Education / Youth – Page 15

Well, I Guess We Know What “Wokeness” Is

If we ever thought the current war on “wokeness” isn’t an effort to dumb America down–to keep the kids from learning about times when the country failed to live up to its principles, to keep them from reading books that might stretch their horizons or (horrors!) make them aware of the existence of folks unlike Ma and Pa–Florida is disabusing us of that error.

Ron DeSantis is updating the old lyrics. Remember “How will we keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree”? In Florida, it’s now “How will we keep them in the GOP after they’ve learned to think?” (Indiana’s legislators are singing along…)

Talking Points Memo has the most recent abomination emanating from the sunshine state.

The Florida statehouse launched another strike in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “anti-woke” war with a new bill this week aiming to hand more control of school administration over to the governor and his political appointees.

House Bill 999, introduced on Tuesday by Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola), proposes to give boards of trustees nearly unanimous power over state university faculty hiring, allow professors’ tenure to be reevaluated “at any time,” remove critical race theory and gender studies from college curricula, and bar spending on diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

The bill also digs in on DeSantis’ obsession with shutting down any educational instruction on race and systemic racism, stating that general education courses must not “suppress or distort” historical events, reference identity politics like critical race theory, or define U.S. history in ways that contradict “universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Instead, the courses must “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

Of course, “suppressing and distorting American history” is precisely what this bill–and the “anti-woke” movement– would do.

DeSantis’ administration has actually threatened teachers that they will be charged with felonies if they allow students to check out unapproved library books. His rejection of an AP African American Studies course for “lack[ing] educational merit” (!!) made national headlines (as did the disgraceful acquiescence of the College Board that “corrected” its curriculum.)

Decisions that are typically made with university presidents and boards of trustees in cooperation with faculty and staff – like setting up core curricula and deciding which departments should close, would be handed exclusively over to the board – members of which are appointed by the governor.

What Daniel Gordon, a historian at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author on academic freedom , finds “particularly striking” about the bill is that it doesn’t require trustees to consult university faculty before hiring new professors. “This contradicts a principle, well established by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), that [sic] professors in a given discipline have the expertise needed to select a new faculty member in the discipline,” he told TPM. “Math professors are the people best equipped to assess applications for a professorship in math!”

In January, DeSantis announced plans to defund diversity, equity and inclusion programs in every public university in the state.

If these appalling measures were limited to Florida–if this out-and-proud racism and anti-intellectualism were limited to just one arguably deranged office-holder– it would be bad enough. But as the linked article notes, DeSantis’ “anti-woke” proposals are clearly intended to appeal to a “very specific breed of Trump voter as he mulls a 2024 bid.”

We all know what that “specific breed” believes.

DeSantis is evil, but not stupid. He clearly intends to ride the tide of White Supremacy to the White House, and he just as clearly believes that there are enough voters who share his racism, misogyny and homophobia to put him there.

A 1939 article from the Atlantic said it best.

THE early Americans were determined that education should be free from political control. Being liberals in the original and true sense of the term, they believed in the integrity of the individual as opposed to the despotism of the state. This integrity or dignity of the individual was, of course, basic in democracy. Among other things, it implied the right of the citizenry to think independently, to seek truth honestly, and to determine without political interference what should constitute the education of their children….

It was the experienced judgment of these early liberals that education, religion, and the press should be free from political domination. These were the institutions of thought. They had to be untrammeled if the individual was to be free. Hence it came about that early America produced a peculiar system of education, its outstanding characteristic that it was to be supported and controlled by the people, by parents, by citizens — but not by the state.

I guess our Founders were woke.

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What I Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Me. Really?

Among the things that make me crazy: one is the GOP’s obvious belief that education and academic research are dangers to be avoided at all costs.

Does evidence show that having guns in your home is dangerous? How many people commit suicide using a firearm? Are guns more lethal than other weapons? Whoa! If government allowed research into those questions, it might divest you of your God-given right to carry your AR-14 in the canned goods aisle of your local Kroger.

As Politico reported back in 2018,

House Republican appropriators Wednesday rejected a proposal to designate millions of dollars for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for gun violence research, voting 32-20 to keep the language out of a fiscal 2019 spending bill.

The party-line vote marked Democrats’ latest failed bid to spur studies into preventing firearm-related injuries and deaths — and comes despite a bipartisan agreement earlier this year that the CDC is permitted to conduct such research.

Republican opposition to any and all gun research has been a problem for years, but guns are only one area of research that the party wants to shut down. Yesterday, the Indianapolis Business Journal reported on a vote from the World’s Worst Legislature stripping funding from the Kinsey Institute.(paywall)

That vote was apparently based upon “disputed allegations” by one of Indiana’s many rightwing GOP wacko’s. This one insisted that Kinsey’s research had been child exploitation and that the institute’s research into human sexuality contributed to “liberalized sexual morals, including more acceptance of homosexuality and pornography.”

