Tag Archives: public education

There’s More….

Yesterday, I shared some of the disturbing proposals of Project 2025, but of course, a document of nearly 1000 pages includes many other terrifying “ideas.”  The New Republic has listed several, gleaned from an advance copy of the book by Kevin Roberts, who captained the Project for the Heritage Foundation.

There’s good reason publication of the book has been delayed until after the election.

Dawn’s Early Light has all the misplaced confidence of a movement that’s mistaken a 6–3 Supreme Court and an easily played New York Times op-ed page for some kind of mandate. The party that has won the popular vote in a presidential election exactly once in the last 35 years is not popular, and people do not want what they’re selling. When your only path to power consists in gerrymandering and shaving tight victories in a few key swing states while the opposition runs up the margins nearly everywhere else, you might try for some soul-searching about why people don’t like you, but Roberts and his Heritage Foundation have instead opted for violent threats, claiming a “second American revolution” is coming that will remain “bloodless” only “if the left allows it to be.”

The book details the Project’s enemies: public schools, China, godlessness, and government regulations are prominent, but the Project proposes widespread destruction of numerous other American institutions.

“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”

What is the plan to enact this bloodletting? While there are sops to Ronald Reagan throughout, Dawn’s Early Light is clear that the era of small government is over; Roberts thinks government should be the change he wants to see in the world. The New Conservative Movement, as he terms it, will use the federal government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and economic foes, while the small-minded small government folk are derided throughout as “wax-museum conservatives.”

Roberts wants government to force American to embrace his vision of “Faith, Family, Community, and Work.” And–not surprisingly–“Faith” means Christianity.

Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

As I noted yesterday, Roberts reserves special animus for reproductive freedom, especially the birth control pill–which he wants to outlaw.

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

Even a thing you might think the pro-birth crowd might like, like in vitro fertilization—which produces babies!—is not good in Roberts’s view….

This technological conspiracy, where every modern convenience from the Pill to the Playstation is keeping us from our God-given duty to be fruitful and multiply, must be fought at every level—from government tax policy and regulation (to encourage stay-at-home mothers) to pro-family technologies (like Tinder rival “Keeper,” a dating app whose mission is to “end human loneliness by giving everyone the opportunity to start a happy, healthy family”).

The article has much more of this insane world-view. (I just learned that Heritage wants to end government’s hard-won new ability to negotiate drug prices, something that just saved seniors and government billions!) But you might also be wondering how these lunatics plan to sell their vision to an American public unlikely to favor their version of utopia.

Pro Publica has answered that. It’s reporters uncovered “training videos” produced for Project 2025’s proponents/salespersons.

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 details how a second Trump administration would operate.

The videos have strategies for avoiding Freedom of Information Act disclosures, for ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges,” and for “radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.”

This entire enterprise is delusional. It entirely ignores the existence of a robust contemporary culture that would resist a U-turn to the 1950s (or, really, the 1850’s).

Project 2025 accurately reflects the MAGA worldview. Sane people must defeat it in November.

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The MAGA Vendetta Against Arts And Education

Well, I see where Ron DeSantis has petulantly stripped thirty-two million dollars of art funding from the Florida budget.

Ron DeSantis stripped more than $32m in arts and culture funding from Florida’s state budget over his hatred of a popular fringe festival that he accused of being “a sexual event”, critics of the rightwing governor say.

DeSantis justified his unprecedented, wide-ranging veto of grants to almost 700 groups and organizations by saying it was “inappropriate” for $7,369 of state money to be allocated to Tampa fringe, a 10-day festival that took place earlier this month with a strong message of inclusivity, and its sister event in Orlando.

I talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Usually, that term connotes the growing willingness of MAGA Republicans to publicly indulge their bigotries against Blacks, women, LBGTQ+ citizens and non-fundamentalist Christians, but DeSantis’ recent fit of pique should remind us that the war against anything “woke” extends to important aspects of the actual culture: the arts, certainly, but also public education. (The GOP proclivity for “projection”–accusing others of their own behaviors–is obvious in their hysterical ranting about public education “indoctrination.”)

The most successful effort to replace American public education with religious indoctrination, of course, has come in the guise of “parental choice,” or vouchers, which allow public monies to be siphoned from the public schools and sent  disproportionately to religious schools. I have posted repeatedly about that effort, which has not only failed to improve test scores but has increased civic divisiveness and re-segregated the schools in several places.

I forget who first popularized the phrase “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” but if Trump should win in November, Project 2025 has outlined policies that would dramatically escalate the attack on public education.

Here are some of the elements of what I can only describe as an assault on steroids:

  • Title I, the $18 billion federal fund that supports low-income students, would disappear in a decade.
  • Federal special education funds would flow to school districts as block grants with no strings attached, or even to savings accounts for parents to use on private school or other education expenses.
  • The U.S. Department of Education would be eliminated.
  • The federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights laws in schools would be scaled back.

