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  • ‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

    ‘Race neutral’ replaces affirmative action. What’s next? | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    When the Supreme Court cut affirmative action out of college admissions programs Thursday, it did not outlaw the goal of achieving diversity, but it set a new “race-neutral” standard for considering applicants.

    That term – “race neutral” – does not appear in the opinion of the court, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, which states that colleges and universities have “concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.”

    But when Roberts clarifies that students can still refer to their race in admissions essays, explaining challenges they’ve overcome, he and the majority are buying into the idea of race neutrality.

    Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote his own concurring opinion, uses the term “race neutral” repeatedly, offering it as an antidote to affirmative action.

    Pointing to efforts in California and Michigan to enroll diverse classes at top universities even after voters in those states ended affirmative action, Thomas says race-neutral policies can “achieve the same benefits of racial harmony and equality without any of the burdens and strife generated by affirmative action policies.”

    Justice Sonia Sotomayor shot back at Thomas and the majority, rejecting the term.

    “The majority’s vision of race neutrality will entrench racial segregation in higher education because racial inequality will persist so long as it is ignored,” she wrote.

    For more on this view, read this piece in The Atlantic by scholars Uma Jayakumar and Ibram Kendi: “‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’”

    If the experience of California and Michigan – where voters ended affirmative action programs years ago – is any indication, we can expect that the representation of Black and Latino students at top-level universities will fall.

    Those states argued in briefings to the court that their race-neutral efforts have not been completely successful, particularly at top-tier, flagship public schools, in creating environments that are inclusive for all.

    California has, according to its brief, tried race-neutral measures that “run the gamut from outreach programs directed at low-income students and students from families with little college experience, to programs designed to increase UC’s geographic reach, to holistic admissions policies.”

    While it has made strides, it says, there is a shortfall “especially apparent at UC’s most selective campuses, where African American, Native American, and Latinx students are underrepresented and widely report struggling with feelings of racial isolation.”

    In California, half of the college-age population – 18-24 – is Latino, according to data from the Public Policy Institute of California. Compare that with just 27% of enrollees for 2022 at the University of California’s nine undergraduate campuses who the UC system categorizes as Hispanic/Latinx.

    On the other hand, less than 13% of the college-age population is Asian, compared with 38% of UC enrollees.

    A little more than quarter of college-age Californians are White, compared with 18% of UC enrollees.

    Five percent of UC enrollees are African American, which is about on par with the 5.6% of college-age Californians who are Black.

    The figures change in comparison with the system overall at UC Berkeley, the system’s flagship undergraduate campus, where a smaller portion of entrants in 2022 were categorized as African American / Black (3.6%) and Chicanx / Latinx (21.1%), and more were White (30.7%) and Asian (52.1%).

    It’s also interesting to note that the Supreme Court exempted military academies from the decision. They can, presumably, still utilize affirmative action even though they are the higher learning institutions over which the federal government has the most control. The court, according to the majority opinion, feels the academies have “potentially distinct interests.”

    Those interests were perhaps outlined by former military leaders who wrote a brief last year arguing affirmative action aided national security.

    Meanwhile, even though race is off the table as a determinative factor, schools like Harvard University can and still will very much take into account whether an applicant’s parents went there, how much their parents might be able to donate and whether an applicant can help their sports teams.

    “While the actual language of the Supreme Court will come across as very intellectualized and esoteric, as if in a classroom, in reality, how will this work?” wondered Laura Coates, CNN’s chief legal analyst, appearing on the network Thursday.

    “How will you be able to have certain color blindedness but then at the same time allowed to take into account one’s experiences when race has been a part of that? That’s the devil in the details of every affirmative action case.”

    CNN’s Nicquel Terry Ellis wrote about what the data suggests will happen:

    A study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found that colleges and universities are less likely to meet or exceed their current levels of racial diversity in the absence of race-conscious admissions. They are also less likely to reflect the racial makeup of the population graduating from the nation’s high schools.

    Zack Mabel, a researcher for Georgetown’s Center for Education and the Workforce, told her race-neutral practices have not driven the diversity many colleges hoped for, and some students are simply not applying. Read more from Terry Ellis.

    Creating a more equitable and representative workforce has been a public aim in corporate America, where companies have created diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, departments. Multiple corporations – from Apple to IKEA – asked the Supreme Court to allow affirmative action to continue so that their potential workforce is more diverse.

    But efforts to recruit students of color in the race-neutral, post-affirmative-action world will be complicated in states where there is a growing backlash to diversity efforts.

    CNN’s Leah Asmelash recently wrote:

    More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced or passed bills reining in DEI programs in colleges and universities, claiming the offices eat up valuable financial resources with little impact.

    “The ruling by the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices prevents higher-education institutions from considering race in admissions precisely as kids of color, for the first time, comprise a majority of the nation’s high-school graduates,” writes Ronald Brownstein, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a senior political analyst for CNN.

    He suggests the decision will “widen the mismatch between a youth population that is rapidly diversifying and a student body that is likely to remain preponderantly white in the elite colleges and universities that serve as the pipeline for leadership in the public and private sectors.”

    Rather than ease social tension, he argues, the new race-neutral requirement could actually propel it.

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  • Amanda Gorman is ‘gutted’ by school district’s decision to restrict her poem after a parent complained it contained ‘hate messages’ | CNN

    Amanda Gorman is ‘gutted’ by school district’s decision to restrict her poem after a parent complained it contained ‘hate messages’ | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    The acclaimed poem written by Amanda Gorman for President Joe Biden’s inauguration was moved from the elementary section of a Miami-Dade County public school after a parent complaint and school review, the district confirmed Tuesday.

    A parent of a student at Bob Graham Education Center – a kindergarten through eighth grade school in Miami Lakes – objected to Gorman’s poem “The Hill We Climb,” for which they erroneously listed Oprah Winfrey as the author/publisher, according to documents obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

    It “is not educational and have (sic) indirectly hate messages,” the complaint said, adding that the poem would “cause confusion and indoctrinate students.”

    The same parent made similar complaints about “Love to Langston,” a poetry-based biography of Black poet Langston Hughes; “The ABCs of Black History” and two books about Cuba, complaints obtained by the nonprofit group show.

    A materials-review panel at the school declined to remove the books from the school entirely but did decide to move the Gorman poem and two other disputed items to the library’s middle school section, which is for grades six through eight, according to minutes of an April meeting of the committee that were obtained by the nonprofit.

    The poem’s removal is the latest consequence of a Florida law that requires the approval of books in classrooms and grants any parent the power to complain about specific works. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican set to run for president, Florida has used this and other “parental rights” laws to ban works on LGBTQ issues, social justice and even math textbooks.

    Gorman, the nation’s first-ever Youth Poet Laureate, was 22 when she performed “The Hill We Climb” at Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Inspired by the Capitol insurrection two weeks earlier, the 700-word poem criticized the “force that would shatter our nation rather than share it” and spoke about the need for justice and social change.

    “The new dawn blooms as we free it,” she concluded the poem. “For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.”

    The poem and performance launched her to national stardom, including appearances at the Super Bowl, on the cover of Time and Vogue and atop bestseller’s lists.

    Gorman was “gutted” by the district’s decision, she said in a statement on Tuesday.

    “I wrote ‘The Hill We Climb’ so that all young people could see themselves in a historical moment. Ever since, I’ve received countless letters and videos from children inspired by ‘The Hill We Climb’ to write their own poems,” she wrote. “Robbing children of the chance to find their voices in literature is a violation of their right to free thought and free speech.”

    Miami-Dade County’s mayor on Wednesday invited Gorman to visit for a reading.

    “Your poem inspired our youth to become active participants in their government and to help shape the future. We want you to come to Miami-Dade to do a reading of your poem. If you’re in, we will coordinate,” Daniella Levine Cava wrote on Twitter.

    In a statement to CNN Tuesday evening, Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesperson Elmo Lugo said, “No literature (books or poem) has been banned or removed.”

    “It was determined at the school that ‘The Hill We Climb’ is better suited for middle school students and, it was shelved in the middle school section of the media center. The book remains available in the media center,” he said.

    Lugo did not respond to a request to verify the authenticity of the complaint documents released by the Florida Freedom to Read Project, instead saying the district would process CNN’s inquiry as a formal public records request.

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  • A transgender girl misses her high school graduation after Mississippi judge denies emergency plea to permit her to go in a dress and heels | CNN

    A transgender girl misses her high school graduation after Mississippi judge denies emergency plea to permit her to go in a dress and heels | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A transgender teen in Mississippi missed her high school graduation after a federal judge denied a motion requesting she be allowed to wear a dress and heels under her robe.

    The 17-year-old, identified in court documents by her initials “L.B.,” did not attend her Gulfport high school graduation, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi. She opted to miss the ceremony when she was told she had to wear boy’s clothes to attend, telling CNN she would “rather stand up for what’s right than be humiliated.”

    The family has asked for the teen’s full name to be withheld for privacy and safety reasons.

    On May 9, less than two weeks before graduation, L.B. says she was pulled into Harrison Central High School Principal Kelly Fuller’s office and asked what she was going to wear for graduation.

    “I told her I was going to wear a white dress, then she told me I was not going to be allowed to wear a dress, and I would have to wear boy clothes,” L.B. said. “And she stated that the Superintendent called her asking about what students would wear to graduation.”

    As far as she knows, no other students were asked the same question.

    L.B. says she has attended Harrison Central High School as a girl for the past four years. She attended prom wearing a blue sparkly dress without any objection from the school. “I was being me, and I felt very accepted at the time,” she said. “I felt very understood. I felt that I had a great support system at that school.”

    L.B. and her parents, Samantha Brown and Henry Brown, filed the federal lawsuit Thursday, demanding Harrison County School District allow the teen to wear what she wishes during Saturday’s graduation ceremony from Harrison Central High School.

    Attorneys with the ACLU of Mississippi are representing the family.

    The Browns cited a violation of their child’s civil rights, accusing the school district of discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and violating the teen’s First Amendment rights, according to the complaint.

    On Friday, the day before graduation, a federal judge in Gulfport, Mississippi, denied a motion filed by L.B.’s family requesting she be allowed to wear her dress and heels at the high school graduation.

    The teen had picked out a dress and heels to wear with the traditional cap and gown in accordance with the school’s dress code for female students, according to a media release from the ACLU.

    “Our client is being shamed and humiliated for explicitly discriminatory reasons, and her family is being denied a once-in-a-lifetime milestone in their daughter’s life,” ACLU spokesperson Gillian Branstetter told CNN in an email. “No one should be forced to miss their graduation simply because of who they are.”

    Samantha Brown, L.B.’s mother, explained that after the conversation with the principal, they learned the dress code policy throughout the school year was different from the policy for graduation.

    A commencement participation agreement is included within the court documents. It shows L.B. and her mother signed the document on March 14, 2023, agreeing to follow conditions required for participating in the graduation ceremony.

    The Harrison County School District’s policy on graduation states: “Students are expected to wear dress shoes, dress clothes (dresses or dressy pant-suit for girls and dress pants, shirt, and tie for the boys).” The policy does not mention dress code rules for LGBTQ students or specify students must dress according to their sex assigned at birth.

    “Graduation school dress policy is girls have to wear white dresses and boys wear a white button up shirt with a tie and black pants and socks with black dress shoes,” Brown said. “This has never been an issue before. We felt like we were abiding by the dress code according to what she identifies as.”

    CNN has reached out to the Harrison County School District and Harrison Central High School for comment.

    L.B. called the news “unexpected and shocking,” saying, “I couldn’t understand why they would change it so suddenly.”

    “You’ve been allowing me to be this way, be myself, and express myself this way for so long. And it wasn’t even a thought in my mind that they would do this to me,” she told CNN.

