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  • The Return of the John Birch Society

    The Return of the John Birch Society

    Michael Smart chuckled as he thought back to their banishment.

    Truthfully he couldn’t say for sure what the problem had been, why it was that in 2012, the John Birch Society—the far-right organization historically steeped in conspiracism and opposition to civil rights—had found itself blacklisted by the Conservative Political Action Conference. “Nobody knows the official reason, because they don’t tell you that,” Smart, a field coordinator for the group, told me.

    He has theories, of course. Perhaps the Birchers’ unapologetic crusade against “globalism” had started to hit too close to home for the Republican Party of 12 years ago; perhaps their warnings about, of all people, Newt Gingrich—a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” whose onetime membership on the Council on Foreign Relations, as Smart saw it, revealed his “globalist” vision for conservatism—had rankled the Republican powers that be.

    Read: Trump has become the thing he never wanted to be

    In any event, the ouster had made the news, coming as it had after a change in leadership at the American Conservative Union, the host of CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative politicians, commentators, and activists. “When they applied, I said, ‘I don’t want any segregationist groups at CPAC; it sends the wrong message,’” Al Cárdenas, the ACU chair from 2011 to 2014, told me recently. “And that was that.” For some optimistic observers, the decision had signified a small but symbolic effort to purge the movement of its most “highly offensive” elements, as one report put it.

    Though CPAC has long catered more to the activist base of the Republican Party than to its establishment, the event has marched steadily closer to the fringes in the years since Donald Trump’s election, the barrier to entry for speakers and organizations being little more than a sufficient appreciation of the 45th president. But even Smart seemed a touch surprised by the ease of it all in 2023; when he applied on behalf of the John Birch Society for a booth at CPAC, and when, after the fuss and hand-wringing of 11 years earlier, the application was approved.

    Read: The martyr at CPAC

    “It was a very basic process,” he recalled with a shrug. (CPAC organizers did not respond to a request for comment about the John Birch Society’s presence at the conference.)

    It was half past noon yesterday, day two of the 2024 gathering, and Smart, a soft-spoken, genial man wearing a trim blazer and slacks, was standing before the red-white-and-blue curtained backdrop of the John Birch Society booth. He occasionally paused our conversation to direct curious passersby to the literature spread across a nearby table—brochures outlining the history of the organization (“How are we unique?”); copies of its latest “Freedom Index,” or congressional scorecard; issues of The New American, the group’s in-house journal, including a “TRUMP WORLD” collector’s edition featuring such articles as “Trumping the Deep State” and “The Deplorables.” It was the contemporary output of an organization with an older and more controversial heritage than probably any other group featured this year at CPAC. And yet what was most striking about the John Birch Society of 2024 was how utterly unremarkable it appeared among the various booths lining this hotel conference center.

    The John Birch Society, once the scourge of some of the nation’s most prominent conservatives, relegated to the outermost edges of the movement, now fits neatly into the mainstream of the American right. David Giordano, another field coordinator for the organization who was attending CPAC, credited Trump for hastening the shift, challenging the global elite in ways that past Republican presidents had only ever talked about doing. “What were the things they said about him? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic’—that got my attention,” Giordano told me, smiling. “What’d they say about the John Birch Society? ‘Racist’ and ‘anti-Semitic.’ That’s when you know you’re over the target.” Longtime members and officers of the organization exuded the polite but unmistakable air of I told you so at the conference. “A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, my grandmother or my dad was a member. We used to think he was crazy, but now, not so much,’” Smart said, beaming. “Because we’ve been warning people about a lot of this stuff for decades, obviously.”

    The John Birch Society, so named for a U.S. Army intelligence officer and Christian missionary killed by Chinese Communists toward the end of World War II, was founded in 1958 by Robert Welch, a retired candy manufacturer who made his fortune by way of Sugar Daddies and Junior Mints. Welch persuaded a handful of the country’s wealthiest anti–New Deal businessmen to join him in a mission to extinguish the “international communist conspiracy” he believed had penetrated the U.S. government and was set to consume every facet of American life. President Dwight Eisenhower, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles—all of them, Welch insisted, were dedicated agents of the U.S.S.R.

    For Welch, the Warren Court was incontrovertible evidence of the Soviet mandate in motion, given its decision outlawing prayer in public schools and, crucially, its ushering of America into a racially desegregated future. Donations flooded in as the John Birch Society took aim at the civil-rights movement, the United Nations, local public libraries and school boards, and the diabolical plot apparently enshrouding all of them. As the organization grew in prominence, a number of conservative leaders, including National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., agonized over how to contain Welch’s influence without alienating the electrified legion of Americans—many of them subscribers to Buckley’s magazine—whom Welch had brought into the movement. In the early 1960s, Buckley would publish a series of editorials critical of Welch and his worldview, urging conservatives to unite in rejection of his “false counsels.” By the mid-’70s, the organization’s formal ranks and funding had significantly dwindled.

    Matthew Dallek: How far-right movements die

    Yet the Bircher worldview never really went away. On the margins of the right, it continued to find purchase in new candidates and new personalities who adapted it to meet new moments. The society’s anti-communist crusade translated into alarm over a post–Cold War plot by the global elite to construct a “new world order” defined by porous borders and centralized, socialist rule; the birther conspiracy theories of the Tea Party era fit well within the Bircher tradition. And then, in 2016, the John Birch Society saw many of its core instincts finally reflected in the White House.

    Giordano was at first skeptical of Trump’s candidacy. But then he watched as President Trump in short succession scrapped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accords—dramatic blows, in Giordano’s view, to plans for the new world order. Giordano counts COVID—the lockdowns, the vaccines—as the wake-up event for many Americans, himself and others in the John Birch Society included. “I’ve been a member since 1994. And I said to my wife, ‘I wonder if this new world order will come in my lifetime,’” he recalled. And then came 2020. “They said, ‘Go home and flatten the curve.’ And I said, ‘This is the new world order. It’s here.’” He refused to take a vaccine or ever wear a face covering in public, recalling to me the time he successfully wore down a sales associate at Designer Shoe Warehouse who’d asked him to abide by the store policy on masks.

