Florida: Man Demands Ban on Bible and Dictionary in Schools

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2022 //
28

Chaz Stevens, a 57-year-old tech wizard, noticed that Florida made it easier to challenge books used in schools and housed in school libraries. The law doesn’t take effect until July 1, but Stevens couldn’t wait that long. So he immediately launched a complaint about the Bible and the Oxford English Dictionary and requested that they be banned.

As of Wednesday, he has filed near-identical petitions with 63 Florida school districts asking to ban the Bible. He has also filed a second petition with one district, Broward County Public Schools, requesting the removal of the Oxford English Dictionary.

His three-page petition critiques the Bible for its depictions of bestiality and cannibalism, its “eye-popping passages of babies being smashed against the rocks” in Psalms 137 and its “strong pro-slavery position,” citing Ephesians 6:5-7.

“As the Bible casually references … such topics as murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and fornication — or as I like to think, Date Night Friday Night — do we really want to teach our youth about drunken orgies?” the petition asks.

Stevens’s subsequent complaint against the dictionary calls it “a weighty tome over 1,000 years old, containing more than 600,000 words; all very troubling if we’re trying to keep our youth from learning about race, gender, sex, and such.”

The Washington Post checked with First Amendment scholars, and one said “that the Bible is replete with episodes of violence and sexual abuse, including the rape of Dinah in Genesis, which leads her brothers Levi and Simeon to kill every man in the city of Shechem to avenge her honor; the incestuous rape of King David’s daughter Tamar by her half brother Amnon; and the brutal dismemberment of a concubine in Judges. She said the Bible is at least as sexually explicit as some of the books parents are labeling inappropriate, raising the question: Why can the Bible stay in the library when those books have to go?”

Two districts told Stevens that he is not a resident of their district, but he hopes to find residents in every district to file the same complaint.

A third official, Eydie Tricquet, the superintendent of the Jefferson County School District, wrote to say that her district is still under state control; Florida took over managing the district five years ago because of its failing grades, financial problems and staffing woes. But Jefferson is due to revert to local control this summer, and Tricquet promised in her email to Stevens that she will consider his request then, in accordance with school board policies and Florida law.

“At this time, I do not have a school or a library to place or remove a Bible,” Tricquet wrote.
Stevens, whose day job involves managing a website that connects people with mental health issues to supports including clinicians and therapy animals, said he knows many people see his efforts to ban the Bible as just the latest triviality in a long line of political pranks.

His colorful history includes campaigning to open city commission meetings with invocations to Satan, erecting a Festivus pole at the Florida Capitol to protest the Christmas Nativity scene and sending butt plugs to misbehaving public officials.
He pointed out that his antics once led to the arrests of two-fifths of Deerfield Beach city’s ruling body, including the mayor, over allegations they falsified records and violated state conflict of interest and gift disclosure laws.

“I’m sorry you’re stuck with me,” he said. “But I don’t see anybody else rising to the challenge, just a lot of …Twitter commentary.”

He added: “If not me, then who?”

Categories Censorship, Florida

Florida: School District Bans “Everywhere Babies”

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2022 //
36

The book-banning and censorship are reaching absurd proportions. A school district in Florida just banned a beloved children’s book, “Everywhere Babies.” Caitlin Gibson wrote about it in the Washington Post. what’s next? “Goodnight Moon”? Some think it’s atheist because the little bunny doesn’t say its prayers. “Harold and the Purple Craton”? Why “purple? Is Harold gay? These censors don’t realize how ridiculous they are. They join the ranks of the ignoramuses who think they can ban ideas and books that are easily available on the internet and television.

The inspiration for the popular children’s picture book “Everywhere Babies” came to author Susan Meyers more than 25 years ago, after the birth of her first grandchild. It was around Christmas, she recalls, and she kept seeing Nativity scenes everywhere — baby Jesus embraced by his doting mother, surrounded by kindly visitors. Meyers, deeply smitten with her 5-month-old grandson, was struck by the everyday, extraordinary miracle of babies in their earliest months of life, how their development touches the lives of everyone around them. So she decided to write about it.

Since its publication in 2001, “Everywhere Babies” — a whimsical, lyrical ode to infancy, illustrated by Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator Marla Frazee — has become a staple of family bookshelves, a common recommendation in new parent groups, and a celebrated title on Best Books lists.

