Daniel Dale is CNN’s fact-checker, and he identified a huge blunder by Representative Tom Massie, a Republican from Kentucky. Earlier this week, a reader asked whether anyone should trust a person who declares “I am science,” and I didn’t know that he was referring to the tweet cited here. I thought it was a real question, not an unsubtle way of slamming Dr. Fauci.
Daniel Dale writes:
Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has been a vocal critic of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director, who also serves as President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser.On Sunday, Massie sarcastically tweeted, “You mustn’t question Fauci, for he is science.” Under those words, Massie posted an image that featured a giant hand crushing a group of much smaller people. The image includes a quote it attributed to Voltaire, the 18th-century Enlightenment writer and philosopher: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” Facts First: There is no record of Voltaire ever uttering these words. The quote is commonly attributed to Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi who pleaded guilty in 2008 to possession of child pornography. Strom uttered a similar quote during a virulently antisemitic 1993 radio broadcast.
Strom said in the 1993 broadcast: “To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?” The context in which he posed the question made clear that this was a reference to Jewish people.
The false Voltaire attribution for the quote has circulated online for years. The attribution has been debunked in numerouspreviousfact checks and in a 2017 blog post by scholar Nicholas Cronk, director of Oxford University’s Voltaire Foundation. Edward Langille, a St. Francis Xavier University professor of French and co-author of the book “The Quotable Voltaire,” also told CNN on Monday that the quote did not come from Voltaire.
Massie’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. As of Monday afternoon, his tweet had been retweeted more than 6,800 times. It remained online without any correction, even though others had been replying for more than 22 hours to note that the attribution was wrong.
The citizens’ group “Public Schools First NC” has published a scathing critique of the double standards that the General Assembly has inserted into the laws that govern education.
Double Standard!
Proponents of school choice, especially voucher program supporters, are often the most committed to holding public schools accountable for how public funds are spent. They point to the need to monitor the value provided by our tax dollars. Yet these same choice proponents are remarkably silent when asked to apply similar standards to the private schools receiving public tax dollars.
There are many notable contrasts (or rather, contradictions) evident in the 2021-23 budget when it comes to spending on education. The accountability double standard for public dollars spent on public schools versus private schools is especially glaring. For public schools, NC has a well-established NC Report Card that provides a range of information about academic performance and school statistics such as class size and teacher qualifications. In addition, the NC School Finance Dashboard, launched in 2019, provides basic financial information about public schools such as the source of funding and how the funding is spent. For private schools receiving public funds through the school voucher programs (e.g. Opportunity Scholarships), there is no school report card or other public-facing accountability mechanisms. Nothing.
The NC, A-F grading program, one component of the NC Report Card, assigns every NC public school a letter grade. Widely disparaged for their outsized reliance on student achievement test scores, the A-F grades were first assigned to NC public schools in the 2013-14 school year. Each school’s grade is based on a formula where 80% of the grade is based on achievement and 20% on growth. The data used to calculate the achievement scores vary by grade and include end-of-grade and end-of-course test scores, passing rates for Algebra II or Integrated Math III, ACT scores, and graduation rates, There have been a number of bipartisan proposals to change the formula to 50% achievement and 50% growth, but no change has yet been made. NC is an outlier among states with letter grading systems in the resistance to developing a more balanced approach. Kris Nordstrom’s report School Performance Grades: A Legislative Tool for Stigmatizing Non-White Schools describes the grading system and some of its problems in detail.
As NC legislators funnel more money to private schools through voucher programs they are failing to require of private schools similar levels of transparency about student achievement and school finances as contained in the NC School Report Card and School Finance Dashboard. For example, although private schools are required to test students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11, there is no mandatory public reporting requirement. In addition, individual schools select which test to administer, which creates a system where there is no standardized way to compare student achievement across schools or to public school student achievement. Interestingly, for 11th grade, the guidelines state that “Each private school should establish a minimum score on an achievement test to be administered on or before 11th grade which ensures students possess a minimum of skills for high school graduation.” In other words, each school sets its own passing standard. In the public school setting, this is equivalent to allowing each school to determine its own passing (Level 3) score on an EOG or EOC test.
In addition, private schools are not required to share information about their curriculum, qualifications of instructional staff (teachers are not required to hold a college degree or be certified) , or even basic information such as class size and technology resources. This chart showing the essential differences further illustrates the striking contrast.