According to the AP,

Alfred Kinsey, who died in 1956, produced groundbreaking sex-behavior studies in 1948 and 1953 and was portrayed by Liam Neeson in the 2004 film “Kinsey.”

Republican Rep. Lorissa Sweet claimed that some of Kinsey’s research was child exploitation as she argued for an amendment to the state budget bill against funding for the institute.

“By limiting the funding to Kinsey Institute through Indiana University’s tax dollars, we can be assured that we are not funding ongoing research committed by crimes.” Sweet said.

Democratic Rep. Matt Pierce, whose Bloomington district includes the university campus, responded that Sweet’s claims were “based on old unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist,” calling them “warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back.”

Pierce said the university maintained a department that ensured all research involving humans met federal laws and that the Kinsey Institute aimed to better understand human sexuality, including how to treat and prevent sexual predators and pedophiles.

All House Democrats voted against the measure; they were joined by seven (presumably more rational) Republicans. The bill specifically prohibits any use of state money for expenses– including the institute’s on-campus facilities, research work, utilities, office supplies and maintenance of research photographs or films.

Pierce said the institute’s funding was being exploited as a “culture war” issue and that it would simply create bookkeeping problems for the university to use sources such as outside grant funding or student tuition to support it.

It is painful for those of us who belonged to the GOP when it was an actual political party to recognize its transformation into a cult whose members routinely chant “don’t confuse me with facts.” There’s a reason today’s GOP is increasingly compared to the Know-Nothing Party. This vote in Indiana’s House confirms the aptness of that comparison.

Research and scholarship aren’t just integral to succeeding in school or in many professions. In a rational world, research informs action. Researchers gather evidence in order to test the theories and factual assumptions upon which both governments and individuals act.

Americans on the far right of the political spectrum–especially White Christian males– are frantically opposed to a number of social changes: the unwillingness of today’s women to be properly subservient, the belief that people of color and LGBTQ+ citizens are entitled to equal treatment by both the law and the institutions of civil society. They see accurate education and the conduct of research as breeding grounds for those changes.

In every era, there are people who respond to social change by yelling “stop the world, I want to get off.” They are a minority, and would be far less threatening in the absence of several outdated structural elements of American politics–especially gerrymandering and the Electoral College–that have entrenched governance by that distinct minority.

An essay in Psychology Today quoted “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” for the saying“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.”

But is it? Let’s look at what results from ignorance: avoidance of facts and information, a skewed view of the world where you don’t want to learn more about something, a desire to label and judge something you might not fully understand, and a general lack of knowledge about the world around you.

In other words, today’s GOP.

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Is Education “Woke”?

The GOP’s hostility to higher education–okay, to education in general–has been getting more scrutiny since Ron DeSantis intensified his war on those “woke” institutions we call colleges and universities. DeSantis (smarter and much more dangerous than Trump) is latching on to the Republicans’ increasing hostility to education.

Before discussing the politics involved in this particular aspect of the culture war, let me readily concede that a significant majority of university instructors and educated Americans are what that base considers “liberal.” There are two reasons for that: first, the definition of “liberal” has changed rather dramatically over time; and second, (depending on that definition) reality has a pronounced liberal bias.

I can personally attest to the rather profound change in the definition of the word “liberal.” As I have previously noted, in 1980 I ran (unsuccessfully) for Congress. I was a Republican–and I was told I was “too conservative” by a fair number of voters. Although I have changed my position on a couple of policy issues since then, as I learned more about them, my overall political philosophy has remained consistent. Only now, I’m routinely accused of being a pinko socialist/communist elitist.

While I was essentially standing still, philosophically, the GOP totally redefined conservatism. Conservatives are now True Believer authoritarians edging toward fascism. Using the current (re)definition, I’m no longer conservative, and neither are most of the GOP politicians with whom I once worked.

The Rights’ newly radical definition of “conservatism” rather obviously excludes the majority of college professors. But even before the transformation of the GOP, and under the “old” definition of the term, a majority of university faculty identified as liberal. Not “leftist”as Europeans use the term, but liberal: people whose world-views are shaped by empirical evidence. These are people who recognize and are able to cope with the emergence of new understandings and/or evidence that conflicts with what they previously thought to be the case– people who lack the all-encompassing, rigid certitude that marks today’s “conservatives.”

Liberal college professors recognize the limits of their knowledge. As I often told my own students, my goal was not to have them leave my classroom agreeing with my perspectives, political or otherwise; my goal was to teach them the importance of understanding and applying two important phrases: it depends, and it’s more complicated than that.

In today’s politics, conservatives are those who hold fixed, immutable beliefs (and want government to impose them on everyone else), and liberals are people who recognize contingency and complexity. DeSantis’ hated “wokeness” is willingness to examine new evidence, determine its credibility, and revise error when the facts support such revision.