But for the first time in its history, “Everywhere Babies” was featured this week on an entirely different kind of list: The book was among dozens of works recently banned from public school libraries in Walton County, Fla. School district officials confirmed the removal of the books to WJHG-TV in Florida. Walton County School Superintendent Russell Hughes told the outlet that it was “necessary in this moment for me to make that decision and I did it for just a welfare of all involved, including our constituents, our teachers, and our students.”

Hughes did not respond to requests for comment from The Washington Post. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Education referred questions to Walton County, noting that “individual school districts are responsible for making these decisions,” and did not respond to follow-up questions….

Gibson interviewed the author Susan Meyers and illustrator Marla Frazee. They were shocked that their book was banned but thrilled to be in the company of illustrious writers like Toni Morrison and Judy Blume whose works were also banned.

Categories Censorship, Florida, Stupid

Beware the Gay Penguins! The Sensitive Ferdinand! The Heterosexual Ducklings!

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2022 //
22

Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, the authors of a popular—and frequently challenged—children’s book “And Tango Makes Three,” warn in this article that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law threatens every book that deals with “gender identity.”

They wrote in The Washington Post:

Dear K-3 teachers of Florida,

Thank you for your kind messages! Please don’t feel bad. We totally understand why you have to stop reading our “gay penguins” book in school. You’re doing great and deeply important work at an extraordinarily difficult time to be a teacher. You shouldn’t have to worry about being slapped with a lawsuit for discussing homosexual seafowl.

We’ve been thinking this law leaves some pretty key terms undefined. Take “sexual orientation.” There are lots of them! Answering a question (“classroom instruction”) about any of them could land you in hot water. So just to be safe, you probably ought to pull more than our book from your curriculum. In case it’s helpful, here are a few we thought could run you into trouble.

• “The Story of Ferdinand” by Munro Leaf — for gender identity

We know, we love it too! But a bull that doesn’t roughhouse and prefers to sit in the shade and smell flowers? This is going to lead you right into some verboten gender-identity discussions. “Do some boys like flowers?” “Why don’t cows get invited to bullfights?” “Can ungulates be nonbinary?” You don’t want to go there.

• “Make Way for Ducklings” by Robert McCloskey — for sexual orientation

Such a gem, but sadly, there’s no way around the sexual orientation of this mallard couple. One is male; the other is female. They go island-hopping, hatch eight ducklings and look after their little ones together. Heterosexuality is a sexual orientation, people! Unless you want to be hit with newly illegal questions such as, “Are Mr. and Mrs. Mallard married?” or “Why would a girl duck want to marry a boy duck?” you should probably nix this one, too.


• “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes” by DuBose Heyward — for very sexual orientation

“The little girl Cottontail grew up to be a young lady Cottontail. And by and by she had a husband and then one day, much to her surprise there were twenty-one Cottontail babies to take care of.” Tempting at Easter time, but skip it.

• “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel”by Virginia Lee Burton — for gender identity and sexual orientation

A hard-working backhoe named Mary Anne is bound to raise gender-identity questions. “How can you tell if an engine is a boy or a girl?” “Can boys be backhoes?” Steer clear. Ditto for the author’s books about a tractor (“Katy”) and cable car (“Maybelle”), as well as Watty Piper’s titular Little Engine That Could, who uses she/her pronouns. Meanwhile, all these machines appear resolutely single. Could they be asexual? Probably best to give a wide berth to all books featuring gendered heavy machinery, at least until we can figure out what’s what.


• “A Kiss for Little Bear” by Else Holmelund Minarik — for pansexuality

Grandmother wants to pass along a kiss to Little Bear, and so we watch a female bear kiss a female chicken, who kisses a male frog, who kisses a male cat, who kisses a male skunk, who gets into some serious necking with a female skunk (they marry) before giving the kiss back to the chicken, who kisses Little Bear. It’s like Berlin in the 1920s. Pass!

• “Good Night, Gorilla” by Peggy Rathmann — for that bedroom scene

A male zookeeper shares a bed with a woman who calls him “dear,” only to be joined by a mouse and an ape (who look as though they’ve been there before). You do not want to discuss “polyamory” with your principal.

