Category Archives: Education / Youth

Rewriting History

I went through grade school, high school, college and law school without ever hearing about the Tulsa riots or the Trail of Tears, among other negative episodes. My experience was not unique. It is only in the last couple of decades that a number of previously suppressed episodes showing the underside of our nation’s history have finally emerged into the public consciousness.

It isn’t a coincidence that Americans are only recently hearing about historical events involving women and people of color. The full history of women and Black and Brown Americans is finally emerging thanks to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement–movements that fostered the equal rights and recognition that MAGA despises as “woke.”

As the culture has changed, the backlash has become more ferocious. The Trump administration is trying to root out DEI–characterizing efforts to combat historic exclusion as “anti-White,” and mounting assaults on historic displays at museums and national parks. Meanwhile, Red states like Florida are re-writing curricula to ensure that their students will graduate with the same ignorance of history that I experienced.

The Washington Post recently reported on one aspect of the administration’s efforts.  An internal government database disclosed “the vast scope of the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to revise or remove information on African American history, climate change and other topics at hundreds of national park sites.” Park employees are under orders to eliminate displays that might “disparage” America, and a growing number of those displays are being “evaluated” to ensure that they are properly positive.

At the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument in Mississippi, the Trump administration is “reviewing” the exhibit on the teen’s brutal 1955 killing by White men— though the park’s staff warned that its removal would leave the site “completely devoid of interpretation.”

At the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park in West Virginia, the staff has asked federal officials “to decide whether a document that describes an abolitionist’s murder by a mob might “denigrate the murderers.'”

These displays and materials are among several hundred that managers have flagged at hundreds of national park locations since last summer in response to administration orders to scrub sites of “partisan ideology,” descriptions that “disparage” Americans, or materials that stray from a focus on the nation’s “beauty, abundance, or grandeur.” The submissions were compiled in an internal government database and reviewed by The Washington Post, which confirmed its authenticity with current federal employees.

The submissions are a troubling indication of the  scope of Trump’s effort to recast the history of the country–and to revise how–if at all– our national parks address such subjects as America’s history of racism and sexism, LGBTQ+ rights, climate change, and pollution.

The database became public when a group that described itself as “civil servants on the front lines” posted it to two public websites, explaining that it did so to show Americans how the administration is “trying to use your public lands to erase history and undermine science.”

You will not be surprised to learn that the Department failed to respond to reporters’ questions about the status of the reviews, the process for evaluation, or about the specific examples in the database.

One obvious effect of the administration’s new rules has been confusion.

Staff members identified a brochure at Cape Hatteras National Seashore, in North Carolina, for “possible disparaging of a prominent American” because it mentions that aviator and onetime Smithsonian Institution secretary Samuel Langley failed to achieve flight. A park staffer at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in Arizona asks for clarification about whether displays on California condors’ return from the brink of extinction disparage hunters “or tell a success ??”

Others wanted to know whether books or displays about slavery and the black experience, or about Lincoln’s assassination–events that may or may not “disparage” historical figures, but that do cover “dark periods in American history”– are acceptable. What about displays that acknowledge Jefferson’s children with Sally Hemings?

As the report notes, many–if not most– National Park Service employees gravitated toward their work because they were passionate about telling true stories about history and science. A former superintendent of Shenandoah National Park was quoted as saying “It’s a real affront to the values that rangers have.”

Among the MAGA revisionists who have applauded Trump’s effort to redact inconvenient history is Indiana’s embarrassing White Christian nationalist Senator Jim Banks, who has written to officials at Interior and the Park Service over his concerns about “woke” projects that “cast America’s founding and history in a negative light.”

Actually, it’s people like Trump and Banks–people who want to rewrite history– who cast America in a negative light.

Comments

Speaking Of Education..

There are many ways to “slice and dice” the U.S. citizenry–ways to distinguish between the Americans who support our mad, would-be monarch, and those who don’t. Research strongly suggests that one of those ways is education–not just the wide distinction in voting patterns between Americans with college degrees and those without (in 2024,college graduates went for Harris by 13 points), but between voters with and without such degrees who continue to cheer the persistent, arguably hysterical war that the administration and the Republican Party is waging against science, history, and genuine education of all sorts.