    “This is a celebration of my high school, this is a celebration of my finish line,” L.B. said. “For me to be forced into something that I’m not, it wouldn’t have been fun for me at all…this kind of injustice is not okay.”

    “We have to do better as a community, as a country, as a state, as a city, as a county, we have to do better,” the teenager added.

    Brown said the ruling from the judge on Friday was hurtful and caused humiliation for her daughter, stating her opinion that it would have been more of a “distraction and shock to her peers and other teachers to show up like that, other than the way she usually dresses.”

    “She’s a good student, she made it to the finish line … that should be more of the things the children should be worried about rather than whether they will be targeted by what they identify as,” Brown said.

    Brown said they will be evaluating their legal options moving forward. “We’re going to continue to speak on this and continue to fight for what we feel is right,” she added.

    According to court documents, the school policy states that “a high school graduation ceremony is a sacred and inspirational ritual which is intended to be surrounded with decorum of dignity, grace, solemnity, reverence, pomp and circumstance.”

    “Students whose attire does not meet the minimum dress requirements may not be allowed to participate in the graduation exercises,” the policy states.

    “My graduation is supposed to be a moment of pride and celebration and school officials want to turn it into a moment of humiliation and shame,” L.B. said in the ACLU release. “The clothing I’ve chosen is fully appropriate for the ceremony and the superintendent’s objections to it are entirely unfair to myself, my family, and all transgender students like me. I have the right to celebrate my graduation as who I am, not who anyone else wants me to be.”

    Fact check: Why state lawmakers around the country keep citing junk science

    The student has been openly transgender since she began attending the school as a freshman, according to the complaint, and her identity has been known to her classmates, teachers, and administrators.

    Mitchell King, the superintendent of Harrison County School District, testified in court documents that the district relies on birth certificates to record whether students are male or female.

    The complaint describes a phone conversation between Samantha Brown and King, in which King says L.B. “is still a boy,” therefore “he needs to wear pants, socks, and shoes, like a boy.”

    The complaint also notes L.B. attended the school’s prom last year wearing a formal dress and high-heeled shoes, without any issues or repercussions.

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  • Arizona student arrested and accused of bringing AR-15 and ammunition to high school | CNN

    Arizona student arrested and accused of bringing AR-15 and ammunition to high school | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A student in Phoenix faces “a number of serious felony charges” after police accused him of bringing an AR-15 weapon and ammunition to a high school, authorities said.

    Phoenix Police Department officers and two school security officers responded Friday afternoon to a call of a student with a gun on campus, the department said in a news release Saturday.

    School administrators called police after learning of a possible weapon at Bostrom High School shortly before 1 p.m., the Phoenix Union High School District said in a statement emailed to CNN.

    “During our investigation, we discovered the report was accurate, and local authorities intervened and confiscated the weapon,” the school district said in an email.

    Arriving officers detained the male juvenile student in the main office of Bostrom High School, authorities said.

    Police said they “acted quickly” to arrest the student, who was found to have brought additional ammunition in his lunchbox and backpack, according to the statement.

    School administrators placed the campus on lockdown during the investigation, according to the high school district.

    The Phoenix Police Department’s Crime Gun Intelligence Unit is assisting with the investigation, and the department said it’s working closely with school and district officials.

    “We commend those who originally reported the possibility of a weapon on school grounds to adults on campus who immediately called police,” police said in the statement.

    The police did not immediately release information on where the semi-automatic rifle came from and why the student allegedly brought it to campus.

    The student’s name and age were not released because he is a minor.

    His arrest comes days after an 18-year-old man in Farmington, New Mexico, used an AR-15-style rifle and two other guns to shoot and kill three people and injure six others, including two police officers, CNN reported.

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  • The demographic makeup of the country’s voters continues to shift. That creates headwinds for Republicans | CNN Politics

    The demographic makeup of the country’s voters continues to shift. That creates headwinds for Republicans | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Demographic change continued to chip away at the cornerstone of the Republican electoral coalition in 2022, a new analysis of Census data has found.

    White voters without a four-year college degree, the indispensable core of the modern GOP coalition, declined in 2022 as a share of both actual and eligible voters, according to a study of Census results by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in electoral turnout.

    McDonald’s finding, provided exclusively to CNN, shows that the 2022 election continued the long-term trend dating back at least to the 1970s of a sustained fall in the share of the votes cast by working-class White voters who once constituted the brawny backbone of the Democratic coalition, but have since become the absolute foundation of Republican campaign fortunes.

    As non-college Whites have receded in the electorate over that long arc, non-White adults and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Whites with at least a four-year college degree, have steadily increased their influence. “This is a trend that is baked into the demographic change of the country, so [it] is likely going to accelerate over the next ten years,” says McDonald, author of the recent book “From Pandemic to Insurrection: Voting in the 2020 Presidential Election.”

    From election to election, the impact of the changing composition of the voter pool is modest. The slow but steady decline of non-college Whites, now the GOP’s best group, did not stop Donald Trump from winning the presidency in 2016 – nor does it preclude him from winning it again in 2024. And, compared to their national numbers, these non-college voters remain a larger share of the electorate in many of the key states that will likely decide the 2024 presidential race (particularly Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) and control of the Senate (including seats Democrats are defending in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.)

    But even across those states, these voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate. And McDonald’s analysis of the 2022 results shows that the non-college White share of the total vote is highly likely to decline again in 2024, while the combined share of non-Whites and Whites with a college degree, groups much more favorable to Democrats, is virtually certain to increase. The political effect of this decline is analogous to turning up the resistance on a treadmill: as their best group shrinks, Republicans must run a little faster just to stay in place.

    Especially ominous for Republicans is that the share of the vote cast by these blue-collar Whites declined slightly in 2022 even though turnout among those voters was relatively strong, while minority turnout fell sharply, according to McDonald’s analysis. The reason for those seemingly incongruous trends is that even solid turnout among the non-college Whites could not offset the fact that they are continuing to shrink in the total pool of eligible voters, as American society grows better-educated and more racially diverse.

    Given that minority turnout fell off, the fact that the non-college White share of the total 2022 vote still slightly declined “has to be a huge cause for concern for Republicans at this point,” says Tom Bonier, chief executive of TargetSmart, a Democratic political targeting firm. If more of the growing pool of eligible minority voters turn out in 2024, he says, “it is not unreasonable to expect” that the non-college White voters so critical to GOP fortunes could experience an even “steeper decline” in their share of the total votes cast next year.

    That prospect remains a central concern for the dwindling band of anti-Trump Republicans who fear that the former president has dangerously narrowed the GOP’s appeal by identifying it so unreservedly with the cultural priorities and grievances of working-class White voters, many of them older and living outside of the nation’s largest and most economically productive metropolitan areas.

    McDonald’s “data support what is self-evident: that Trumpism peaked in 2016, and that it leads to a dead end,” says former US Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. “We saw this in 2018 when Republicans lost the House; we saw it in 2020 when they lost the presidency and the Senate, and we saw it in last year when Republicans were supposed to have big gains in both chambers and [did not]. All of these failures can be attributed to Trumpism. These data just confirm what is visible to the naked eye.”

    Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster, says these slow but steady long-term changes in the electorate leave him convinced that the ceiling for Trump’s potential support in 2024 is no more than 46% of the vote. But Democrats, he believes, still face the risk that the clear majority in the electorate opposed to Trumpism will not turn out in sufficient numbers or splinter to third-party options if they do. Both dangers, he argues, are most pronounced for the diverse younger generations that have never found President Joe Biden very inspiring and have not received sufficient messaging and organizing attention from Democrats.

    The political impact of those younger voters, he warns, could be blunted by the proliferation of red state laws making it more difficult to vote and Democrats focusing too much “on chasing this mythical [White] swing voter that doesn’t look like that Millennial or Gen Z voter we are relying on.”

    Overall voter turnout in 2022 was high compared to almost all previous midterms, but below the peak reached in 2018, when a greater share of eligible voters turned out than in any midterm election since 1914, according to McDonald’s calculations.

    Turnout last year fell most sharply among minorities: while 43% of all eligible non-White voters showed up in 2018, that slipped to just 35% last year, McDonald calculates. Turnout among eligible college-educated White voters also dropped from an astronomical 74% in 2018 to just over 69% last year. White voters without a four-year college degree actually came closest to matching their elevated 2018 performance, slipping only slightly from just over 45% then to about 43% last year.

    But turnout is only one of the two factors that shape how large a share of actual voters each group comprises, which is the number that really matters in determining election outcomes. The other factor is how large a share of the pool of potential eligible voters each group represents. Turnout, in effect, is the numerator and the share of eligible voters the denominator that combined produce the share of the total vote each group casts during every election.

    As McDonald found, the long-term trends in the eligible voter pool – the denominator in our equation – continued unabated in 2022. Whites without a college degree fell to just over 41% of eligible potential voters. That was down 3.2 percentage points from their share of the eligible voter population in 2018 – which was itself down exactly 3.2 percentage points from their share in 2014. In turn, from 2014 to 2022, college-educated White voters slightly increased their share of the eligible voter pool and minorities significantly increased from 30.5% then to nearly 35% now.

    Netting together both the turnout results and these shifts in the eligible voter pool, McDonald found that working-class White voters in 2022 declined as a share overall, whether compared either to the last few midterm elections or the most recent presidential contests.

    In 2022, Whites without a college degree cast 38.3% of all votes, he found. That was down from 39.3% in 2018 and more than 43% in 2014, according to his calculations. That finding also represented a continued decline from just over 42% of the vote when Trump won the 2016 presidential election and 39.9% in 2020 – the first time non-college Whites had fallen below 40% of the total presidential electorate in Census figures.

    Whites with at least a four-year college degree were the big gainers in 2022: McDonald found they cast nearly 36% of all votes last year, compared to a little over-one-third in both 2018 and 2014 and a little less than that in the 2020 presidential year. Burdened by lower turnout, the non-White share of the total vote slipped to just over one-fourth, down slightly from 2018, but still higher than in the 2014 midterms. The minority share of the total vote was considerably larger in 2020, reaching nearly three-in-ten in Census figures.

    All of this extends very consistent long-term trends. Census data analyzed by the non-partisan States of Change project show that non-college Whites have fallen from around two-thirds of the total vote under Ronald Reagan, to about three-fifths under Bill Clinton, to less than half under Barack Obama, to the current level of just under two-fifths. Over those same decades, college-educated Whites have grown from about two-in-ten to three-in-ten voters, while minorities have increased from a little over one-in-ten then to nearly three-in-ten now.

    Other respected data sources differ on the share of the total vote comprised by these three big groups: the Pew Validated Voter study and the estimates by Catalist, a Democratic targeting firm, both put the share of the vote cast in 2020 by non-college Whites slightly higher, in the range of 42-44%.

    But both also show the same core pattern as the Census results do, with the share of the total vote cast by those non-college Whites declining by about two percentage points every four years. The Edison Research exit polls conducted for a consortium of media organizations, including CNN, changed its methodology in a way that makes long-term comparisons impossible. But, similarly to McDonald, the exits found the non-college White share of the total vote declining to 39% in 2022 from 41% in 2018, with minorities also slightly falling over that period, and college-educated Whites growing.

    The trend lines that McDonald documented for last year suggest it’s a reasonable prediction that non-college Whites will again decline as a share of total voters by two points over the period from 2020 to 2024. That would push their share of the national 2024 vote down to below 38%, with more minority voters likely filling most of that gap and the college-educated Whites growing more modestly to offset the rest.

    McDonald says the basic dynamic reconfiguring the voting pool is that many Baby Boomers and their elders are aging out of the electorate. That’s both because more of them are dying or they are reaching an advanced age where turnout tends to decline, either for infirmity or other obstacles. Those older generations are preponderantly White (about three-fourths of seniors are White), and fewer have college degrees, which were not as essential to economic success in those years, McDonald points out. Meanwhile, a larger share of young adults today hold four-year degrees, and the youngest generations aging into the electorate every two years are far more racially diverse. According to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Metro think tank, young people of color now comprise almost exactly half of all Americans who turn 18 and age into the electorate each year.