In a recent column, Paul Krugman considered what he called “the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.”

Not that long ago, most Americans in both parties believed that colleges had a positive effect on the United States. Since the rise of Trumpism, however, Republicans have turned very negative. Recent polling shows an overwhelming majority of Republicans agreeing that both college professors and high schools are trying to “teach liberal propaganda.”

Did America’s colleges — which a large majority of Republicans considered to have a positive influence as recently as 2015 — suddenly become centers of left-wing indoctrination? Did the same thing happen to high schools, run by local boards, across the nation?

No, as Krugman notes, what happened was that right-wingers expanded their definition of what counts as “liberal propaganda.”

Thus, when one points out that schools don’t actually teach critical race theory, the response tends to be that while they may not use the term, they do teach students that racism was long a major force in America, and its effects linger to this day. I don’t know how you teach our nation’s history honestly without mentioning these facts — but in the eyes of a substantial number of voters, teaching uncomfortable facts is indeed a form of liberal propaganda.

And once that’s your mind-set, you see left-wing indoctrination happening everywhere, not just in history and the social sciences. If a biology class explains the theory of evolution, and why almost all scientists accept it — or, for that matter, the theory of how vaccines work — well, that’s liberal propaganda. If a physics class explains how greenhouse gas emissions can change the climate — well, that’s more liberal propaganda.

Krugman says that what we need to understand is that people like DeSantis are attacking education, not because it uses liberal propaganda to indoctrinate, but because it fails to sustain the ignorance they want to preserve.

I wonder how many MAGA folks ever encountered or seriously considered that famous quote from Thomas Jefferson: If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

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Public Schools And Parents

When the movement for school vouchers first began, proponents insisted that a “free market” in education would improve outcomes–that children no longer confined to those failing “inner city” schools would emerge better-educated. They tended to ignore pesky concerns about transportation, fly-by-night “education entrepreneurs” and the inconvenient fact that public schools serving rural folks who had no private options were losing resources so that urban kids could attend primarily religious schools.

As the years went on, numerous credible research projects showed that the magic of the market had unaccountably failed. Voucher students not only didn’t perform better, they mostly lagged behind their public-school peers.

That was inconvenient, but the intrepid opponents of American public education weren’t about to let a little thing like poor educational outcomes keep them from realizing their goals: destroying teachers’ unions, evading Separation of Church and State, and enriching donors from the for-profit education sector. So proponents pivoted from test scores to the horrors of “woke” instruction: assertions that the public schools were “indoctrinating” children by teaching them accurate history and –horrors!!–letting them read “woke” books.

The battle cry this time was “trusting and empowering parents” whose Christian family values were being undermined. It turns out, however, that a majority of parents are satisfied with their “woke” public schools.

As an article from the American Prospect explains. there was considerable discontent with school closures during the pandemic, and early successes by reactionary parent groups built on that discontent. Then they over-reached.

The new culture war over the future of education is a stalking horse for the same old battle over school choice. The not-too-hidden goal of denigrating public schools is to weaken support for teachers and their unions, and to redirect funds into school vouchers and other programs that pummel public education even further.

Polling conducted by the American Federation of Teachers in mid-December found that the culture-war framing was unpopular. Instead, voters and parents saw strong academic, critical reasoning, and practical life skills as most important, when compared to anti-wokeness. Furthermore, among the sample group, when given the option between improving public education and giving parents more school choices, 80 percent preferred improving public schools. Most revealing was that two-thirds of voters said that culture-war battles distracted public schools from their foremost role: educating students.

The article noted that even some Republican state legislators resist efforts to privatize education.

In Iowa, nine Republicans in the House, and three in the Senate, voted against a bill that would pull $345 million of taxpayer money over a four-year period into family private-school costs. Thanks to the margins in the Iowa legislature, the bill still passed. The state’s education department expects it would include an additional drop of $46 million from public-school funding as a result…

One Iowa Republican who opposed the measure told the Des Moines Register that he represented a “very Republican, very conservative district” –and that his constituents were opposed to the measure.

The article also referred to the earlier experiment in Kansas under Gov. Sam Brownback that led to a reversal of the cuts and the election of a Democratic governor now serving her second term.

Diverting resources to voucher and “scholarship” programs has reduced funding for public school teachers, as well as for extracurricular activities, English-as-a-second-language programs, special-education programs, school bus drivers, janitorial services, and coaches. Those cuts most definitely are not in the public interest, nor are they desired by the vast majority of parents.

As NPR has reported:

Math textbooks axed for their treatment of race; a viral Twitter account directing ire at LGBTQ teachers; a state law forbidding classroom discussion of sexual identity in younger grades; a board book for babies targeted as “pornographic.” Lately it seems there’s a new controversy erupting every day over how race, gender or history are tackled in public school classrooms.

