Education / Youth – Page 12

The Culture Warriors Are Coming For Your Schools

For at least the past decade, pundits reporting on the steady degradation of American political life have argued that America’s far-too-apathetic polity wouldn’t act “until we hit bottom.”

I think we’re there.

Posts and comments to this blog regularly grapple with the widespread lack of civility–not to mention intelligence–in public life. There’s the in-your-face bigotry, the denial of science and evidence, defense of the ever-widening gap between the rich and the rest, and the daily assaults on democracy and democratic norms.

Those very unAmerican behaviors and beliefs have recently been joined by an all-out MAGA attack on public education. GOP legislatures have diverted education funding to fundamentalist religious schools, Republican administrations are banning books, and extremists have taken over an uncomfortable number of school boards.

I recently came across an NBC report detailing one such takeover, in Colorado.

Woodland Park, a small mountain town that overlooks Pikes Peak, became the first — and, so far, only — district in the country to adopt the American Birthright social studies standard, created by a right-wing advocacy group that warns of the “steady whittling away of American liberty.” The new board hired a superintendent who was previously recalled from a nearby school board after pushing for a curriculum that would “promote positive aspects of the United States.” The board approved the community’s first charter school without public notice and gave the charter a third of the middle school building.

Among other moves that especially alarmed teachers was the decision by the new superintendent not to reapply for the grants that covered the salaries of counselors and social workers. When challenged, he told staff members that he “prioritized academic achievement, not students’ emotions. We are not the department of health and human services.” When asked if taxpayers would get a say in these changes, he said that they already had — when they elected the school board.

Woodland Park offers a preview of how quickly a new majority can move to reshape a district — and how those battles can ripple outward into the community. Some longtime residents say that the situation has grown so tense, they now look over their shoulder when discussing the school board in public to avoid confrontation or professional consequences…

When asked to respond to criticism from school personnel and parents, Illingworth, the board’s vice president, replied in an email: “I wasn’t elected to please the teacher’s union and their psycho agenda against academic rigor, family values, and even capitalism itself. I was elected to bring a parent’s voice and a little common sense to the school district, and voters in Woodland Park can see I’ve kept my promises.”

As the school year winds down, many of the Woodland Park School District’s employees are heading for the exit, despite recently receiving an 8% raise. At least four of the district’s top administrators have quit because of the board’s policy changes, according to interviews and emails obtained through records requests. Nearly 40% of the high school’s professional staff have said they will not return next school year, according to an administrator in the district.

While Colorado is rapidly becoming a Blue state, Woodland Park is a mostly white, middle-class city of 8,000 people up a mountain pass from Colorado Springs. The community voted for Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 2-to-1 a year earlier.

When teachers complained about Board decisions, the Board’s vice-president accused the teachers’ union of attempting to organize a “coup,” and issued a barely-veiled threat, instructing the Superintendent to make “a list of positions in which a change in personnel would be beneficial to our kids” and “help the union see the wisdom in cooperation rather than conflict.”

The article is lengthy, and much of what the new board has done is genuinely appalling. Case in point: the Board’s adoption of the American Birthright social studies curriculum referenced above, without any prior consultation with social studies teachers.

American Birthright materials emphasize patriotism, argue that the federal government should have no authority over public schools and say teachers should not encourage civic engagement, such as registering to vote or petitioning local lawmakers on issues students care about.

The curriculum was based on input from dozens of right-wing groups and activists, including the Claremont Institute, the Family Research Council and Moms for Liberty. Proponents defend it as a “bipartisan” alternative to coursework described as “hijacked by liberal concepts.” It’s heavily biased toward the right (for example, it includes Bill Clinton’s impeachment but not Donald Trump’s.)

The Colorado State Board of Education rejected American Birthright in October. The National Council for the Social Studies, a professional trade group for educators, issued a rare warning against using it.

You really need to read the whole thing.

If America hasn’t hit “bottom” I don’t know what bottom would look like…..

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Guess What’s “Inappropriate”

The rule of law.