    “We are right now at the teetering edge of the influence of the baby boomers,” says McDonald. “They are just starting to enter those twilight years in their turnout rates, while other [more diverse] groups are maturing. So we are right at that cusp – that critical point of where things are going to start changing.”

    The impact of these changes on the outcomes of elections, as McDonald says, is very incremental, “like the proverbial frog in the boiling water.” One way to understand that dynamic is to assume that Whites without a college degree on the one hand, and minorities and college-educated Whites on the other, all split their vote at roughly the same proportions as they have in recent elections. If the former group declines as a share of the electorate by two points from 2020-2024 and the latter groups increase by an equal amount, that change alone would enlarge Biden’s margin of victory in the two-party vote from 4.6 percentage points to 5.8, Bonier calculates. Republicans would need to increase their vote share with some or all of those groups just to get back to the deficit Trump faced in 2020 – much less to overcome it.

    Ruy Teixeira, a long-time Democratic electoral analyst who has become a staunch critic of his party, argues exactly that kind of shift in voting preferences could offset the change in the electorate’s composition – and create a real threat for Biden. Even though Biden is aggressively highlighting his efforts to create blue-collar jobs through “manufacturing and infrastructure projects that are starting to get off the ground,” Teixiera recently wrote, a “sharp swing against the incumbent administration by White working-class voters seems like a very real possibility.”

    Teixeira, now a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also maintains Democrats face the risk Republicans can extend the unexpected gains Trump registered in 2020 with non-White voters without a college degree, especially Hispanics.

    Curbelo, the former congressman, shares Teixeira’s belief that Democratic liberalism on some social issues like crime is creating an opening for Republicans to gain ground among culturally conservative Hispanics. “If they are not careful, they can jeopardize their potential gains from Republicans doubling down on Trumpism by alienating themselves from minority voters who may identify with some of the [Democrats’] economic policies but who do not necessarily identify with the party’s victimhood narrative about minorities,” Curbelo says.

    Still, Curbelo warns that Republicans are unlikely to achieve the gains possible with minority voters so long as they are stamped so decisively by Trump’s polarizing image. And polling has consistently found that while many non-college Hispanic voters hold more moderate views on social issues than college-educated White liberals, those minority voters are not nearly as conservative as core GOP groups, like blue-collar Whites or evangelical Christians.

    As Teixeira has forcefully argued in recent years, such demographic change doesn’t ensure doom for Republicans or success for Democrats. Among other things, that change is unevenly distributed around the country, and the small state bias of both the Electoral College and the two-senators-per-state rule magnifies the influence of sparsely populated interior states where these shifts have been felt much more lightly.

    Yet, even so, the long-term change in the electorate’s composition, along with the Democrats’ growing strength among white-collar suburban voters, largely explains why the party has won the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections – something no party has done since the formation of the modern party system in 1828.

    And even though Whites without a college degree exceed their share of the national vote in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, their share of the vote is shrinking along the same trajectory of about 2-3 points every four years in those states too, according to analysis by Frey. Meanwhile, in the Sun Belt battlegrounds of Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, more rapid growth in the minority population means that blue-collar Whites will likely comprise a smaller portion of the eligible voter pool than they do nationally.

    Trump, with the exception of his beachhead among blue-collar minorities, has now largely locked the GOP into a position of needing to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups, particularly non-college Whites. It’s entirely possible that Trump or another Republican nominee can meet that test well enough to win back the White House in 2024, especially given the persistent public disenchantment with Biden’s performance. But McDonald’s 2022 data shows why relying on a coalition tilted so heavily toward those non-college Whites becomes just a little tougher for the GOP in each presidential race.

    While Trump or another Republican certainly can win in 2024, Bonier says, “he has reshaped the party in such a way that they have a very narrow path to victory.”

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  • How to negotiate your college’s financial aid offer | CNN Business

    How to negotiate your college’s financial aid offer | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    So you want to improve your college’s financial aid package? Fine. Just don’t have your mom call the college to do the negotiating.

    For most high school seniors, “decision day” is May 1, the deadline for students to alert a college or university that they are accepting an offer of admission. For many, if not most, students and their families, finances play a role in that decision.

    The average cost of attending a four-year college in the United States is $25,707 per year, or $102,828 over four years, according to an April 2023 report by Education Data Initiative. Out-of-state students at state schools pay $44,014 per year; while, private, nonprofit university students now average a whopping $54,501 per year.

    But several financial aid officers and college admissions counselors who spoke with CNN said students don’t realize that they can appeal a college’s aid offer — not only by May 1, but all year long. In some cases, filing an official financial aid appeal may even delay the deadline for putting down a deposit. So it can pay off handsomely to haggle.

    Grace Wilson, a freshman now at Northeastern University in Boston, was dismayed when the initial financial aid package offered by the school last year wasn’t what she needed. Her family had a budget of $38,000 per year, but the total cost of attendance was $47,358.

    After a concerted campaign by Wilson, Northeastern offered her an additional federal grant of $9,495, she said, and a work-study arrangement sweetened the deal. For this fall, she has also negotiated a tuition offset for working as a Resident Assistant.

    But there are right, and some very wrong, ways to go about haggling with your chosen college. Here, according to college financial aid and admissions officers, consultants and students, are the steps to take:

    Email, don’t call, and handle it yourself.

    The appeal should be coming from students, not parents, said Miranda McCall, Duke University’s Assistant Vice Provost and Director of Undergraduate Financial Support.

    “We always love to see students take the incentive to understand their offer and take control of their financial future… It is never wrong for a student to take the lead. It’s the first step in the financial confidence that will serve them well after college, too,” McCall told CNN.

    Pleading backfires, use math.

    The amount offered was reached after using formulas, discussion and a standardized form — the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). So, students have to establish why they need more. With the financial aid office, don’t brag or boast: Each school has a different system and preferences, but the general rule is to send an appeal letter for need-based scholarships or funds to the financial aid office and, separately, for merit-based scholarships to the admissions office.

    Explain what has changed in your circumstances.

    Events such as job loss, divorce, sudden death of family members, high unreimbursed medical expenses and more can change the equation. “If there has been a significant reduction in income compared to your application, inform the school’s financial aid office; in some cases, financial aid can increase,” said Phil Asbury, Director of Financial Aid of Northwestern University in Illinois.

    Asbury explained that around 10% of families experience a material shift in circumstances after applying and the university offers an online form for special appeal through its website. Make sure it contains new information, not a second submission of your original application.

    Reach out to professors, coaches or administrators you know at the college.

    Just don’t have your recommendations, or famous alumni, call up, as impressive as you think that might be. Financial aid offers won’t discuss your offer with them.

    Add proof.

    Document a parent’s loss of a job, for example, divorce, or of an unexpected expense. The forms applicants should attach include an income reduction form, federal tax returns and W2 and severance or unemployment benefit paperwork.

    “Include a clear explanation of what has changed financially for the student, with any supporting documentation. The opportunity to increase need-based aid depends on the accuracy of your documented financial change and the financial ability of the school to make a change,” John Leach, Associate Vice Provost for Enrollment and University Financial Aid at Emory University, told CNN.

    Be specific on the amount you need.

    Financial aid officers like to help, and will try to accommodate you if there are funds available. Also, disclosing an amount up front will save a student time if the amounts are too far apart.

    Replace out-of-date information.

    This year’s FAFSA “uses 2021 tax return data and now it’s 2023,” said Vicki Vollweiler, a founder and CEO of College Financial Prep. One of her client’s families went through a divorce during the college application process, she said. That student was able to receive an additional $10,000. “Students definitely should file an appeal and the school might be able to help out and offer more in funding.”

    Document aid offers you received from other colleges.

    “Especially if you get a higher offer from a comparable school, that is a school competitor, [disclose that] they’ve given you a better package. That means there must be some discrepancy,” said Bethany Goldszer, education expert and owner of Stand Out College Prep in New York.

    But make sure the schools are comparable. Comparing a generous offer from a non-competitive school to one from a highly selective one may make the financial aid officers think you don’t understand the value they are offering.

    It’s never too late.

    Northwestern has a “priority deadline” so that the financial office can notify students early, but students can still apply for financial aid all year round. “It doesn’t mean that we run out of funding,” said Asbury. “Don’t get too discouraged if [deadlines] are already past, you can still apply for the financial aid.”

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  • Indiana’s recycling plant fire is mostly out, but evacuations remain as crews monitor air quality and clear debris from schools and homes | CNN

    Indiana’s recycling plant fire is mostly out, but evacuations remain as crews monitor air quality and clear debris from schools and homes | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A fire burning at a recycling plant in Richmond, Indiana, is mostly out, but hundreds remain evacuated from their homes as crews monitor the air for chemicals and collect potentially harmful debris from neighboring schools and homes, officials said Saturday.

    Richmond residents who live within a half a mile radius of the recycling plant – about 2,000 of Richmond’s 35,000 residents – have been under a mandatory evacuation order since Tuesday, when the massive inferno exploded at the plastic-filled recycling plant in Richmond, sending thick, black smoke over the area.

    When they can return home will mainly depend on whether it’s safe to breathe the air in their community. Officials had warned that the smoke the fire spawned was “definitely toxic,” forcing the closure of Richmond public schools for days as the US Environmental Protection Agency performed air sampling and monitoring tests in the area.

    An announcement was initially expected Saturday on when evacuation orders could be lifted, but Richmond city officials later said that no determination had been made. “We have another meeting in the morning to determine the best time to lift the evacuation order,” Mayor Dave Snow said Saturday evening.

    “Unfortunately, we are unable to provide an exact time when evacuation orders will be lifted. As air monitoring results come back from lab testing and they can be analyzed by our health experts, we are hoping to be able to allow residents to return to their homes,” Wayne County Emergency Management Agency officials said Saturday.

    Those downwind from the fire were asked to continue to shelter in place “if they feel they are in danger or find themselves in a smoke plume,” emergency officials said.

    More meetings and data analysis are needed before the evacuation order can be lifted, Richmond Fire Chief Tim Brown told CNN Saturday.

    As for the blaze itself, Brown said firefighters have knocked down 98-99% of the fire at the recycling plant as of Saturday.

    “Right now, there is no plume, there is no product being off-gassed from the fire itself,” Brown told CNN. “What we have coming off of it is mainly a white smoke or some steam. We have no plume. We have a slight wind, which is kind of pushing things out.”

    Inside the facility, there are hot spots and occasional small fires that will continue to smolder for days and produce smoke, soot or the smell of burnt plastic, emergency officials said.

    In the meantime, work is underway to clear debris scattered in the community from the toxic fire.

    Some samples of debris from the area tested positive for asbestos containing materials, Wayne County emergency officials said, citing preliminary tests by the EPA.

    “Because all debris has the potential to contain asbestos, it is important that a trained professional remove all materials suspected to be from the fire,” emergency officials said, asking residents to not disturb or touch any debris they find on their property.

    Asbestos is a naturally occurring, but very toxic, substance that was once widely used for insulation. When inhaled or ingested, asbestos fibers can become trapped in the body, and may eventually cause genetic damage to the body’s cells. Exposure may also cause mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive form of cancer.

    Crews in protective gear began collecting debris from three schools near the fire site on Saturday, including three in Richmond and one school in Ohio.

    Officials said that schools impacted with debris will be cleared first, and then contractors will begin to deploy drones to search rooftops for additional debris, according to the post.

    “After school grounds are cleared, these contractors will begin removing debris from residential properties, parks and/or public areas, and businesses,” city officials say in the post.

    The county said the EPA is bringing in federal contractors to assist with the proper cleanup and removal of visible debris in both Indiana and Ohio.