But for most parents, these concerns seem to be far from top of mind. That’s according to a new national poll by NPR and Ipsos. By wide margins – and regardless of their political affiliation – parents express satisfaction with their children’s schools and what is being taught in them…

In the poll, 76% of respondents agree that “my child’s school does a good job keeping me informed about the curriculum, including potentially controversial topics.”…

Just 18% of parents say their child’s school taught about gender and sexuality in a way that clashed with their family’s values; just 19% say the same about race and racism; and just 14% feel that way about U.S. history.

Vouchers don’t improve education, and a small minority of parents is dissatisfied with the curricula in their children’s schools. But in Indiana, evidence is irrelevant. Republican legislators are pushing hard to expand an already-generous voucher program.

They need to explain just who they are representing–and why.

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Indiana’s Pathetic Legislature

An analysis of the priorities of Indiana’s legislative super-majority yields two possible interpretations. Either the members of the demonstrably unrepresentative GOP caucus hate their constituents (unless they’re well-to-do), or they are so devoid of common sense that they enthusiastically support measures that are the legislative equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

I do tend to think the problem is intellect rather than malice–a rabid devotion to ideology that precludes the evaluation of credible contrary evidence. But former state employees who depend upon their state pensions might be forgiven for thinking those in the current Statehouse super-majority hate them.

As the Capitol Chronicle recently reported,

A bill mandating that Indiana’s public pension system divest from firms or funds that use certain non-financial investment criteria — a flashpoint in the state’s culture wars — could slash the system’s returns by nearly $7 billion over the next decade, according to a revised fiscal analysis.

Author Rep. Ethan Manning, R-Logansport, and supporters say the proposal would ensure that the Indiana Public Retirement System puts finances first. House Bill 1008 is part of a GOP effort to crack down on the environmental, social and governmental framework known as ESG investing.

But its restrictions and administrative requirements could mean a hefty price tag for the fund and its retirees.

As the article noted, even the conservative-leaning Indiana Chamber of Commerce strongly opposes the measure. That opposition undoubtedly reflects the long-time–but evidently now discarded–Republican opposition to unnecessary and/or intrusive meddling in decisions that should be left to the owners and managers of businesses.

But hey! Today’s GOP recognizes the terrible threat posed by allowing Hoosier companies to consider the environmental, social and governance positions of the enterprises in which they invest, or with which they do business. If former state workers must suffer in order to avoid participating in this descent into “wokeness,” well, so be it.

Lest the casual observer conclude that this misbegotten bill is an outlier, allow me to disabuse you.

Let’s look at just a couple of other areas where our intrepid lawmakers are hard at work making sure the state will not and cannot reach its purported goals. You can probably identify others.

One problem to which everyone gives lip servicee is that Indiana lacks a sufficiently skilled workforce to make us competitive for many of the companies our economic development folks would like to attract.

So what did the God-Fearing misogynists at the Statehouse do? They passed a ban on abortion–sending a clear message about Indiana’s political culture to skilled workers (male and female) who might otherwise have considered living here. Multiple news outlets have confirmed the increased difficulties in recruitment that followed passage of the ban.

Another major issue for Indiana is the worsening teacher shortage, a shortage that the General Assembly is assiduously addressing with multiple efforts to drive educators (who might produce that skilled workforce) out of the profession and/or the state.

It isn’t just the bills telling teachers and school librarians what books they can use and what history they can teach. At the same time our lawmakers are trying to micro-manage what happens in public school classrooms, they are intent upon enlarging a voucher program–aka “scholarship” bill–with virtually no oversight mechanisms.

That program is patterned after one in Arizona, where even minimal oversight was evidently considered intrusive. As The Guardian recently reported,

When the former governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, signed a law last year that lets any family receive public funds for private school or homeschooling, he said he “trusts parents to choose what works best” for their children.

Over 46,000 Arizona students now take part in the state’s education savings account, or ESA, program, which provides about $7,000 per child annually for a huge array of school expenses. But with households in greater charge of curricular choices, some purchases are raising eyebrows, among them items like kayaks and trampolines, cowboy roping lessons and tickets to entertainment venues like SeaWorld….

One parent in the group said she uses the Disney+ streaming service to “extend our learning” and asked if the state would approve the cost of a subscription. Others said they had received approvals for trampolines and horseback riding lessons.

It’s pretty obvious that what legislative culture warriors tout as a boon for “family empowerment ” is really part of a persistent effort to disempower and dismantle public education.

In Arizona, the seemingly endless variety of options available to homeschoolers makes it difficult for state officials to regulate them – and that may be the point. The goal, school choice proponents say, is to break free of school bureaucracy and put parents in control.

In Indiana, the message to teachers is clear: we trust even the most uneducated parents, but we sure don’t trust you.

Gee, I wonder why we have a teacher shortage…?

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