That war is wide-ranging.

MAGA’s White “Christian” nationalist base is once again trying to post the (cinematic version of the) Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Red State legislators–very much including Hoosier lawmakers–continue to confuse education with job training, evaluating the “merit” of high school and college programs on the basis of student’s later earnings. RNK, Jr. has led the battle against medical science and probative evidence, while others in the administration continue to force changes to accurate historical displays in the nation’s parks and museums, turning them into “patriotic” propaganda.

But the administration continues to wage its most ferocious war on the nation’s universities. And as Arne Duncan, the former U.S. education secretary, and David Pressman, a former ambassador to Hungary recently argued in the linked essay, America’s universities need to dramatically improve their response to the unremitting assaults on academic freedom.

For decades, universities have cast themselves as guardians of free inquiry and intellectual independence. Yet when confronted with political coercion aimed squarely at those values, too many have revealed a troubling gap between rhetoric and practice.

In their essay, they draw a troubling parallel between what happened to the universities in Hungary and what they see unfolding in the United States. They point out that the early responses were the same, and predict that if the current spinelessness continues, the outcome will also be the same.

In Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s Hungary, a kleptocratic and illiberal political movement began not with tanks in the streets, but with pressure, “compacts” and quiet accommodation. Storied institutions of higher education and research were slowly captured, their leaders coerced through financial threats and political pressure.

There, university rectors told themselves that going along was the best way to protect their institutions and their work. But they were wrong. Accommodation did not moderate the regime; it emboldened it, signaling weakness and inviting further demands.

Duncan and Pressman list the Trump administration assaults: conditioning federal research grants on ideological conformity; threatening investigations; freezing funding; intrusive oversight; turning money meant to cure disease and advance knowledge into political ransom. But, as they charge, with only “a handful of notable exceptions,” academic leadership has responded “with timidity, silence or preemptive concession.”

As the authors charge, “When institutional self-preservation replaces moral leadership, universities abandon their core mission. This is a striking abdication of responsibility — particularly from leaders entrusted with educating the next generation of citizens.”

It’s hard to disagree with their warning that allowing legal caution to displace moral leadership is anticipatory surrender.

Lest we be tempted to shrug off that warning, we might want to take a look at what is happening in Florida right now, where Ron DeSantis is making Florida the poster child for the GOP’s war on reality. The state has just handed down a sociology curriculum that they are requiring all public colleges to use– and the Florida Department of Education is already working on a similar framework for American history classes.

Aligned with the state-sanctioned sociology textbook, the framework requires that the courses do not “include a curriculum that teaches identity politics” or one that “is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

The Florida Department of Education also distributed an instructor’s manual and textbook, while demanding that institutions submit their current sociology syllabi, “including detailed assignment schedules, topic calendars, or modules to show course coverage.” The state has entirely banned class discussions that “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color,” “that argue most variations between men and women are learned traits and behaviors,” and “that describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

Welcome to Fantasy Island….

Comments

Parental Rights– And Wrongs

One of the thorniest issues in American law involves “parental rights.” On the one hand, the law recognizes the primacy and importance of parenthood, acknowledging the right of parents to inculcate (or at least try to inculcate) their children with their own values and religious beliefs.

On the other hand, the law makes exceptions for behaviors that abuse or endanger children. Courts have long intervened when parents have tried to deny their children life-saving medical care in favor of “praying the illness away,” no matter how sincere such religious beliefs may be. Child welfare departments are supposed to intervene in cases where parents are physically or sexually abusing their children.

In other words, the law attempts to balance respect for the rights and prerogatives of parents with the safety and well-being of children.

Which brings us to a case in Texas. (Of course, it would be Texas…)

There’s a case pending before the Supreme Court of Texas that will test the reach of that state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment.” That state-level constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing.” The measure provides that any governmental action found to “interfere” with those parental rights must be subjected to the highest level of judicial scrutiny.

Presumably, this stringent level of analysis is intended to protect parents whose conduct is ambiguous, or those who engage in parenting rooted in foreign cultural backgrounds. The record in this case is neither. As the linked article reports,

The conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.