    The John Birch Society, Giordano claimed, has been in a “growing phase” in the years since. “I’m constantly signing people up—I’ve got a new chapter in Ocean County; we had no chapters in Delaware, and now I’ve got a new chapter right in Wilmington.” Oddly enough, it’s a Trump victory in November that he fears could reverse the tide. “If Trump wins—which I personally hope—our membership will drop,” he predicted. “‘Oh,’ they’ll all say, ‘he’s gonna save us.’ And I explain to people, we’re the watchers on the Wall. The Founders said, ‘Here’s a constitution; this is forever; you got to fight every day to keep it.’”

    Giordano’s claims of growth dovetail with the recent uptick in references to the John Birch Society by right-wing celebrities. Last May, in conversation with the Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich on his War Room podcast, Steve Bannon mocked left-wing efforts to deploy the “Bircher” label as a smear. “They say, ‘Oh! Moms for Liberty is just the modern version of the John Birch Society,’” Bannon said, laughing, before turning back to Descovich: “You’re doing something right, girl.” A few months before that, Nick Fuentes, a far-right vlogger and white supremacist who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, heralded the John Birch Society as a “prelude to the Groypers”—the army of neo-Nazi activists and online influencers Fuentes counts as followers.

    Some national Republicans, moreover, no longer try to maintain even a nominal distance from the organization. Joining the John Birch Society for its return to CPAC in 2023 were lawmakers including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Ronny Jackson of Texas, both of whom sat for livestreamed interviews with The New American as throngs of conference-goers listened from the sidelines. At this year’s conference, a woman helping staff the booth urged me to check out the magazine’s January issue, the cover of which featured a close-up portrait of Andy Biggs; the Arizona congressman—former chair of the House Freedom Caucus—had sat for an exclusive interview on “many of the issues facing our country,” including President Joe Biden’s “corruption,” as the magazine put it, “immigration, and China.”

    From the January/February 2023 issue: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?

    It’s unclear just how large the John Birch Society is today—even Smart told me, “They keep those numbers close”—but to measure its influence by membership is to miss the point. Naturally, as the principles and positions of the John Birch Society have insinuated themselves into the mainstream on the right, the Birchers’ own claim to those ideas has weakened. The organization’s rogue crusades of the past are now so familiar and universal that the original fingerprints are no longer visible.

    Consider fluoride. At the height of the group’s relevance in the ’60s, the John Birch Society railed against fluoridated drinking water as a communist conspiracy to poison Americans en masse, a go-to data point for the National Review set and others invested in the political exile of the Birchers. As soon as I stepped off the escalator at the convention center outside Washington, D.C., that hosted CPAC, though, I came upon cocktail tables scattered with brochures listing “Fun Facts on Fluoride,” among them that “Fluoride was used by Hitler and Stalin” and that “it will kill you.”

    There was no stated affiliation with the John Birch Society, and no person around to discuss the pamphlets. And perhaps that was telling; far from the niche boogeyman of one conservative organization, the perils of fluoride had become part of the generic paraphernalia of the movement. (The “Myth vs Facts” section of the John Birch Society website, I should note, currently states that “while the JBS doesn’t agree with water fluoridation because it is a form of government mass medication of citizens in violation of their individual right to choose which medicines they ingest, it was never opposed as a mind-control plot.”)

    Plenty have noted the John Birch Society’s echoes in the GOP’s oft-invoked specter of the “deep state,” the conspiracism that immediately hijacked the memory of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer murdered in July 2016. Yet to attend CPAC today is to see those instincts taken to their most troublingly banal ends. Lifestyle and wellness products are hawked as solutions that the medical establishment never wanted you to find; a payment-processing company warns, with a massive image of a human-silhouette target riddled with bullet holes, “Your business is a target.”

    For the John Birch Society, returning to CPAC has meant slipping seamlessly back in among groups and personalities that for years have been operating within its legacy, whether they knew it or not. The organization has been “eclipsed by many different groups and offshoots, so they’re not controversial in the same way that, say, Richard Spencer was a few years ago,” Matthew Dallek, a historian at George Washington University and the author of Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right, told me.

    Why was the John Birch Society invited back to CPAC? The better question, in Dallek’s view: “Why wouldn’t it be?”

    Elaina Plott Calabro

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  • Education Secretary Calls Diversity Program Cuts Latest ‘Boogeyman’ To Divide Schools

    Education Secretary Calls Diversity Program Cuts Latest ‘Boogeyman’ To Divide Schools

    WASHINGTON ― U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said Tuesday that he believes attacks on diversity programs in public schools are part of a larger campaign to “decrease the confidence in our public schools.”

    In a roundtable discussion with Black journalists at the Department of Education building in Washington, Cardona referred to the rollback as a “boogeyman” that opponents of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives have created to sow division in America’s schools — not unlike the debates over COVID masks and the teaching of critical race theory.

    “There are very deliberate attempts to seek division in our schools so that a private option sounds better for parents. So we created a boogeyman,” Cardona said. “Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, banning books. Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools.”

    Since the beginning of 2023, more than 70 pieces of legislation targeting diversity programs at colleges and universities have been introduced, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Public schools in Texas, Florida and other Republican-controlled states have been forced to limit student access to certain books by Black authors. Cardona said he sees the rollback of diversity efforts across public education as a “deliberate” attempt to prevent schools from being inclusive places for all students.

    “The attack on DEI, to me, is a deliberate attack on efforts to try to make sure schools are inclusive, welcoming places for all students — in particular, students from different backgrounds,” the education secretary said. “No different than what I think happened when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action.”

    Cardona’s belief that the goal is to undermine confidence in public education has been underlined by remarks from conservative activists such as Christopher Rufo, who is behind many of the attacks on DEI. Rufo has been blunt about his desire to create “universal public school distrust” as a way to promote funding for school choice.

    In September, the Department of Education released recommendations to help colleges and universities improve diversity on campuses following the high court’s June gutting of affirmative action in admissions. Emboldened by the court’s decision to end most college affirmative action programs, anti-DEI activists are waging legal wars on diversity initiatives at private businesses and foundations as well.

    “Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools.”

    – Education Secretary Miguel Cardona

    Cardona said he believes these DEI programs are critical to help students of color feel supported by their institutions. “My rationale around these programs is they make students feel seen, welcome and [can] unapologetically be themselves. The dismantling of those programs, in my opinion, reduces schools’ abilities to provide an inclusive environment for students to learn.”