• “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle — for fabulousness

A ravenous, and possibly gender-fluid, male caterpillar mysteriously transforms into a “beautiful butterfly.” Trans parable? Don’t risk it.

Now that we think of it, eliminating all books with characters who have a gender identity or a sexual orientation doesn’t leave a lot. You’ll probably want to avoid all books that touch on love or relationships. Also, books with people or animals or things that are male or female or some other gender or non-gender.

Actually, it’s probably best to skip books altogether. Maybe stick with games.

Is duck, duck, goose okay?

Hang in there,

Peter and Justin

Categories Censorship, Florida

Time to Reform the Federal Charter School Program

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
28

I wrote this article that was published in the New York Daily News. It could be subtitled: “Lies that the Charter Lobby Says to Protect Its Money Pit.”

Fix this wasteful federal charter-school fund

By Diane Ravitch

New York Daily News

April 28, 2022 at 5:00 am

The federal Charter School Programs (CSP) began in 1995 as a modest program intended to jump-start new, independent, publicly funded schools free of most regulations. The idea was to free educators from bureaucracy and enable them to create laboratories of innovative practices that could be used to improve district schools. At the time, there were only about 100 charter schools in the nation. It was a bold idea. Having worked in the George H.W. Bush administration, I supported it.

Soon, however, entrepreneurs with no background in education at all realized that the new funding stream could present a profit-making opportunity.

Businessman Ron Packard, with experience at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, saw a chance to use federal funds to help build the highly profitable K12 Inc. online charter chain (now called Stride), which gets dismal academic results but paid him $19 million during a four-year period.

J.C. Huizenga, the Waste Management heir, used federal CSP dollars to launch his for-profit National Heritage Academies, which helped him amass a real estate empire.

Marcus May, now serving time in prison for massive fraud, got substantial funding from the feds for his New Point Education Partner charter schools, some of which he used to buy a yacht and enjoy extravagant vacations.

Marcus May, the CEO of charter school management company Newpoint Education Partners, was found guilty of racketeering and fraud. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined $5 million.

The program that began with only $6 million has grown into a $440 million fund rife with fraud, waste and abuse. Now there are more than 7,000 charters. The Network for Public Education, an organization I lead, prepared a report called “Still Asleep at the Wheel,” which used data from the U.S. Department of Education to show that 12% of the schools that got federal tax dollars never even opened and another 25% closed within a few years, but the federal money often landed in the entrepreneurs’ bank accounts.

Almost three decades later, the Biden administration has proposed modest reforms to restore the program’s original purposes, such as barring for-profit charter operators. The charter industry has reacted to his effort to regulate the program with outrage, falsely claiming that he is trying to shut down charter schools. Rather than supporting reform, commentators from the Washington Post to the far-right-wing Newsmax have pummeled the proposed regulations.

Opinion pieces defending the status quo sound as if they were written by the charter industry’s lobbyists. Their lies have become so bold that the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Rosa DeLauro, issued a scathing condemnation, lambasting the “unserious efforts and false claims” advanced by the “national trade organization of low-quality for-profit companies,” arguments that according to DeLauro are intended to “shift outrage and attention away from the risky, low-quality for-profit charter schools they represent.”

What these proposed regulations will do is make sure that federal funds do not flow to charter schools operated by for-profit corporations. The for-profit operators can still open schools if their state allows them, but they won’t get federal dollars to do it.

The regulations would give a few bonus (priority) points to charter schools that try to be good neighbors with local public schools and find ways to share ideas and services. Is it a requirement? No. But remember, cooperation between charters and publics was one of the original purposes of the program. It makes sense that both sectors should share best practices.

Contrary to the critics’ claims, the local public schools would not have to be over-enrolled for a charter school to get a grant. The proposed regulations are clear. Over-enrollment is only one of many ways that a new charter school can demonstrate that it is needed.

Some critics claim that the regulations will force new charters to be diverse, but this is not true. Under the changes, charter schools in areas where there is no racial diversity would still be able to get CSP funds. And if you are in a diverse community and you want to open a white-flight charter school you can still do it, but not with federal start-up funds. CSP money should not be used to fund white-flight charters.