    A primary health concern to residents is particulate matter, which could cause respiratory problems if inhaled, Christine Stinson, who heads the Wayne County Health Department, previously said.

    At the fire zone’s center, the chemicals hydrogen cyanide, benzene, chlorine, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, were detected, the EPA said Friday. They were not detected outside the evacuation zone, the agency said.

    Potentially harmful VOCs also were found in six air samples, the agency said, without saying where the samples were taken.

    Particulate matter also was found inside and outside the half-mile evacuation zone, as expected, the agency said.

    Additionally, one of two air samples taken a little more than a mile from the fire site detected chrysotile asbestos in debris, an EPA official said Thursday. Also called white asbestos, chrysotile asbestos can cause cancer and is used in products from cement to plastics to textiles.

    As for water quality, testing downstream of the fire site is underway and officials say they have “not found anything of immediate alarm, including any sign of fish kills.”

    Crews did find some ash and loose plastic debris, “but weir booms have been installed and are successfully capturing this material. Likewise, Indiana American Water has also been closely monitoring the drinking water and has reported no unusual readings or results from testing,” Wayne County emergency officials said.

    The cause of the fire remains under investigation and likely won’t be known for weeks, officials said. But local leaders have shared concerns since at least 2019 that the facility had hazards and building code violations, records show.

    The mayor has accused the plant’s owner of ignoring a city order to clean up the property, saying the plant was a fire hazard.

    CNN has sought comment from the plant’s owner, Seth Smith. The attorney who previously represented Smith in a related lawsuit declined to comment.

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  • 3 unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff to begin historic strike over contract negotiations | CNN

    3 unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff to begin historic strike over contract negotiations | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Three unions representing about 9,000 Rutgers University faculty and staff will go on strike Monday morning after nearly a year of gridlocked contract negotiations, marking the first educator strike in the university’s nearly 257-year history, according to the unions.

    Members of the unions will form picket lines on Rutgers’s three main campuses in New Brunswick, Newark and Camden, New Jersey, to demand salary increases, improved job security for adjunct faculty and guaranteed funding for graduate students, among other requests, union representatives said in a joint release.

    “Those closest to our learning and to the university’s mission to teaching, research and service deserve more than to merely be surviving and scraping by,” Rutgers masters student Michelle O’Malley said during a virtual town hall Sunday night.

    The three unions are Rutgers AAUP-AFT, which represents full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral researchers and counselors; the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, which represents part-time lecturers; and AAUP-BHSNJ, which represents faculty who teach at the university’s medical and public health facilities.

    While union leaders expect the action to halt instruction and “non-critical research,” the university is insisting most classes will continue. Clinicians at the university’s health facilities “will continue to perform patient care duties and critical research, while curbing voluntary work,” the unions’ release said.

    In guidelines posted in the case of a strike, the university advised students to continue to attend classes and complete assignments as normal.

    “To say that this is deeply disappointing would be an understatement,” Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway said in a letter to the community. According to Holloway, the two sides agreed to appoint a mediator just two days before the strike was announced.

    “For the past several weeks, negotiations have been constant and continuous,” the president said. “Significant and substantial progress has been made, as I have noted, and I believe that there are only a few outstanding issues. We will, of course, negotiate for as long as it takes to reach agreements and will not engage in personal attacks or misinformation.”

    Union representatives, however, insist that the university has refused to meet their central demands.

    “After sitting at the bargaining table for 10 months trying to win what we believe to be fair and reasonable things, like fair pay, job security, and access to affordable health care, and getting virtually nowhere on these core demands, we had no choice but to vote to strike,” Amy Higer, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers and president of the Adjunct Faculty Union, said in a statement.

    She continued, “We’ve heard management say that a strike will harm students. But you know what really harms students? The high turnover that results from paying teachers poorly and making them reapply for their jobs every semester.”

    New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy in a statement implored university and union bargaining committee representatives to meet in his office Monday “to have a productive dialogue.”

    In addition to the three groups that announced the strike, there are nine other unions seeking new contracts with the university, according to the unions’ release.

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  • After their university’s president canceled a charity drag show, students found a new venue | CNN

    After their university’s president canceled a charity drag show, students found a new venue | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A group of students at West Texas A&M University have announced a new venue for their charity drag show, which was initially set to take place on campus before it was canceled by the school’s president.

    The performance, titled “A Fool’s Drag Race,” will occur at the Sam Houston Park in Amarillo, according to a flyer posted by Spectrum WT, the university’s student-led LGBT+ organization. It is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. local time Friday, according to the post.

    Proceeds from the show will support The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people, the student group said.

    West Texas A&M University President Walter V. Wendler announced the cancellation of the student drag show in an email earlier this month. In that email, Wendler said drag shows “discriminate against womanhood,” compared them to blackface and said there was “no such thing” as a harmless drag show, angering both students and free speech advocates and prompting a federal lawsuit.

    But the organization putting together the performance was determined to make it a reality, and it began a GoFundMe page which helped them secure the new venue, a group member said. The GoFundMe had raised more than $5,700 as of Thursday evening.

    “Despite the pushback we’ve gotten from the university, we’re holding this show no matter what. It doesn’t matter if we have to be off-campus or not, our primary goal is to raise money for a good cause and celebrate our identity at the same time,” K Klein, the secretary of Spectrum WT, told CNN in a statement. “The show must go on.”

    Last week, Spectrum WT and two of its student leaders sued Wendler and other officials.

    “We are upset and disappointed that President Wendler does not respect the First Amendment and that the Texas A&M System would not lift a finger to protect our First Amendment rights,” Barrett “Bear” Bright, the Spectrum WT president, said in a statement. “We will be seeing President Wendler in court.”

    CNN has reached out to Wendler, the university’s vice president, chancellor and members of the Board of Regents of the Texas A&M University System for comment.

    The students are represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which said the president’s decision to ban the show on campus violated students’ First Amendment rights.

    That lawsuit is ongoing and “will proceed until the First Amendment is restored at West Texas A&M,” a FIRE spokesperson said in an email to CNN.

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  • Virginia school district did not try to withhold students’ National Merit Scholarship recognition, officials say, citing independent report | CNN

    Virginia school district did not try to withhold students’ National Merit Scholarship recognition, officials say, citing independent report | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    An independent investigation shows the Fairfax County Public Schools system in Virginia did not intentionally refrain from notifying some high school students of their National Merit Scholarship recognition in a timely manner, the system superintendent announced Wednesday.

    The school district asked a law firm in January to conduct the investigation over publicized allegations that school staff withheld some notifications to “avoid hurting the feelings of students” who did not receive recognition, according to a statement from the district.

    The investigation found that out of 23 district high schools with students who received commendations in the National Merit Scholarship competition, eight notified the commended students after November 1, which is an early admission deadline for some colleges, the statement reads.

    But the probe found “no evidence” of intentionally withholding commendation notifications or minimizing students’ achievements, or any suggestions that the delays came from racial considerations, the statement reads. The investigation also did not find evidence “suggesting that any later-than-usual notification impaired students’ academic, professional, or financial interests,” the statement reads.

    The law firm’s investigation found that “logistical factors” varying from school to school were responsible for the delays, according to the district.

    “This is not a school-specific concern at this point. Rather, this is a system concern around the policy and procedures that need to be in place to prevent this from happening again,” Superintendent Michelle Reid said about the probe at a public meeting Wednesday.

    Students should have been notified in September as to whether they received commendations for the National Merit Scholarship program, an “academic competition for recognition and college undergraduate scholarships,” the program’s website says.

    Of the approximately 1.5 million entries, some 34,000 of the top 50,000 students nationwide receive commendations recognizing their accomplishments – but this also means they did not reach the semifinalist level and are out of the competition for National Merit Scholarships, according to the program.

    While the program informs semifinalists of their accomplishment directly, it does not do so for commended students – and relies on schools to relay the commendations instead, the Fairfax County district said.

    Independent college counselors previously told CNN that such recognition would likely not tip an admissions decision from a top-tier college, but each school handles such awards differently.

    Virginia’s attorney general had launched his own investigation of the district over the issue in January. The probe first focused on the district’s Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Alexandria on suspicion of unlawful discrimination, but later expanded to the entire district over reports that other schools withheld recognition.

    Of the 459 seniors at Thomas Jefferson High School, 393 were either commended or semi-finalists, according to the Fairfax County Public Schools system.

    The school also is being investigated for its admission policies, which commonwealth Attorney General Jason Miyares said in a January statement have significantly reduced the number of Asian American students in recent years.

    Thomas Jefferson High School’s student population ethnicity is nearly 66% Asian, according to the school system.

    Victoria LaCivita, spokeswoman for the attorney general, told CNN regarding the latest report: “It’s encouraging that FCPS is working to be more transparent about the inconsistencies surrounding their National Merit award decisions and process.”

    The attorney general’s office will continue its investigation, she said.

    One parent questioned Reid at Wednesday night’s meeting, claiming a racially disproportionate number of Asian students were not informed of the commendations.

    “A summary of findings identified no discrimination on the basis of race at this point. … At this time the summary of key findings from the investigative review does not show disparate impact,” Reid told the parent.

    School staff members have drafted a new regulation that will ensure students and parents get notified in a timely manner about the merit recognition, Reid said.

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  • Opinion: Ron DeSantis brought his culture wars to my college campus | CNN

    Opinion: Ron DeSantis brought his culture wars to my college campus | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Sophia Brown is a senior at New College of Florida and editor of the school newspaper, The Catalyst. The views expressed here are her own. Read more opinion at CNN.



    CNN
     — 

    The freedoms of students in Florida have long been under fire during Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration, with his book banning, attacks on critical race theory and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    But I still wasn’t entirely prepared for his attacks on academic freedom at New College of Florida, the liberal arts college in Sarasota, where I’ve been a student for the past four years.

    As bad as things got in Florida, I and many of my classmates thought that surely his culture war policies wouldn’t reach our school, which has been something of a bubble of sanity and safety for queer students like me, as well as my transgender and BIPOC classmates. With any luck, DeSantis’ ginned-up culture wars will scuttle his presidential aspirations.

    The governor is continuing to plow ahead with his takeover of New College. He has installed a new board of trustees and a new interim president. Last month, the board voted to abolish New College’s Office of Outreach and Inclusive Excellence. Our Dean of Diversity was fired a few days later. And just last week, it was announced that our provost has been replaced, as DeSantis continues to force his conservative values on a place where they’re not wanted.

    Many students who have come to think of New College as a sanctuary, now feel as though they are no longer welcome here. Students feel as if they’re walking on eggshells – in part because the new conservative leadership has been incredibly vague about the next changes they will try to ram through.

    Each time he has given a speech on campus, our interim president has spoken about the great things he wants to do for New College. But he also recently wrote in a letter to donors and alumni in which he said that the school is “dominated by a self-aggrandizing few who want to co-opt the education system to force their personal beliefs on other people’s children.”

    This doesn’t augur well for its future as an academic and cultural oasis. Students are feeling burned out and afraid. Many of us are just trying to make it through what feels like it could be the last “normal” semester at the school we love so much.

    When people ask me why I chose New College, my usual answer is that I always wanted to go to a small school (we have an enrollment of just 700 students) with a rigorous academic program. But there’s much more to it than that.

    I went to a high school where students would wear shirts bearing the image of the Confederate flag. During my freshman year there, my classmates would draw swastikas on the corners of the papers on my desk when I wasn’t looking. I don’t think it was meant maliciously against me, but it showed the degree to which they had internalized and normalized hateful behavior. It was a high school that was tolerant enough to have a Gay Students’ Association, but intolerant enough that some kids would sign each other up as a prank.

