Last Call For Throwing The Book At Them, Con't

The book-burning fascists from Moms for Liberty are trying to throw as many school librarians in prison for "trafficking porn" as they can in Florida.

 

Two members of Moms for Liberty, a right-wing activist group, have reported several Florida school librarians to law enforcement. They claimed they had evidence that librarians were distributing "pornography" to minors and requested that law enforcement officers be dispatched. This represents a serious escalation of the tactics deployed by members of Moms for Liberty against school librarians.

On October 25, Jennifer Tapley, a member of the Santa Rosa County chapter of Moms for Liberty and a candidate for school board, contacted the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office. "I've got some evidence a crime was committed," Tapley said in an audio recording of the call obtained by Popular Information through a public records request. "Pornography given to a minor in a school. And I would like to make a report with somebody and turn over the evidence." Tapley made the call from the lobby of the main office of the Santa Rosa County Sheriff's Office in Milton, Florida.

She told the dispatcher that she did not want to provide her name because she was "afraid of people getting mad at me for doing this." Tapley said that she would tell the Deputy Sheriff her name, but she didn't want "any public records with her name on it because then people could look it up."

In an interview with Popular Information, Tapley said she was "scrolling through Facebook" this summer and saw "a video of a mom reading a book" that was "really disgusting." She later learned that there was a Moms for Liberty chapter in her area addressing the issue and joined the group. As a member of the group, she learned that local schools had "some really shocking pornographic books in our libraries."

Tapley was accompanied at the Sheriff's Office by Tom Gurski, who is also active in the local Moms for Liberty chapter. Soon, Deputy Sheriff Tyler Mabire and another officer arrived and interviewed the pair.

"The only reason we are here: A crime is being committed. It's a 3rd-degree felony. And we've got the evidence," Gurski said in a body cam video of the interview obtained by Popular Information. "The governor says this is child pornography. It's a serious crime," Tapley added. "It's just as serious as if I handed a playboy to [my child] right now, right here, in front of you. It's just as serious, according to the law." The video has been edited to protect the identity of a minor.

The "pornography" at issue is actually a popular young adult novel, Storm and Fury, by Jennifer L. Armentrout. The book, which is 512 pages, is mostly about humans and gargoyles fighting demons. The main character of the novel, Trinity, is 18 years old. There are some passages with sexual themes, including a few makeout sessions, and one where the main character almost has sex. In the 2020-21 academic year, the Florida Association of Media in Education (FAME), a professional association of Florida librarians, recommended Storm and Fury on its "Teen Reads" list. FAME says books on the list "engage" teens and "provide a spur to critical thinking." Barnes and Noble recommends the book for readers 14 to 18. It was also recommended for students by the School Library Journal.

 

If this counts as porn, everything does.

 

Which is the point. These fascist freaks want public school libraries, librarians, and in fact, puiblic schools gone. They want librarians, teachers, educators, administrators and everyone involved in running a school in prison and the schools destroyed.

 

Keep in mind that's the end game, and all this makes a sick amount of sense, doesn't it?

Sunday Long Read: The School Shooting Survivor's Club

Our Sunday Long Read this week finds that we've had so many school shootings in America that there's now a dedicated support network for school principals to deal with the pain and death of what is becoming more and more an annual sacrifice ritual across the country to the Second Amendment.

IT WAS A cold, breezy morning in April 2019 when the club gathered for the first time. None of those present had asked to be part of this club, but they were the ones who answered its call, 12 men and five women, mostly strangers then.

They collected their coffees, took seats around the table in the conference room in Reston, Virginia, and looked at one another under the fluorescent lights.

Greg Johnson, the principal of a small Ohio high school called West Liberty-Salem, felt awkward. They all knew what they had in common. But do you ask about the awful thing right away, or wait?

Frank DeAngelis felt moved. Over the years, and with dread, the former principal of Columbine High School in Colorado had watched the ranks of his fellowship grow, had in fact called new members to tell them they’d joined what he dubbed the club where no one wants to join. Now here they were, so many in one room.

Ty Thompson felt guarded. A year after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, lawsuits and investigations loomed. He wasn’t sure what he could and couldn’t say.

One by one, the principals shared. When Johnson confessed that more than two years after the shooting at West Liberty-Salem he still wrestled with doubts about his ability to support his students and staff, he was relieved to see heads nodding. Thompson was struck by how immediately these strangers felt safe with one another, how some group members unloaded like it was therapy. They talked about the loss of young lives that haunted them, the guilt they felt as survivors, and how they questioned what they could have done differently. Someone asked: What are you doing for self-care? Silence. Then Johnson spoke up: “Who has time for self-care?” More heads nodded.

Andy McGill, Johnson’s assistant principal at West Liberty-Salem, remained quiet. As he listened to DeAngelis talk about Columbine and Thompson talk about Marjory Stoneman Douglas, what happened at his school began to seem trivial. No one had died during their shooting, thankfully. What was he doing in this room?

That night, McGill went to the hotel bar with a group that included DeAngelis. There, a former assistant principal from New York named Michael Bennett, who was shot confronting a gunman in 2004, began to express what McGill had been feeling—that there had been no fatalities at his school’s shooting and his presence here was a mistake. But DeAngelis cut him off with what would become one of the club’s party lines: You don’t compare tragedies. Trauma is trauma. At the next day’s meeting, McGill felt better. DeAngelis was right. The most important thing they could do was help others.

The club emerged from that 2019 meeting as the Principal Recovery Network (PRN), a support group for principals whose schools have experienced gun violence. Grimly, since the PRN was founded, both its workload and membership have grown—46 shootings occurred at K–12 schools in 2022, more than in any year since Columbine, according to Washington Post data. The PRN today is composed of 21 current and former leaders from schools including Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut; Marjory Stoneman Douglas; and Columbine. When gun violence strikes, the PRN reaches out to the principal, offering emotional support and advice on everything from how to reopen a school to how to commemorate the one-year mark. In 2022, the group released a handbook of its best practices: The NASSP Principal Recovery Network Guide to Recovery. But the most valuable resource the PRN offers may be its simplest: the opportunity to connect with others who have been through the same thing.

The principals realized at that first meeting in 2019 that while their shootings were different, many of their experiences were similar. As they led their communities forward, they faced common challenges, which unfolded in a similar sequence. Today, as the PRN, they offer their experiences as a guide, in hopes they might help others find smoother passage through. On the other side of the hardship, the principals promise, there can be healing.

But the story must begin with the horror. Because the horror, unfortunately, is how you join the club. 

 

More principals will join this club every month. More kids will join the ranks of those killed in these shootings. And more and more of us are throwing up our hands and accepting that this is how it has to be, and that the only solution is more and more death.

It doesn't have to be, but that starts with no electing the people who want to arm everyone and watch us shoot each other.

A Bleak Test Case For College

A new NY Times analysis finds that rich kids score far higher on SATs/ACTs than poor kids, which is news something akin to "the sun is a burny hot fusion sphere" because it was true when I was in college 30 years ago, but it's even more true now and to an even more astonishing degree.

 

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.

The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.

The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.

“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.

Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.”

The children of the top 0.1 percent, whose parents earned an average of $11.3 million a year in today’s dollars, got far better scores than even the children of the families just below them, the new data shows. For the 12,000 students in this group, opportunities that drive achievement were amplified — exclusive private schools, summers traveling the world and college prep services that cost more than college itself — said John N. Friedman, an economist at Brown, who analyzed the new data with Raj Chetty and David J. Deming of Harvard.

But the larger inequality is between the children of the merely rich and those below them. As class differences have grown more extreme, and a college degree has become more crucial to achieving a middle-class lifestyle or better, it has bred competition among parents anxious about their children’s futures.