    The battle over diversity, equity and inclusion programs is largely fought at the state level, with Republican politicians, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, leading the charge. Cardona acknowledged that states and localities take the lead on how state-funded schools are run.

    “I cannot tell schools you have to have a DEI program, but I could, through data, demonstrate if there’s a decrease in students who have access based on race. And I can attribute that to some of the lack of inclusivity or attacks that maybe students feel there,” he said.

    The education secretary said that his department and the Department of Justice are actively investigating school districts that are systematically ignoring the civil rights of their students.

    “We see deliberate attempts to go after LGBTQ students in our country. We see leaders saying that slavery was a skilled program that people left with skills to do better. We see the majority of banned books having protagonists of color. We see AP Black History under attack,” Cardona said. “It’s very deliberate, very intentional.”

    “It’s getting worse because what people used to do in the shade, they’re now doing in the sunlight,” he said.

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  • How the Far Right Took Over a Pennsylvania School Board—And How Parents Took It Back

    How the Far Right Took Over a Pennsylvania School Board—And How Parents Took It Back


    Last spring, when the odds seemed far longer, Bob Cousineau, a social studies teacher at Pennridge High School, predicted that whatever happened in his embattled district would become a national “case study” one way or another. It would either create “the blueprint” for outside political interests to enact a complete takeover of local public schools, he said, or “the blueprint for how to stand up to it.”

    For much of the past two years, Pennridge School District, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—one of Philadelphia’s suburban swing counties—has served as an experiment in how far conservatives can pull public schools right.

    Until this past November, its nine school board members had all been elected as Republicans, including a five-member majority reportedly affiliated with the activist group Moms for Liberty. Policies introduced by the board and district administrators in recent years have been sweeping: Two separate groups focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues were shut down; LGBTQ+ “Pride” rainbows were banned alongside other “advocacy” symbols; curriculum was repeatedly changed or culled to remove purportedly partisan topics; and more than a dozen library books—most related to race, gender, or sexuality—were reportedly “shadow-banned” by officials unwilling to wait for a formal review. Anti-trans policies were passed, school staff were ordered not to use “terms related to LGBTQ,” and a full year of social studies was cut from graduation requirements to make room for supposedly more patriotic instruction.

    All of this reached a boiling point last April, when Pennridge hired a brand-new consultancy firm called Vermilion Education. The company, according to its website, is intended to help school board members keep their districts “ideology-free,” but critics say it is meant to transform public school districts along the lines of the right-wing Hillsdale College. At the Moms for Liberty annual conference in July, Vermilion founder Jordan Adams said that districts like Pennridge, where conservatives had gained control of school boards, faced a “do or die kind of moment” to enact so many new changes, so swiftly, that their opponents wouldn’t be able to resist. “If we don’t make the most of this chance,” he said, “we’re not going to get another one.”

    “It hit us like a ton of bricks,” said Laura Foster, a local mother who helped create the progressive advocacy group the Ridge Network to fight the right-wing dominance of Pennridge’s schools. “They systematically changed policies in the school…so if there’s racism happening, you can’t do anything about it; if there’s homophobia, you can’t do anything about it. Just these methodical, step-by-step plays.”

    That’s how things seemed in Pennridge until November’s school board election, when all five open seats were won by Democrats—a stunning turnaround in a district with a more than 3:2 Republican advantage. A week later, another page in an emerging playbook for fighting back was more quietly revealed, when a group of Pennridge community members charged that the policies Pennridge had adopted weren’t just partisan, but violated civil rights law, in a federal complaint that could have implications far beyond Bucks County.

    When the Pennridge board passed a last-minute motion to hire Vermilion Education last April, the company was virtually unheard of apart from a controversy that had just roiled Sarasota, Florida. There, another school board had unsuccessfully attempted to contract it to review curricula, teacher trainings, union contracts, and more.

    But if Adams and Vermilion were unknown quantities, for many in Pennridge, what they seemed to represent was not.

    Before officially launching Vermilion in March, Adams had worked for his alma mater, Hillsdale—a private Christian college in Michigan dedicated to “classical” education, hard-right political advocacy, and spreading its education model nationwide. Its “1776 Curriculum” for grades K-12 has been criticized for revisionist history, including whitewashed accounts of US slavery and depictions of Jamestown as a failed communist colony. Hillsdale boasts a national network of affiliated charter schools, and one of its former professors helped revise South Dakota’s social studies standards along the lines of the 1776 Curriculum. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed a slate of hard-right board members at the public New College of Florida, with the goal of transforming it into a “little Hillsdale” of the South.

    A Hillsdale employee until early 2023, Adams worked on its charter program and to promote the college’s 1776 Curriculum. He’d also been enlisted by Florida’s Department of Education to review math textbooks for “prohibited topics” like critical race theory, and by South Dakota to train teachers on the new social studies standards.

    In Sarasota, after public outcry over Adams’s proposed contract with the district, two conservative board members broke rank and blocked it. The following week, after Pennridge hired Vermilion instead, Sarasota board chair Bridget Ziegler—a Moms for Liberty cofounder—lamented on Facebook that Vermilion’s inaugural “‘WOKE’ Audit” should have been with them. “We could have and should have led on this.”





    Kathryn Joyce

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  • Gov. Shapiro lays out sweeping plan to reform higher education in Pennsylvania

    Gov. Shapiro lays out sweeping plan to reform higher education in Pennsylvania


    A semester at a state university or community college would cost just $1,000 for many students under a proposal Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said he will detail in his second budget address next month.

    Shapiro won the governor’s office in 2022 campaigning, in part, on improving access to higher education and developing Pennsylvania’s workforce to boost the state’s economy. In his first budget address last February, Shapiro declared the state’s higher education system broken.

    RELATED: Philadelphia public schools hope to raise $40 million by 2028

    “Every Pennsylvanian deserves the freedom to chart their own course and the opportunity to succeed,” Shapiro said in a statement. “For some, that means going right into the workforce – but for those who want to go to college or get a credential, we need to rethink our system of higher education.”

    Pennsylvania’s public universities have suffered disinvestment for 30 years, Shapiro said, leaving students without enough affordable options to earn a degree and enter the workforce. Pennsylvania spends less on higher education than any other state except New Hampshire, the governor’s office noted.