    New College was a departure from all of that. It has been a sanctuary that not only made me passionate about education in a way that high school never did, but that taught me that I don’t have to compromise who I am. As an LGBTQ student, I don’t need to leave my identity at the door in order to have the education I deserve. My full identity can sit in the classroom with me because it informs my education and interests in a way that I cannot sever from myself.

    One of the trustees appointed by Gov. DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, gave a speech in January in which he described diversity, equity and inclusion efforts of the type that make New College such a tolerant community as “Orwellian” and said that they “manipulate” and “divide the world into oppressor and oppressed.”

    In fact, the diversity efforts proudly practiced at New College were inherent to a quality education. A student’s academics are enriched when they are able to encounter a variety of people and viewpoints. Broadening our horizons is the point of pursuing higher education.

    Anyone who reframes these concepts as deceitful or who wields them as a weapon in a culture war that the New College community did not ask to participate in, will never serve the best interests of students. In opposing diversity, equity and inclusion, DeSantis and the people he has put in place to run my school are agitating against the very thing that has made New College such a wonderful place to spend four years.

    I’m now a senior and in my final weeks as a student at New College. It’s been a great time. I’m editor-in-chief of our student-run newspaper, the Catalyst, and have had a complete, well-rounded and rigorous academic experience. But who knows how much longer it will be allowed to continue?

    The New College we knew, one of my friends recently said to me, is dead. I hope she’s wrong. I hope it can return one day to what it was: a college where students have access to an education free from interference by powerful individuals and entities that will never know our names and never really, truly cared – other than to score political points – about what we want to learn.

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  • In 2024 Republicans may complete a historic foreign policy reversal | CNN Politics

    In 2024 Republicans may complete a historic foreign policy reversal | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The GOP in 2024 is moving toward a reprise of its most consequential foreign policy debate ever in a presidential primary. Only this time, the results may be reversed.

    The 1952 GOP presidential nomination fight proved a turning point in the party’s history, when Dwight Eisenhower, a champion of internationalism and alliance with Europe to contain the Soviet Union, defeated Sen. Robert Taft, a skeptic of international alliances who wanted to shift America’s focus from defending Europe toward confronting communist China.

    A similar divide is opening within the GOP now. In a distant echo of Taft, former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the race’s two front-runners have both declared that defending Ukraine against Russia is not an American “vital interest” and “distracts” (as DeSantis put it) from the more important challenge of confronting China. Other likely 2024 candidates, such as former Vice President Mike Pence and former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, come closer to upholding the Eisenhower position that the US must remain steadfast in protecting Europe against Russian aggression – and insisting that abandoning Ukraine would embolden China and other potential US adversaries.

    After Eisenhower’s landmark victory over Taft in 1952, every Republican presidential nominee over the next six decades – a list that extended from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney – identified more with the internationalist than isolationist wing of the party.

    But Trump broke that streak when he won the nomination in 2016 behind a message of brusque economic nationalism and skepticism of international alliances. Now, the GOP appears on track for a 2024 nomination fight which may demonstrate that Trump’s rise has lastingly shifted the party’s balance of power on foreign policy – and ended the long era of GOP internationalism Eisenhower’s victory began.

    The fact that DeSantis unveiled his views about Ukraine in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a fierce opponent of American engagement with allies, underscored the governor’s determination to court Trump’s base with his provocative remarks. After several days of intense criticism from Republican internationalists, DeSantis retreated last week from his description of the war as a “territorial dispute” and called Russian President Vladimir Putin “a war criminal,” much harsher language than Trump has ever used. But DeSantis, in his interview with British journalist Piers Morgan for another Fox outlet, also reiterated his skepticism of open-ended US support for Ukraine. “I just don’t think that’s a sufficient interest for us to escalate more involvement,” the governor said.

    Even with his qualifying statements last week, DeSantis’ skeptical posture toward Ukraine shows the magnetic pull that Trump has exerted on his party, tugging it away from the Eisenhower tradition.

    “Trump-ism is the dominant tendency in Republican foreign policy and it’s isolationist, its unilateralist, its amoral,” said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former director of policy planning at the State Department under George W. Bush. The “traditional institutional approach to the world [which was] … the dominant Republican approach since World War II … has clearly been eclipsed for now,” said Haass, who also held foreign policy positions in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

    Ivo Daalder, president of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and former US permanent representative to NATO under Barack Obama, agrees. The fact that both 2024 GOP front-runners are expressing a broad skepticism about US engagement abroad, he said, raises the possibility that Republican “internationalists have not only lost in ’16 and ‘20” when Trump headed the GOP ticket, “but have lost the party forever.”

    The 1952 presidential election, by contrast, was the moment when GOP internationalists seemed to win the party forever. Leading into World War II, the party had been closely split between an internationalist wing determined to counter Adolf Hitler and imperial Japan and an isolationist faction resistant to entanglement in the intensifying confrontation with fascism, especially in Europe. The divide was both ideological and geographic, pitting generally more moderate internationalist East Coast Republicans (many of them tied to Wall Street and international finance) against more conservative isolationist forces centered in the small towns and small businesses of the Midwest and the far West.

    The Japanese surprise attack that triggered the US entry into World War II ended the political viability of a purely isolationist stance.

    “After Pearl Harbor there was no way to be a strict isolationist and a national political [figure],” said Joyce Mao, an associate professor of history at Middlebury College and author of the book “Asia First,” which recounts the GOP foreign policy debates of that era.

    After World War II, Republican internationalists joined with Democratic presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to build the international institutions meant to prevent another global war: the United Nations, the Marshall Plan to economically rebuild Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to militarily defend it from the Soviet Union. Eisenhower, who had organized the Allied invasion of Europe on D-Day in 1944, was firmly in that camp and, in fact, returned to Europe in January 1951 to serve as NATO’s first supreme commander.

    But Robert Taft led a block of “old guard” congressional Republicans that remained much more skeptical of European commitments. Taft, a senator from Ohio and the son of former Republican president William Howard Taft, had generally opposed American aid to Europe before Pearl Harbor and even after the war he pushed to reduce the Marshall Plan and voted against the creation of NATO. Like many of the Republicans who initially resisted involvement in World War II, Mao noted, Robert Taft in the post-war period tried to separate himself both from that isolationist past and the contemporary priorities of GOP internationalists like Eisenhower by arguing for an “Asia First” foreign policy that would shift resources and emphasis from defending Europe to confronting the Communists who had seized control of China.

    “Eisenhower was viewed by Taft and his colleagues as much too moderate,” Mao said. “His European focus was deemed by that conservative wing of the party as much too similar to the liberal Democrats. If this was going to be a moment for conservatism to reassert itself not only against liberalism but also against the moderates in the Republican Party, China provided an ideal plank” to do so.

    All these strains culminated in the landmark battle for the 1952 GOP presidential nomination. Taft, the Republican Senate leader, was a passionate favorite of conservatives. Eisenhower, still in Europe as NATO supreme commander, was in many respects a reluctant candidate. But as Stephen Ambrose showed in his classic biography, Eisenhower felt compelled to run largely from fear that Taft would lead the US out of NATO, while simultaneously risking a catastrophic war in China. (Eisenhower was also deeply disenchanted with Truman’s leadership.) Eisenhower resigned his NATO position, returned to the US, mobilized enough support from the GOP’s internationalist wing to beat Taft at the 1952 Republican convention, and then decisively won the presidency that November. “Eisenhower became president precisely because he did not trust this version of isolationism in Taft,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University political scientist who served as a senior adviser for strategic planning on the National Security Council under George W. Bush.

    Both as a general election candidate and as president, Eisenhower tried to minimize his public conflicts with his party’s “old guard.” But he unmistakably steered the party (and the nation) toward acceptance of American global leadership within a robust international system of alliances. With only modest variation, that became the dominant foreign policy ideology of the GOP for the next 60 years under Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Late in that period, George W. Bush offered a different emphasis by stressing unilateral American action over coordination with allies, but even he emphasized the need for the US to remain engaged with the world. “It’s a pretty unbroken streak,” said Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of “Rule and Ruin,” a history of the struggles between GOP conservatives and moderates.

    Taft-like isolationism, coupled with nativist opposition to immigration and protectionist opposition to free trade, first resurfaced as a major force in the GOP with the long-shot presidential campaigns of conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan in 1992 and 1996. Two decades later, Trump revived that same triumvirate of isolationism, protectionism and nativism – what scholars sometimes call “defensive nationalism” – in his winning drive for the 2016 GOP nomination.

    Though some traditional GOP internationalists had hoped that Trump in office might moderate those impulses, as president he barreled down all those roads, repeatedly clashing with traditional allies. Now, DeSantis’ choice to echo Trump in devaluing Ukraine – following the calls from so many House conservatives to reduce the US commitment there – is deflating another hope of the GOP’s beleaguered internationalist wing: that Trump’s ascent represented a temporary detour and the party would snap back to its traditional support for international engagement once he left office.

    “Trump-ism has to be taken seriously,” as a long-term force in GOP thinking about the world, Haass said. The foreign policy center of gravity in the Republican Party, he added, has moved toward “a much more pinched or minimal American relationship with the world, [with] not a lot of interest in contributing to global responses to challenges like climate change or pandemics.”

    Even before DeSantis qualified his comments in the interview with Morgan, Feaver believed the Florida governor was trying to find a position on Ukraine somewhere between Trump’s undiluted skepticism and the unreserved support of Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But, Feaver said, by including such inflammatory language as “territorial dispute” in his initial comments, DeSantis demonstrated the risks of pursuing such a strategy of “triangulation.”

    “Triangulation is a risky game because if you get the language off, you may commit yourself in a campaign to a line that makes no sense when you are governing,” Feaver said. “This is one of the hardest problems for newcomers and challengers when they are campaigning for president. By giving applause lines that work for the narrow segments of ideologically hardened factions that they are trying to win over for the primary, they can lock themselves into policy positions that are not sound when they actually win.”

    As an example, Feaver said DeSantis’ insistence that the US should shift more attention from countering Russia to containing China – an argument he repeated with Morgan – was illogical because “abandoning Ukraine assists China’s most significant ally, Russia.” Haley made a similar case in her recent Wall Street Journal article criticizing DeSantis (though not by name) for his comments to Carlson. “It’s naive to think we can counter China by ignoring Russia,” Haley wrote.

    Daalder points out another logical flaw in the updated “Asia First” arguments from DeSantis and Trump. “If the US were to abandon its allies in Europe … our allies in Asia are going to ask, ‘What’s to say they are not going to do the same with regards to China?’” Daalder said. “By demonstrating your willingness to stand up to Russia you are also strengthening the view that in Asia that when it comes to it that we will be there to help them.”

    But polls leave no doubt that both prongs of the modern Robert Taft position – that the US should reduce its commitment to Europe-focused international alliances and harden its resistance to China – have a substantial base of support in the contemporary Republican coalition. In a Gallup poll released earlier this month, by a lopsided margin of 76% to 12%, Republican voters were more likely to identify China than Russia as the principal US adversary in the world. (More Democrats picked Russia than China.) Polls have also found a steady decline in Republican support for US aid to Ukraine: polls this year by both the Pew Research Center and Quinnipiac University found that the share of GOP voters who believe the US is doing too much now equals the combined percentage who think it is doing too little or the right amount. (Quinnipiac found big majorities of Democrats and independents still believe the US is doing the right amount or not enough.)

    The latest Chicago Council on Global Affairs annual survey also tracks a broader retreat from the world among GOP voters. In that poll, conducted last November, the share of Republicans who said the US should take an active role in world affairs fell to 55% – the lowest the survey has ever recorded. Underscoring that erosion, a slight majority of Republicans in the poll said the costs of an active US international role now exceed the benefits.

    Opinions in the GOP about whether the US should do more or less in Ukraine don’t vary much along lines of education or age, the Pew poll found. But generally, these surveys show that the turn away from global leadership is most powerful among two distinct groups of Republicans: those who are younger, and those who lack college degrees. While a solid three-fifths of Republicans with a college degree in the Chicago Council poll said the benefits of US leadership exceed the costs, for instance, a majority of non-college Republicans disagreed. Younger Republicans were also much more likely than those over 60 to say the costs exceed the benefits.