“People are kind of jockeying to get into the school district that they think is going to be most beneficial for their kid,” said Ann Owens, a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California, who studies inequality in education. “A lot of this is driven by rising income inequality. When people have more money to spend on stuff, they’re spending it on moving to an affluent neighborhood, or buying their kids test prep and tutors and all these things they think will help them.”

 

And why wouldn't parents help their kids with college test prep? Mine did. The more money you have available, the more assistance you can buy. It's an investment that pays off in the millions over the course of a career.

 

And remember, these numbers are from ten years ago, 2011, 2013, and 2015. It's even worse now in the post-pandemic, assistive-AI, post-affirmative action era of 2023 which we're only now starting to experience.

 

The book on this era of college admissions is being written now, and if you thought disparity was bad before, well...

School Daze: SWAT Team Edition

Over the last year, more than 500 schools have been subjected to faked shooting hoax calls to police in dozens of states and DC, and the coordinated effort is only getting worse now that school is back in session for tens of millions of kids.

 

Over the past year, more than 500 schools in the United States have been subjected to a coordinated campaign of fear that exploits the all-too-real American danger of school shootings, according to a review of media reports and dozens of public records requests. The Washington Post examined police reports, emergency call recordings, body-camera footage or call logs in connection with incidents in 24 states.

The calls are being investigated by the FBI and have generated an aggressive response by local law enforcement — particularly after officers in Uvalde, Tex., came under criticism for waiting more than an hour to confront the gunman during the May 2022 elementary school massacre.

In state after state, heavily armed officers have entered schools prepared for the worst. Students have hidden in toilets, closets, nurse’s offices. They’ve barricaded doors with desks and refrigerators. Medical helicopters have been placed on standby while trauma centers have paused surgeries, anticipating possible victims. Terrified parents have converged on schools, not knowing if their children are safe.

The wave of school shooting hoaxes is without precedent, education safety experts and law enforcement officials say. It’s part of a larger phenomenon known as “swatting,” where callers report nonexistent crimes with the goal of triggering a police response — preferably by SWAT teams — at the homes of enemies or celebrities.

The shooting hoax calls often come in waves, with multiple schools in a state targeted on the same day, and most are “remarkably similar,” said Drew Evans, the superintendent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. More than 20 schools in the state were targeted in two separate incidents, one in September of last year and another this February.

“This is a really serious crime,” Evans said. “It places everybody in a situation of potential danger to have police officers rushing into a school.”

Many of the calls have followed a distinct pattern, according to police reports and recordings reviewed by The Post.

A male voice says that he is inside a school and that multiple students are shot. Many times, he claims to be a teacher. He says he is in a particular classroom or a bathroom, and tells the police to hurry.

He speaks with a heavy accent, police reports note. The calls first come in on non-emergency lines and are not recordings: The speaker interacts with dispatchers and responds to their questions.

When local authorities tried to trace the fake school shooting calls, they quickly ran into obstacles. Police reports show that the caller used free internet-calling services that allow anyone with an email address to make calls that appear to be coming from a U.S. number.

In incidents in at least 12 states, The Post found, the numbers were provided by TextNow, a Canadian company that offers free calls using voice over internet protocol, or VoIP.

TextNow says it works proactively to prevent bad actors from using its service while also keeping it free and accessible. The company “does not condone the use of our platform for harassment, fraud or other illegal activity that jeopardizes public safety,” said Derek Ting, TextNow’s co-founder, in a blog post in August. “However, when serving millions of people of various backgrounds and needs, you cannot solve every challenge with the biggest hammer you can find.”

 

The FBI continues to investigate, meanwhile, schools are getting invaded by armed SWAT teams looking for non-existent shooters, because Gunmerica. 

We would rather puts kids at risk than do something about guns.

Throwing The Book At Them

Yet another big school district in Florida is pulling books from school libraries in order to comply with Commissar Ron's order banning LGBTQ+ folks from existing. From Judd Legum's Substack, Public Information:

 

Librarians in public schools in Charlotte County, Florida, were instructed by the school district superintendent to remove all books with LGBTQ characters or themes from school and classroom libraries.

Charlotte County school librarians sought guidance from the school district about how to apply an expansion of the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, better known as the "Don't Say Gay" law, to all grades. "Are we removing books from any school or media center, Prek-12 if a character has, for example, two mothers or because there is a gay best friend or a main character is gay?" the librarians asked. Charlotte County Superintendent Mark Vianello answered, "Yes."

The guidance by Vianello and the school board's attorney, Michael McKinley, was obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP) through a public records request and shared with Popular Information. FFTRP requested "electronic records of district and school decisions regarding classroom and library materials." In response, FFTRP received a document memorializing a July 24 conversation between Vianello and district librarians, known in Florida as media specialists.

The guidance made clear that all books with LGBTQ characters are to be removed even if the book contained no sexually explicit content. The librarians asked if they could retain books in school and classroom libraries with LGBTQ characters "as long as they do not have explicit sex scenes or sexual descriptions and are not approaching 'how to' manuals for how to be an LGBTQ+ person." Vianello responded, "No. Books with LBGTQ+ characters are not to be included in classroom libraries or school library media centers."

Vianello also says teachers must ensure that books with LGBTQ characters and themes do not enter the classroom, even if they are self-selected by students for silent reading. According to Vianello, books with "[t]hese characters and themes cannot exist."

The librarians were seeking guidance on how to interpret a revised version of The Principles of Professional Conduct for the Education Profession in Florida. The revised rules, issued by the Florida Department of Education earlier this year, expanded the restrictions imposed by the"Don't Say Gay" law. According to revised Rule 6A-10.081, educators in Florida "[s]hall not intentionally provide classroom instruction to students in prekindergarten through grade 8 on sexual orientation or gender identity." (A similar provision was included in a law Governor Ron DeSantis (R) signed in May.) The revised rule also extends that prohibition through grade 12, except where explicitly required by state standards or as part of "a reproductive health course or health lesson for which a student’s parent has the option to have his or her student not attend."

Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has insisted that allegations that his policies, including the "Don't Say Gay" law, are being used to ban a wide range of books is a "hoax." DeSantis claimed that the only books being removed from Florida libraries are "pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards." But in Charlotte County, DeSantis' policies are being used to justify purging all books with LGBTQ characters, even if there is no sexual content.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for Charlotte County Schools told Popular Information that books with LGBTQ characters were removed from libraries because “there are elementary schools that utilize their school library media center as classrooms… [for] elective courses that our students are officially scheduled into and attend on a regular basis.” Therefore, the library “is considered a classroom setting.” As a result, “our school board attorney advises that we do not make books with these themes available in media centers that serve as classrooms since this would be considered ‘classroom instruction’ and such instruction and/or availability of these themes may not occur in PreK- grade 8.” The spokesperson acknowledged that “high school media centers are not designated as classrooms,” but books with LGBTQ characters were excluded anyway because “if a teacher were to bring a class of students to the media center and provide instruction, books with these themes cannot be included in that instructional time unless supported by the academic standards of that course of study.”

 

And as Chris Geidner reports, Texas's statewide school book ban law is now being allowed to take effect thanks to the 5th Circuit.

A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit quickly acted Monday to issue another administrative stay, allowing the state of Texas to enforce its new law establishing a book-ban regime in the state’s schools.

The law, passed earlier this year, had not been allowed to go into effect due to significant constitutional concerns from the lower court, meaning that Monday’s stay — though presented as “administrative” — altered the status of state law in Texas, putting a new law in effect for the first time with no reasoning and in a one-sentence order.