Yet with the 2021-23 budget, even though in previous years, demand for Opportunity Scholarships has lagged behind the funds allocated to them, with millions left unspent, the legislature allocated even more money to this unaccountable voucher program. By law, funding for Opportunity Scholarships was set to grow by $10 million each year (on top of base funding) regardless of whether the money was spent. With the 2021-23 budget, the increase was bumped to $15 million each year. More than 3.1 billion will be spent on the program over the next 15 years. To drum up demand, they earmarked $500,000 to market the Opportunity Scholarships. At the same time, the legislature failed in its constitutional obligations to fully fund public schools. Members of legislative leadership have even taken the extreme measure of filing an appeal to stop the courts from requiring that dollars are allocated to fund education at the minimum required by the NC constitution.
So why is there such a double standard?Why are our legislators so resistant to an equal evaluation of public and private schools when private schools are spending public tax dollars? Are they concerned that the private school sector won’t hold up to a fair comparison? Ask your legislator! With the abundant unspent voucher school funds, they could build a private school online dashboard just like the public school dashboards so taxpayers can see all aspects of how tax dollars are being used for education. Better yet, let’s put the public taxpayer funds back into our public schools where it belongs.
A reader who identifies as Quickwrit posted the following comment about the filibuster. For most of our history, debates in the Senate could be used to delay consideration of a bill, even to kill it. But the filibuster was not written into law until 1917.
Our Founding Fathers would agree that “contemptible” aptly describes Manchin, Sinema, and each of the other Democrats who oppose ending the filibuster because our Founding Fathers during the 1787 Constitutional Convention flatly rejected the idea of allowing a minority to block the will of the majority by filibustering — that’s because our well-read Founding Fathers knew how the practice of the filibuster in the Roman Senate had eventually brought down the Roman Republic by allowing a minority of reactionary senators to block the will of the majority of Romans in a process that ultimately led to one-person rule by dictatorial emperors.
Founding Father and President James Madison whom we revere as “The Father of the Constitution” disgustedly called the filibuster extortion, pointing out that “In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed…the fundamental [majority rule] principle of free government would be reversed. It would no longer be the majority that would rule: The power would be transferred to the minority…to extort.”
Alexander Hamilton angrily denounced the filibuster, declaring that “To give a minority a negative upon the majority is…to subject the sense of the greater number to that of the lesser…[resulting in] contemptible compromises of the public good.”
Two words of our Founding Fathers that stand out in regard to how they felt about the filibuster are: “EXTORT” and “CONTEMPTIBLE”.
Anyone who supports the filibuster betrays our Founding Fathers and the majority-rule system of government that they established in our Constitution.
As Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) defend the filibuster and block voting rights legislation, corporate media keeps repeating the lie that the two are doing so because they care deeply about Senate rules and tradition. By doing so, news outlets are refusing to admit the obvious: Sinema and Manchin are just the latest of the Senate’s many corrupt puppets who want to help corporate lobbyists preserve their legislative kill switch.
Amid the high-concept discourse about voting rights, historical precedent, and The Greatest Deliberative Body In The World™, big business has been telegraphing what the filibuster actually is. It is not about democracy or minority rights or any other maudlin subplot from a West Wing episode — it is about something much more raw and ugly. It is about giving capital veto power over the economy, as the most powerful corporate lobby group in Washington effectively admits.Tip Jar
Indeed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has publicly opposed filibuster reform for this very reason. Last year, the organization gloated to its members that the rule would prevent Democrats from passing a minimum wage hike or legislation to make it easier for workers to form a union.
Stephen Sawchuk wrote in Education Week about the ways that public controversy about “critical race theory” is affecting the drafting and revision of state history standards. He looks closely at three states that revised their history standards in 2021: Louisiana, New Mexico, and South Dakota.
For months, GOP officials and FOX news kept up a steady and alarming drumbeat, falsely claiming that public schools were indoctrinating white students to hate America and to be ashamed of their race. This weird notion was suddenly discovered in the last year of the Trump regime, when beating up on public schools became a cultural wedge issue. The governor’s race in Virginia showed that the campaign against CRT was effective in rousing people’s fears.
As Sawchuk shows, the effort to twist U.S. history to leave out anything bad that happened in the past is working its way into state standards. Message from the GOP, FOX News, and Chris Rufo: Teach lies about U.S. history!
He writes:
Spiked drafts. Allegations of political interference. Confusing terminology. And thousands of angry comments: The volatile debate over how to teach about America’s racist past is wreaking havoc on states’ processes for deciding what students will learn about history and social studies.