Finally, the regulations would require states to supervise how the money is being spent — something that has been sorely lacking. That would be a big improvement over the status quo, which has wasted a billion dollars since 1995 on schools that never opened or opened and eventually closed.

Conservatives always prided themselves on being good stewards of tax dollars. There is nothing conservative about refusing to regulate a federal program that hands over $440 million a year to entrepreneurs and grifters without oversight.

Ravitch is president of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit nonpartisan organization that exists to support and improve public schools. An education historian recently retired from New York University, she served as assistant secretary of education for research under U.S. Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud

Brooklyn Public Library Opens Its Archives to Teens to Fight Book Banning

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
25

Good news from the Brooklyn Public Library for teens whose libraries have been ransacked by censors and other vandals.

The Brooklyn Public Library will give you free access to its collection, which is uncensored.

Like we needed another reason to love libraries: with book bans ramping up in school systems around the country, the Brooklyn Public Library is taking steps to make its massive catalog available to as many young people as possible.

Right now, and for a “limited time,” anyone in the United States between the age of 13 and 21 can apply for a free Brooklyn Public Library eCard, which gives access to 350,000 eBooks, 200,000 audiobooks, and online databases. (Normally, Brooklyn Public Library eCards are only free for people who live and/or work in New York state.)…

Teens who want to apply for the free eCard can send an email to BooksUnbanned@bklynlibrary.org or a message to @bklynfuture on Instagram.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Freedom

Dana Milbank: The Revolt of the Gentry

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
14

Dana Milbank noticed a strange phenomenon: some prominent members of the GOP who graduated from Ivy League colleges are denouncing Democrats who graduated from the same colleges as elitists. He wrote this column during the Senate hearings on the confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. How dare this Harvard/Harvard Law School elitist expect to win their votes!

Sen. Tom Cotton is what you might call a counterfeit commoner.
The dour Arkansas Republican announced with indignation at this week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings that he doesn’t want a justice who follows the “views of the legal elite.” He later complained that “a bunch of elite lawyers” such as nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson “think that sentences for child pornography are too harsh. I don’t and I bet a lot of normal Americans don’t, either.”

And who is this “normal American” decrying the “legal elite”? Why, he’s a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, a former clerk on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and a former associate at two Washington-insider law firms who now sits on the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate.

He’s part of a Republican Party of 2022 that has flipped the script on populism: The gentry are revolting.

At the same hearings this week, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) decried a “managerial elite” of media, academics, bureaucrats and corporations. “This cabal think they are smarter and more virtuous than the American people,” argued Kennedy, whose bio says he has a “degree with first class honors from Oxford University (Magdalen College).” This man of the people — Phi Beta Kappa at Vanderbilt, executive editor of the law review at the University of Virginia and a member of something called the Order of the Coif — has been heard denouncing the “goat’s-milk-latte-drinkin’, avocado-toast-eating insider’s elite.”

Also on the dais during the proceedings: Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law who loves to inveigh against the “coastal elites,” and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a former Supreme Court clerk out of Stanford University and Yale Law School who fancies himself standing with the proletariat in “the great divide” between the “leadership elite and the great and broad middle of our society.”

Three decades ago, Pat Buchanan, himself a Washington insider, ran for the Republican presidential nomination claiming a revolution of “peasants with pitchforks.” The latest Republican revolution seems to be of the trickle-down variety. Call it plutocrats with pitchforks.

Cruz, Hawley and Cotton are all contemplating presidential runs — where they might meet in the Republican primary another man of the people, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law, he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal titled “Don’t Trust the Elites,” and he rails routinely about “elites” trying to shove this or that “down the throats of the American people.”

These phonies must be onto something, because a new generation of pretend populists aims to join them in the Senate.

In Nevada, Republican candidate Adam Laxalt portrays himself as a modern-day Robespierre. He has repeatedly warned of the “rich elites … taking over America,” “elites in Washington,” the “coastal elites,” the “elites” who “do not believe in our nation” and the “elites” who are “all in one club” while “we’re all in another club.”

“We”? Laxalt is the grandson of a U.S. senator and governor of Nevada and the son of a Washington lobbyist. He is a graduate of prep school, Georgetown University and Georgetown Law School who recently hauled in $2.2 million as a partner at Cooper & Kirk, the same Washington firm that employed those plebeians Cotton and Cruz.