The extraordinary move — from Judges Jennifer Elrod (George W. Bush), Catharina Haynes (George W. Bush), and Dana Douglas (Biden) — came after U.S. District Judge Alan Albright, a Trump appointee, had temporarily prevented enforcement of the law just before its effective date of Sept. 1 and then, just one week ago, issued a preliminary injunction against enforcement, finding the law likely unconstitutional on several grounds.

Texas is appealing the Sept. 18 order from Albright. The state also, on Sept. 20, asked the appeals court for a stay pending appeal or, in the alternative, an administrative stay. The court granted an administrative stay on Monday, five days later (including a weekend).

Among other requirements, the Restricting Explicit and Adult-Designated Educational Resources (READER) Act, H.B. 900, requires private companies to create and produce lists of every book they wish to sell to public schools, determining which books are to be banned as “sexually explicit” and restricted as “sexually relevant.” The law then allows a state board to change those lists, with no appeal apparently available to the booksellers. The timeline for when the lists need to be submitted goes into next year, but, as the plaintiffs and district court explained, harms will accrue immediately. First, it’s not clear what school districts are supposed to do between the law going into effect and the lists being posted. And companies are certainly going to have difficulty selling books that could even possibly be covered by the new law to those schools in the meantime — particularly given that the law also requires booksellers to “recall” books previously sold that are later deemed to be banned.

Additionally, and as Albright explained in his decision last week, the state lacked answers to many basic questions about the law and its enforcement.

Nonetheless, on Monday, the appeals court said the state could go ahead and begin implementing the new law for now. Again, with no reasoning, and posed as an “administrative” action.

Remember, Donald Trump not being able to threaten witnesses and taint a jury pool with tirades against judges, prosecutors, and court officers violates the First Amendment, but a law forcing schools to pull books for the crime of existing LGBTQ+ characters or whatever bowdlerization Texas wants, with no appeal mind you, is fine, if not necessary.

Funny old world, huh.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Black churches in Florida are stepping up with teaching lessons now that Black history has been outlawed in Florida schools.

 

They filed into the pews one after the other on a sweltering Wednesday night, clutching Bibles and notepads, ready to learn at church what they no longer trusted would be taught at school.

“BLACK HISTORY MATTERS” proclaimed television screens facing the several dozen men and women settling in at Friendship Missionary Baptist Church. An institution in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Liberty City, “The Ship” had borne witness to many of the seminal events of the past century, shepherding its followers during Jim Crow and the heyday of the KKK, through the civil rights movement to the racial justice protests of recent years.

Now, as a new school year started, the Rev. Gaston Smith was standing at the pulpit with a lesson on one of those chapters. After months of controversy over new directives governing classroom instruction in Florida — changes that critics said sanitized or even distorted the past — he and other Black pastors across the state agreed their churches had no choice but to respond.

They would teach Black history themselves.

“Whenever there has been any kind of movement, particularly in the African American community, it started in the house of God,” said Smith, 57, a commanding presence with a resonant voice. “We cannot be apathetic, we cannot sit back, we cannot be nonvocal. We have to stand our ground, because the Bible says we have to speak up for those that cannot speak up for themselves.”

Their resolve has drawn a groundswell of support. A nonprofit coalition of religious institutions, Faith in Florida, put together an 11-chapter tool kit to guide the churches and suggest books, articles, documentaries and reports covering the Black experience through what it calls “the lens of truth.” The chapters, featuring content for all ages, cover a lot of ground. “From Africa to America,” one is titled. Another highlights “Race, Racism & Whiteness.”

Some 200 faith leaders quickly signed up to use it, representing African Methodist Episcopal, United Methodist and other denominations. Each committed to weave teachings on Black history into their sermons or Sunday school classes or Bible study sessions. That way, they’d be reaching parents as well as children.

The churches’ involvement harks back to the pivotal role many played in the struggle to end segregation and advance voting rights.

“There’s always been that connection,” said Loren Lyons, a spokesperson for the coalition. “And so, we pretty much said that because of what’s going on in the curriculum and what’s going on in Florida right now, it’s time that we took back that power.”

 

Cynical me wonders just how long Ron DeSantis's government will wait before Black churches become targets of investigation for being terrorist hotbeds, this of course coming from people who will tell you that white Christians are the most persecuted group on Earth and that religious freedom is the bedrock of American society.

 

Black communities taking education of kids and families into their own hands, often through Black churches, is nothing new. We've been doing it for decades if not centuries. From spirituals to Dr. King's SCLC to the Black Panthers to today, we survive and thrive though that community.

 

But Depressing Realist Me wonders why DeSantis would lift a finger when Black churches are technically making his case that public education is broken and that religious education for students is the answer. That this effort will be hijacked in order to push public education dollars going to churches and religious schools is inevitable.

So no, I'm not celebrating this at all. I fully expect Republicans to co-opt this movement for evil.

Black Lives Still Matter though.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

As I warned months ago, the entire point of Florida GOP Gov. ROn Desantis picking a fight directly with the College Board and AP Black History classes was to serve as cause for evicting all of the College Board's products from Florida schools and universities, including the SAT college entrance exam, and to replace it with the right-wing Christian Dominionist version.

 

The Classic Learning Test is the college admissions exam that most students have never heard of. An alternative to the SAT and ACT for only a small number of mostly religious colleges, the test is known for its emphasis on the Western canon, with a big dose of Christian thought.

But on Friday, Florida’s public university system, which includes the University of Florida and Florida State University, is expected to become the first state system to approve the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, for use in admissions.

“We are always seeking ways to improve,” said Ray Rodrigues, the chancellor of the State University System of Florida, noting that the system, which serves a quarter million undergraduates, was the largest in the country to still require an entrance exam.

It’s the latest move by Gov. Ron DeSantis to shake up the education establishment, especially the College Board, the nonprofit behemoth that runs the SAT program.

Governor DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate, has already rejected the College Board’s Advanced Placement course on African American studies, and sparred over content on gender and sexuality in A.P. Psychology.

Now, at a time when the College Board faces a dwindling number of students taking the SAT, Governor DeSantis is giving a big lift to an upstart competitor.

Jeremy Tate, the founder of Classic Learning Initiatives, the company that developed the test, insisted that the CLT is apolitical. It’s an effort, he said, to avoid educational fads and expose students to rich intellectual material.

The company, however, describes the CLT as part of “the larger educational freedom movement of our time” — language that echoes that of conservative supporters of private-school vouchers and tax credits for home-schoolers. The “end goal,” the company says, is “promoting a classical curriculum.”

After a century of dominance by the College Board and the nonprofit ACT — which administers the test of the same name — the emergence of an alternative is “healthy and overdue,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “It’s all for the best if this becomes a more vibrant marketplace.”

There has been pushback. The College Board and ACT say that there is little research that shows that the CLT can accurately assess college readiness. Some classics scholars say that the CLT’s vision of classical education is too narrow; others say it’s too expansive.

While there is no single definition of classical education, the CLT celebrates canonical works from Western civilization, with an emphasis on Greek, Roman and early Christian thought. Memorization, logic and debate are considered important skills.

The test has three sections: verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and quantitative reasoning (math). Its English sections, like the SAT and ACT, ask students to read dense passages, demonstrate their comprehension via multiple-choice questions and spot grammatical errors.

But in sample materials, there is more religious thought, with passages from Thomas Aquinas; Jonathan Edwards, the Great Awakening preacher; and Teresa of Ávila, a 16th-century saint.