    Enrollment in state universities and community college has decreased by about a third, the governor’s office said. And colleges are competing for the same students, duplicating programs, driving up costs and reducing access.

    On Friday, Shapiro announced a three-pronged plan to reinvigorate public higher education by:

    • Uniting Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education universities with the state’s 15 community colleges under a new governance system

    • Setting tuition at those schools at $1,000 per semester for low and moderate income students and increasing Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Agency grants for students attending private universities by $1,000

    • Distributing state appropriations to Pennsylvania’s state-related universities – the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State, Temple and Lincoln universities – according to a performance-based formula

    Democratic lawmakers spoke in support of the plan, noting that it would help Pennsylvanians avoid the burden of student debt. 

    “We need to make it easier and more affordable for students to attend our state schools, which provide vital job training and a quality higher education for tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians every year and remove barriers for students transferring between schools here in the commonwealth,” House Democratic leaders said in a statement.   

    While Republican lawmakers said the plan was short on details, they said they were glad to see the administration join Republicans in putting students first while acknowledging the state’s financial needs.

    “We will work with education stakeholders, the administration, and Pennsylvania families to continue moving away from the endless funding of systems in Pennsylvania so we can move toward a student-first, family-focused, and taxpayer-accountable system of higher education,” Jason Gottesman, spokesperson for House Minority Leader Bryan Cutler (R-Lancaster), said.

    Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) said ensuring that Pennsylvania is an economic leader depends on a strong workforce and jobs in the commonwealth and preserving access to higher education is a key to promoting economic growth.

    Pittman said the changes that Shapiro proposed are substantial and his plan lacked information about how the state would fund them. Key considerations in implementing such changes include the cost to taxpayers and the impact on communities where state universities are located, Pittman added.. 

    “Details matter and a proposal of this magnitude will require extremely close examination,” Pittman said, adding that he looks forward to discussing the proposal with Shapiro and fellow lawmakers. 

    For several years, funding for the state-related universities used only to provide tuition discounts for Pennsylvania residents, has stalled in the General Assembly during budget season. Republican lawmakers have cited objections to research using fetal tissue cells, gender affirming care, a lack of transparency, and rising tuition as reasons for withholding the two-thirds majority votes needed to approve appropriations to the private institutions.

    State Rep. Seth Grove (R-York), who is the GOP’s ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee, was less complimentary of Shapiro’s plan, however, describing it as a “three-step plan for financial disaster.” It would come with unsustainable spending increases, depletion of the state’s $12 billion surplus and future tax increases, Grove said. 

    “The bottom line is this plan creates more bureaucracy, necessitates more spending, and creates more questions than answers,” Grove said, adding that it doesn’t comport with the Republican position that the state should fund students, not institutions.

    “Shapiro should propose direct grants so every child of God will have options for higher education.  But given his track record on reneging on school choice, it appears the Governor is once again siding with unions over students,” Grove said.

    Shapiro’s announcement included statements of support from the heads of the state university system and each of the state-related universities. 

    PASSHE Chancellor Dan Greenstein said the consolidation of several state universities over the last six years has shown that collaboration benefits students, communities and employers. Shapiro’s proposal would build on the strengths of state universities and community colleges.

    “Together we can create a new, larger system with better collaboration that gives students more pathways to a degree or credential, rapidly adjusts to the changing knowledge and skills employers want, and provides the lowest-cost option for students throughout their lifetime,” Greenstein said.

    Performance-based funding for the state-related universities would not only improve transparency and accountability, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi said, but it would also help ensure positive outcomes for students.

    “I am extremely pleased to see that part of Gov. Shapiro’s blueprint is a call to establish a predictable performance-based funding formula, and we look forward to working with the legislature to implement such a model,” Bendapudi said.

    Pennsylvania Capital-Star is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on Facebook and Twitter.





    Peter Hall, Pennsylvania Capital-Star

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  • Strategos Group Welcomes Former Hillsborough Schools Superintendent Addison Davis

    Strategos Group Welcomes Former Hillsborough Schools Superintendent Addison Davis


    TAMPA, Fla., July 18, 2023 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Strategos Group, a leading national education management consulting firm, is pleased to announce the addition of former Hillsborough County Public Schools Superintendent Addison Davis as its newest Partner. 

    With an impressive career spanning over 24 years in education, Davis has enhanced education and driven positive change.

    During Davis’ tenure from March 2020 to July 2023, the district improved remarkably, seeing a rise in its state academic ranking from 35th to 19th, and a reduction in the number of historically “D” and “F” schools from 28 to only five. 

    Strategos Group Managing Partner Adam Giery said, “Addison’s commitment to students, teachers, and the American education system, accelerates our mission of helping students thrive in their living and learning. Addison’s arrival fulfills a goal to be the Nation’s only management consultancy with a partnership comprised of every major role in the American education ecosystem. We thank Addison, his wife, Natalie, and their daughters, Madisyn and Kaitlyn, for their trust and belief in our mission.”

    Davis will work in the firm’s Business Transactional Advisory (BTA) practice, supporting district partners and education organizations in advancing student objectives. 

    He expressed excitement for his new role saying, “The mission to positively impact student performance and outcomes is an instrumental part of who I am as a practitioner. Over the last 25 years, I have dedicated my time, efforts, and energy to driving the most ambitious educational strategies that have led to transformational results for students both inside and outside the classroom.”

    After decades of success in public education, Davis looks forward to the challenge of channeling his deep knowledge and experience into meaningful private-sector work that can have a nationwide impact.

    “By joining Strategos Group there is an opportunity to work alongside an accomplished team of innovative professionals with diverse experience who are revolutionizing consulting practices and improving client services,” he said.  “I am excited to be surrounded by forward-thinking leaders who share a common desire to create a positive change in education.”

    Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho said of Davis, “As a mentor to Addison, he has listened, learned, and developed to be a remarkable leader. Through our collaboration and his action, HCPS has recognized tremendous growth toward closing the achievement gap. His decision to join Strategos Group proves his commitment to accelerating student performance and aiding school districts by strategically navigating the crowded market of educational solutions.”