Milbank goes on in this vein, identifying other Republicans who rail against elites. Hypocrisy seems to be in vogue. Beware.

Categories Hypocrisy, Republicans

Jeb Bush: Let’s Get Back to Destroying Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
48

Say this for Jeb Bush: he is not dissuaded by failure. No matter how many studies show the failure of vouchers, he doesn’t care. No matter how many studies show that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how many grifters have drained millions through privatization of schools, he doesn’t care. No matter how little evidence he has for any of his proposals, he still pushes them.

His ideas are old and tired and incoherent. But count on him to package them as fresh and innovative, which they are not.

He is the male counterpart to Betsy DeVos.

He just cares about destroying public schools.

He wrote recently in The Miami Herald:

Last month marked two years since the pandemic swept across the country, causing the largest disruption to our nation’s education system in modern history. But at last, this spring brings an academic revival of sorts. Schools are remaining open, mask mandates are disappearing and plexiglass dividers between students in their classrooms are coming down.

In the rush to return to normal, we owe it to our nation’s children to emerge from this pandemic transformed, not by going backwards, but ready to forge a better future for them with all we’ve learned.

Our starting point is challenging. Prior to the pandemic, America’s public schools were struggling to serve the needs of students, and since the pandemic, a study by McKinsey found students have fallen months behind as a result of school closures and disruptions. There were severe impacts on student mental health, too. Pew Charitable Trusts found students are reporting significantly increased levels of grief, anxiety and depression.

It’s also no surprise that there’s a growing distrust in public education. A survey by Ipsos found trust in teachers declined during the pandemic, and there’s been a subsequent decrease in the number of students enrolling in public school.

Those are serious setbacks, but there are reasons for optimism. The pandemic put a spotlight on a myriad of possibilities for the future of education. Notably, it illustrated a desperate need by families for a broadened ecosystem of options for their children, with funding flexibility to create more equity in choice. And it elevated the power of parents to blaze new educational pathways for their children.

The Associated Press recently reported that homeschooling remains a popular choice for parents, despite schools reopening. And, private schools and public charter schools have witnessed increased enrollment. But choice, in and of itself, isn’t enough. Policymakers must continue to seek new ways to unbundle education systems, transforming old approaches into new and better learning options.

In Indiana, lawmakers, led by House Speaker Todd Huston, took the first step toward creating the nation’s first “parent-teacher compact” law. This innovative policy would allow parents to directly hire teachers. Educators would continue to be paid by the state and receive their health and retirement benefits, but this policy would enable parents and educators to enter into a peer-to-peer relationship to benefit individual students, without the hurdle of a district middleman. This individualized approach to education would give educators more freedom, families more flexibility and individual students the personalized experience they may need.

As we unbundle education, we need to reimagine all aspects of how education is delivered to students. One approach is enacting new part-time enrollment policies. Right now, students are defined by the school in which they’re enrolled.

Lawmakers can improve the education experience by allowing students to have more flexibility, whereby a student can enroll in their local public school and easily access a portion of their education funding to also enroll part-time in a private school, with an online provider, or engage in another learning experience that benefits the child’s education.

Another approach that complements unbundling is rethinking education transportation options. Last year, Gov. Doug Ducey awarded $18 million in grants to modernize Arizona’s K-12 transportation system, including direct-to-family grants to help close transportation gaps. In Oklahoma this year, Gov. Kevin Stitt proposed changing Oklahoma’s school transportation funding formula to expand how public school buses can serve students. And Florida’s Legislature recently passed legislation to create a new $15 million transportation grant program that encourages districts to create innovate approaches to school transportation, including carpooling and ride sharing apps, for both school-of-choice families and traditional school students.

Those are just a few examples, and we must continually look for more ways to unbundle and reimagine education. The pandemic saw an explosion of families, in all communities and from all demographics, embrace micro schools, homeschooling and customized learning pods. Rather than trying to limit these families, we should give them access to direct funds to further personalize and benefit their child’s out-of-school learning experience.

That’s what Gov. Brad Little has championed in Idaho. In response to school closures in 2020, Little used federal emergency COVID relief funds to provide direct grants to families to support students who were no longer learning in school. And this year, Little signed the Empowering Parents Grant Program into law, giving qualifying families up to $3,000 to use for tutoring, educational material, digital devices or internet connectivity….