 

"We need a more vibrant marketplace" in college admissions testing, bleats the AEI think tank toad, but Florida doesn't want a vibrant marketplace of ideas, it wants the CLT to be the only game in town for Florida universities period, and it wants to banish the textbooks and knowledge and ideas that might stand in opposition to what the CLT tests for.

And pretty soon in Florida it will be the only game in town.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

The battle over Florida's position on slavery as Black history was far worse than previously thought, as the state objected to AP Black History being taught in the state because the course refused to consider the benefits of slavery for Black Americans, and it was too hard on the slave traders, nearly all of them white.

When Florida rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American Studies, state officials said they objected to the study of several concepts — like reparations, the Black Lives Matter movement and “queer theory.”

But the state did not say that in many instances, its reviewers also made objections in the state’s attempt to sanitize aspects of slavery and the plight of African Americans throughout history, according to a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times review of internal state comments.

For example, a lesson in the Advanced Placement course focused on how Europeans benefited from trading enslaved people and the materials enslaved laborers produced. The state objected to the content, saying the instructional approach “may lead to a viewpoint of an ‘oppressor vs. oppressed’ based solely on race or ethnicity.”

In another lesson about the beginnings of slavery, the course delved into how tens of thousands of enslaved Africans had been “removed from the continent to work on Portuguese-colonized Atlantic islands and in Europe” and how those “plantations became a model for slave-based economy in the Americans.”

In response, the state raised concerns that the unit “may not address the internal slave trade/system within Africa” and that it “may only present one side of this issue and may not offer any opposing viewpoints or other perspectives on the subject.”

“There is no other perspective on slavery other than it was brutal,” said Mary Pattillo, a sociology professor and the department chair of Black Studies at Northwestern University. Pattillo is one of several scholars the Herald/Times interviewed during its review of the state’s comments about the AP African American Studies curriculum.

“It was exploitative, it dehumanized Black people, it expropriated their labor and wealth for generations to come. There is no other side to that in African American studies. If there’s another side, it may be in some other field. I don’t know what field that is because I would argue there is no other side to that in higher education,” Pattillo said.

Alexander Weheliye, African American studies professor at Brown University, said the evaluators’ comments on the units about slavery were a “complete distortion” and “whitewashing” of what happened historically.

“It’s really trying to go back to an earlier historical moment, where slavery was mainly depicted by white historians through a white perspective. So to say that the enslaved and the sister African nations and kingdoms and white colonizers and enslavers were the same really misrecognizes the fundamentals of the situation,” Weheliye said.

The objections are an example of how Florida education officials are enforcing broad state laws and rules that restrict how schools can teach about racism and other aspects of history — and how the College Board’s pilot African American Studies course became a casualty of those policies.

 

To recap, everything I said earlier this year about Republicans withing to eliminate Black history and replace it with a white-friendly version where the "exploitation of human beings may have been bad but" nonsense is active, systemic racist violence against the children of an entire state and especially against the descendants of those Black slaves.

 

They want that history gone, if not criminalizing its teaching. 

Republicans hate us. They want to exterminate our history, so they can exterminate us.

Don't expect us to forgive you if you facilitate this brutality.

Black history, Black lives, they all matter.

Sunday Long Read: The Far Future Of Nearsightedness

In our Sunday Long Read from Amit Katwala at Wired Magazine, while it seems the overwhelming prevalence of myopia in Taiwan has led to much scientific hand-wringing and social wrangling, the solution is apparently simple: get more outdoor light.

 

DOING SURGERY ON the back of the eye is a little like laying new carpet: You must begin by moving the furniture. Separate the muscles that hold the eyeball inside its socket; make a delicate cut in the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that covers the eye. Only then can the surgeon spin the eyeball around to access the retina, the thin layer of tissue that translates light into color, shape, movement. “Sometimes you have to pull it out a little bit,” says Pei-Chang Wu, with a wry smile. He has performed hundreds of operations during his long surgical career at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Kaohsiung, an industrial city in southern Taiwan.

Wu is 53, tall and thin with lank dark hair and a slightly stooped gait. Over dinner at Kaohsiung’s opulent Grand Hotel, he flicks through files on his laptop, showing me pictures of eye surgery—the plastic rods that fix the eye in place, the xenon lights that illuminate the inside of the eyeball like a stage—and movie clips with vision-related subtitles that turn Avengers: Endgame, Top Gun: Maverick, and Zootopia into public health messages. He peers at the screen through Coke bottle lenses that bulge from thin silver frames.

Wu specializes in repairing retinal detachments, which happen when the retina separates from the blood vessels inside the eyeball that supply it with oxygen and nutrients. For the patient, this condition first manifests as pops of light or dark spots, known as floaters, which dance across their vision like fireflies. If left untreated, small tears in the retina can progress from blurred or distorted vision to full blindness—a curtain drawn across the world.

When Wu began his surgical career in the late 1990s, most of his patients were in their sixties or seventies. But in the mid-2000s, he started to notice a troubling change. The people on his operating table kept getting younger. In 2016, Wu performed a scleral buckle surgery—fastening a belt around the eye to fix the retina into place—on a 14-year-old girl, a student at an elite high school in Kaohsiung. Another patient, a prominent programmer who had worked for Yahoo, suffered two severe retinal detachments and was blind in both eyes by age 29. Both of these cases are part of a wider problem that’s been growing across Asia for decades and is rapidly becoming an issue in the West too: an explosion of myopia.

Myopia, or what we commonly call nearsightedness, happens when the eyeball gets too long—it deforms from soccer ball to American football—and then the eye focuses light not on the retina but slightly in front of it, making distant objects appear blurry. The longer the eyeball becomes, the worse vision gets. Ophthalmologists measure this distortion in diopters, which refer to the strength of the lens required to bring someone’s vision back to normal. Anything worse than minus 5 diopters is considered “high myopia”—somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of myopia diagnoses around the world are in this category. In China, up to 90 percent of teenagers and young adults are myopic. In the 1950s the figure was as low as 10 percent. A 2012 study in Seoul found that an astonishing 96.5 percent of 19-year-old men were nearsighted. Among high schoolers in Taiwan, it’s around 90 percent. In the US and Europe, myopia rates across all ages are well below 50 percent, but they’ve risen sharply in recent decades. It’s estimated that by 2050, half the world’s population will need glasses, contacts, or surgery to see across a room. High myopia is now the leading cause of blindness in Japan, China, and Taiwan.

If those trends continue, it’s likely that millions more people around the world will go blind much earlier in life than they—or the societies they live in—are prepared for. It’s a “ticking time bomb,” says Nicola Logan, an optometry professor at the UK’s Aston University. She wasn’t the only expert I talked to who used that phrase. Because so much of Taiwan’s population is already living life with myopia, the island nation has already glimpsed what could be coming for the rest of us. And in a rare confluence, the country may also be the best place to look for solutions.

 

Literally the solution to the myopia epidemic in Asia is "send kids outside more" instead of keeping them in dimly lit classrooms all year. Australia's occurrence of myopia among kids is just 13%, where in Japan, China and Taiwan it's around half.

So yeah, go let the kids play outside for a bit.

Black History Matters

Black History Matters, because Black History is American history, but in Ron DeSantis's Florida, it's propaganda and indoctrination designed to take history away from everyone.

 

Slavery was a compromise. The Black Lives Matter movement led to more crime. Masculinity helped win World War II.

Those are some of the lessons included in PragerU Kids videos, an educational entertainment program created by PragerU, a right-wing advocacy group long criticized for its content being “misleading” or factually inaccurate. Its videos have prompted even more backlash online since PragerU CEO Marissa Streit announced last month that the group is partnering with the state of Florida as an education vendor to provide supplemental lessons.