In state after state, commentators and politicians contended that proposed expectations for social studies embedded “critical race theory”—even as the educators sitting on the panels writing the new standards defended them for providing an honest, if sometimes challenging, view of America.
Education Week reviewed hundreds of standards and thousands of pages of public comment relating to the standards-writing processes in South Dakota, Louisiana, and New Mexico, all of which took up revisions in 2021, and interviewed writers, educators, and state officials. Across the three states, we found:
None of the three states’ drafts mentioned the term critical race theory, but in written comments, people attacked dozens of standards in Louisiana’s and New Mexico’s drafts for purportedly embedding it.
In South Dakota, state officials removed about 20 references to Native Americans from the draft submitted by the standards-writing panel—then scotched the draft altogether.
The critiques about CRT in Louisiana led the writers to recast some standards and to delete others. And public comment protocols in Louisiana were changed out of fear for the writers’ physical safety.
The teaching method of having students take civic action to address classroom and local problems—an approach some conservatives contend is indoctrination—was mysteriously cut from both Louisiana’s and South Dakota’s drafts.
About 1 in 10 of some 2,900 pages of comments on the New Mexico standards referenced CRT, often citing language in the draft about “social justice,” “group identity,” and “critical consciousness.” Those terms also attracted confusion from district leaders wondering how those tenets should be taught.
The findings illustrate how the fallout from the confusing and often misleading debate about CRT stands to alter history education in U.S. schools through subtle—but material—changes to day-to-day teaching expectations.
“Standards provide teachers with cover to teach hard things—controversial things,” noted Lynn Walters-Rauenhorst, an instructor and student-teaching supervisor at the University of New Orleans, who was among the writers of Louisiana’s draft. “If we don’t have standards that support deep inquiry about things that may not be the easy topics to cover, then teachers aren’t going to do it.”
And the discord stands as another testament to how the country’s polarization has affected K-12 policymaking at large.
“The uncivil discourse centering around these issues is detrimental not only to the process, but really, it’s also detrimental to these embedded ideas in our constitutional democracy of compromise, of listening to each other, not always agreeing,” said Tammy Waller, the director for K-12 social studies at the Arizona education department.
Arizonans, she noted, faced some controversies over topics like civil rights and the LGBTQ movement when completing the state’s 2018 social studies revisions, but ultimately officials were able to complete a set everyone could live with. That is getting harder.
“In the past I feel like we could have disagreements, and even really intense disagreements, but in the end, it wasn’t a zero-sum game,” Waller said. “We felt like we had something bigger that we were responsible for.”
Those are important stories. But states’ revisions to history standards have attracted far less attention, even though they stand to affect millions more students.
That question is especially relevant for K-12 students, who are now 54 percent Asian, Black, Latino, and Native American. Where—and how—are these students reflected in this complex story? What does their inclusion or erasure mean for their understanding of who they are as Americans? To what extent should K-12 teaching reflect academic scholarship, which has produced increasingly rich insights over the past three decades about cultural history, especially the experiences of women, Black Americans, and immigrants?
States update teaching standards—the key guide for the content and skills that teachers must cover—about once every seven years. Teachers are legally and professionally obligated to cover these standards, which are usually drafted by panels of teachers, content experts, and lay people. The public also offers feedback before final versions are adopted by state boards of education. …Read more
To illustrate these complex issues, take one representative standard currently under debate in Louisiana in grade 7. The standard, a broad one, directs teachers to explain events and ideas in U.S. history between 1789 and 1877, “including, but not limited to, the Whiskey Rebellion, Indian Removal Act, Fugitive Slavery [sic] Act, Reconstruction amendments.”
As currently written, the standard highlights uneven progress towards true participation in the American democratic experiment. But several commentators in the state suggested replacing those examples with touchstones emphasizing expansion and enfranchisement, though mainly of white Americans: “Jacksonian democracy, Texan independence, Manifest Destiny, and Reconstruction,” they wrote.
“Teachers are not going to stick their neck out to teach something they think they ethically should talk about, but isn’t going to be assessed,” said Walters-Rauenhorst. “There’s no upside for them.”
EdWeek selected the three states—Louisiana, South Dakota, and New Mexico—for analysis because all three issued at least one draft set of standards in 2021, and received public feedback on that draft.