Many pundits–including yours truly–throw that term around, assuming readers understand its elements. I think most Americans do recognize one of those elements–the principle that no one is above the law, that the rules apply to everyone, very much including Presidents and lawmakers.

There are other principles that are less-well understood, however, and one of them is specificity. If laws are to be obeyed, they must be explicit. They must describe the behaviors being prohibited (or required) clearly, in terms that allow citizens to fully understand them. When courts strike down laws for being unconstitutional, it is often because those measures have been found to be unconstitutionally vague.

That required specificity is among the many, many things that far too many legislators ignore. Texas comes immediately to mind, but the following example is from Ron DeSantis’ Florida–a state that is beginning to resemble Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

As Daily Kos — among others–recently reported:

There are more than 500 entries for Florida in PEN America’s ever-expanding list of books banned in American schools. These include what should be obviously innocuous titles like the “Zen Shorts” series by Jon Muth, which are some of the best children’s books available to parents and teachers. This effort to remove books about Black and LGBTQ+ people and characters from schools and libraries is a part of a larger effort to sanitize our country’s history. Like almost all efforts that pass for conservative “policies” these days, citizens of all ages are widely opposed to the bans….

DeSantis and his team of book-banners also highlighted the need to criminally punish teachers or librarians who give out books people like DeSantis deem pornographic. Mind you, our federal government (and Florida itself) already has laws outlining what is and is not considered pornographic. And there are also laws that prohibit books, images, and videos that sexualize minors…

Judd Legum over at Popular Information has gotten his hands on some of the Florida books that have been banned and the stated reasons they were banned. You would be hard-pressed to figure out how the previous statements above have any bearing on the decisions being made about libraries in the Sunshine State.

The article links to PEN’s report on the multitude of books that have been removed from Florida classrooms and it’s as jaw-dropping as you might imagine. The extensive nature of the list is an artifact of an unconstitutionally vague statute–a truly excellent example of a law that violates the specificity required by the rule of law. That’s because, In Florida, while there may be a few books deemed “pornographic,” most of the books that have been banned are attacked under the “how vague can you get” term “inappropriate.”

Rather obviously, my definition of “inappropriate” and yours may differ substantially.

The linked article suggests that the DeSantis Administration finds books depicting racism in negative terms to be “inappropriate.” For example, the Florida Department of Education announced that it rejected 35% of social studies textbooks submitted to them. One of those–a book for 6th to 8th graders– was evidently rejected for containing the following section:

“New Calls for Social Justice

During the 2000s, one effect of an increase in the use or mobile devices and social media was the spread of images of police violence, sometimes deadly, against Black Americans. The deaths of Black Americans outraged many Americans and led to a crowing awareness of systemic racism that permeated the broader society.

In 2013, a new social and political movement called Black Lives Matter formed to protest violence against Black Americans. The movement called for an end to systemic racism and white supremacy.”

Lest anti-Semites feel neglected by Florida lawmakers’ focus on protecting racism, the state has also rejected education about the Holocaust, finding it “woke.”

Florida’s state education department rejected two new Holocaust-focused textbooks for classroom use, while forcing at least one other textbook to alter a passage about the Hebrew Bible in order to meet state approval…

“Modern Genocides” was rejected in part for its discussion of “special topics” prohibited by the state. The list of such topics includes terms such as “social justice” and “critical race theory,”a phrase that traditionally concerns a method of legal analysis but that Republicans have used pejoratively to refer to discussion of systemic racism in the United States. The department did not clarify which prohibited “special topics” the book included.

Florida evidently considers accurate history and support for civic equality as (equally-vague) “woke” and thus “inappropriate.”

Maybe we should get rid of speed limits and just prohibit “driving too fast.” We can trust the police to decide who’s speeding–right?

Just like we can trust Florida’s current government to decide what’s “inappropriate.”

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Thank Goodness They Went Home…

Can you stand one more diatribe about the pathetic Indiana legislature that has finally and mercifully departed?