Among the PragerU Kids videos making the rounds on social media is one called “Leo & Layla Meet Frederick Douglass,” in which a pair of children go back in time and meet an animated depiction of Frederick Douglass. In the video, Douglass, an abolitionist who devoted his life to anti-slavery efforts, describes slavery as a compromise between the Founding Fathers and the Southern colonies for the benefit of the U.S. The depiction also criticizes fellow abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.

The animated video drew swift criticism from social media users who deemed it propaganda, and condemned an apparent reference to the police violence protests of 2020, in which a purported Douglass said “William refuses all compromise, demands immediate change, and if he doesn’t get what he wants, he likes to set things on fire,” referring to Garrison.

“This is some of the most dangerous & false propaganda I’ve ever seen,” one person tweeted. “The description of Frederick Douglass in this animation is a flat out lie and the concept that children should be learning from this should scare everyone.”

Another added: “This video bastardizes the essence of Frederick Douglass. It’s insulting for me as a former history/govt teacher. I can’t imagine how devastating it must feel for Black people to see this dehumanizing curriculum implemented (or continued) in Florida public schools.”

Streit, though, said in a phone interview Thursday, that any educational offering could potentially include material that could be deemed offensive.

“I challenge those same people to look through every word that Scholastic has printed or, or every word that BrainPOP has published, and tell me that you’re not going to find something that you are not offended by," she said. "But you know, I completely stand by what’s in our videos. I actually think that our Frederick Douglass video is a great one.”

Streit contends that critics have only read one version of history — a progressive one, documented in works like "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn. "The fact that people are so upset is actually a sign of the fact that there has been one way of doing things for a very long time," she added.

Her sentiments echo her announcement last month that the K-12 “supplemental educational resources” are a response to U.S. schools being “hijacked by the left.” The news comes as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running for president in 2024, has championed controversial changes to the state’s education curriculum. His administration has tried to block a high school Advanced Placement African American studies course and signed laws to restrict the instruction of reproductive health and gender identity in schools. Additionally, challenges to book access have reportedly increased as a result of DeSantis’ education bills.

In a statement, the Florida Department of Education said in part: “The Florida Department of Education reviewed PragerU Kids and determined the material aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards. PragerU Kids is no different than many other resources, which can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”

 

PragerU hogwash as an officially recognized supplemental lesson for kids in Florida is disturbing as hell. It's vile, and they give the excuse that the right-wing noise machine always gives: "Stupid libtards fear our real history in the marketplace of ideas!"

Well yes, "slavery was an acceptable compromise that helped the Blacks" is something that should be shunned along with flat earth nonsense and "your womb belongs to God and the state".

And I wish  Zinn's People's History of the US was as ubiquitous in high school or college as the right claims it is, Jesus.

Black History Matters.

Last Call For The Loan Arranger Rides Again

The SCOTUS argument as to why President Biden's COVID-era student loan forgiveness program had to die was because the executive didn't have the authority from Congress to run the program under emergency rules. The Biden administration has responded with "We do have explicit authority to modify student loans under the Education Department and we're going to use it."

The SAVE, or Saving on a Valuable Education, plan was finalized after the Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness initiative in June. It marks a significant change to the federal student loan system that could lower monthly loan payments for some borrowers and reduce the amount they pay back over the lifetime of their loans.

“Part of the president’s overall commitment is to improve the student loan system and reduce the burden of student loan debt on American families,” a senior administration official said, previewing the beta website first to CNN. “The SAVE plan is a big part of that. It is important in this moment as borrowers are getting ready to return to repayment.”

Federal student loan borrowers can access the beta website at https://studentaid.gov/idr/. The enrollment process is estimated to take 10 minutes, and many sections can be automatically populated with information the government has on hand, including tax returns from the IRS, administration officials said.

“We will be able to show borrowers their exact monthly payment amount and give them the ability to choose the most affordable repayment plan for them,” one official said.

Borrowers will only need to apply one time, not yearly as past systems require, which officials said would make this plan “much easier to use.” Users will receive a confirmation email once the application is submitted, and the approval process, which can be tracked online, is expected to take a few weeks.

Those already enrolled in the federal government’s REPAYE, or Revised Pay As You Earn, income-driven repayment plan will be automatically switched to the new plan.

The full website launch will occur in August, and applications submitted during the beta period will not need to be resubmitted. The beta period will allow the Department of Education to monitor site performance in real time to identify any issues, and the site may be paused to make any necessary updates, officials said.

The SAVE plan, which applies to current and future federal student loan borrowers, will determine payments based on income and family size, and some monthly payments will be as small as $0. The income threshold to qualify for $0 payments has been increased from 150% to 225% of federal poverty guidelines, which translates to an annual income of $32,805 for a single borrower or $67,500 for a family of four. The Education Department estimates this means more than 1 million additional borrowers will qualify for $0 payments under the plan.

Some borrowers could have their payments cut in half when the program is in full effect next year and see their remaining debt canceled after making at least 10 years of payments, a significant change from previous plans.

With the new plan, unpaid interest will not accrue if a borrower makes their full monthly payments.

But the new plan does come at a cost to the federal government. Estimates of the program’s expense have varied depending on how many borrowers sign up for the new plan, but they range from $138 billion to $361 billion over 10 years. By comparison, Biden’s student loan forgiveness program was expected to cost about $400 billion.

The Education Department has created similar income-driven repayment plans in the past and has not faced a successful legal challenge, officials noted.

The beta site launch comes as borrowers will need to begin making federal student loan payments again in October after a pause of more than three years because of the pandemic.

The question now becomes how quickly Republicans will sue to block the program and send it to the Supreme Court.  They will find their federal judge to block the program, and we'll see how fast they move to get it to SCOTUS to end it. I'm betting they will get it blocked in the next few months, but delay any further legal action until after summer 2024. After the election, if Trump wins, he'll just end the program in 2025 or better yet, just have SCOTUS do it so he can say "Oh well I tried" and blame SCOTUS justices who won't face a lick of accountability. If Biden gets a second term, same thing happens.

The trillion-dollar-plus student loan industry that owns SCOTUS conservatives won't let this stand. This will be blocked before the October deadline and the hundreds of billions in student loan repayments will crash the economy by early next year.

Everyone will blame Biden, and then Trump wins easily.

That'll be the plan. Whether it works, well, you tell me.

Last Call For An Education In Fascism

If you want to know what fascism in America looks like, visit a red state public university's purge of faculty over thought crimes.

 

Joy Alonzo, a respected opioid expert, was in a panic.

The Texas A&M University professor had just returned home from giving a routine lecture on the opioid crisis at the University of Texas Medical Branch when she learned a student had accused her of disparaging Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick during the talk.

In the few hours it took to drive from Galveston, the complaint had made its way to her supervisors, and Alonzo’s job was suddenly at risk.

“I am in a ton of trouble. Please call me!” she wrote to Chandler Self, the UTMB professor who invited her to speak.

Alonzo was right to be afraid. Not only were her supervisors involved, but so was Chancellor John Sharp, a former state comptroller who now holds the highest-ranking position in the Texas A&M University System, which includes 11 public universities and 153,000 students. And Sharp was communicating directly with the lieutenant governor’s office about the incident, promising swift action.

Less than two hours after the lecture ended, Patrick’s chief of staff had sent Sharp a link to Alonzo’s professional bio.

Shortly after, Sharp sent a text directly to the lieutenant governor: “Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week.”

The text message was signed “jsharp.”

 

Now, Joy Alonzo got to keep her job after the school's investigation found that she did nothing wrong, but the bigger issue is that what college students are being taught is that learning something that they don't agree with is wrong, being exposed to those ideas is actually making them victims, and that they have the power to remove that thought from the school so that they never have to deal with it.