    About Strategos Group

    Founded in 2011, Strategos Group is a national education management consultancy comprised of former state education commissioners, legislators, White House appointees, school district superintendents, and recognized business leaders advising Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, startups, philanthropy, and private equity. Strategos operates at the national, state, and local levels with offices in Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Maryland, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington D.C.

    Media Contact:

    Antonio Hebert, Marketing Manager

    Strategos Group

    mediarelations@strategosgroup.com

    Source: Strategos Group

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  • A Teacher Used A Popular Book About Systemic Racism — Then Students Started Complaining

    A Teacher Used A Popular Book About Systemic Racism — Then Students Started Complaining

    In February, as part of Black History Month, a high school teacher in South Carolina had to stop using Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir “Between the World and Me” in a lesson plan about systemic racism — because teachers are prohibited from making students feel uncomfortable about their race or gender in the state.

    Students complained after Mary Wood, who teaches Advanced Placement Language Arts at Chapin High School in Chapin, South Carolina, included the book in a lesson intended to guide students through participating in civil debate, local news outlet The State first reported.

    Wood’s lesson plan was a part of preparing for Advanced Placement tests and involved watching two videos about systemic racism, reading Coates’ memoir and doing research with a variety of sources. Then, students were meant to write essays on their understanding of the book and make an argument about whether they agreed with Coates that systemic racism is a problem in the U.S.

    “This wasn’t one side or the other,” Wood, who has been teaching for 14 years, told HuffPost. “I wanted them to develop their own understanding.”

    Students complained that the lesson made them feel ashamed to be white and were successful in blocking the section on systemic racism entirely.

    “Hearing (Wood’s) opinion and watching these videos made me feel uncomfortable,” one student said in their complaint. “I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian. These videos portrayed an inaccurate description of life from past centuries that she is trying to resurface.”

    In 2021, South Carolina Republicans included a provision in the state budget stipulating that taxpayer dollars may not be used to teach lessons suggesting that any race or sex is inherently “racist, sexist, or oppressive whether consciously or unconsciously” or that cause anyone to feel “guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex.”

    “If the goal is to undermine public education, they’re doing a good job of it,” Wood said of the lawmakers who passed the policy. “You cannot talk about glitter and rainbows and still get students to engage with differing viewpoints.”

    Once the lesson, which Wood had taught the previous year without issue, was axed, she said she kept her head down and proceeded with an improvised lesson plan using AP tests from the past.

    “I was mortified professionally and I felt my hands were tied,” she said. “I certainly didn’t want to use anything self-selected.”

    “If the goal is to undermine public education, they’re doing a good job of it.”

    – Mary Wood, high school teacher in South Carolina

    South Carolina’s policy that essentially bars teachers from teaching about certain topics is a disservice to students, Wood said, especially those who are supposed to be preparing for college.

    “I don’t want my kid to go into a college classroom thinking a professor isn’t allowed to speak about a topic because he came from a high school that limited instruction,” Wood said.

    But schools nationwide have moved to limit what teachers can teach in their classrooms. Republicans have made critical race theory a boogeyman for conservative parents.

    In reality, it’s a college-level academic theory that studies the way racism has influenced policy-making in the United States, but the GOP has perverted it to mean any discussion of racism or inequality. Lawmakers in Florida, Texas and Oklahoma are among those who have restricted what teachers can say in their own classrooms. Meanwhile, educators are on edge, fearing that saying the wrong thing could cost them their jobs.

    And South Carolina, like many states, is in the throes of a teacher shortage. The state had nearly 1,500 teacher vacancies when the 2022-23 school year started, according to an annual report — an increase of approximately 500 from the prior academic year.

    South Carolina educators cite the same issues that are plaguing their colleagues in other states, including low pay, funding cuts and limited support from administrators. But the culture wars are wearing on them, too, as routine lessons about racism and history have been turned into just another political talking point. Educators who try to teach full and accurate history are labeled radicals who are out to indoctrinate children.

    And South Carolina Republicans do not plan on stopping at the current provision, which will remain in effect unless the legislature removes it.

    A bill requiring “fact-based” discussion on lessons about race is pending in the legislature. It does not specifically mention critical race theory, but, like the budget provision, it does bar educators from teaching their students that any race is inherently oppressive and outlines steps for parents to object to lessons being taught at school. However, it does not include the restriction that bans making a student uncomfortable.

    “The First Amendment protects freedom of speech,” Wood said. “And if the state government is intentionally limiting freedom of speech, then they are the ones supporting the indoctrination that teachers are always being accused of.”

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  • “Smart People Are Falling for Stupid Lies”: How One Florida County Has Become Ground Zero for the Far-Right’s Education Blitz

    “Smart People Are Falling for Stupid Lies”: How One Florida County Has Become Ground Zero for the Far-Right’s Education Blitz

    On a Sunday afternoon in late May 2022, Zander Moricz, then class president of Sarasota County’s Pine View School, spent the moments before his graduation speech sitting outside the auditorium, on the phone with his lawyers. Over the previous month, the question of what he’d say when he stepped to the podium had become national news. That March, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had signed the Parental Rights in Education Act, quickly dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law for its ban on all mention of gender identity and sexuality in K–3 classrooms and restriction of those discussions in higher grades as well. Moricz, a student LGBTQ+ activist, had led several protests against the act that spring and joined a high-profile lawsuit against the state. In early May, he charged on Twitter that Pine View’s administration had warned that if he mentioned his activism or the lawsuit at graduation, his microphone would be cut. (In a statement released last year, the school district confirmed that students are told not to express political views in their speeches.)

    In the tumultuous weeks leading up to the ceremony, Pine View—Sarasota’s “gifted” magnet institution, consistently ranked one of the top 25 public high schools in the country—was besieged with angry calls and news coverage. Moricz stayed home for three weeks, he said, thanks to the volume of death threats he received, and people showed up at his parents’ work. When a rumor started that Pine View’s principal would have to wear a bulletproof vest to graduation, he recalled, “the entire campus lost their minds,” thinking “everyone’s going to die” and warning relatives not to come. His parents worried he’d be killed. 

    But after all the controversy, graduation day was a success. Moricz, now 19, delivered a pointedly coded speech about the travails of being born with curly hair in Florida’s humid climate: how he worried about the “thousands of curly-haired kids who are going to be forced to speak like this”—like he was, in code—“for their entire lives as students.” Videos of the speech went viral. Donations poured into Moricz’s youth-led nonprofit. That summer, he left to study government at Harvard. 