Transforming our nation’s education system and ensuring students receive the individualized experience to unlock potential and lifelong success require continual forward momentum, especially after two years of disruptions. We have to keep moving, keep reimagining, keep transforming. This commitment to excellence is a point of pride for Florida.

Last year, Florida’s Legislature passed some of the most significant improvements and expansions to the state’s school-choice programs. And this year, lawmakers strengthened the charter school law, expanded the Florida Empowerment scholarship program, created a new financial literacy requirement for high school graduates and ensured parents are better informed of their child’s progress through online diagnostic progress monitoring and end-of-year summative tests.

This Pied Piper plays a tune meant to deceive. Ignore him.

Categories Bush, Jeb, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, School Choice, Vouchers

Los Angeles: Teachers at 4 Charter Schools Plan to Strike Today

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
9

This just in:

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES
ADVISORY FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 28   

On-site Contact
Rosalina Cardenas 

C: 213-280-1144

E: rosalina@cardenasgroup.net


Follow Up ContactGlenn Goldstein

Organization & Field Services, AFT
C: 510-735-4815
E: ggoldste@aft.org

Charter educators to strike on Thursday, April 28, as management continues to deny right to unionize

Educators demand Alliance College-Ready Public Schools begin negotiations on the educators’ first contract after three years and multiple PERB violations

Educators at four Alliance College-Ready charter schools will be going on a one-day Unfair Labor Practice strike on Thursday, April 28, in response to the Alliance Board of Directors continued refusal to negotiate the educators’ first contract after multiple orders by the Public Employment Relations Board to bargain.

WHAT: One-day Unfair Labor Practice strike

WHEN & WHERE: Thursday, April 28, 2022

· MAIN EVENT (rally with speakers, followed by march) — 11:30 a.m.
2301 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007 (MAP)

· Picketing starts at 7:15 a.m. Main picket location is Gertz-Merkin 6-12.
2023 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007

WHO: Teachers, counselors, and education professionals from Alliance College-Ready charter schools, and rally speakers (below).

· Emcees: Brittany Cliffe and Erin Belefski (UTLA Alliance educators)

· Jamie Garcia, UTLA Alliance educator from Burton Tech High School

· Jackie Goldberg, LAUSD School Board Member District 5

· Gloria Santos & Manuela Chaidez, parents of Alliance students

· Ron Herrera, President of the LA County Federation of Labor

· Jeff Freitas, President of California Federation of Teachers

· Cecily Myart-Cruz, President of UTLA

VISUALS: Strike picket signs, banners, educators leafleting the community, rally, speakers, DJ, march after rally to school for afternoon picket.

A supermajority of educators at the four Alliance charter schools (Alliance Burton Tech, Alliance Gertz-Merkin, Alliance Leichtman Levine Family Foundation ESAT, and Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School) voted to unionize over three years ago with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). Since that time educators have gone on multiple occasions to the Alliance Board of Directors to get the board to begin negotiations, but they have refused to bargain.

On February 28, 2022, the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) announced that Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is in violation of the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA) for refusing to bargain with educators and once again ordered Alliance to negotiate.

However, the schools’ leadership have yet to meet with the educators to negotiate for their contract. 

Teachers, counselors, psychologists, and parents at the schools are coming together to ensure the highest quality of education at Alliance. Educators love their schools and students, and they believe that — through the collective voice that union membership and the bargaining process provides —  they can advocate for small class sizes, teacher and counselor recruitment and retention, health and safety, and a commitment to social, emotional, and educational support for students that will help build the schools Alliance students need and deserve.

###

 

About Alliance Educators United

 

Alliance Educators United is a movement of dedicated and passionate teachers, counselors, and education professionals in the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools committed to fulfilling the mission and vision of a college-ready education for all Alliance students. We are forming a union with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to have a collective and effective voice in the decision-making processes at our Alliance schools.