 

They will expect to be able to do that going forward in life. The removal of people unlike them, not the thinking part, that is.

 

In the America that Republicans are setting up, where everything is a culture war battle and fighting that battle so that your side is the only one left standing in the battle of "ideas", that will be the new norm. 

Welcome to the GOP "education initiative".

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

The government of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has completed their rewrite of Black history in the state for students this fall and the results are just as bad as I warned you they would be.

The Florida State Board of Education approved new rules Wednesday for how Black history will be taught in public schools that critics are decrying as a “step backward.”

The updated standards say students should learn that enslaved people “developed skills” that “could be applied for their personal benefit,” and that in teaching about mob violence against Black residents instructors should note “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

“These standards are a disservice to Florida’s students and are a big step backward for a state that has required teaching African American history since 1994,” the Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s largest teachers union, said in a statement.

The standards are the latest development in an ongoing debate in Florida over how Black history should be taught in school. Earlier this year, the education board rejected a new Advanced Placement high school course on African American studies, arguing it lacked “educational value,” igniting protests and outrage.

Meanwhile, the state legislature has passed a raft of new laws backed by Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who contends the measures remove “woke indoctrination” and empower parents. The laws ban the teaching of critical race theory, an intellectual movement that examines the way policies and laws perpetuate systemic racism, and forbid teachers from offering instruction that makes other students “feel guilt” because of actions committed by others in the past.

Education Commissioner Manny Diaz argued at Wednesday’s meeting in Orlando that the changes to the Black history curriculum make it more “robust.”

“I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states,” Diaz said, adding that Florida would continue to “teach the good, bad and the ugly of American history” in an age-appropriate manner.

But critics said the dozens of new “benchmark clarifications” to the existing Black history curriculum water down that history. The changes include teaching elementary school children to “recognize Rosa Parks and Thomas Jefferson as individuals who represent the United States.” The FEA criticized the approach, saying it excludes a deeper teaching of their “histories and struggles” in favor of easy identification and memorization.

Genesis Robinson, political director of Equal Ground, a voter education group, said the new standards omit important lessons regarding the history of civil rights in Florida and ultimately dehumanize people of color.

“Black history is more than being able to identify well-known Black people,” he said.

A spokesman for DeSantis did not respond to a request for comment. Alex Lanfranconi, communications director for the state Department of Education, echoed Diaz’s remarks on Twitter, saying the new standards “teach it all.”

“Don’t believe the union lies,” he wrote.

More than a dozen speakers at Wednesday’s board meeting opposed the changes, including state Sen. Geraldine Thompson (D), who helped pass a law in 2020 that requires schools to teach lessons about the Ocoee Massacre. The incident in 1920 began when several Black residents attempted to vote, and ended with as many as 60 people dead, making it the deadliest instance of Election Day violence in U.S. history.

Thompson said the new curriculum “suggests that the massacre was sparked by violence from African Americans. That’s blaming the victims. ”

 

Has anyone stopped to consider that Black kids in Florida might "feel guilt" over having the schools tell them that our ancestors were responsible for their own massacres because they wanted to, you know, not be slaves?

Of course not. By the way, Florida's Education Secretary saying  “I think this is something that is going to set the norm for standards in other states” is an open threat to criminalize Black History.

Treat it as such.

Last Call For Blacked Out In College

The Nation's Elie Mystal doesn't mince words, stating plainly that colleges and universities are going to have to all but eliminate Black students from admissions, lest they be sued out of existence by white students accusing them of back-door, unconstitutional affirmative action.

 

The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case banning race consciousness in college admissions, is facially unenforceable. That’s an underreported aspect of Chief Justice John Roberts’s gobbledygook ruling, mainly because most of the white people doing the reporting have adopted the gospel of “race-neutral” and “color blindness” without giving those concepts a whole lot of critical thought. But humans cannot retroactively make themselves unaware of race. People cannot un-conscious themselves, and ordering them to not think about race just ensures that they will. (In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called it a “classic pink-elephant paradox.”) The court expects college admissions officers to know about the race of their applicants, and not care, but there’s really not going to be any way to tell if colleges are disregarding the precise bit of information the court wants them to.

As a result, the real upshot of the affirmative action ruling is this: Colleges and universities must now punish Black applicants by decreasing the enrollment of Black students, by any means necessary. That’s because the only way universities can show compliance with Roberts’s new rules is to show that they’ve decreased the number of Black kids they let into school. Anything less than that will likely trigger litigation from the white supremacists who have already promised to hunt down schools that admit too many Black people, as determined by their own white-makes-right accounting system.

This intended revival of segregationist educational opportunities flows directly from the sheer hubris of Roberts’s attempt to legislate how admissions officers think, along with his open threats to universities that do not comply with his version of thought-policing. In his decision, Roberts expects that colleges and universities will be responsible for self-enforcing his ruling, but he also warns them that additional litigation will be coming their way if they try a work-around to achieve racial diversity in their classes. Again, the white media has made a big deal about the part of Roberts’s ruling where he says that colleges can still consider how race has affected an applicant (for instance, as described in a college essay), but they’ve ignored the last lines of his ruling where he specifically threatens schools that use those very essays to achieve racial diversity.

Roberts writes:

But, despite the dissent’s assertion to the contrary, universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today…. “[W]hat cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly. The Constitution deals with substance, not shadows,” and the prohibition against racial discrimination is “levelled at the thing, not the name.”… A benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example, must be tied to that student’s courage and determination. Or a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated him or her to assume a leadership role or attain a particular goal must be tied to that student’s unique ability to contribute to the university.

I’s sho hopes Massa Roberts thinks I is a good Negro wit the determination to keeps learnin’ my letters at the fancy school.

Roberts’s closing flourish here is trash on many levels. First of all, I don’t recall anyone appointing him as the chief judge for how Black people are supposed to overcome racial discrimination. Second, I’d argue that college admissions officers should pay special attention to applicants who didn’t fully overcome the hurdles white people put in their way, but might do so in the future. And third, Roberts’s paean to model minorities is still a white man’s wishes disguised as a legal remedy: How in the hell will Roberts know if some essay reader saw “courage and determination” in an applicant? How can Roberts possibly know what constitutes a unique contribution to a university, and how can Roberts place himself in a position to second-guess what the admissions officers on the ground think are worthwhile contributions?

Most important of all, how can Roberts, or anybody else, know if universities are following his rules? Roberts doesn’t tell us outright, but he sure drops a powerful hint. In his decision, he effectively accuses Harvard of using a backdoor quota system to maintain a consistent rate of Black students. He writes: “For the admitted classes [at Harvard] of 2009 to 2018, black students represented a tight band of 10.0%-11.7% of the admitted pool.” He adds in a footnote: “Harvard must use precise racial preferences year in and year out to maintain the unyielding demographic composition of its class.”

Even if you think Roberts is right (and I’ll point out that Roberts offered no evidence that Harvard “must” be using precise racial preferences to achieve this kind of diversity, nor did the trial court, whose presentation of facts was what Roberts was supposed to be bound by, instead of his own conglomeration of fact-free inferences), how will a school like Harvard prove, to Roberts’s satisfaction, that it is not using racial preferences in the future?

The answer: Only a decrease in Black enrollment is likely to satisfy Roberts. If Harvard maintains its class diversity, Roberts will accuse it of using racial preferences. If Harvard increases Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of using newly unconstitutional race-consciousness to promote Black applicants—beyond historical levels, he’ll likely say. Only a decrease in Black enrollment will satisfy Roberts’s unworkable standard of ignoring race. It doesn’t actually matter how Harvard goes about putting together its class: If this doesn’t produce Roberts’s desired outcome of decreasing Black enrollment, Roberts will accuse it of thinking about race.