    Half-a-year later though, when Moricz came home, Sarasota felt darker. 

    “I’m wearing this hat for a reason,” he said when we met for coffee in a strip mall near his alma mater in early March. “Two years ago, if I was bullied due to my queerness, the school would have rallied around me and shut it down. If it happened today, I believe everyone would act like it wasn’t happening.”

    These days, he said, queer kids sit in the back of class and don’t tell teachers they’re being harassed. A student at Pine View was told, Moricz said, that he couldn’t finish his senior thesis researching other states’ copycat “Don’t Say Gay” laws. (The school did not respond to a request for comment through a district spokesperson.) When Moricz’s nonprofit found a building to house a new youth LGBTQ+ center—since schools were emphatically no longer safe spaces—they budgeted for bulletproof glass. 

    “The culture of fear that’s being created is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do,” he said. And much of it was thanks to the Sarasota County School Board. 

    Over the last two years, education culture wars have become the engine of Republican politics nationwide, with DeSantis’s Florida serving as the vanguard of the movement. But within the state, Sarasota is more central still. 

    Its school board chair, Bridget Ziegler, cofounded the conservative activist group Moms for Liberty and helped lay the groundwork for “Don’t Say Gay.” After a uniquely ugly school board race last summer, conservatives flipped the board and promptly forced out the district’s popular superintendent. In early January, when DeSantis appointed a series of right-wing activists to transform Florida’s progressive New College into a “Hillsdale of the South”—emulating the private Christian college in Michigan that has become a trendsetting force on the right—that was in Sarasota too. In February, DeSantis sat alongside Ziegler’s husband and Moms for Liberty’s other cofounders to announce a list of 14 school board members he intends to help oust in 2024—Sarasota’s sole remaining Democrat and LGBTQ+ board member, Tom Edwards, among them. The next month, Ziegler proposed that the board hire a newly-created education consultancy group with ties to Hillsdale College for what she later called a “‘WOKE’ Audit.” (Ziegler did not respond to interview requests for this article.)

    The dizzying number of attacks has led to staffing and hiring challenges, the cancelation of a class, a budding exodus of liberals from the county, and fears that destroying public education is the ultimate endgame. In January, Ziegler’s husband, Christian—who chairs the Florida Republican Party—tweeted a celebratory declaration: “SARASOTA IS GROUND ZERO FOR CONSERVATIVE EDUCATION.” 

    It wasn’t hyperbole, said Moricz. “We say that Sarasota is Florida’s underground lab, and we’re its non-consenting lab rats.” 

    For as long as Florida has been grading schools and school districts—a late 1990s innovation that helped spark the “school reform” movement—Sarasota, with its 62 schools and nearly 43,000 students, has enjoyed an “A” rating. Perched on the Gulf Coast just south of Tampa, the county’s mix of powder-soft beaches and high-culture amenities—including an opera house, ballet, and museums—have made it a destination for vacationers and retirees. And that influx has made Sarasota one of the richest counties in the state. 

     Since many of those retirees, dating back to the 1950s, have been white Midwestern transplants, it’s also made Sarasota a Republican stronghold and top fundraising destination for would-be presidential candidates. Both the last and current chairs of the state GOP—first State Senator Joe Gruters and now Christian Ziegler—live in the county. Sarasota arguably launched Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, thanks to Gruters’s early support. These days, though, Sarasota isn’t just conservative, but at the leading edge of Florida’s turn to the hard right.  

    Partly that’s thanks to the Zieglers, who have become one of Florida’s premier power couples, with close ties to both Trump world and the DeSantis administration and a trio of daughters enrolled in local private schools. As founder of the digital marketing company Microtargeted Media, Christian did hundreds of thousands of dollars of work for pro-Trump PACs in 2021, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reported. After being elected state GOP chair this February, he announced his goal was “to crush these leftist in-state Democrats” so thoroughly that “no Democrat considers running for office.” Although Bridget stepped down from Moms for Liberty shortly after its founding, she subsequently helped draft Florida’s Parents’ Bill of Rights, which helped pave the way for DeSantis’s 2021 ban on mask mandates and ultimately last year’s “Don’t Say Gay” law. Last year, the right-wing Leadership Institute hired her as director of school board programs, and built a 6,000-square-foot headquarters in Sarasota to serve as a national hub for conservative education activism. This winter, DeSantis also appointed her to a new board designed to punish the Disney Company for criticizing his anti-LGBTQ laws. 

     But it wasn’t just them. After Trump lost reelection in 2020, leaders across the far right, from Steve Bannon to the Proud Boys, called for a “precinct by precinct” battle to take control of both the Republican Party and local government. Many making that call were from Sarasota, dubbed the “right-wing capital” of the country last year by Sarasota Magazine, for the flood of far-right figures relocating there. They included former Trump national security advisor and QAnon hero General Michael Flynn; Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk; and Publix grocery chain heiress Julie Fancelli, who helped bankroll both the January 6 rallies and Moms for Liberty. Then there’s the Hollow, a 10-acre wedding venue/shooting range/children’s playland that has become the center of a far-right network led by Flynn, targeting local institutions from the county GOP to a local hospital to the district’s public schools. 

    Over the last three years, the school district has experienced waves of chaotic unrest, beginning in mid-2020. That August, amid the tumult of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the presidential election, Tom Edwards, a silver-haired former New York businessman, won an upset race for school board on a platform of public health precautions and fighting school privatization. Already that year, two sitting board members had left the Republican Party in disgust over its far-right shift. The election of Edwards—a self-described moderate Democrat who’d moved to Sarasota shortly after selling his second business and had quickly grown restless with retirement—meant the board suddenly had a 3-2 moderate majority. 

    Kathryn Joyce

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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



    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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  • 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


    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



    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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  • 2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics

    2 personal stories shed light on the unforeseen consequences of Brown v. Board of Education | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Everett R. Berryman Jr. was 11 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which made racial segregation in public schools illegal.

    But supervisors in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where Berryman was attending public school, had no intention of complying. Five years later, in 1959, as Berryman was looking ahead to attending 7th grade, the county shuttered all public schools and opened a private school – for White children only. It would take five years, an intervention by the Department of Justice and another Supreme Court order, before integrated public schooling in Prince Edward County proceeded.