During the past session, I posted several times about the GOP super-majority’s deliberate rejection of evidence about the state’s woeful performance in education. (I could have focused on a large number of other deficits, but who has the time…?)

The GOP’s persistent efforts to privatize education–while ignoring the state’s increasingly critical shortage of the public school teachers who teach 90% of Hoosier children–required legislators to ignore the years of highly credible academic research rebutting justifications for vouchers.

I have previously posted about the many problems with privatized and other forms of “alternative” schools that researchers have identified. Among those numerous problems is the distressingly high percentage of such schools that close within 4 years of their founding. A May 4th article from the Indianapolis Star confirms that Indiana is not exempt from such closures. It appears that a third of charter schools close each year.

Proponents of charters and vouchers claim that these closures are a “feature, not a bug”–that the closures are evidence that “the market” is working. Tell that to the distraught parent for whom these closures are disruptive at best. As the article notes, those disruptions create yet another barrier for students who are already vulnerable to low student outcomes, and particularly for students of color.

The Indiana Capital Chronicle took a look at the legislature’s education policy failures during the just-completed session–and published an analysis with which I entirely agree.

As demonstrated by the 2023 session of the Indiana General Assembly, the Republican supermajority is more concerned with creating problems rather than solving them.

If we are not able to attract and retain teachers and education support professionals because of low pay, lack of respect and inadequate funding, it’s the students who lose out.

Too many students are in schools where decision-makers have driven away quality educators by failing to provide competitive salaries and support, disrespecting the profession and placing extraordinary pressure on individual educators to do more and more with less and less.

Additionally, too many potential educators never go into the classroom in part because of appallingly low starting salaries and record wage gaps between teaching and professions that require similar education – gaps that get worse over the course of educators’ careers.

So, what did our elected leaders do to solve these problems?

- They silenced teachers by eliminating a 50-year right to discuss students’ learning conditions with school administrators.
- They threatened educators with a level-six felony and two-and-a-half years in jail if they recommend certain books to kids.
- They trampled on the ability for local schools and educators to work collaboratively with parents addressing individual students’ mental health needs.
- They continued to drain public schools of scarce funding by siphoning a billion dollars to wealthy Hoosiers so their kids can attend private school for free.

As the commentary pointed out, it was Republican lawmakers who ignored testimony from educators and parents, and doubled down on what has become a GOP “anti-woke” obsession. They focused on appeasing the Republican culture warriors who are determined to attack teachers and librarians in our public schools, employing misinformation and lies.

They listened to wealthy corporate donors who gave their campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars to privatize our schools.

This agenda may benefit their political donors, but it hurts local communities which cherish and rely on their local schools – where 90% of Hoosier kids attend.

It wasn’t just education, of course. The GOP super-majority ignored environmental concerns, thwarted efforts to improve building codes, spit on medical professionals and went to war against trans children–among many, many other things.

To call them “representatives” is to misuse the term.

Poll after poll confirms that Indiana’s legislature does not represent the policy preferences of Hoosier citizens. Thanks primarily to gerrymandering–which is the most effective of the GOP’s various efforts to suppress the votes of rational Hoosiers–Republican members of the General Assembly represent the most extreme elements of the Republican base.

Since the Supreme Court has refused to notice that extreme gerrymandering is inconsistent with democracy and “one person, one vote,” the only way Hoosiers will ever get a truly representative legislative body is by massive turnout. Redistricting lines, after all, are based on turnout numbers from prior elections; if the people who have given up going to the polls because they’re convinced they live in a district that is “safe” for the other party were to vote in sufficient numbers, a lot of those “safe” districts wouldn’t be so safe.

I wish I knew how to get that message across.

I wish we didn’t have a legislative super-majority fixated on making Indiana the peer of a third-world country.

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Sunday Sermon

Today, I will be delivering a talk–shared below– to Danville’s UU Congregation, addressing our legislature’s assault on trans children.