Of course, Roberts doesn’t say by how much universities will have to decrease their Black enrollment to satisfy his new legal requirements. If he had, white media might actually have reported on this aspect of his ruling. Instead, Roberts can almost certainly rely on the efforts of outsourced goons to keep an eye on universities and sue them if too many Black kids get in. One goon squad leader in particular, Trump political adviser Stephen Miller, has already volunteered to do this work, and has basically said the quiet part aloud.

 

Every Black student at a non-HBCU is going to have to "prove" they didn't get in from affirmative action, just like we've been doing for decades now. The difference with the end of race in college admissions is now non-Black students can sue.

 

Expect a sharp drop in college admissions for Black students as a result.

 

Which is the point.

 

Oh, and wait until the Roberts Court gets rid of the EEOC. If you're Black and employed in anything more than an entry-level minimum-wage job, well, that's affirmative action, and you need to be fired as a result.

 

Stay tuned.

A Supreme Week From Hell, Con't

As widely expected, telegraphed, implied, hinted at and foretold, all six conservatives on the Supreme Court have effectively ended race as an admission factor in colleges and universities.

The Supreme Court on Thursday struck down affirmative action programs at the University of North Carolina and Harvard in a major victory for conservative activists, ending the systematic consideration of race in the admissions process.

The court ruled that both programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and are therefore unlawful. The vote was 6-3 in the UNC case and 6-2 in the Harvard case, in which liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was recused.

The decision was hailed by prominent conservatives, who say the Constitution should be "colorblind," with former President Donald Trump calling the ruling "a great day for America." Liberals, however, condemned the ruling, saying affirmative action is a key tool for remedying historic race discrimination.

"It wasn’t perfect, but there’s no doubt that it helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb," said former first lady Michelle Obama, the first Black woman in that role.

President Joe Biden called the decision a "severe disappointment," adding that his administration would provide guidance on how colleges could maintain diversity without violating the ruling.

 

What this means is that by ruling considering race as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, it's very, very possible that everything involving race will be challenged by conservatives, including all federal protections for schools, housing, job discrimination, etc.

It's going to be bad. The Biden admin is at least working on it.

We'll see, but at this point I expect a brutal crash in college admissions for Black folk going forward.

A Supreme Week From Hell

With the last week of June upon us, several critical Supreme Court decisions are still awaiting, and these rulings could affect the rights and lives of tens of millions of Americans in the days ahead.

The Supreme Court is set to hand down key decisions this week on student debt relief, affirmative action and federal election laws as it enters the last week of its summer session with 10 cases pending.

The court has given no indication it will break its norm of finishing decisions by the end of June, and the next batch is slated to be released Tuesday morning.

Beyond the decisions, the court is also forming its docket for the next term. The justices on Monday could announce whether they will take up several high-profile cases, including on guns, racial discrimination and qualified immunity.

Here are the remaining cases as the Supreme Court wraps up its annual term:

President Biden’s plan to forgive student debt for more than 40 million borrowers will soon be greenlighted or blocked, depending on how the justices rule.

Biden’s plan would forgive up to $10,000 for borrowers who meet income requirements and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.

But the debt relief remains on hold until the Supreme Court resolves two lawsuits challenging the plan.

If either succeeds, the debt relief will be blocked.

During oral arguments, the conservative majority cast doubt that the administration had the authority to cancel the debts, expected to amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.

But before they can strike down the plan as unlawful, the justices must first decide whether any of the challengers have legal standing.

The six GOP-led states and two individual borrowers challenging the plan have promoted various arguments.

Missouri’s argument received the most attention, and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals in questioning the state’s theory during oral argument.

The cases are Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown.

When the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action in college admissions in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in her majority opinion made a temporal prediction:

“The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” she wrote.

That landmark decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, marked its 20th anniversary Friday.

It might not reach its 21st.

The justices have been weighing whether to overturn Grutter — and decades of affirmative action programs in higher education along with it — in challenges to admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

During oral argument, the majority appeared skeptical of upholding race-conscious college admissions.

The justices tend to write no more than one majority opinion for each monthly argument session.

Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh have not yet issued majority opinions for any cases argued in November, when the affirmative action challenges were heard, meaning one of them is the likely author.

The cases are Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.

Web designer Lorie Smith, an evangelical Christian, is challenging Colorado’s public accommodation law on free speech grounds.

Like many other states, Colorado’s law prohibits businesses that serve the public from discriminating based on sexual orientation.

Smith wants to expand her business to create wedding websites. But Colorado’s law would demand she create same-sex wedding websites if she wants to do so for opposite-sex unions, and Smith is vehemently opposed to gay marriage.

The justices are now set to decide whether public accommodation laws, as applied to Smith and other artists, violate the First Amendment by compelling their speech.

The conservative majority signaled support for Smith during oral argument.

Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch appear to be the likely pool of authors because they are the two remaining justices who have not issued majority opinions from a case argued in December.

The case is 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis.

The court is weighing a major election clash that will decide who has the final word on setting federal election rules.

North Carolina Republican lawmakers appealed a state court ruling that struck down their congressional map, promoting to the justices a sweeping argument known as the “independent state legislature” theory.

That theory asserts that state legislatures have exclusive authority to set federal election rules under the Constitution.

Adopting it would claw back the ability of state courts and state constitutions to block legislatures’ congressional map designs and other regulations surrounding federal elections.

It’s possible, however, that the court tosses the case without reaching the theory’s merits.

As the justices considered the case, Republicans regained control of North Carolina’s top court and overturned the underlying decision that struck down the state’s congressional map.

The Supreme Court has been paying close attention to whether they still have jurisdiction in the case, a potential offramp from the high-stakes dispute.

Based on the decisions released so far, Roberts or Gorsuch appears to be the likely author of the majority opinion.

The case is Moore v. Harper.

Again, predicting SCOTUS decisions is something even the experts get wrong, and I'm just a guy with a blog who probably should have walked away a decade ago. But as I'm here and you're reading this, I expect three really awful conservative decisions and a punt on the independent state legislature nonsense, with the court all but begging for cases where they can greatly expand on the precedents set in all four cases.

But if the worst comes to pass, and the Roberts Court sides with NC in the final case there, our democracy is all but finished. The notion that state legislatures can simply determine the electoral college outcome of each state regardless of the vote for president is heartstopping lunacy, and you'd better believe that Republican state legislatures will anoint Republican winners for everything across the board, no matter what the voters actually say or do.

Granted that would mean Democratic state legislatures could simply appoint democrats across the board too, but who knows how far that could go? We don't need to find out.

The point is, this is most likely going to be a dismal week, starting Tuesday.  

Sunday Long Read: Reading, Writing, Religion

In the wake of Roberts Court decisions like Hobby Lobby and Kennedy v Bremerton on religion in schools and in the workplace, and Texas allowing schools to dump mental health counselors for school chaplains and forcing schools to display the Ten Commandments, the crusade to put Christianity into all public schools is well on the way to becoming reality as this week's Sunday Long Read recounts.

 

After more than a decade living out of state, Jennifer Russell and her husband decided it was time to return home to northwest Louisiana. The couple, both in their early thirties at the time, wanted their two children to get to know their grandparents and to benefit from good public schools. In early 2015, lured by inexpensive rental housing on the Air Force base in the area, the family moved to a town in Bossier Parish, across the Red River from Shreveport, where they’d both grown up. Russell’s daughter started kindergarten that fall; her one-year-old son began day care. At first, her daughter adjusted well to the move and made friends. “It was what every parent wants,” Russell told me.