    Around the same time, in North Carolina, Dr. E.B. Palmer was working as the executive secretary of state for the North Carolina Teachers Association, advocating for Black teachers after Brown was decided.

    “When the school system said ‘separate but equal,’ that was fine,” Palmer recalled to CNN. “But when we moved a little further, they tried to say, ‘We don’t want Black teachers teaching White students.’”

    Nearly 40,000 teaching positions held by Black teachers in 17 southern and border states would be lost in the ensuring years, according to Samuel B. Ethridge, a National Education Association official who was a leader in the movement to integrate teacher organizations during the civil rights movement.

    Today, Brown v. Board of Education is remembered as a watershed moment in the history of America’s civil rights progress and the fight against systemic racism. But the ruling also had the unintended effect of leaving behind thousands of Black students and educators whose fates were not considered when America moved to reshape its education system.

    Berryman and Palmer shared their stories with CNN as part of the “History Refocused” series, which explores surprising and personal stories from America’s past that may bring new understanding of today’s conflicts.

    The Supreme Court officially struck down the legal basis for segregated classrooms in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, but a second, follow-up ruling a year later outlined the process for implementing school desegregation. In “Brown II,” the Supreme Court ordered district courts to enforce desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” reasoning that such language would provide local authorities with time to adjust to the new law of the land.

    Instead, those opposed to desegregation exploited the terms, including officials in Prince Edward County, who figured that by starving the local public school system of funding, they could do an end-run around the high court’s order by opening a private – and all-White – school.

    “Even in cases where White children or White families rather could not afford to attend the school, they even charged as little as a dollar to allow White students to attend school,” Dawn Williams, dean of Howard University’s School of Education, told CNN. “Now, for the Black community – something totally different for the Black community. There were no forms of public schooling.”

    To combat the lack of educational opportunities, members of the Black community in the area created a grassroots community center, which also served as a makeshift school, but it was not the real thing.

    Two years into the lockout, the Berryman family looked for other ways to keep their children in school. They tried to enroll their children in the neighboring county of Appomattox, Virginia, only to find out that they had to live in the county and present a valid address to do so. The next step was to move in with a family friend.

    At that point, Berryman was a 14-year-old who stood 6-foot-2 but was still in 7th grade, when he should have been in the 9th grade had he not missed out on years of public schooling.

    “I was the tallest guy in the whole school,” he recalled.

    Eventually, the Supreme Court had to become involved again. In 1964, it ruled that the time for desegregating schools “with all deliberate speed” had passed and that there was no justification for “denying these Prince Edward County school children their constitutional rights to an education equal to that afforded by the public schools in the other parts of Virginia.”

    Berryman and his family returned to Prince Edward County when the public schools reopened, and he remembered feeling “happy to be back home.” But there were constant reminders of the toll taken on the Black community.

    “We ran across students – all students were with us that hadn’t been in school for going on five years. And some of the students here began school at 10 years old. … And on the upper end, we had guys and girls graduating high school at 21 and 22 years old,” Berryman said. “So we had – it was like a kaleidoscope of pupils every which way in this grand scheme of school opening again.”

    Brown was intended to protect education opportunities for students. It didn’t say anything about teachers whose jobs would be soon jeopardized by school integration, when Black students often moved to White facilities that had superior conditions.

    In the wake of Brown, various tactics were used across the nation to undercut Black teachers and educators, from outright dismissals or demotions to forcing teachers to teach unfamiliar subjects or grades – making it easier to fire them based on poor performance.

    In Alabama, tenure rules were rewritten in several counties and teachers believed they were dismissed because of their participation in the civil rights movement, the NEA found in a 1965 report. North Carolina and South Carolina repealed their teachers’ continuing contract laws.

    “I had to spend day and night traveling all over the state following behind complaints of Black teachers being dismissed where schools were being desegregated,” recalled Palmer, the former official with the North Carolina Teachers Association.

    Ethridge, writing in the Negro Educational Review in 1979, found that by the mid-1970s, 39,386 teaching positions had been lost by Black teachers as a result of desegregation in 17 states, mostly in the South. In the 1970-71 school year alone, the cumulative loss in income to the Black community in those states totaled $240,564,911, the NAACP found.

    “The cumulative amount is staggering to the imagination,” Ethridge wrote in his research, noting that even as the Black student population grew in those years, the number of Black teachers decreased in those states.

    The Black teaching force has never recovered from the tremendous losses. In the 2017-18 school year, even though Whites accounted for less than half of the students in public schools – the result of a steady increase in diversity over the last 30 years – White teachers made up 79% of the workforce, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, down from 87% three decades earlier. The percentage of public school Black teachers – 7% in 2017-18 – decreased one percentage point over that same time period.

    “Sadly, the reasons for this disparity go far back, and a key impetus happened just as the nation attempted to fix our public education system,” Williams said.

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  • DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics

    DeSantis says Florida requires African American history. Advocates say the state is failing that mandate | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    Facing accusations of whitewashing history after his administration blocked a new Black studies course for high-achieving high schoolers, Gov. Ron DeSantis has countered that Florida students already must learn about the triumphs and plight of African Americans.

    “The state of Florida education standards not only don’t prevent, but they require teaching Black history,” DeSantis said last week. “All the important things, that’s part of our core curriculum.”

    Indeed, Florida has required its schools to teach African American history since 1994, long before the recent push in many states to move toward a more complete telling of the country’s story. The stated goal at the time was to introduce the Black experience to a generation of young people. That included DeSantis himself, then a student in Florida’s public school system when the mandate became law.

    But nearly three decades later, advocates say many Florida schools are failing to teach that history. Only 11 of the state’s 67 county school districts meet all of the benchmarks for teaching Black history set by the African American History Task Force, a state board created to help school districts abide by the mandate. Many schools only cover the topic during Black History Month in February, said Bernadette Kelley-Brown, the principal investigator for the task force.

    “The idea that every Florida student learns African American history, it’s not reality,” Kelley-Brown said. “Some districts don’t even realize it’s required instruction.”