Other states in the beginning of rewriting their standards are already starting to see the same sort of contention. Minnesota, midway through its own process, has faced tensions over an ethnic-studies portion of its standards; in Mississippi, legislators filed a bill in November to outlaw critical race theory just weeks before the state education department posted a history draft for review….
LOUISIANA: A CRT Reckoning Awaits
One by one, the commentators stood up at a June public meeting, one of three that the standards-writing committee held to present updates. And one by one, they condemned the state’s draft history standards for purportedly including critical race theory or indoctrinating students.
A typical example: “There is no reason to make students feel guilty,” one speaker said. “We should teach the good things about this country.”
Another: “If you want to continue to talk about slavery, [you should] go to China now…”
Now it’s unclear what will happen to the draft, which is set to be taken up by the state board of education in March.
“I went to law school; I learned critical race theory in law school; I have a Ph.D. This is not something we use in K-12,” said Belinda Cambre, a social studies instructor at a lab school located at Louisiana State University who contributed to the draft. “Really the whole issue saddened me more than anything else, that it could be so weaponized to turn people against talk of diversity.”
The criticism took its toll. Even before the Louisiana department opened up an online public-comment portal, the writers had made significant changes in response to the bruising June feedback.
Some revisions reframed a standard in a more optimistic way: One in the high school civics course originally called for students to “examine issues of inequity in the United States with respect to traditionally marginalized groups.” In its rewritten form, it calls on them to “analyze the progression and expansion of civil rights, liberties, social and economic equality, and opportunities for groups experiencing discrimination.”
By far, the most substantive revision to the draft was the deletion of one of the overarching skills for students—meant to be embedded across the grade levels and courses—called “taking informed action.”
Louisiana’s board-appointed State Superintendent Cade Brumley, a former social studies teacher, wrote in a July op-ed that the standards should strike a balance between critique and patriotism, but should not include critical race theory, which he defined as “suggest[ing] America was intentionally founded on racism, oppression, supremacy.” By October, he said that he could not recommend the draft as written.
Robert Kuttner, editor of The American Prospect, predicts that Biden will turn around public opinion before the mid-term elections. Biden has been the target of endless media speculation about his failures. Kuttner thinks this will change.
We can count on Trump to seize defeat out of the jaws of victory.
It is just sickening to watch the media pile on Biden. OK, Manchin and Sinema are holding the administration hostage. The signals from the CDC on COVID have been mixed, and Biden stepped on some of his lines at his recent press conference. The man doesn’t walk on water. But compared to … what?
Here is a scenario for a Democratic comeback.
Within the next month or two, my sources indicate that Biden will get about $1.5 trillion of his Build Back Better program. The reconciliation process cannot be filibustered, and Manchin will eventually support a lot more than zero.
At that point, Democrats-in-Disarray stops being the slow-drip, day-after-day headline. And the herd-instinct, echo-chamber press has to find a new story.
One leading candidate is Republican cannibalism, which has been proceeding right on schedule.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis broke the unwritten norm that nobody challenges Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination, by suggesting that Trump is a wuss for urging people to get vaccinated. This in turn made Trump predictably apoplectic.
If DeSantis can hint at a presidential run, others will follow. Trump will do more damage to his party by running lunatic unelectable MAGA candidates in primaries. And then the story becomes Republicans in disarray.
Just in case the public needs another reminder of just how deranged the Trump and congressional Republicans are, in February and March the January 6 Committee investigation of the attempted coup will reveal more and more details. All of that will also dominate the headlines.
And a massive election-year grassroots mobilization of Democrats will take shape this spring. Pundits, seeking a new morning line, will start remembering the larger stakes for our democracy and start writing about Biden as the comeback kid.
Needless to say, I can’t guarantee that this will happen. But don’t rule it out either.
Jesse Hagopian is an activist teacher in the Seattle Public Schools, a leader in Black Lives Matter at School and editor of the book More Than a Score: The New Uprising Against High-Stakes Testing. This article appeared in the Seattle Times:
State Republican Rep. Jim Walsh recently introduced HB 1807 and Republican Rep. Brad Klippert introduced HB 1886 for this legislative session — two bills designed to mandate educators lie to Washington’s students about structural racism and sexism.
This copycat legislation is lifted from a growing number of bills around the country that seek to ban an honest account of history in K-12 education, including many of the long struggles against oppression. These bills especially target the teaching of critical race theory (CRT), the 1619 Project, the Zinn Education Project and Black Lives Matter at School.