She had no inkling that her family’s religious identity would prove to be a complication. Russell and her husband both grew up Southern Baptist, a conservative, evangelical Protestant denomination that dominates this area of the Bible Belt. They went to the same church, in fact, and had met because their parents became friends. But she’d abandoned the Baptist church as a young adult, after studying world religions in college and starting to doubt what her faith promoted. Following graduate school and during her first years working as a psychologist, her skepticism grew. It seemed to her, she told me, that believers felt they had a “monopoly on truth, that their way was the only way.” Her husband, too, wanted a more progressive form of Christianity. After moving from Wichita Falls, Texas, the family joined a Unitarian church in Shreveport, a progressive house of worship with Christian roots that incorporates the traditions of many religions.

The first signs of trouble began a few years after the family’s move. Russell’s daughter, who did not want her name used to maintain her privacy, came home from school one day with the report that some boys on the school bus had interrogated her and other children about their religion. They asked each student, “Are you a believer in God?” The girl, who liked attending her Unitarian church but did not believe in God, recalled that she told her questioners, “‘No.’ And they said, ‘You’re going to hell.’”

Russell was dismayed, but she wanted her daughter to respect others’ views. She told her, “There are kids who believe that…. You want to be respectful, but it doesn’t mean he’s necessarily right, either.” Russell and her husband, who did not want to be interviewed for fear of backlash in the workplace, advised their daughter that if someone started talking to her about her faith, to change the subject, put on headphones, or read.

Russell felt it was harder to ignore teachers. In fourth grade, at least twice a week, the girl’s teacher said a prayer aloud in class. Following their teacher’s lead, some children clasped their hands and bowed their heads. “It was a lot about Jesus and God and help us through the day and stuff like that,” said Russell’s daughter, who sat in the back of the class and tried to tune it out.

Increasingly incensed, Russell felt her daughter’s experiences were symptomatic of the school system’s extensive promotion of evangelical Christianity, also evident in routine prayers at school board meetings, graduations and sporting events. “Teachers, administrators, other staff of the schools — they set the temperature in terms of what was accepted,” she told me. Worried that her daughter would become more of a target for her peers, however, she did not complain directly to Bossier Parish schools. Instead, Russell and her husband began to contemplate moving away.

Other families, however, did complain. In 2018, four parents from three families, listed as Does 1–4, sued Bossier Parish schools for promoting religion and coercing students to participate in prayer. They argued that the prayer was a violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which calls for a separation of church and state. The lawsuit listed more than 100 church/state violations, including teacher-led prayer in classrooms, prayer at sporting events and faculty- and administrator-led prayer at graduations. “It was all flatly unconstitutional,” said Richard Katskee, the former legal director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, who represented the Bossier Parish plaintiffs.

The school system acknowledged most of the incidents, but denied that all of the schools’ actions were unlawful. The following year, a federal court in Louisiana sided with the plaintiffs, and ordered the nearly-23,000-student school district to stop promoting religion.

As Bossier Parish school district was ordered to change, however, the legal landscape was changing, too. A different lawsuit was winding its way through the courts, backed by organizations that had long supported school prayer, over the right of a high school football coach to pray on the field after games. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in favor of the coach, Joe Kennedy, who sued the Bremerton, Washington, school district after it disciplined him when he refused to end the practice of praying at the 50-yard line following games. The majority opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton stated that the coach had a right to freely exercise his religion because he was praying outside his coaching duties. The decision described Kennedy’s prayer as a quiet, personal act. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, noted that for years the coach had led students in locker-room prayers. Often, students from both teams joined him on the field in his prayers. Katskee, who represented the Bremerton school district, told me that students who declined to participate “got harassed and harangued.”

In Bossier Parish schools, parents, teachers, and students told me, the court order stalled, but didn’t entirely stop, Christian prayer. Now, with a Supreme Court friendly to school prayer, educators and state lawmakers around the country are testing the limits of the strict separation of church and state written into the Constitution. In a handful of states, including Kentucky, Montana and Texas, lawmakers have recently proposed or passed measures attempting to promote faith in schools. In Kentucky, for example, the legislature passed a law in March that would allow teachers to share their religious beliefs in school. A Kentucky lawmaker who sponsored the House bill told local television station Lex 18 that he hoped the measure would “embolden these Christian teachers” who may have been afraid to express themselves in public schools.

Meanwhile, attorneys from organizations that often handle complaints about school prayer told me they are receiving word that the Kennedy ruling is leading to more open proselytizing by teachers. In some states, one attorney said, teachers have set up prayer clubs for students and delivered sermons in class. In at least one case, a school district cited the Kennedy ruling as the reason for prayer at school board meetings.

 

What "personal religious freedom" is being used for of course is the camel's nose under the tent, to allow evangelical Christians to proselytize in schools with the goal of converting kids.

There's no reason to believe this Supreme Court isn't going to eventually decide that Christianity, or the dark, warped, hate-filled version we see many Republicans practicing today, will become not only allowed but encouraged and required in public schools in the very near future.

It's going to be a mess, but it's going to happen, almost certainly.

 

 

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Team Biden has figured out that Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis having school libraries living in fear and banning books to keep from being defunded is, you know, a major vulnerability for the entire Republican party.

Presidential campaigns often are waged on whether or not the country is ready to “turn the page.” President Joe Biden wants his reelection bid to hinge on whether or not there is a page to turn.

The president’s team has made the issue of book banning a surprisingly central element of his campaign’s opening salvos. He referred to GOP efforts to restrict curriculum — Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” was the third most banned title in America last year — in his first two campaign videos. He presents himself in each video as the defender of the country’s core values, a bulwark against an extreme Republican Party rolling back America’s freedoms.

The campaign’s first TV ad, a 90-second spot running in seven states over the next two weeks as part of a seven-figure buy, warns Republicans “seek to overturn elections, ban books and eliminate a woman’s right to choose.” Biden followed up with a tweet hitting “MAGA extremists … telling you what books should be in your kids’ schools.” That followed the explicit reference to book bans in Biden’s launch announcement video Tuesday.

The early focus on book banning is part of the campaign’s attempt to reinforce a broader message, said one Democratic adviser involved in the effort: Biden is the only one standing between the American people and a Republican Party determined to roll back rights and limit freedoms.

“People just don’t understand why we should ban books from libraries,” said the adviser, who spoke with candor about the campaign’s strategy on the condition of anonymity. “So it’s a measure of extremism and another thing [Republicans] are trying to take away.”

Biden’s message is based on mounds of research by Democratic pollsters over the last several months, as the president’s advisers and the Democratic National Committee have expanded the constellation of pollsters and data analysts tracking voter attitudes and the effectiveness of certain messages.

The potency of book bans, along with issues like abortion and gun safety, is quite clear, according to multiple people familiar with the campaign’s data.

“Book banning tests off the charts,” said Celinda Lake, one of the Democratic pollsters who tested the issue for Democrats. “People are adamantly opposed to it and, unlike some other issues that are newer, voters already have an adopted schema around book banning. They associate it with really authoritarian regimes, Nazi Germany.”

Authoritarian book bans: poll-tested, voter disapproved!

I keep seeing all this agita over Biden being too old and too unpopular to win a second term, and all I have to say is "It's pretty easy to beat the party that's in the news weekly for banning books in schools and public libraries."

At least, I hope it is.  I mean, it's not like Trump is disagreeing with the concept, either.

Or, anyone in the GOP, for that matter. This is a slam dunk and I'm glad to see Biden opening with the most obvious "These parties are not the same" comparison in decades.