Berkshire and Bailey: The Democrats Are Not Champions of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2021 //
69

Veteran journalist Jennifer Berkshire speculated on Twitter about why Democrats failed to defend public schools against extremists. The answer is that they swerved into the politics of neoliberalism 25 years ago and promoted privately-run charter schools. They allied with reactionary forces like the Waltons in their fruitless quest for “innovative” schools. Her handle is @@BisforBerkshire.

She wrote with crystal clarity:

Lots of takes on the Dem’s public education problem. But party’s utter inability to articulate why public education matters may be the biggest.

The Democrats’ favorite policy shop in D.C. is the Center for American Progress, which has been the party’s leading advocate of charter schools. The question that CAP can’t answer is: Why does public education matter?

Nancy Bailey addressed the same problem on her blog. She said bluntly that Democrats are not the education party, as they want the public to believe. They abandoned public schools and teachers by their promotion of school choice and evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores.

The eight years of Obama’s Race to the Too was a nightmare for teachers, who were constantly scapegoated. Arne Duncan fell in love with Common Core and Teach for America and used every opportunities to bash teachers and real public schools.

Democrats cannot be the education party when they support charter schools, Common Core, and fast-track teachers like Teach for America. They haven’t stood up for public education despite all the teacher union hoopla.

Where have they been on the discussion of special education? They’ve worked along with Republicans to deny children individualization, smaller class sizes.

Democrats can become the “education party” again when they walk away from the billionaires like Bill Gates, who likes to play with other people’s lives.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democrats, Education Industry

Harold Meyerson: Manchin and Simena are not “Moderates”

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2021 //
69

Harold Meyerson, one of my favorite commentators on current events, says that we should stop calling Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema “moderates.” How can one man and one woman block every proposal that would help improve the lives of millions of Americans, including their constituents? Nor should we use that term to describe the handful of Democrats in the House who are blocking reasonable and popular programs, like lowering drug prices. I note that I allow Meyerson to use a word that is not permitted on this blog…but he wrote it.

He writes:

Memo to Media: Stop Calling Manchin et al. ‘Moderates’
Being more swayed by big-money contributions and an anti-mother bias are far better descriptors. 
“Moderates Hinder Efforts to Negotiate Drug Prices,” says a front-page headline in today’s Washington Post. Certain Democrats are indeed blocking those efforts, but is the media right to characterize them as moderates? How much of the fight between the overwhelming majority of both the House and Senate Democratic caucuses and the Manchin-Sinema-Gottheimer-Peters gang can accurately be described as left-vs.-center or liberal-vs.-moderate, which are the autopilot descriptions that the media applies to them?

Consider, for instance, that a number of these battles are being waged over policies that would win over swing voters and, indeed, are popular across the political spectrum. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, fully 83 percent of Americans, including 76 percent of Republicans, favored allowing the federal government to negotiate with drug companies to bring down the prescription drug prices for Medicare recipients and people with private insurance. Which is why, on Sunday, 15 House Democrats in frontline districts—genuine moderates—signed a letter to the congressional leaders saying that bringing down drug prices was key to their survival in next year’s midterm elections (and, by extension, to the Democrats’ ability to hold a majority in the next Congress).

There are similar majorities in support of other initiatives that the so-called moderates have blocked, like paid sick leave (73 percent in a recent CBS News poll) and extending Medicare coverage to vision and dental care (84 percent in the same poll).

So, is “moderate” an accurate characterization of the Manchin Gang? Is it moderation that dictates their stances?

Even a cursory look at the campaign contributions to those gang members suggests other factors besides “moderation” are in play. In the House, two of the three Democrats who blocked the relatively comprehensive drug price negotiation provision—California’s Scott Peters and Oregon’s Kurt Schrader—are among the largest recipients of drug company campaign contributions. The nay-saying duo of Schrader and Peters have received a combined $1.5 million in pharma contributions in the course of their congressional careers. The one Democrat who blocked that provision in the Senate, Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, raised a record $1.1 million from July through September, as her opposition to reducing drug prices became clear. A good chunk came directly from Big Pharma executives, even as a paltry 10 percent came from actual Arizonans. With ratios like that, it would not be a stretch to conclude that Sinema, who’s not up for re-election until 2024, may be more motivated by a high-paying job in a high-paying industry than she is by winning the votes of her constituents, moderate and otherwise, should she seek re-election.