    It’s probably no coincidence that those two groups – Republicans without a college degree and those who are younger – have consistently registered as Trump’s strongest supporters in early polls about the 2024 race.

    Trump is signaling that in a second term he will likely push even further in an isolationist and protectionist direction. John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, has said he believed the former president came close to withdrawing the US from NATO and would likely do so if elected to a second term. Trump certainly hinted at that possibility in a recent campaign video in which he declared, “we have to finish the process we began under my administration of fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” Trump has also said he would impose a four-year plan “to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods, everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals.” That would be a wrenching change in the global economy.

    In all these ways, Trump is promising to fulfill Robert Taft’s vision from seven decades ago – and to erase Eisenhower’s lasting victory in setting the GOP’s direction. DeSantis does not appear to have decided to jump entirely on that Trump train – but neither is he lying down on the tracks to stop it. With these two men far ahead of any potential rival, it seems highly likely that the GOP in 2024 will continue to move away from Eisenhower-style international cooperation toward a volatile compound of isolationism and unilateralism. And that could generate enormous turbulence across the globe.

    Trump’s first term, as Daalder noted, was a chaotic time for the international order and traditional US alliances. But “If an isolationist leader gets elected president in 2024,” Daalder added, “you haven’t seen nothing yet.”

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  • Idaho governor signs bill that restricts transgender students’ bathroom use in schools | CNN Politics

    Idaho governor signs bill that restricts transgender students’ bathroom use in schools | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little signed a bill this week that prohibits transgender students in the state from using public school bathrooms that do not align with their gender assigned at birth.

    Senate Bill 1100, which takes effect July 1, requires public schools to provide separate male and female bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, dressing areas and overnight accommodations for students in the state. The restrictions do not apply to single-occupancy restrooms. The bill also requires reasonable accommodations to be made for students who are unwilling or unable to use multi-occupancy restrooms or changing facilities.

    “Requiring students to share restrooms and changing facilities with members of the opposite biological sex generates potential embarrassment, shame, and psychological injury to students,” the bill states.

    Under the law, students can take legal action against the schools in instances where they encounter people of the opposite sex using gendered facilities if the schools gave those people permission to use the facilities or failed to “take reasonable steps” to prevent the person from using those facilities.

    Students who are successful in their private lawsuits will receive $5,000 from the public school systems for each time they saw “a person of the opposite sex” in those gendered facilities or sleeping quarters and can receive monetary damages from schools for psychological, emotional or physical harm.

    Advocates have for years worked to combat bathroom bills like the one passed in Idaho, blasting them as an unnecessary and harmful attack on transgender students’ humanity.

    Democratic state Sen. Rick Just told CNN on Saturday that he had voted against the bill largely because it allows people to file private lawsuits against school systems. “I don’t believe it’s helpful to encourage citizens to seek damages whenever they feel aggrieved in the slightest way,” he told CNN in an email.

    Republican state Rep. Ted Hill, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the legislation would ultimately “bring peace” among the schools, school boards and parents, and that it would help them focus on students’ education instead.

    “The most important part of this legislation was to recognize the rights of everyone,” Hill told CNN in an email. “Recognized the rights for young girls to be safe and secure in a place where they are most vulnerable, same for the boys to be safe and secure where they are most vulnerable, and the rights for everyone else to be safe, secure and comfortable in a place where they are most vulnerable.”

    Little did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the bill Saturday.

    Following the legislation’s passage, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ advocacy group in the US, slammed Little and said, “LGBTQ+ people in Idaho deserve the opportunity to live their lives with dignity and respect.”

    “Unfortunately, the bills that Gov. Little is signing into law will make life harder on LGBTQ+ folks across the state,” the group’s state legislative director and senior counsel, Cathryn Oakley, said in a statement. “These bills will not accomplish anything other than to further alienate and stigmatize those already on the margins of life in this state.”

    The Human Rights Campaign said that more “bathroom bills” have been filed across the country so far in 2023 than in any previous year.

    The Idaho legislation follows similar bills Republican governors in Arkansas and Iowa signed this past week.

    On Tuesday, Arkansas Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill that prevents transgender people from using restrooms that do not match the sex they have listed on their birth certificates. And in Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a bill prohibiting transgender people from using school restrooms that do not correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

    Transgender Americans make up a tiny fraction of kids in the US – the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has estimated less than 2% of high school students identify as transgender.

    Health care professionals have said the types of bills Republicans are pushing are likely to further ostracize transgender kids, a group that already struggles with higher rates of depression, anxiety and suicide.

    The political debate around which bathrooms trans people are allowed to use exploded in 2016, when North Carolina enacted a law that required people at government-run facilities to use bathrooms and locker rooms that corresponded to the gender on their birth certificates, if the rooms in question were multiple-occupancy. The measure drew intense criticism from businesses and advocates, and it was later repealed.

    Alongside the transgender legislation, Little signed House Bill 186, which allows for executions by firing squad in Idaho if the state cannot obtain the drugs needed for lethal injection. Several states have struggled to source the drugs required for lethal injection, causing them to pause executions.

    This story has been updated with further reaction.

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  • Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

    Shift in San Francisco politics serves as warning from Asian American voters to Democrats in 2024 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Allene Jue used to vote in a simple, rapid manner – scan the names on the ballot and pick the Asian sounding names.

    That was before 2020.

    “Something turned on during the pandemic and lit a fire,” said Jue, a Chinese American mother of two girls, ages 3 and 5, living on the west side of San Francisco. Throughout the pandemic, Jue watched as violent hate crimes against Asian Americans brought fear to the community with not enough response from local law enforcement or prosecutors. As the school closures wore on and on in California, Jue saw her local school board discuss progressive policy issues like renaming schools ahead of focusing on simply returning students to the classroom.

    Jue, who generally considers herself a Democrat, recalled her anger at liberal local politicians.

    “They care about policies that don’t really help someone who just lives in the city and just want to be safe, who wants their kids to be educated well,” she said. “They forgot the core problems for regular people. I wanted to do something to try to change and take that power back. It was fear and frustration, a lot of frustration, that I turned into action.”

    Her involvement began with stuffing envelopes for recall campaigns against the district attorney and several school board members and then grew – she even appeared in Chinese language campaign ads for a moderate Democrat running for city supervisor.

    It was a political awakening replicated to varying degrees by other Asian Americans in San Francisco, resulting in a series of political upheavals in one of the United States’ most progressive cities – including a moderate White man unseating a progressive Chinese American incumbent for supervisor of the majority-Asian American Sunset District

    California activists warn that these shifts in the politics of San Francisco – a place that has long been a beacon for progressives – are a signal to national Democrats ahead of 2024 that the party needs a course correction with the fastest growing racial group in the US – Asian Americans.

    “I see this frustration with the direction of the party,” said Charles Jung, a civil rights attorney and local Bay Area advocate. “Asian Americans feel like Democrats are focused on the wrong things, that they’ve let ideology run amok. If Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core Democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    Supervisor Joel Engardio, a gay married man who by most national standards is a liberal, describes himself as a moderate in San Francisco. And he is quick to criticize the word “progressive.”

    “To me, progressive is forward thinking, moving into the future and building a better city,” said Engardio from his San Francisco City Hall office. “For too long, we have not followed that definition of progressive. Progressive is a city that works and functions and builds toward the future.”

    Engardio unseated a Chinese American incumbent last year, becoming the first non-Asian supervisor to represent the majority Asian American district in more than 20 years. He campaigned on removing roadblocks for small businesses, putting more police officers on the streets, and using merit-standards for public schools. He said his supervisor race, while close, sends a broader political message about the limits of liberal ideology.

    “We should all pay attention that San Francisco, the most liberal place in America, is saying enough. We want safe streets. We want good schools. That should tell anyone – pay attention,” said Engardio.

    CNN national exit polls do show the pendulum shifting among Asian American voters in recent elections. In 2018, during the Donald Trump presidency, Asian Americans overwhelmingly supported Democrats by 77% vs. Republicans at 23%. In 2022, Asian Americans remained supportive of Democrats, but that preference slid 58% vs. Republicans at 40%.

    That’s a significant shift, warns Jung. “You saw a substantial double-digit erosion of support from Asian Americans from this midterm election to 2018. And incidentally, it’s not just Asian Americans, you saw the same thing among Hispanic voters,” he said. “I think if Democrats don’t redouble their efforts to focus on core democratic issues, they will lose people of color over time.”

    While Asian Americans may be thought of as a Democratic constituency, Jung warns recent history shows that wasn’t always the case.

    CNN’s historical exit polls on congressional vote choice show Asian American voters were closely divided or tilting toward Republicans in the 1990s. But since 1998, they have generally leaned toward the Democratic Party, by varying margins.

    Erosion among Asian and Latino voters, said Kanishka Cheng of grassroots community building organization Together SF, is explained by Democrats forgetting the core values for immigrant communities.

    Kanishka Cheng is the founder of community building organization Together SF and Together SF Action, whose mission includes fighting against crime, homelessness and high housing costs through change at San Francisco's city hall.

    “Democrats have a really hard time talking about public education and public safety,” said Cheng. “That’s the common denominator between the Asian and Latino community – we are immigrant communities. We came to America for stability and opportunity. Public safety and public education are the things that give us stability and opportunity. We need education and we need to feel safe.”

    Engardio said that message came through loud and clear as he knocked on “14,000 doors, talking to voters. My advice is to talk about what they need, and actually, listen.”

    Listening to Asian American voters is the work that Forrest Liu continues in the Sunset District as 2024 approaches. A former Bay Area finance worker, Liu left the business world and became an Asian community advocate to fight hate crimes targeting Asians.

    Liu spends his day conducting field interviews to try to understand the political shift that took place among San Francisco’s Asian voters, because Liu believes it’s predictive of what will happen in the upcoming national elections. “I want to understand why they made the decisions they made last year and what they want moving forward. And what we should be advocating for,” said Liu.

    What he’s learned so far, he said, is the community is far savvier than politicians may think.

    “There are some politicians out there who are like, ‘Let me get in a photo with some Asian people. Let me walk through Chinatown, shake hands with a few Asian community leaders and that’s it. I got the Asian vote,’” said Liu. “No. You actually need to be in tune with what this demographic needs.”

    Liu said the political discontent that led to Engardio’s victory remains, even as publicity around “Stop Asian Hate” may have faded.

    “‘Why should I feel unsafe?’ I would say that’s the summary of the emotion of the people I’m interviewing. They still feel unsafe.”

    You hear three languages spoken in Jue’s house – English, Mandarin and Cantonese. Her 5-year-old daughter, Eloise, is in a Cantonese immersion kindergarten, though she also speaks Mandarin. Lucille, 3, speaks Mandarin to her parents. Jue flips from one language to the next, a product of the multilingual public schools in San Francisco.

    “I’m a public school kid, from kindergarten all the way to college,” she said. “There is a common background from my core group – children of immigrants who went through public school.”

    Work hard, strive for educational success, and build a safe community – that’s what Jue and her generation grew up seeking.

    The effects of the pandemic began to crack into all those core values. The attacks targeting Asian American – which spiked 567% from 2019 to 2021 in San Francisco – worried Jue.

    07 Asian American Voters Allene with Kids

    “I’m Asian, my family’s Asian. If I have to worry about just stepping out to run an errand, I think that’s a huge problem and I can’t live in a city like that,” she said.

    Amid those concerns in 2021, Jue noticed the school board vote to rename 44 schools whose names were linked to former presidents like Abraham Lincoln, stating the names were linked to “the subjugation and enslavement of human beings/ or who oppressed women.”