_______________________
Let me begin this talk by quoting from the introduction of a recent article in the New York Times:

When the Supreme Court declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage nearly eight years ago, social conservatives were set adrift.\

The ruling stripped them of an issue they had used to galvanize rank-and-file supporters and big donors. And it left them searching for a cause that — like opposing gay marriage — would rally the base and raise the movement’s profile on the national stage.

“We knew we needed to find an issue that the candidates were comfortable talking about,” said Terry Schilling, the president of American Principles Project, a social conservative advocacy group. “And we threw everything at the wall.”

What stuck to that wall was the issue of transgender identity, particularly that of young people. As the article went on to detail, the effort to restrict transgender rights has supplanted same-sex marriage as an animating issue for social conservatives. It has reinvigorated a network of conservative groups, increased rightwing fund-raising and set the Right’s agenda in school boards and state legislatures, including Indiana’s.

Nothing like fear of a demonized “Other” to gin up the troops….

I was asked to address the legal issues triggered by the Indiana General Assembly’s efforts to keep trans children from receiving appropriate medical care. I will do that—but before I do, I think it is critically important to point out that what we are experiencing in the U.S. right now, not just in Indiana, isn’t just an attack on the autonomy of women and the existence of trans people; it’s a political calculation that is also part of a wholesale attack by MAGA partisans on the Bill of Rights and long-settled principles of American jurisprudence.

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was—in Justice Jackson’s immortal words—”to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities and officials and establish them as legal principles to be applied by the courts.” Or, less eloquently, as I used to tell my students, the Bill of Rights answers a deceptively simple question: who decides? Who decides what book you read, what God you worship (or if you do), what politics you endorse, who you choose to marry, whether you choose to procreate…who gets to dictate what philosophers call your telos—the ultimate aims and objectives that you have chosen and that shape your life?

From 1967 to last year, America’s Courts answered that question by upholding a doctrine called substantive due process—often called the individual’s right to privacy or personal autonomy. That doctrine recognizes the existence of an intimate “zone” that governments have no right to enter— a set of personal decisions that must be left up to the individuals involved. That doctrine, first enunciated in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized the libertarian principle embraced by the nation’s founders.

Those who crafted America’s constituent documents were significantly influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and its then-new approach to the proper role of the state. That approach rejected notions of monarchy and the “divine right” of kings (in other words, the overwhelming authority of the state) in favor of the principle that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they did not thereby harm the person or property of someone else, and so long as they were willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

When I was much younger, that principle, and the importance of limiting government to areas where collective action was appropriate—keeping the state out of the decisions that individuals and families have the right to make for themselves– was a Republican article of faith. It was basic conservative doctrine. Ironically, the MAGA folks who inaccurately call themselves conservative today insist that government has the right—indeed, the duty– to invade that zone of privacy in order to impose rules reflecting their own particular beliefs and prejudices.

That process requires the use of other inaccurate labels. We’re hearing a lot about “parental rights,” for example—but we sure aren’t hearing about the rights of parents who want to treat their children’s gender dysmorphia or who want their children to have access to a wide range of books, or to be taught accurate history. In MAGA world, parental rights extend only to parents who agree with them. (A more accurate label would be “parental privileges.”)

Indiana’s legislature has now gone home, but before they left, the culture warriors who dominate that legislature passed measures doing irreparable harm to trans children. That same gerrymandered legislature was first in the nation to pass an almost complete ban on abortion after Dobbs was handed down. It was the same legislature that ignored law enforcement warnings and passed “permit-less carry,” and the same legislature that has conducted a years-long effort to destroy public education in Indiana.

I think it’s really important to understand that denying medical care to defenseless trans children isn’t a “stand-alone” position. It’s part of an entire worldview that is anti-choice, pro-gun, anti-immigration, racist, anti-Semitic and homophobic, a worldview that is autocratic and profoundly anti-American. The good news is that it’s a worldview held by a distinct minority of Americans—and that minority has gotten substantially smaller since the recent judicial and legislative assaults on women and LGBTQ+ people. The bad news, of course, is that—thanks to gerrymandering– that minority controls far too many legislative bodies, very much including Indiana’s.)