It’s fitting that Rep. Klippert’s bill is numbered “1886,” as that was the year a mob of white people in Seattle rounded up more than 200 Chinese people, forced them into wagons, and hauled them to Seattle docks where they were placed on a ships and deported. Though 15 people were tried in court in relation to the riot — including Chief of Police William Murphywho helped the mob round up Chinese people illegally — not a single one was ever convicted of a crime.
It’s similarly appropriate that Rep. Walsh’s bill is numbered “1807” because this bill seeks to return us to the early 19th century — a time when the nation was accelerating the attack on Black people’s rights in the North and colonizing the land of Native Americans. In 1807, New Jersey took away the right to vote for Black people. On April 1, 1807, Ohio outlawedBlack people from testifying in cases with white people. For the next 40 years, white people could act with impunity in filing baseless lawsuits and commit crimes — even violent attacks — against Black people who could not testify to defend themselves or give any evidence against them…
HB 1886 states that educators would be banned from teaching that, “The United States is fundamentally or structurally racist or sexist.” But consider these facts: The average white family has 10 times the amount of wealth of the average Black family.
For teachers who believe in accurate history, there is no real choice here — we will always teach students about the reality of structural racism and other intersecting oppressions. Revealing these facts in the classroom is not about shaming white students — in fact, it is those who deny structural racism who end up leading white children to suspect that they are personally responsible for the racial disparities they see, rather than understanding the way systems can work to perpetuate inequities sometimes regardless of the intentions of the individuals who work in these systems.
Jim Sleeper is a lecturer in political science at Yale and an author. He wrote the following post in 2018, when the horrors of the Trump regime were fresh. It is still relevant.
Donald J. Trump isn’t a Nazi, although his father came close. It’s true that historical analogies between Trump’s policies and Hitler’s are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here’s one that I’m not inclined to shrug off.
During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It’s a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.
It’s also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station’s Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week’s shipment of several hundred “Juden” to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.
It’s hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they’d been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.
Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Some time after that, postcards they hadn’t written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they’d listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations.
One day in April of 2009, as I sipped my coffee at the Grunewald station alongside retirees in their 70s and near a beer-garden where younger Germans also overlooked the square, three police cars swept in and officers leapt out, commanding us, “Don’t Move.” Then approximately 45 young military officers in formal parade dress descended from a tourist bus. Their uniforms were attractive, but alien—clearly not German. As they milled about, one of the men seated near me asked a police officer, “Was is das?”
“Israelischen,” he answered. They were Israeli army officers.
A silence descended upon the square like nothing I’d ever felt, so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Not another word was spoken, but I thought that I sensed three dimensions in the quiet all around me. The first was straight out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “They’re here. They’ve come.” The second was of admiration, or at least respect, for these vibrant young officers, stunning negations of the image of “Juden” that some of these older men must have remembered from their infancy. The third dimension, I sensed from the tightened body language around me, carried a flicker of resentment at having to be reminded, instead of being left to sip one’s coffee in peace.
A black car with tinted windows ascended a ramp toward Track 17. The Israeli officers fell into formation and followed. They’d come to lay a wreath on Track 17 on Yom Ha’Shoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day. Ironically, I hadn’t remembered the day myself.
I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn’t think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children—on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who’s Jewish—I’m thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, “Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran.”
Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolph Hitler.
We now know that German veterans of that war, Jews and non-Jews alike, were lied to and sent into harm’s way for no good reason. So were soldiers in the Nazi Wehrmacht 25 years later, whom my father, a corporal in the U.S. Army Combat Engineers, was ordered to supervise as prisoners as his 277th battalion clanked across northern Germany, because he spoke Yiddish, which is closely related to German.
He did it with mix of grief and revulsion. One day, when his battalion commandeered a Nazi-friendly baron’s estate in the town of Hohne, my father and others scouted a cottage behind the mansion and found a white-haired, well-spoken man who said he was a caretaker but whom the G.I.’s suspected was closer to the missing baron. As some of them prodded him down the hill toward the mansion, jabbing him roughly with their rifle barrels, my father said, suddenly, almost instinctively, “Cut that out.”
“Why? You should enjoy this Sleeper, you’re a Jew.”
“Cut it out, I said.” He had no illusions about Nazism. But he was a young American, emancipated from his ancestors’ European hell, and he thought he was fighting for a world better than one in which the tables of unjust power are merely turned, a world where justice—dare one say, “due process”?—is stronger than revenge.