We should note that the other Democratic senator from Arizona—former astronaut Mark Kelly—met with fellow moderate Amy Klobuchar and genuine leftists Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren last Thursday to discuss how to get a drug price reduction into the reconciliation bill. Does that make Kelly a liberal and Sinema a moderate? I think not.

So, what do we call these non-moderate moderates who for reasons of their own have broken ranks with their fellow Democrats and President Biden? How about OMT Democrats—Only Money Talks Democrats?

That works for most of them; I’m not sure it does justice, though, to Joe Manchin, who increasingly seems a character of Dostoevskian perversity. With each passing (or blocking) day, Manchin comes across as a creature of steadily mounting rage against fellow legislators who don’t pay him sufficient obeisance, who fail to recognize that this is really all about him. On one issue—paid family leave—he has positioned himself as the sole but sufficient bulwark against making sure that Americans in need, most particularly mothers of newborns and sick children, must choose between work and parenting.

There’s a term for this that is far more accurate than “moderate.” The mot juste for Manchin is “motherfucker.” 
Categories Accountability, Politics

Why the Abortion Debate Will Soon Become Moot

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2021 //
79

As everyone knows, Texas passed a law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, well before women know they are pregnant. There are no exceptions, not even for cases of rape and incest. Governor Gregg Abbott says the exemptions are unneeded because he will “eliminate” rape in Texas. Since he has already passed legislation to remove gun control, women can defend themselves, presumably, by shooting rapists dead. The Governor didn’t explain what to do if a woman is the victim of incest.

Many people think that the current Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, abolishing women’s right to an abortion.

But this entire discussion may soon be moot, if it’s not already. Currently women can order pills online that are inexpensive and easy to obtain. States like Texas will try to ban these pills but they can’t control the mail.

In the United States, where the abortifacients misoprostol and mifepristone have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, abortions by pill made up more than a third of all abortions in 2017.

“It’s really a revolution that’s happened in the last 20 years for women,” said Rebecca Gomperts, a doctor in Austria who founded the online medical abortion service Women on Web in 2005.

Providers and analysts say interest in these pills has spiked in the United States since Texas passed a law banning most abortions in the nation’s second-most-populous state.

No matter what the Supreme Court does, no matter what red-state legislatures do, access to abortion will be easy.

Categories Health

Anti-CRT Stance Helps Republicans Win School Board Races

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2021 //
149

After the election, I posted an article from the Charlotte News-Observer/AP that suggested that attacks on critical race theory was not a decisive factor in many local school board races.

But since there are thousands of local school boards, no one knows for sure whether the issue changed minds and votes.

Axios reports that the anti-CRT crowd made many gains in their effort to win school board races.

Mike Allen writes:

A new PAC focused on electing conservative candidates to public school boards — by raising fears about how racism is taught — won three-fourths of its 58 races across seven states on Tuesday.

Why it matters: Those wins for the 1776 Project PAC, and Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial victory in Virginia, underscore the political potency of culture wars and COVID-related issues in schools this year — and how GOP candidates are seeking to ride the trend to new majorities.

  • Founder Ryan Girdusky told Axios: “My PAC is campaigning on behalf of everyday moms and dads who want to have better access to their children’s education.”

But, but, but: School officials are concerned there’s been intense hype and misinformation around the U.S. about what’s actually being taught in most schools.

  • They also worry politicization of school boards is sometimes translating to violence against teachers, and poorly informed decision-making.

By the numbers: Thirteen Pennsylvania school board candidates backed by the group won their races, along with 11 in Colorado, nine in Kansas, four in New Jersey, three in Virginia and two each in Ohio and Minnesota.

  • They’re not just winning in Republican areas; several candidates won in solid blue counties: Montgomery County, Pennsylvania; Passaic County, New Jersey; and Johnson County, Kansas.

Between the lines: Critical race theory is an academic movement focused on systemic racism, especially in U.S. law. It’s largely remained in graduate school settings as opposed to public secondary schools.