    The school district at that time still had shared no public plan for reopening schools.

    Jue, juggling working at her tech job and raising kids about to enter pre-school, was incensed.

    Jue was among the Asian Americans in San Francisco who rolled out recall actions first against the school board, recalling three members. Jue then helped the successful effort to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, which a majority of the west side Asian communities backed.

    Last November, Jue volunteered for her neighboring district’s supervisor race – where Engardio successfully challenged the Sunset district’s sitting city supervisor. She was featured in two Mandarin and Cantonese campaign ads.

    Like many political shifts, Jue said the Sunset District was driven by discontent. And Jue said that discontent, while felt most profoundly in her city, is not limited to San Francisco.

    The self-described socially liberal-fiscal conservative said while she is a registered Democrat, she struggles with the current state of the party entering 2024. “I don’t think they’ve gotten those basics down yet, like crime and education,” said Jue. “I know of folks that have traditionally voted Democrat that are now voting Republican because they do not feel that the Democratic Party is representing them.”

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  • How frustrated parents of Los Angeles students are getting creative managing their children while school is out | CNN

    How frustrated parents of Los Angeles students are getting creative managing their children while school is out | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Tucked into a small art studio at a California university, Sea Krob took their 3-year-old and 7-year-old to graduate school with them because they didn’t have a daycare option this week.

    They are one of the parents of the half-million students who are out of school for three days because of the Los Angeles Unified School District school worker strike.

    “It’s really frustrating that the one thing that was supposed to be dependable is not,” Krob, 32, told CNN. “And it’s not because the workers are striking, but it’s because LAUSD would rather make time to find volunteers and make plans for our kids not to be in school than just meet the needs of the people that they’ve employed.”

    The stakes are high for school workers, including bus drivers, custodians and other support staff represented by Service Employees International Union Local 99 asking for more equitable wages, more work hours and more staffing to provide better student services.

    It is the same district that shut down for a six-day strike in 2019, when teachers went to the picket lines to fight for smaller class sizes, more staff and an increase in wages.

    This strike has left parents scrambling to find childcare, many cobbling together creative solutions to keep their children on track with school, while also working their full-time jobs.

    For Krob, that’s meant notifying individual professors of their situation and asking if they can bring their two children with to classes. Krob is a full-time graduate student pursuing art at California State University, Long Beach.

    “My partner is out of sick days for the year already – it’s March – so I am on the whims of whatever professor I have to have my kids come with me,” they said.

    For safety and liability reasons, Krob cannot take their children into the art lab where they work, so they had to forgo their lab hours this week, they said. Instead, they are getting creative with how they spend time during the strike and borrowing art supplies from a university office.

    “I just stretched out a big piece of paper so that we could color on it for the three days and make art, hang out and do our best,” they said.

    Krob commutes on public transit two hours each way to get to the university from their Los Angeles home. It’s been an extra challenge doing that with their two children in the pouring rain this week.

    What frustrates Krob, who supports the staff on strike, is that the resources for parents are through the school system, which is shut down, they said. They wish there was more support for parents.

    “I think that the people who are striking are totally within their right and they should be able to engage in a strike and parents still have resources to be able to take care of their kids, and that shouldn’t be cut off.”

    Sandra Colton-Medici, an online business entrepreneur, has two children in two different situations: Only one of them gets to go to school this week.

    Her 5-year-old daughter attends kindergarten at a LAUSD school, while her 3-year-old attends some classes at a private school.

    Sandra Colton-Medici smiles with her two children, aged 5 and 3.

    “I had to wake up both of them and say, ‘One of you is going to school and the other one is not,” Colton-Medici said. “That was a little bit difficult for one to say, ‘But what do you mean I’m not going to school?’”

    Her 5-year-old didn’t understand that her teachers and support staff are marching outside the school, but they aren’t in school today, she said. The 44-year-old broke it down into simple terms to explain the strike to her children.

    “The teachers and the support staff there, they’re going to talk to their employer, their boss, to say we need more to take care of ourselves,” Colton-Medici said. “In order to do that, they have to take a break from school.”

    In a moment of innocence, she says her oldest daughter asked, “‘So do they need money? I have money in my coin purse.’”

    Her daughter’s teacher provided informational and educational packets to do at home and Colton-Medici is doing her best to act as a fill-in educator – all while running her business from home.

    “If I had to grade myself with how I’m dealing with their time off from school and me balancing that thing that people call work-life balance, I would probably say I’m giving myself a 10 for effort and like a six for like completion,” she said. “I know that there’s going to be something that I’ve missed.”

    Colton-Medici’s husband is working in the office, but he stayed at home Tuesday morning to care for their older daughter while she took their toddler to her school. She’s grateful she can also call on her mother if she needs backup childcare, especially since she said there was enough advance notice of the strike to make plans.

    “I know by Thursday, in a few days, it might be a little overwhelming, especially since I do run my own business from home,” she said.

    Thousands of Los Angeles Unified School District teachers and SEIU members rally outside the LAUSD headquarters in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

    Colton-Medici said she feels for the support staff when she sees them ushering kids into school, walking them to the nurse or giving them a hug at the end of the day. She knows that some of those staffers work as crossing guards and have double duties.

    She said it’s important to support the people on strike and make sure they are valued. She reminds people that some of these support staffers also have children in school, some of whom may be at home because their parents are on strike.

    “Yes, we are pseudo inconvenienced, but how do you get inconvenienced by your own child?” Colton-Medici said. “I’m just trying to be better, trying to be more of an educator today, in addition to being able to hug my kids because I think that’s really important too.”

    While the strike is inconvenient for parents in the district, Wade Armstrong says he and his wife have the flexibility to make it work with their son, Declan, being out of school.

    “We’re really lucky because my wife and I, we both work at home,” Armstrong, 47, told CNN. “It’s not such a big impact in terms of we have to find child care and stuff like that, which some of our friends do have to do.”

    Yet, the parents are concerned because of the learning time that’s lost for all children during the strike.

    “It’s annoying and we’re sad to see the learning loss for our kids,” Armstrong said. “It’s really coming on the heels of the holidays and with spring break coming up soon, it really feels like we’ve barely even had a spring semester.”

    Their son is a fourth grader, but this isn’t the first time the 9-year-old has been affected by a strike. He was in kindergarten during the 2019 LAUSD strike.

    The previous strike was tougher for the Armstrongs to deal with, as neither of them were working from home and they needed child care. This time around, their son is older and more self-sufficient.

    Armstrong said the materials sent home from school aren’t directly related to what’s going on in the classroom, so he’s focusing more on spending time with his son and having some of Declan’s friends over to help other parents.

    Wade Armstrong and his son, Declan, play with their dogs while Declan is at home on a school day due to the LAUSD strike.

    While Armstrong said he’s “disappointed” that the district and the union couldn’t reach a resolution, he understands why so many staffers are on the picket lines.

    Armstrong said his son talks fondly about classroom aides who help special needs students, and they make time to help the whole class with projects. Cafeteria workers are also doing admirable work, especially after feeding so many children during the pandemic, he said.

    “There’s a lot of the aides and staff in our schools who really aren’t getting paid much at all and I know how essential they are from what my son tells me about his days in school,” Armstrong said. “I hope they get paid.”

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  • A Texas university president canceled a student drag show, calling it ‘divisive’ and misogynistic. First Amendment advocates disagree | CNN

    A Texas university president canceled a student drag show, calling it ‘divisive’ and misogynistic. First Amendment advocates disagree | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A student drag show aimed at raising money for the LGBTQ community was canceled Monday by West Texas A&M University’s president, who called such shows “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny,” drawing backlash from students and free speech advocates.

    In an email to the school community, university President Walter V. Wendler said drag shows “discriminate against womanhood,” compared them to blackface and said there was “no such thing” as a harmless drag show.

    “A harmless drag show? Not possible. I will not appear to condone the diminishment of any group at the expense of impertinent gestures toward another group for any reason, even when the law of the land appears to require it,” the email read.

    Proceeds of the show were due to support The Trevor Project, a suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ young people.

    The show was scheduled for March 31.

    A university spokesperson declined to provide further comment on the president’s email, citing pending litigation.

    Wendler’s decision and remarks drew backlash from both students and advocates who said the move was wrong – and unconstitutional.

    A Change.org petition said the university’s student body “is calling for the reinstatement” of the performance on campus and called its canceling an “indirect attack on the LGBT+, feminist, and activist communities of the WTAMU student body.”

    The petition said the president’s comparison of blackface and drag performances was a “gross and abhorrent comparison of two completely different topics” and “an extremely distorted and incorrect definition of drag as a culture and form of performance art.”

    In a letter to Wendler, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a group focused on freedom of speech and religion in academia, wrote it was “seriously concerned” by his decision and asked that he reinstate the performance.

    “The First Amendment and Texas law protect student expression from administrative censorship,” FIRE said in a later statement.

    “As an individual, Wendler can criticize this particular drag show, or the existence of drag writ large. No reasonable person would argue that public university administrators personally endorse the views expressed at every event hosted by every student group on campus. But as a government actor, President Wendler cannot co-opt state power to force his own views on the WTAMU community,” the statement said.

    “WTAMU must allow the show to go on — and we’ll continue watching to ensure that happens,” it added.

    PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization, called the cancellation an “abhorrent trampling on students’ free expression rights.”

    “Drag shows should be welcome on campus; censoring speech the university president dislikes should not,” Kristen Shahverdian, PEN America senior manager of free expression and education, said in a statement.

    As transgender issues and drag culture have increasingly become more mainstream, a slew of bills – mostly in Republican-led states – have sought to restrict or prohibit drag show performances.

    LGBTQ advocates have told CNN those bills add a heightened state of alarm for the community, are discriminatory and could violate First Amendment laws.

    Earlier in March, Tennessee became the first state this year to restrict public drag show performances. Its law will go into effect on July 1.

    A Texas House bill introduced this year also seeks to regulate public venues hosting drag performances.

    At least nine other states are also considering anti-drag legislation.

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  • Suspect charged after allegedly shooting Olivet College baseball player after game at Muskingum University | CNN

    Suspect charged after allegedly shooting Olivet College baseball player after game at Muskingum University | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A suspect is facing charges of attempted murder and felony assault after authorities say he shot and injured an Olivet College baseball player after a Friday night game at Muskingum University in Ohio.

    The player was taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and has since been released, according to a statement from Olivet College, in Michigan.

    On Sunday, the Muskingum County Prosecutor’s Office announced that a suspect, 26-year-old Franklin J. Grayson, of Jacksonville, Florida, would face charges of attempted murder with a firearm and felony assault with a firearm.

    Grayson, who was taken into custody Friday, is accused of shooting the victim three times and could face up to 14 years in prison if convicted, the prosecutor’s office said, adding that additional charges could be filed in the case. The office has requested $1 million bail for Grayson, who remains in custody.

    Olivet College said Grayson was a 2021 graduate of the school but said authorities are unclear of any relationship between him and the player.

    The victim’s name has not been released and it is unclear if Grayson has an attorney to speak on his behalf.

    Muskingum University is in New Concord, about 70 miles east of Columbus.

    The shooting occurred around 7 p.m. local time at Mose Morehead Field after Olivet defeated Muskingum. Olivet said one of its players went back to the dugout to get a personal item when “an incident occurred involving an unknown individual with a firearm.”

    No faculty, staff or students for Muskingum University were injured, according to an alert posted on the university’s website.

    Olivet College Athletics tweeted that the team will not play its games scheduled for Saturday and Sunday in Ohio.

    “The team is together and safe at the hotel and we have been in communication with their parents,” McCauley told CNN. “The team will remain at the hotel tonight and they will return to the Olivet College campus Saturday.”

    In its alert, Muskingum said all athletic events this weekend were canceled.