The proposals are contained in a comprehensive policy agenda that’s part of a Heritage Foundation-led initiative called Project 2025: Presidential Transition Project, which includes nearly 900 pages of detailed plans for virtually every corner of the federal government and a database of potential staffers for a conservative administration. It will also feature a playbook for the first 180 days of a new term.

Project 2025 was devised by several former Trump administration officials and allies, working with dozens of aligned advocacy organizations (misnamed “think tanks.”) including Moms for Liberty. You will recall that Moms for Liberty is the organization that fought school boards over COVID-19 safety protocols, advocates for censorship of books in school libraries, and endorses far-right school board candidates.

Trump has said that parents should elect school principals. He advocates the abolition of teacher tenure, has promised to cut federal funding to schools pushing “progressive” social ideas, and pledges to establish universal school choice.

Under the Project 2025 agenda, states would be able to opt out of federal education programs, whose “regulatory burden far exceeds the federal government’s less than 10 percent financing share of K–12 education,” the document asserts.

States would also have full authority to decide how to spend Title I funds, which currently go to schools with large populations of low-income students.

Under the Project 2025 plan, those funds would first flow to states as “no-strings-attached” block grants before they’re phased out in a decade. Parents of students attending Title I schools could even have access to the federal funds in “micro-education savings accounts” to pay for private education or supplemental services for their kids. The plan outlines similar ambitions for funds distributed under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the nation’s special education law, though it doesn’t propose phasing them out.

The assault on public education has displayed the fundamental disconnect between the civic purposes of education and citizens who see education as just another private, consumer good–skills to be acquired (by those who can afford it) in order to enhance the ability of one’s children to succeed in the marketplace.

Access to the arts and a common base of educational knowledge both facilitate civic conversation and cohesion. Both enlarge our understanding of the world we inhabit–its complexity and, yes, its diversity. The arts and liberal education are the antithesis of rigid ideology and group-think.

I assume that’s why MAGA cannot tolerate either.

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Is Rokita Even Worth The Pixels?

What is so depressing about living in Indiana these days is the dismal quality of our state government.

I’ve frequently posted about what the late Harrison Ullmann accurately called “The World’s Worst Legislature,” a body currently waging war on Indianapolis and higher education, among other travesties.

I actually had some residue of respect for the governor, who I thought was an “old kind” of Republican caught in the vice of MAGA world, but that respect evaporated when he sent Indiana National Guard troops to the southern border to bolster Texas’ performative pissing match with the federal government.

The embarrassment that is our current legislature is largely attributable to the gerrymandering that allows lawmakers to choose their voters, but that excuse is unavailable when we consider statewide candidates like our Attorney General, Todd Rokita, about whom I have posted more frequently that his sorry career warrants. (Put “Rokita” in the search bar, and multiple examples will come up.)

Rokita’s efforts to out-MAGA the MAGAs in his party have been so egregious and unethical that he was sanctioned by Indiana’s all-Republican Supreme Court.

As Paula Cardoza-Jones (a former member of the Disciplinary Commission) has noted,  Rokita just can’t stop lying:

In 2022, Attorney General Todd Rokita spoke repeatedly and publicly about his investigation into complaints about a doctor who provided abortion services in Indiana to a 10-year-old rape victim who was unable to obtain such services in Ohio.

As a result, Rokita was accused of violating a statute that requires complaints about a doctor “be held in strict confidence until the attorney general files notice with the [Medical Licensing Board] of the attorney general’s intent to prosecute the licensee.”  Ind. Code § 25-1-7-10(a) (“Confidentiality Statute”).

On September 18, 2023, the Disciplinary Commission (“Commission”) filed a Disciplinary Complaint in three counts (“Complaint”), Cause No. 23S-DI-00258, alleging violations of the following Indiana Rules of Professional Conduct (“Rules”):

(1) Rule 3.6(a)—making extrajudicial statements with a substantial likelihood of prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding;

(2) Rule 4.4(a)–using means that have no substantial purpose other than to embarrass, delay, or burden a third person; and

(3) Rule 8.4(d)—engaging in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice based on his violation of the Confidentiality Statute.

Members of Indiana’s highest court agreed on the probity of those allegations, only disagreeing about the severity of the sanctions to be imposed. Rokita subsequently issued misleading pronouncements about that conclusion and was again reprimanded by the Court.

You might think being continually slapped down would teach him a lesson, but–despite his focus on Indiana schools–Rokita is clearly incapable of being educated.

As the Capital Chronicle reports:

A new dashboard unveiled Tuesday by the Indiana Attorney General’s Office makes public more than two dozen allegations of “potentially inappropriate materials” in Hoosier schools, like critical race theory materials and gender identity policies.