  • But “CRT” has become a potent political buzzword among conservative politicians and parents upset about schools introducing new lessons about racism and the history of slavery in the U.S.

What to watch: Expect more Republican candidates up and down the ballot to pick up CRT along with the rest of Youngkin’s political playbook.

  • The education issue “seems to be trending in our direction, whether it’s school lockdowns, curriculum or critical race theory,” one national GOP strategist told Axios.

If the attacks on CRT continue to stir animosity and spread lies about teaching history, this will cause teachers to self-censor whatever they teach about race and racism. This chilling effect will hamper efforts to think critically and honestly about some of the most important issues in American history. The attacks have also targeted any efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. The anti-CRT crusaders say they want to restore “patriotic education.” That is, an education built on lies.

Categories Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Propaganda, Race, Racism

Texas: The Smell of Burning Books is in the Air

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2021 //
49

The heated debate over “critical race theory,” “indoctrination” and “socialism” in the schools, and attacks on teachers for teaching books like Beloved has unleashed the native fascism that usually hides under a rock.

We saw it in Virginia, where the Republican winner in the election played on these issues in his campaign and vowed that he would pass a law to allow parents to opt their children out of reading stuff that made them “uncomfortable.”

A Texas legislator aims to be on the front lines of book banning. Rep. Matt Krause assembled a list of 850 books that he thinks should be removed from the schools. The books must go “because they might cause students to feel “discomfort.”The list is heavily weighted towards titles about gender, sexuality, racism, and other topics that he thinks should not be taught or read about in school. He probably would ban them for college too if he could.

My guess is that these books were chosen simply by their title, not because Rep. Krause read them.

Here is the list of 850 books that he wants to eliminate from the schools. Krause has no idea whether any of them are taught in the schools.

In the age of the Internet, when teens can see anything and everything mentioned in these books, this crude censorship is ridiculous.

I can’t tell whether the odor in the air is the burning of books or is the stench of McCarthyism.

What do you think?

Categories Democracy, Education Reform, Ignorance, Racism, Texas

Boston: Voters Overwhelmingly Support Return to Elected School Board

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2021 //
17

Boston has had mayoral control of the schools since 1992. On November 2, the voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly supported the return of an elected school board. Mayoral control was sold as a “reform” panacea that would lead to higher achievement. It didn’t. Boston joins Chicago as cities where the public wants to abandon autocratic rule of the schools. The vote in Boston to restore an elected board went 4-1 in favor.

The newly elected mayor, Michelle Wu, said before the election that she would be open to a board in which a majority of members were elected, and some were appointed by the mayor.

The Boston Globe wrote:

The Question 3 ballot measure, which passed with 78.7 percent of the vote, was nonbinding, meaning it doesn’t carry legal weight. But councilors say it will prompt them to push for changes that will democratize school decision-making and empower communities of colorwho have long felt ignored by the appointed committee.

Categories Accountability, Boston, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections

Pro-Public School Candidates Lost in Virginia, But Captured Some School Board Races Elsewhere

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2021 //
20

The media focused its attention on Virginia, where the gubernatorial race was centered on education issues, especially whether parents had a right to control what their children read. A parent led a crusade against Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved for years. The Republican winner, Glenn Youngkin, featured Mrs. Murphy’s decade-old campaign against Beloved in a TV ad. So, many journalists see the Virginia election as a repudiation of “critical race theory” or teaching the horrible facts about human enslavement.

But the North Carolina-based News & Observer published a story that went national via the Associated Press with a different slant. And according to some of the readers here, the anti-CRT, anti-masking folks lost in their districts.

Groups that oppose face masks and vaccines frequently lost. No clear national trend has emerged so far, but parents who want safe schools without censorship of high-quality literature have to organize to keep their schools boards free of extremism and bigotry.

Here is an excerpt:

In Wisconsin, four members of the Mequon-Thiensville School Board held off a recall challenge that cost anti-critical race theory backers nearly $50,000.

In Minnesota, three conservative candidates failed to win a seat on the board in Wayzata. They ran on a “Vote for Three!” platform that denounces “harmful ideologies like CRT,” political indoctrination and “controversial medical mandates.”