Watching the fires that Trump is stoking week in, week out, I wonder when his supporters and enablers will see that the unthinkable could happen to them. I’m not inclined to alarmism, but what if, a couple of years from now, veterans who say they fought for an America where people are free to speak their minds decide to speak their own minds in ways Trump doesn’t like? How far might this admirer of Vladimir Putin go against Americans he thinks are his enemies? He’s already said that he wants to tighten libel laws; his ICE agents have developed arrest-and-detention tactics that a craven Congress would let him expand with the stroke of a pen; municipal police forces are more militarized than ever before.
Yes, historical analogies are risky. But, sipping coffee overlooking the Grunewald station’s charming cobblestone square, you’d never imagine what happened there if you hadn’t been told.
Paul Bonner, who recently retired as a principal in Alabama, wrote the following comment as part of a discussion of administering NAEP to kindergartners.
He wrote:
One of the experiences that made me aware that my time with public education was coming to an end was when our district began testing kindergartners. I would walk into kindergarten classrooms and watch students struggle and often cry over the inability to navigate iPads. I would leave those classrooms shaken to the core. The students who could work with the devices were not making decisions about correct answers but through simply getting the program to move from question to question. Almost none of these students could understand what the test was asking them to do. This angered me significantly because what we were focusing on ignored the activities that were needed to build an actual foundational developmental standard. No focus on gross and fine motor skill development or social and emotional growth. No test below third grade will give us meaningful understanding of what children actually know and that really is beside the point. The poor quality of most of the tests I have seen keep us from understanding what those form third grade through twelve understand! What we are doing to children, or being asked to do, is criminal and a denial of how the brain can get to a point of meaningful inquiry. The fact that people who have no experience with child development and have done no meaningful study of the early brain, provides further evidence that our society and polity has no appreciation for the professional approach required to raise children to become successful adults. It just seems to be getting worse. I am absolutely appalled to see another presidential administration and the plethora of state governments that refuse to see the damage they are doing. This predatory capitalism that has so infected education, and all of governance, just might result in the same effect led poisoning had on Rome.
Mercedes Schneider writes that it is literally impossible to ban a book that is easily available on the Internet. The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to ban a Pulitzer-prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust called MAUS.
But, she points out, students can find it for free on the Internet.
Furthermore, banning a book is a sure fire way to motivate students to want to read it. They might want to see for themselves the awful words “God Damn” or see nude mice.
Schneider writes:
If parents want to control what their children read, they might consider refocusing their school-district, book-banning attention toward controlling content on their children’s iPhones, iPads, and other electronic devices. As of this writing, three of Art Speigelman’s Maus book series are rated, 2, 3, and 7 on Amazon’s best sellers…
In response to the ban, a Knoxville, Tennessee, comic book store is giving away free copies of Maus to students who wish to read the book.
As it stands, readers can also do what my colleague’s son did with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four: Read it online for free. Here’s the first in the series: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986).
(Note that the above text is available on Internet Archive, which is involved in a June 2020 lawsuit brought forth by several publishers. Internet Archive maintains it offers the books under “fair use.”)
Book bans backfire: they increase sales. And they encourage students to seek them out and read them. School boards should not embarrass themselves by acting as censors.
The Guardian in the U.K. reports on a study finding that parents in England are unhappy with the past three decades of “school choice.” By contrast, parents in Scotland are satisfied with their local public schools.
Three decades of school choice in England has left parents feeling more “cynical, fatalistic and disempowered” than their peers in other parts of the UK, according to new research.
A study comparing parents in England, where families can name up to six state schools for their children to attend, with those in Scotland, where children are generally assigned to local state schools, found Scottish families were still more likely to be satisfied with the outcome.
While 75% of parents in England said they had enough choice of schools, 76% of those in Scotland said the same, despite their lack of explicit choices within the admissions process.
Parents in England were more likely to express frustration and disempowerment, with several calling the current school choice policies an “illusion”, in surveys and interviews conducted for the research published in the Journal of Social Policy.
Aveek Bhattacharya, the chief economist at the Social Market Foundation and the author of the paper, said: “This research adds to the growing evidence that school choice policies have failed to bring the benefits they were supposed to.
“For all the emphasis that policymakers in England have put on increasing choice, parents south of the border are no happier with their lot than their Scottish counterparts. Indeed, many are disenchanted and dismayed.
“These findings show that parents offered a range of options for their children’s school are no happier than parents who have less choice about education.”