That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.

We are all familiar with the rhetoric. Public schools are “undermining” parents. (Usually, by acknowledging that LGBTQ+ people exist, or by teaching accurate history or science rather than creationism.) As the linked essay notes, the phrase “parental rights” has functioned as a euphemism—it isn’t aimed at parents’ right to raise their children in a manner consistent with their values, but intended to protect a parental right to control what “any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.”

The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.

Parental rights advocates insist that parents should have a veto over school library books or pronouns, but that same movement is quick to override parents who seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. Now, the Texas Supreme Court is being asked to rule that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation are protected  parental “rights.” As the essay says, such a finding would be tantamount to ruling “that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.”

That unthinkable result would confirm the actual intent of the modern parental rights movement. As the author asserts, the movement is not about freedom from government overreach in any principled sense. It is about allowing some parents to “enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight.”

A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.

The lower courts had (properly) terminated parental rights in the case. Given those rulings and the copious record of abuse, the willingness to appeal–to argue that abuse is a “parental right”– is a chilling admission.

Comments

Monetizing Everything

Could Indiana’s legislature be any more arrogant, or any more oblivious to what constitutes value? (That was a rhetorical question, since the correct answer is obviously “no.”)

The Indianapolis Star recently reported on yet another example in the General Assembly’s continuing war on education. The report described Senate Bill 199–which recently passed the Senate– as a “Frankenstein of technical education-related changes.” (The bill had originally included restrictions on social media access for minors, but that measure was stripped by the bill’s author on the Senate floor.)

It is possible that many of the legislators who voted for SB 199 were unaware of a single line, “buried in the middle of the bill and absent from the bill digest,” that would eliminate any public college degree if graduates holding that degree are found to earn less than those with only a high school diploma. As the Star noted, that provision is “yet another blow for the state’s higher education institutions less than a year after last-minute language from last legislative session led colleges to cut more than a fifth of the state’s degrees because of low enrollment.”

The bill ties the definition of a “low earning outcome program” to a section of federal law amended by President Donald Trump’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That bill already restricts federal student loans from going toward such degrees, but the Indiana bill would go further by putting the degree programs themselves on the chopping block.

It’s unclear what programs could fall into such a category. Programs where the median earnings of its cohort surpassed the median earnings of Hoosiers between 24 and 35 with only a high school diploma — around $33,500 — would be unaffected by the bill.

If a university wants to keep a low earning degree program, it can appeal to the higher education commission. Without commission approval, the university would be mandated to eliminate the program.

According to the report, the bill still needs to pass the House and be signed by the governor to become law. Given the makeup of the House, and the cluelessness of the Governor, not to mention the fact that the bill contains numerous other–arguably reasonable–provisions, I don’t hold out much hope for a last-minute reprieve.

Where do I start with a critique of this ridiculous provision?

For one thing, it is yet another display of what might be called the legislature’s “overlord complex”–the evident belief that, by virtue of winning a (gerrymandered) seat in Indiana’s General Assembly, legislators have been endowed with the right to make all manner of decisions: controlling (i.e. overruling) municipal governments, school corporations, medical personnel…Our overlords deem themselves capable of deciding a wide range of issues that are arguably none of their concern–from whether local governments can ban plastic bags or puppy mills to whether doctors and medical practitioners can determine the medical necessity of abortions or provide gender care.

Our overlords’ zeal to redefine education as job training, and place a fiscal value on everything, is also burdensome and expensive. Some state functionary will be tasked (and paid) to assess the earnings of students who’ve chosen these “low value” degrees. Is that really where citizens want their tax dollars spent?

What happens when inevitable changes in the job market depress the earnings of people with degrees that previously escaped the ax?

And what do we tell the student who wants to major in art or philosophy or a similar subject–a student whose intellectual interests trump her concerns about earning potential? (For that matter, how do we factor in MAGA’s new “tradwife” focus–which, if it took off, would see female graduates taking “home ec” and then staying home with multiple children rather than earning anything at all?)

What really, really makes me livid, however, isn’t the legislature’s obvious inability to recognize the practical problems and jurisdictional breaches such measures represent. It is the constant equation of education with job training, legislators’ evident inability to recognize the value of intellectual inquiry.