In Connecticut, a slate of five five candidates opposed to critical race theory lost the board of education race in the Guilford school system, where a racial reckoning began years ago, first with an episode in which a student wore blackface to a home football game, followed by a fraught debate over the elimination of its mascot, the Indians. Parents for Guilford Students, which backed the losing candidates, posted on Facebook: “Our five republican candidates lost the BOE election.” But, the post said, “those that lost the most are the dear children of Guilford.”

In Colorado, early results showed anti-mask candidate Schumé Navarro trailing in her bid for a seat on the Cherry Creek School District. The mother of three went to court last month to win the right to attend a district candidate event without a face mask, arguing that she cannot wear one because of abuse she suffered as a child. “The environment and the culture that it’s creating is just stealing from our kids,” she said of masks.

However, the fight against diversity education resonated in the school board race in the Carroll Independent School District in Southlake, Texas, where Andrew Yeager won on Tuesday night. He was backed by a political action committee that opposes a diversity and equality plan created after a video of students chanting a racial slur began circulating online three years ago. A temporary restraining order has blocked the plan.

1776 Action, a group inspired by former President Donald Trump’s now-disbanded 1776 Commission that played down America’s role in slavery, urged candidates to sign a pledge calling for the restoration of “honest, patriotic education.” At least 300 candidates and elected officials did so, said Adam Waldeck, the group’s president. Waldeck said his group also sent out mailers and targeted text messages in races in Johnston, Iowa, where three candidates have signed the pledge, and in West Chester, Pennsylvania, where law enforcement was called to investigate threats against school board President Chris McCune. The backlash stems from his ordering the removal from a July meeting of a parent who kept demanding information about critical race theory after her two-minute time limit had ended. McCune, who is on track to retain his seat, wrote in a letter to the Daily Local News newspaper in Pennsylvania that it is his duty to “maintain order” and insisted that the district doesn’t even teach critical race theory.

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/article255471366.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Elections, Parent Groups

Virginia: The Fraud Behind Glen Youngkin’s Attack on “Critical Race Theory

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2021 //
139

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the race for governor in Virginia, centered his campaign on education, specifically on his insistence that parents should have the right to determine what their children learn and on his promise to ban “critical race theory” in the state’s public schools.

The second part of the promise should be easy, because Virginia public schools do not teach “critical race theory.”

Youngkin ran a commercial on his behalf that showed a mother complaining that her son was compelled to read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which upset him.

What the mother did not say was that her son was a senior in an AP English class where he should have been expected to read the work of a Nobel-Prize winning author.

What the mother did not say was that her son’s discomforting experience occurred a decade ago.

What the mother did not say was that her son went on to have a successful career in the federal government.

A recent article by an African American columnist at the Washington Post contrasts this young man’s experience of Beloved with her own. She too was deeply disturbed by the book.

“Having read it, I can confirm that “Beloved” is an intense, at times frightening book.

“Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has sex, violence, mention of bestiality. It centers on the story of a mother who kills her own child, desperate to ensure the infant won’t have to experience the horrors of slavery as she did. It’s visceral, and haunting, and deeply sad.

“But then again, imagine how enslaved people must have felt to live it.

“This exercise in empathy is, presumably, what is meant to be taught in an Advanced Placement English Literature course for 17- and 18-year-olds — which is where it was situated in the Virginia curriculum when Laura Murphy, the Fairfax County mother prominently featured in a viral campaign ad for Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, began to complain about it.

“In the ad, Murphy describes being horrified by the “explicit material” after looking at her child’s reading assignment. And indeed, in 2013, her son — who was by then a 19-year-old college freshman — told The Post that the book was “gross” and hard for him to handle. “I gave up on it,” he said.

“His mother tried to have the novel banned from county schools. Having escaped the hardship of thinking about slavery, the younger Murphy went on to clerk in the Office of the White House Counsel during the Trump administration and is now a lawyer for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

“I was also asked to read “Beloved” in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.

“The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it.”

Isn’t that what great literature is supposed to do?

So, now we know that Mrs. Murphy’s son couldn’t bear to read Beloved, but it didn’t cause him any harm. Other students, however, learned from it, experienced it, and treasured their experience.