 

About UTLA

 

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is 35,000 educators in Los Angeles dedicated to quality public education

Categories Los Angeles, Unions

Michigan: The GOP Goes Off the Deep End

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2022 //
26

Amber Phillips reported in The Washington Post that the Michigan Republican Party selected a Trump-chosen person for the role of Secretary of State—the official who oversees and certifies elections. She sounds like a true believer in conspiracy theories:

Until the 2020 election, secretaries of state — at least at the state level — worked mostly under the radar, overseeing state elections and certifying the results. But then an election in a pandemic, combined with efforts by the sitting president to call into question the results, suddenly made the job a politically charged one.

That’s still true for the 2022 midterm elections. Donald Trump and his allies have recruited, supported and endorsed candidates who have denied the results of the 2020 election to run for secretary of state in key swing states. That has election-integrity experts worried that people who haven’t recognized basic election facts could be in charge of deciding who wins the 2024 presidential contest.

In Michigan, one of those candidates just got nominated to be on the ballot in November. Kristina Karamo is one of the loudest provocateurs among a dozen or so secretary of state candidates running on false election-fraud claims. She has Trump’s endorsement.

This weekend, in a sign of how much the grass roots of the Republican Party is with Trump on election fraud, the Michigan GOP voted to nominate her. In addition to denying election results without evidence, she has called schools “government indoctrination camps,” opposes the teaching of evolution and opposes coronavirus vaccines and childhood vaccines.

Thinks Trump won in 2022: check.

Hates public schools: check.

Opposes teaching about evolution: check.

Opposes COVID vaccines: check.

Opposes all childhood vaccines (polio, measles, mumps, smallpox, diphtheria, etc.): check.

No one asked about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Wrap all those issues into one candidate and you gotta worry about the future of our democracy.

A

Categories Democracy, Hoax, Ignorance, Lies, Trump

Jan Resseger: Unfair School Funding and the Legacy of Jim Crow

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2022 //
5

Jan Resseger writes here about the continuing effects of racism on school funding today, not only in the south but across the nation. She cites the important writings of law professor Derek Black, whose work deeply informed her about the history of racism and how it persists today (I think that is called “critical race theory”).

She writes:

In a powerful new article, Legacy of Jim Crow Still Affects Funding for Public Schools, constitutional law professor, Derek Black and Axton Crolley expose the largely unexamined racist past of the kind of school funding inequity we observe today across many of the fifty states.

Derek Black’s Schoolhouse Burning is the best and most complex history of American public education I know. While the history of our public schools is generally traced back to New England and Horace Mann, Derek Black’s book examines progress toward equity in the South during Reconstruction, its reversal in the Jim Crow era, the corrections attempted during the Civil Rights Movement, and a period of reaction against the Brown v. Board of Education decision…

In their new article Black and Crolley describe how, after the collapse of Reconstruction, Southern states devised policies to perpetuate inequality: “Some… used ‘racially distinct tax’ policies that reserved separate funds for white and Black schools. Other states… moved school funding responsibility and control from state officials to local communities. Local officials could then ensure inequality without any specific law mandating it… (D)uring the Jim Crow era, localism became the tool to reverse… progress and equality. States increased reliance on local taxation, gave local white officials discretion over state funds, and constitutionally secured segregation. Some went so far as to craft color-coded funding systems where white taxes funded white schools exclusively… The development of Northern local school systems was historically distinct. Yet even in some Northern states, racial antagonism and concerns over segregation prompted pushes for local decision-making.”

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education was intended to address this long history of inequality, but there was a serious omission: “Nearly 70 years ago—in its Brown v. Board decision—the Supreme Court framed racial segregation as the cause of educational inequality… That framing rightly focused on segregation’s immediate horror—excluding students from schools based on the color of their skin—but obscured an important fact. In addition to requiring school segregation, many states also had long segregated school funding. Some had used ‘racially distinct tax’ policies that reserved separate funds for white and Black schools. Other states had moved school funding responsibility and control from state officials to local communities. Local officials could then ensure inequality without any specific law mandating it. Brown’s focus on physical segregation inadvertently left important and less obvious aspects of local funding inequality unchecked.

As she goes on to demonstrate, these issues perpetuate inequitable funding, based on residence and race. This is a crucial feature of systemic racism, a survival of Jim Crow that harms the education of children of color. Many states in the South and Midwest are passings laws to criminalize the study and knowledge of systemic racism. They fear the teaching the truth will make white students uncomfortable.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Inequity, Racism, Segregation
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