But numerous local officials told the Indiana Capital Chronicle they weren’t made aware of the complaints and contend the allegations were not properly vetted before the portal went live.

Attorney General Todd Rokita referred to “Eyes on Education” as a transparency tool that intends to “empower parents to further engage in their children’s education” and provide “real examples of indoctrination.”

The portal accepts submissions pertaining to K-12 classrooms, colleges, universities and “other affiliated academic entities in Indiana.” But it is unclear how, or if, they are vetting the accuracy of the allegations.

Given what we know of Rokita, it is highly unlikely that these allegations are being “vetted” at all. His “explanation” makes the politics of this new “portal” abundantly clear.

“As I travel the state, I regularly hear from students, parents and teachers about destructive curricula, policies or programs in our schools,” Rokita said in a statement, adding that the portal allows Hoosier parents to “view real examples of socialist indoctrination from classrooms across the state.”

“Our kids need to focus on fundamental educational building blocks,” he continued, “NOT ideology that divides kids from their parents and normal society.”

Several districts have pointed out that portal submissions were out of date or simply inaccurate–but of course, none of those responses appear on the portal. Representative Ed Delaney notes that–among other issues– public education matters are outside the purview of the Attorney General.

This effort to score political points with the most rabid of the MAGA cultists isn’t simply a dishonest ideological stunt; it exceeds the Attorney General’s jurisdiction.

But hey, it’s Todd Rokita–the “lawyer” who has no respect for the Constitutions of either the U.S. or Indiana, or for the rule of law.

Please vote so that I won’t have to waste pixels on this sorry excuse for a public servant after November.

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Moms For White Nationalism

Maybe we should call the wildly mis-named “Moms for Liberty” “Moms for White Nationalism.” Or “Proud Girls,” in recognition of their cozy relationship with the Neo-Nazi “Proud Boys.”

Heather Cox Richardson placed the organization in historical context.

The success of Biden’s policies both at home and abroad has pushed the Republican Party into an existential crisis, and that’s where Moms for Liberty fits in. Since the years of the Reagan administration, the Movement Conservatives who wanted to destroy the New Deal state recognized that they only way they could win voters to slash taxes for the wealthy and cut back popular social problems was by whipping up social issues to convince voters that Black Americans, or people of color, or feminists, wanted a handout from the government, undermining America by ushering in “socialism.” The forty years from 1981 to 2021 moved wealth upward dramatically and hollowed out the middle class, creating a disaffected population ripe for an authoritarian figure who promised to return that population to upward mobility… 

Richardson attributes the organization’s focus on America’s public schools to the fact that those schools teach democratic values–i.e., engage in“liberal indoctrination.”

As a Moms for Liberty chapter in Indiana put on its first newspaper: “He alone, who OWNS the youth, GAINS the future.” While this quotation is often used by right-wing Christian groups to warn of what they claim liberal groups do, it is attributed to German dictator Adolf Hitler. Using it boomeranged on the Moms for Liberty group not least because it coincided with the popular “Shiny Happy People” documentary about the far-right religious Duggar family that showed the “grooming” and exploitation of children in that brand of evangelicalism.

Moms for Liberty have pushed for banning books that refer to any aspect of modern democracy they find objectionable, focusing primarily on those with LGBTQ+ content or embrace of minority rights… A study by the Washington Post found that two thirds of book challenges came from individuals who filed 10 or more complaints, with the filers often affiliated with Moms for Liberty or similar groups. And in their quest to make education align with their ideology, the Moms for Liberty have joined forces with far-right extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, sovereign citizens groups, and so on, pushing them even further to the right.

Richardson notes that Moms for Liberty is the contemporary version of  “a broader and longstanding reactionary movement centered on restoring traditional hierarchies of race, gender and sexuality.” It’s the modern version of “Women of the Ku Klux Klan.” 

Given media emphasis on the gender gap, we sometimes lose sight of the fact that not all women are progressive. The Guardian recently considered the history of female rightwing activism.

As a movement, Moms for Liberty draws from the long history of rightwing women’s activism in the US – particularly in such activists’ identity as mothers. Where mothers’ movements are often associated with projects of social welfare, a counter-tradition of women’s activism has politicized motherhood to pursue staunchly conservative aims.

Fueled by anti-communist panic, they fought for the removal of textbooks, teachers and administrators they judged to be tainted by progressive ideals. A defining feature of these groups was how they leveraged cultural beliefs surrounding motherhood for political ends.

White mothers’ organizations were some of the most committed players in the mid-century project of “massive resistance” fought to preserve the Jim Crow order…. And one of its battlegrounds remains central to the mission of Moms for Liberty: textbooks and school curricula. In the south and beyond, mothers’ organizations fought to eliminate books and teachings that highlighted white violence or white supremacy.

