University of Colorado, the University of Texas and Austin — and she went to the University of Colorado in Boulder — and you know, they just kind of get sucked into this Marxist, communist ideology and she and I just don’t see eye to eye when it comes to the whole socialism, communism, Marxist philosophy,” he said.
Lt. Governor Dan Patrick of Texas explains in this video why he wants to eliminate tenure in the colleges and universities of Texas. He believes in “academic freedom,” he says, but he thinks the legislature should govern what is taught in universities. He lashed out at professors who want to teach “critical race theory.” He believes that there is no academic freedom for those who want to teach the Constitution (!), but only for those who teach controversial topics.
Apparently he thinks that academic freedom and tenure should protect only those who share his views.
Just how dangerous is Dan Patrick’s proposal?
Seth Masket, director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver, understands that Patrick threatens one of our nation’s greatest treasures: its public institutions of higher education.
He writes, at NBC’s website:
Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced last month a plan to phase out all tenure in Texas’ public colleges and universities, and to revoke tenure for those who teach critical race theory. These changes would have dramatic effects on public education in Texas and, ultimately, across the United States, undermining academic freedom and compromising a higher education system that is the envy of the world.
If you were to make a list of the United States’ most significant contributions to the world, our public university systems would have to be somewhere near the top. According to U.S. News’ rankings, of the top 20 universities around the world, 15 are American, and five of those are public. Thanks to these and other universities, the U.S. dominates Nobel Prizes and other scholarly achievements, while it educates tens of millions of students annually. Typically, about a million students per year come from other countries to attend American colleges and universities. Those on student visas largely return to their home countries, spreading the knowledge and values they learn here.
Rather remarkably, this is not widely celebrated. Worse, America’s public universities are currently being attacked from multiple sources, threatening both our educational integrity and global reputation, to say nothing of the way such attacks could impact student opportunities.
The first of these attacks stems from a rather long-term historical force — declining state budgets. States are simply subsidizing public education far less than they used to do. Outside just a handful of states, per-student funding from state governments dropped substantially over the past few decades. Students and their families increasingly have to make up that difference.
But there’s a more immediate threat going on, of which Patrick is only the latest instigator. Patrick is hardly the first state leader to go after tenure for university professors. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker worked to weaken tenure protections at his state’s university system. A current bill in South Carolina would end tenure in that state. Georgia made it easier last year for administrators in public universities to fire tenured professors. Tenure has long been a target of Republican state officials seeking to reduce the status of the professors they see as elitist liberals.
Tenure, of course, is complicated, involving complicated and school-specific standards. Some schools have suspiciously biased tenure patterns. But at its best, tenure serves two important purposes. First, it protects researchers from reprisals. Academics may produce findings that make state leaders uncomfortable or defensive — tenure helps assure that findings are not suppressed and altered. Think, for example, of recent academic debates over whether voter ID and other voting restrictions disproportionately affect people of color and actually reduce turnout. This is an important discussion that quite legitimately makes people on all sides of it uncomfortable. But researchers must be able to pursue the truth without fear of losing their jobs…
Second, tenure is a valuable perk for professors who could typically make more money in another line of work. In both these senses, tenure helps keep top scholarly talent at universities producing important and occasionally critical and politically unpopular research.
But Patrick’s second announcement, that he is seeking to revoke tenure protections for professors who teach critical race theory, is even more sinister. It’s important to note first that very few professors outside of law school actually teach critical race theory. Rather, the term “critical race theory” for public officials like Patrick has come to mean any lessons involving race, identity and/or history that conservatives do not like. For some, critical race theory now just means any history lesson that might make white students feel bad. It’s not hard to guess who will be blamed for teaching these sorts of lessons, and who will more readily be fired or silenced as a result…
Great public university systems with top scholars educating millions of students at (relatively) low cost are legitimately one of the U.S.’ greatest accomplishments. We are watching that accomplishment being dismantled before our eyes
Diane Ravitch's blog 