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  • Voters of color are a big reason Trump leads the GOP primary | CNN Politics

    Voters of color are a big reason Trump leads the GOP primary | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump holds an average double-digit advantage over Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in national 2024 Republican primary surveys. That, in itself, isn’t notable given Trump, the frontrunner, has been ahead of DeSantis (by far his nearest competitor or potential competitor) since polling began about the race.

    But what may surprise is how Trump is ahead. An average of CNN/SSRS and Quinnipiac University polls released this week reveals that Trump’s lead may, in large part, be because of his clear edge among potential Republican primary voters of color.

    Trump was up an average of 55% to 26% over DeSantis among Republican (and Republican leaning independent) voters of color in an average of the two polls.

    Among White Republican voters, the race was well within the margin of error: Trump’s 38% to DeSantis’ 37%.

    I should note the combined voter of color sample size of the CNN/SSRS and Quinnipiac University is about 200 respondents. This isn’t particularly large, but it’s more than large enough to say with a high degree of statistical confidence that Trump is ahead among them and that he is doing better among them than he is among White Republicans.

    The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist. I noted in 2019 that more Americans described Trump as racist than the percentage of Americans who said that about segregationist and presidential candidate George Wallace in 1968.

    But Trump’s overperformance with Republican voters of color makes sense in another way. The Republican primary race right down is breaking down along class lines just like it did during the 2016 primary.

    Trump’s base is made up of Republicans whose households pull in less than $50,000 a year. He led this group of voters by 22 points over DeSantis in our CNN poll. He trailed DeSantis by 13 points among those GOP voters making at least $50,000 a year. This is a 35 point swing between these two income brackets.

    Republican voters of color are far more likely than White Republicans to have a household income of less than $50,000 a year. According to the CNN poll, 45% of Republican voters of color do compared to just 28% of White Republicans.

    Trump’s lead among Republican voters of color comes at a time when they’re becoming a larger part of the party. During the Republican primary season in 2016, voters of color were 13% of Republican voters. Today, they’re closer to 18%.

    To put that into some perspective, White voters with a college degree are about 28% of Republican potential primary voters. Trump, of course, has historically struggled among well educated White voters, even within own party.

    While voters of color don’t make up nearly the same share of the Republican party as White voters with a college degree, the difference isn’t all that large. This means that if Trump ultimately does as well with Republican voters of color as the current polling indicates, it would be a good counterbalance for his weakness among White voters with a college degree.

    Trump doing better among Republican voters of color now is after he dramatically improved among all voters of color during the 2020 general election. While he still lost among them in 2020 by 45 points to Joe Biden in exit poll data, this was down from his 53-point loss in the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. (Other data shows a similar improvement for Trump.)

    Trump’s improvement with voters of color occurred even as his margin among White voters declined between 2020 and 2016. In fact, Trump probably would have won the 2020 election had he had slightly less slippage among White voters between 2016 and 2020.

    Indeed, the Republican Party as a whole has been improving among voters of color. The party’s 38-point loss among that bloc for the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms was a 5-point improvement from 2020. Its margin among White voters stayed the same in exit poll data.

    Put another way: The shift among voters of color from 2022 to 2020 could have provided the winning margin for Republicans to take back the House.

    The question going into 2024 is whether voters of color will continue their shift to the Republican Party and with Trump in particular. If they do, they could provide them both with a big boost.

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  • In wake of Florida law, additional states seek to restrict certain LGBTQ discussions in schools | CNN Politics

    In wake of Florida law, additional states seek to restrict certain LGBTQ discussions in schools | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Bills similar to Florida’s controversial legislation that bans certain instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity in schools are being considered in at least 15 states, data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union and reviewed by CNN shows.

    Some of the bills go further than the Florida law, dubbed by its critics as “Don’t Say Gay,” which sparked a furious nationwide discussion about LGBTQ rights, education policy and parental involvement in the classroom.

    The debate reflects the sensitive forces of LGBTQ rights becoming increasingly ascendant at a time when some parents are seeking greater input in their children’s education, especially in the wake of the tumult wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Republicans, arguing that discussions around gender identity and sexuality are inappropriate for young children, have used the banner of “parental rights” to push for a curtailment of such conversations in schools, even though opinions on the matter vary widely among parents. LGBTQ rights advocates see a conscious decision to stigmatize a vulnerable slice of American society and a potential chilling effect on what they believe to be urgently needed discussions.

    “These bills are predicated on the belief that queer identities are a contagion while straight, cisgender identities are somehow more pure or correct,” Gillian Branstetter, a communications strategist for the ACLU, told CNN. “In truth, every student has a right to have their own life stories reflected back at them and every student benefits from stories that serve as a window into the lives of people different from them. Censorship and homogeneity benefit no one while denying all students an equal chance to learn, grow and thrive.”

    The ACLU has tracked a total of 61 bills across 26 states, though efforts in several states, including Mississippi and Montana, have already failed. Earlier this month, Arkansas approved restrictions against such discussions through the fourth grade.

    Ultimately, it’s unclear how many of the bills will be enacted. A Human Rights Campaign report released in January said that of 315 bills that they viewed as anti-LGBTQ that were introduced nationwide last year, only 29 – less than 10% – became law.

    Florida’s law, titled the “Parental Rights in Education” bill, prohibits classroom instruction about sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” It also requires districts to notify a student’s parent if there’s a significant change in their mental or emotional well-being, which LGBTQ rights advocates argue could lead to some students being outed to their parents without the student’s knowledge or consent.

    “We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, health care and well-being of their children. We will not move from that,” Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said when he signed the bill in March 2022.

    According to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that advocates for issues including LGBTQ rights, Florida’s law was the catalyst for the bills currently under consideration in other states, which include:

    • An Iowa bill that passed the state House last week that would prohibit instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation from kindergarten through sixth grade.
    • A bill in Oregon that would prohibit any discussion on sexual identity for grades kindergarten through third grade without parental notification and consent.
    • Legislation in Alaska that would require parental notification two weeks prior to “any activity, class or program that includes content involving gender identity, human reproduction or sexual matters is provided to a child.”
    • Multiple bills in Florida that seek to double down on last year’s legislation, including one that requires instruction that “sex is determined by biology and reproductive function at birth” and another that prohibits requirements for employees to use pronouns that do not correspond with a student’s sex.

    A recurring theme in the legislation is a requirement that school employees notify a parent if a child expresses a desire to be addressed by a pronoun that matches their gender identity if it differs from the one assigned at birth.

    “We’re not saying that you can’t do this,” Washington Republican state Sen. Phil Fortunato, who introduced legislation that would limit instruction on gender and sexual identity for kindergarten through third grade, told CNN. “I mean, I disagree with it, but, you know, if the parents and the child agree with it, that is their decision. But they shouldn’t be doing it behind the parent’s back when their kid goes to school. And that’s the point of the bill.”

    Missouri’s bill is uniquely far-reaching: no employee at a public or charter school would be allowed to “encourage a student under the age of eighteen years old to adopt a gender identity or sexual orientation,” though what the law means by “encourage” is not explained. School officials would be required to immediately notify parents if their child confides in them “discomfort or confusion” about their “official identity” and teachers would not be allowed to refer to a student by their preferred pronouns without first securing a parent’s approval.

    The bill specifically calls for whistleblower protections for school employees who report violators, who would then face “charges seeking to suspend or revoke the teacher’s license to teach based upon charges of incompetence, immorality or neglect of duty.”

    In a blog post entitled “Evil perpetrated on our children,” Missouri GOP state Sen. Mike Moon, who sponsored the legislation, called it a “lie that boys can be changed into girls and girls can be changed into boys.”

    “One thing we must agree on, though, is that parents are responsible for the upbringing of their children,” he continued. “To that end, parents must be involved in the education of their children.”

    The measures are likely to face swift legal challenges if enacted, though at least two efforts to block Florida’s law have so far failed to take it off the books. One of those lawsuits, brought by a group of students, parents and teachers in Florida, was thrown out last month by US District Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee, who said the challengers were unable to show that they’ve been harmed by the law.

    “Plaintiffs have shown a strident disagreement with the new law, and they have alleged facts to show its very existence causes them deep hurt and disappointment,” Winsor wrote in his order. “But to invoke a federal court’s jurisdiction, they must allege more. Their failure to do so requires dismissal.”

    At the heart of opponents’ concerns is the vagueness in the laws’ language as written. LGBTQ issues are not generally a formal part of public school curricula, they point out, leaving educators with the prospect of having to determine where legal fault lines are drawn with nothing less than their careers at stake.

    “What counts as classroom discussion? As classroom instruction? Does it just include the curriculum for the class?” asked Alice O’Brien, the general counsel for the Alice O’Brien, in an interview with CNN. “For example, does it include teachers’ lesson plans, or does it sweep so broadly as to include classroom discussion? A teacher answering a student’s question, a teacher perhaps intervening in an incident where one student is bullying another student because of that student’s prestige, sexual orientation or gender identity? It’s very unclear what is prohibited and what is not prohibited.”

    There are other concerns. Naomi G. Goldberg, the deputy director of MAP, worries about a “chilling effect on teachers themselves in terms of their ability to support students in the classroom as well as the students themselves in the classroom.”

    A similar point was made in a CNN op-ed last year by Claire McCully, a trans mother who is outraged over Florida’s law.

    “Like any other parent, I expect my family to be welcomed and accepted by others at the school,” McCully wrote. “And of course, this acceptance might be more likely if some of the children’s stories read in classrooms feature two dads, two moms or even a trans mom.”

    Cathryn Oakley, the state legislative director and senior counsel of the Human Rights Campaign, told CNN that using a student’s preferred pronouns is harmless to other students but deeply meaningful to trans children themselves. She urged a cautious approach that recognizes the need for schools to be a safe space for vulnerable children, particularly if there is a risk that outing a child before they are ready could lead to “family rejection or even violence.”

    “No one is suggesting that this is information that won’t be relevant to parents,” she said. “But what we are saying is that young folks should be able to have this conversation on their own terms with their parents and not have a third party be forced to broker a conversation that could put that child in danger.”

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  • English professor in Florida says university terminated his contract after a complaint over his racial justice unit | CNN

    English professor in Florida says university terminated his contract after a complaint over his racial justice unit | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A former English professor at Florida’s Palm Beach Atlantic University says the school terminated his contract early after a complaint that he was “indoctrinating” students by teaching about racial justice.

    Sam Joeckel told CNN in a Wednesday statement he felt the university ended his contract early “for a clear reason: my decision to teach and speak about racial justice.”

    Officials at the private Christian university informed Joeckel last month his contract renewal was placed on hold while they investigated the materials he used in the racial justice unit, telling him a decision would be made by March 15, CNN previously reported. The former professor told CNN at the time February’s conversation with his employers indicated the investigation was prompted by a complaint from a parent.

    “I believe this goes against the Christian beliefs that I hold closely, and that PBA claims to hold closely,” Joeckel said in his statement this week. “PBA has chosen to reject the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: ‘Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, [racial] injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.’”

    In a statement in response to CNN’s inquiry, Palm Beach Atlantic University spokesperson Jason Masterson said: “On the advice of legal counsel, the university has no comment.”

    The university’s employee handbook says, “Discontinuance of employment may occur at any time, without cause, at the discretion of PBA.” The institution does not offer tenure, the review process for employment decisions regarding senior faculty that is meant to safeguard academic freedom.

    Joeckel said he believed “the timing of this is not a coincidence,” and pointed to rhetoric from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other “far-right politicians and activists” around subjects including race.

    DeSantis, a Republican, has said he intends to defund all diversity, equity and inclusion programs at state colleges and universities in Florida. These policies and programs are created to promote representation for people who have historically faced discrimination because of their race, ethnicity, disability, gender, religion or sexual orientation.

    Joeckel said he plans to pursue legal options to “fight back and show PBA, and other institutions, that they cannot get away with this.”

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