Given their goals, I’m sure these “Moms” applauded when the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction explained that–under that state’s “anti-woke/anti-CRT” rules, schools could teach that the Tulsa massacre happened– but could not attribute it to racism.

Walters is a pro-Trump Republican who was elected to oversee Oklahoma education in November. He has consistently indulged in rightwing talking points including “woke ideology” and has said critical race theory should not be taught in classrooms. Republicans have frequently conflated banning critical race theory with banning any discussion of racial history in classrooms.

At the forum in Norman, Oklahoma, Walters was asked how the massacre could “not fall” under his broad definition of CRT.

Walters responded that the incident should be taught, but not attributed to the race of the victims. That, he said “is where I say that is critical race theory.”

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, the massacre was the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” White mobs burned down the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, and killed hundreds of Black people.

Explaining why is now a “CRT no-no.” Moms-for-ridiculous-results must be so proud….

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Once More, With (Angry) Feeling…

In case you doubt my repeated assertions that the Republicans controlling Indiana’s legislature are waging all-out war on the state’s public schools, take a look at the current status of bills heading for passage this legislative session.

The budget bill has a 5% increase for public schools in the first year of the two-year budget. That minor increase, however, has to cover the newly “free” textbooks–a requirement that reduces funds left for  everything else (including teacher salaries) by 1.5 to 2%.    

Contrast that with the planned raise in virtual charter school funding in the first year– 18.3%, despite the state’s past unfortunate experience with “virtual” schooling. Or with  voucher schools funding, which is getting a 70% increase, despite the fact that those schools have failed to improve educational outcomes and increased social divisions.

That enormous increase in funding doesn’t come with any increase in accountability–far from it.

The budget also includes $10 million each year for “Education Savings Accounts” (a/k/a vouchers) plus $1.5 million each year for the State Treasurer, to cover program administration. (Interesting that oversight of a purportedly educational program isn’t handled by the Department of Education…)

Then there are the brand-new “Career Scholarship Accounts” that will pay private companies to employ students who will “learn” while they work: $7 million in year one, $14 million in year two. I’m sure it is just a coincidence that one of the sponsors of that particular boondoggle runs a company that stands to benefit handsomely from it….

A recent article from Talking Points Memo pointed out that vouchers are popular with legislators, but not with the public. The author wanted to understand why voucher programs continue to grow despite evidence they do not improve, and often even impede, students’ educational achievement.

Rather than put the question of whether to use public money for private schools before voters, advocates for choice almost always want state legislatures to make the decision instead. That may be because a careful look at the efforts suggests that if it were up to voters, school choice proposals would rarely succeed.

The article went on to describe past results in states that –unlike Indiana–allow citizens to vote on such issues via initiatives and/or referenda. In Indiana, our excessively gerrymandered legislature is not “hobbled” by a mechanism that might allow citizens to weigh in.

A new report by Public Funds Public Schools—a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Education Law Center (ELC)—has documented a massive increase in public spending on voucher programs in the decade following the Great Recession.

The report, The Fiscal Consequences of Private School Vouchers, examines the growth in voucher programs and spending in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin from fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2019. For comparison, the report provides data for per-pupil expenditures on public education in inflation-adjusted dollars for these seven states, as well as the nation’s 43 other states, over this same period.

But it isn’t just money.

Lawmakers aren’t just defunding public education–they are passing bills that make teaching hazardous. In Indiana, Senate Bill 12 will remove the legal defense currently available to school teachers and librarians (who they evidently believe are handing out porn to kindergarten students) and adds yet another mechanism through which parents can challenge school library materials. 

House Bill 1407 is one of the numerous, misnamed “parental rights” bills targeting trans children; it opens the door for litigation against schools, teachers and other government employees who might exhibit a modicum of compassion for these children.

Then there’s House Bill 1608, providing that “no employee, nor a third-party school vendor may provide any instruction to a student in K-3 on human sexuality.” 

An employee or staff member of a school may only use a name, pronoun, title, or other word to identify a student that is inconsistent with the student’s biological sex as either male or female based on genetics and reproductive biology at birth if the student is emancipated or a parent requests in writing the use of the specific name, pronoun, title or other word to identify the student.

There’s much more, but you get the gist: our state lawmakers–few of whom have any background in education (or medicine, when it comes to issues of gender dysphoria)–are engaged in an all-out war on our  public schools and the people who teach in them.

Hoosier Legislators are pouring our tax dollars into the coffers of religious schools–and now, “connected” businesses–despite years of evidence disproving the original justifications for vouchers. They are weaponizing state laws in order to provide legal tools to the rightwing activists working to overrule the documented preferences of large majorities of parents who have children in those schools. 

These culture warriors don’t care what their constituents think, but you should call them anyway.

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