What is my evidence for the assertion that these are minority positions?

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in 2021, before Dobbs, 59% of Americans believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 39% believed it should be illegal in all or most cases. In a Gallup poll earlier this year—after Dobbs— 35% of Americans said abortion should be legal under anycircumstances, and another 50% said the procedure should be mostly legal, but with some restrictions. Only 13% responded that it should always be illegal. (What’s that old saying? You don’t know what you have until you lose it…)

It isn’t just abortion.

In a 2021 Gallup poll, 56% of Americans said they believe gun laws should be stricter, while 43% said they should remain as they are or be less strict.

In a Pew poll from 2021, 60% of Americans said that immigrants strengthen the country, while 37% said that they burden the country.

In another poll that year, 70% of Americans supported same-sex marriage while only 28% said it should be illegal. That level of support explains why the GOP has shifted its main focus from same-sex marriage to transgender people; the public is less familiar with transgender people, so they can more easily be demonized.

With that background, let me turn to the legal issues. On April 5th, Indiana’s ACLU– joined by the national organization– filed a 47-page complaint challenging the discriminatory and cruel anti-trans measure signed by Governor Holcomb. Let me just read the opening paragraph of that Complaint:

Over the sustained objection and concern of medical professionals, Indiana passed Indiana Senate Enrolled Act 480, effective July 1, 2023, which prohibits transgender minors from receiving what the law labels as “gender transition procedures.” These prohibited interventions are evidence-based and medically necessary medical care essential to the health and well-being of transgender minors who are suffering from gender dysphoria, a serious condition that can lead to depression, anxiety and other serious health consequences when untreated. By denying this medically necessary treatment to minors, the State of Indiana has displaced the judgment of parents, doctors, and adolescents with that of the government. In so doing, the State has intruded on the fundamental rights of parents to care for their minor children by consenting to their receipt of doctor-recommended and necessary care and treatment. This violates due process. Additionally, by singling out for prohibition the care related to “gender transition,” the law creates a facial classification based on sex and transgender status, violating the equal protection rights of transgender adolescents. It also violates their bodily integrity and is fundamentally irrational, which violates due process. And, to the extent that it prohibits the provision of essential services that would otherwise be authorized and reimbursed by Medicaid, the law violates the federal requirements of the Medicaid Act and the Affordable Care Act. It also intrudes on the First Amendment rights of doctors and other practitioners.
Speaking of intrusions on Constitutional rights, the ACLU has also filed two cases challenging Indiana’s abortion ban. The first case argues that the ban violates Indiana’s constitution. In my view, the second case is the really important challenge—it’s based upon religious liberty. Your Unitarian Church—along with several other Christian denominations, the Jewish community, and an assortment of other minority religions– has an extremely important interest in both its argument and outcome.

I’m one of many people who are convinced that abortion bans are prompted by a desire to return women to a subservient status– but those bans are publicly justified by equating a fertilized egg with a human person. As doctors will confirm, that is a religious precept, not a medical one. It’s a belief held by some Christian sects, but it is at odds with doctrinal beliefs held by other Christian denominations and by adherents of other religions. In Judaism, the health of the pregnant woman takes priority over that of the fetus throughout pregnancy, and the fetus does not have equal moral status with the mother until the head emerges from the womb.

If the Indiana Supreme Court upholds the ban, it would be favoring one part of one religion over others—a violation of the First Amendment, and ironically, a violation of Indiana’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act., or RFRA. As you will all recall, that act was passed in order to justify discrimination against LGBTQ+ citizens. (What’s that saying about karma??) I’m relatively optimistic about Indiana’s Supreme Court, since none of its justices appear to be clones of Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito.

So here we are.

MAGA Republicans are waging culture war against a fundamental premise of American governance—what Justice Brandeis once called “the right to be left alone”—a premise that animates the Bill of Rights and for the past 56 years has been protected by the explicit doctrine of substantive due process—the premise that there are decisions government doesn’t get to make.