Categories Literature, Virginia

Bruce Lesley: Why Public Schools? Because They Are Essential to Democracy

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2021 //
43

Bruce Lesley, child advocate, explains in this article in Medium why a democratic society needs public schools. It’s an excellent article and it reviews the current attacks on public schools and even their right to exist. Did you know that one candidate for U.S. Senate has called for the abolition of public schools; he thinks every child should attend a religious school. Does every parent want their child enrolled in a religious school? Are there enough religious schools to admit 50 million children? A generation ago, a proposal this absurd would have turned him into a laughing-stock.
But these days, ridiculous ideas are in the mainstream, polluting civic discourse.

Lesley’s article returns the discussion of education to reason, a rare quality in these troubled times.

Lesley explains why individual parents should not control what happens in school:

For example, imagine an elementary school of 450 students where 15 parents oppose the teaching of evolution, 19 parents believe the earth is flat, 28 are Holocaust deniers, 22 oppose white children learning about slavery, 7 believe in racial segregation, 21 believe in the concept of a school without walls, 49 demand the use of corporal punishment, 18 want to ban Harry Potter books from the school library, 26 want to ban any books that mention the Trail of Tears, 62 believe that parents should be allowed to overrule a physician’s decision that a child with a concussion should refrain from participating in sports, 87 oppose keeping their kids out of school when they have the flu, 9 believe that a child with cancer might be contagious, 29 believe that kids who are vaccinated should be the ones who quarantine, 72 support “tracking” in all subject areas, 32 believe students should not be taught how to spell the word “isolation” and “quarantine”because they are too “scary of words,” 104 don’t like the school neighborhood boundaries, 38 don’t like the bus routes, 71 parents want a vegan-only lunchroom, 4 demand same-sex classrooms, 5 oppose textbooks and want their children only reading from the Bible, and it can go on and on. The vast majority of parents do not agree with any of these things, and yet, parental rights extremists would insist schools must accommodate them, even if they are completely false, undermine the purpose of education, threaten the safety of children, or promote discrimination.

How can a school operate if every parent can decide every aspect of the education of their child, as some are demanding? It cannot.

The parents who want control of every aspect of their child’s education are homeschoolers.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform

Marty Levine: Does the Arc of the Moral Universe Really Bend Toward Justice?

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2021 //
32

Marty Levine recalls the famous saying by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. He read a new book about police killings of Black men and wonders if Dr. King was overly optimistic. Consider this to be a validation of critical race theory.

He begins:

In 1968, shortly before he was murdered, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, was still giving us hope that we would overcome. Speaking at the National Cathedral, he said we needed to keep not become despondent when things seem to be stuck because “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I am now wondering if he was correct.

I’m reading “America on Fire”,  a recently published book looking at police and community violence written by Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale Associate Professor of History & African American Studies and Law. Spurred to write by the series of police murders of Black men and women and the protests and violence that arose in response, Professor Hinton has found a history of a national failure to learn and unwillingness to confront reality. Time after time police violence was the match that set off violent uprisings in Black communities which had been marginalized and systematically kept in poverty and neglect. Time after time she found we said we knew that we needed to invest in people and communities. And time after time, she found, that we ignored these lessons and turned our resources to defending the built-in bias, expanding our police forces, and expanding our prison systems.

Hinton’s conclusion, formed after she analyzed more than 2,200 separate community outbreaks between 1964 (Harlem, New York) and  2001 (Cincinnati, Ohio) was that the conflict is more than just a symptom of racism and poverty. “They happened when police seemed to be there for no reason, or when the police intervened in matters that could be resolved internally (disputes among friends and family). Rebellions began when the police enforced laws that would almost never be applied in white neighborhoods (laws against gathering in groups of a certain size or acting like a “suspicious person”). Likewise, they erupted when police failed to extend to residents the common courtesies afforded to whites (allowing white teenagers to drink in a park but arresting Mexican American teens for the same behavior).”

Those in power were interested in protecting their power and the status quo rather than bringing the changes they promised. They listened to the voices of the hurting communities, said pious words about their now seeing the pain of those left out of the American Dream, vowed to take on the underlying and systemic problems that had been ignored, and then did little beyond strengthening the police.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Racism
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