A few days ago, I quoted passages from David Brooks’ final column for the New York Times. In that essay, he noted that the road to Trump and MAGA had been paved by the generations of students and their parents who fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, “driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.”

Indiana’s legislature has been drinking that Kool-Aid for years. It’s one reason Indiana is often said to be in competition to be the new Mississippi….

Comments

MAGA’s War On Education

Yesterday, I posted about the threat to higher education spearheaded by a Florida organization that proposes to redefine education as job training and to defund college courses that don’t promise graduates good salaries. 

The fact that the sponsoring organization is located in Florida shouldn’t surprise us: under DeSantis, that state is leading the way when it comes to MAGA’s war on education. He has already destroyed New College, which offended him by being “woke.”

As one observer recently wrote, DeSantis’ goal was to convert a liberal institution into a conservative one by using government money and purges. But by 2023, one third of its faculty had departed for jobs elsewhere, students were unable to find classes, and those with housing contracts were living in an airport hotel.

Today, New College spends more per student than any other institution of higher education in Florida–but the “return on investment” that so fascinates the Right has failed to materialize. The school has dropped 60 spots in the US News & World Report rankings, and its administration is currently trying to turn things around by–wait for it–recruiting student athletes and eliminating all-gender bathrooms. (In all fairness, maybe it will work. Indiana University’s winning football team has succeeding in diverting attention from the widely-criticised performance of IU’s president.)

Efforts to replace education with indoctrination aren’t limited to Florida. An article in Talking Points Memo notes that, when it comes to waging war on education, Trump appears to have taken yet another a page from the Confederacy.

In the early twentieth century, devotees of the ahistoric Lost Cause (it was all about state’s rights, not slavery) like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) used their considerable political influence to revise history curricula. As the article reports, “For the next several decades, nearly 70 million Southern students were taught that the enslaved were actually servants and that the Confederates fought merely to preserve a Southern way of life.” The article traced the numerous efforts that commandeered state-level commissions and controlled the “history” taught to generations of students, particularly–but not exclusively– in the South.

Under President Donald Trump, this blueprint is being adapted and disseminated directly from the White House. The president in September announced the Department of Education’s partnership with dozens of conservative and far-right organizations including Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty, and PragerU. The group will lead the Trump administration’s 250th anniversary civic education efforts “in schools across the nation.” Among the administration’s priorities? “Renewing patriotism,” and “advancing a shared understanding of America’s founding principles in schools across the nation.”…

Trump II is leaning heavily on the “again” part of his MAGA slogan by pushing policy that propels the nation backward. Experts told TPM that by partnering with right-wing groups, Trump and his allies are exercising control over the retelling of history in hopes of shaping the political opinions of the youngest Americans. With groups like TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation at the helm, the Trump administration threatens to propagandize public education for generations to come, and to revive the highly politicized, and ahistorical, curriculum campaigns of the early- and mid-20th centuries.

The linked article goes through the history of these (undeniably successful) efforts to distort history, and is very much worth reading in its entirety. It also highlights Trump’s partnership with PragerU, a conservative, anti-DEI media nonprofit, to produce “educational materials” about the Revolutionary War. 

PragerU has published materials with false claims about slavery and racism, echoing the ethos of the UDC, in the name of “American values.” Like the UDC and other 20th century education activists, the group has been lobbying to get its materials in schools for years. Under Trump, the architects of the next decades of public (and charter and private) schooling appear to be right-wing groups like the PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point.

If that isn’t chilling enough, a glance through the administration’s wider efforts to control what Americans learn is instructive. 

The administration’s numerous threats to museums and libraries are part of that war. At the end of December, The New York Times reported the destruction of NASA’s largest research library, described as “a facility that houses tens of thousands of books, documents and journals — many of them not digitized or available anywhere else.” According to a NASA spokesman, while some materials would be stored in a government warehouse, the rest would simply be tossed away. That library’s closure followed the shutdown of seven other NASA libraries around the country since 2022, including three this year. 

I think it was Santayana who warned that those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat it…

Comments