I may disagree with your choice of religion or politics or life partner, but my disapproval is irrelevant. Even if a majority of Americans disagree with your choices, in our system, they are yours to make. Absent harm to others, government must “butt out.”

The Indiana legislature’s assaults aren’t just against women or trans people—these assaults should be seen for what they are: an effort to overturn a fundamental principle of American government. And if that effort is successful, it won’t just be trans children who suffer. None of us will have rights that government will be obliged to respect.

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Indiana’s Senate Should Hang Tight..

Indiana’s legislature will end its current session this Saturday. (Your sigh of relief is appropriate.) Thus far–at least to the best of my knowledge–the House and Senate continue to disagree over whether to expand Indiana’s already far-too-generous school voucher program. The House wants to expand it; the Senate–mercifully–does not.

Vouchers were initially touted as a way to allow poor children to escape those “failing” public schools in order to improve educational outcomes. Enthusiasm for them waned as study after study rebutted virtually every argument for “school choice,” but lately–as the Right has trumpeted “parental rights” and attacked public schools as “woke”– proponents are once again having successes; South Carolina, for example, is expanding vouchers, and that state’s lawmakers are using the same dishonest rhetoric that Hoosier legislators employ.

SC senators that supported the bill for school choice vouchers spoke repeatedly about how they were motivated to help poor kids who were trapped in failing public schools and couldn’t afford other options. But on the last day of debate an amendment was filed to double the income threshold to help families making more than $100,000.

Just in case a member of Indiana’s Senate super-majority reads this blog and is on the fence about House efforts to sway the Senate, let me share a recent Time Magazine article by a professor of education policy at Michigan State, summarizing the multiple ways vouchers hurt students.The article begins by acknowledging the recent uptick in voucher programs, and notes that several states, including Indiana, have had such programs for several years. He then sets out what is known about the success or failure of these programs, asking “Do they work?” (The honest answer would be that these programs do achieve their actual goals: to funnel tax dollars to religious institutions, weaken or destroy teachers’ unions, and make war on the public schools.)

Of course, the purported goal of such programs is educational improvement. So what does the research have to say about that goal? The author of the article has studied school choice for nearly two decades, and–as he says–he’s in a good position to give an answer.

“Based on data from existing voucher programs, the answer is almost unambiguously negative.”

Let’s start with who benefits. First and foremost, the answer is: existing private school students. Small, pilot voucher programs with income limits have been around since the early 1990s, but over the last decade they have expanded to larger statewide initiatives with few if any income-eligibility requirements….In Arizona, more than 75% of initial voucher applicants had never been in public school—either because they were new kindergartners or already in private school before getting a voucher. That’s a problem because many voucher advocates market these plans as ways to improve educational opportunities for public school children.

For children who do transfer from a public school, the academic results are, in his words, “catastrophic.”

Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

It turns out that elite private schools with strong academics “often decline to participate in voucher plans. Instead the typical voucher school is a financially distressed, sub-prime private provider often jumping at the chance for a tax bailout to stay open a few extra years.”

In Wisconsin, 41% of voucher schools have closed since the program’s inception in 1990. And that includes the large number of pop-up schools opening just to cash in on the new voucher pay-out. For those pop-up schools, average survival time is just 4 years before their doors close for good.

The author cites data showing that 20% of students leave voucher programs each year, either because they are disappointed, or because the schools (which-unlike public schools–can choose their students) push them out.

That is what research on school vouchers tells us. Vouchers are largely tax subsidies for existing private school families, and a tax bailout for struggling private schools. They have harmful test score impacts that persist for years, and they’re a revolving door of school enrollment. They’re public funds that support a financially desperate group of private schools, including some with active discriminatory admissions in place.

I applaud the Indiana Senate’s uncommon case of good sense. The last thing Indiana needs is expansion of a failed program that enriches fundamentalist religious schools while weakening Indiana’s struggling public education system.

Fingers crossed that the Senate’s unusual manifestation of good sense makes it to Saturday…

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