    The persistent focus in Florida on instruction of African American topics comes as DeSantis has partially built his Republican stardom by targeting public schools for signs of progressive ideologies. His administration has forced K-12 schools to comb their textbooks and curriculum for any evidence of Critical Race Theory or related topics and he championed a new law that puts guardrails on lessons about racism and oppression. Both measures were cited in the state’s decision last month to block a new Advanced Placement class on African American Studies from Florida high schools. (On Wednesday, the College Board, which oversees AP courses and exams, released an updated framework of African American Studies class that did not include many of the authors and topics DeSantis had objected to. His administration said it was reviewing the changes to see if the course now complies with state law.)

    Black Democratic lawmakers say the state Department of Education under DeSantis has shown far more zeal in enforcing these new restrictions on how race can be taught in schools than the state, in almost 30 years, has ever demonstrated toward ensuring that Black history is taught at all.

    “If we say that the speed limit is 70 and someone goes 80, the Highway Patrol is there with some consequences,” state Sen. Geraldine Thompson said at a recent press conference. “But there have been no consequences for not teaching African American history.”

    The governor’s office and the Florida Department of Education did not respond when asked about the state’s efforts to enforce the mandate to teach Black history. But DeSantis recently elaborated on how he expects the subject to be taught.

    “It’s just cut and dried history,” DeSantis said. “You learn all the basics. You learn about the great figures, and you know, I view it as American history. I don’t view it as separate history.”

    For a state that had to be dragged to desegregate all of its schools well into the 1970s, the move to require African American history in Florida classrooms was notably unceremonious. Lawmakers unanimously approved the mandate in 1994 with little debate. Few newspapers covered then-Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles signing the bill into law.

    After it passed, the state created the African American History Task Force to help school districts with this new directive and to come up with a strategy for implementation. But neither the law nor the Florida Department of Education set a deadline for districts to comply.

    Former state Rep. Rudolph Bradley, the Black lawmaker who sponsored the bill to require African American history back then, now says there was a major flaw in the legislation that kept it from accomplishing what he set out to achieve: Lawmakers didn’t set aside any money for school districts to update their textbooks, buy new instructional materials or train teachers.

    “The mistake on my part, being a freshman, I didn’t understand the importance of attaching appropriations,” Bradley told CNN in a recent interview. “I didn’t understand what an unfunded mandate was and how difficult that would make it for school districts to incorporate it.”

    Even districts that had sought to comply with the law faced hurdles. Among those early adopters in 1994 was Pinellas County, where efforts to incorporate African American history into their lessons were underway prior to the law’s passage – and where a teenage DeSantis was entering sophomore year of high school that fall.

    At Dunedin High School, a predominantly White school within walking distance of Florida’s gulf shores, DeSantis should have been among the first wave of students to be exposed to this more complete telling of history. The school already offered African American history as an elective and the district had tapped the teacher of that class, Randy Lightfoot, to guide Pinellas schools into compliance with the new law. (Lightfoot said DeSantis was not a student in his African American history class.)

    Lightfoot and his team met after school for three hours a day, four times a week for months to forge a plan to incorporate Black history, culture and figures into every grade level, he told CNN in a recent interview. They printed a blueprint called “African American Connections.”

    The accurate teaching of African American studies, the document said, “explains the causes of racial division in society, including prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination” and the “systematic oppression perspective of Africans and African-Americans and their resistance to that oppression.”

    The state heralded Lightfoot’s efforts as a model for adhering to the new law, according to news accounts from the time. The Florida education commissioner liked it so much he handed a copy to every school district, Lightfoot said. DeSantis more recently has called the idea of systemic racism “a bunch of horse manure.”

    By 1996, Lightfoot was warning that his efforts were being stymied by lack of resources. Lightfoot struggled to convince the Pinellas school board to acquire textbooks that included the new lessons on Black history, according to the St. Petersburg Times, which also noted that the district cut his staff.

    The attempts to expand the curriculum to teach African American history also came during a period of racial strife in Pinellas County. In 1996, riots broke out in St. Petersburg, the city 20 minutes south of DeSantis’ suburban home, after the police killed an unarmed Black teenager during a traffic stop, and again when the officers involved were cleared of charges. Meanwhile, graduation rates for Black male students remained stubbornly low in Pinellas, the Times reported, and the county school board had broached the controversial idea of curbing forced busing to desegregate the public schools, leading to a period of distrust between the board and Black residents.

    By the time DeSantis graduated in 1997 – having earned recognition as a decorated Advanced Placement history student, according to his senior yearbook – getting African American history in Pinellas schools was still a work in progress, Lightfoot said.

    Statewide, only a handful of schools had earned “exemplary” status from the African American History Task Force by the end of that decade, meaning they had reached benchmarks for compliance. “Exemplary” school districts must demonstrate their curriculum included African American topics beyond Black History Month, training for teachers in the subject, involvement of parents in the learning and collaboration with a local university for support. In 1999, a bill that would have required public school textbooks to include African American history went nowhere in the state legislature.

    Carlton Owens, a Black classmate of DeSantis’ at Dunedin High, said he only saw people like himself reflected in the curriculum during Black History Month or lessons around slavery and the Civil Rights movement.

    “There’s so much more history that’s inspiring that is interwoven in the American story as a whole,” Owens, now a lawyer and small business owner, said. “And that wasn’t highlighted then, and that needs to be happening now.”

    The state “put the material out there for districts,” said Lightfoot, now a history professor at St. Petersburg College. “But they didn’t put the kind of money in to check and make sure everyone is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.”

    “We were trying to fill in the gaps and the holes in history,” he added. “At the same time, we had Black male students who we thought we could help improve their grades if they saw their stories in history and science and literature. Where it worked, we had pretty good success with it. But we had the support of state leaders to do it. It was a different climate then.”

    In a 2019 press release, the Florida Department of Education announced it would require districts for the first time to report how they were teaching required subjects including “Holocaust education, African American history, Hispanic heritage, women’s history, civics and more.”

    A CNN review of those reports for the 2021-22 school year found wide discrepancies in how districts lesson-plan around the subject of African American history. Some districts provide lengthy plans for weaving the African American experience into social studies from kindergarten through high school graduation; others suggest exploration comes primarily during Black History month. More than a dozen submissions largely parroted the requirements listed in state law without including any details of the instruction.

    Leon County, declared an exemplary school district by the African American History Task Force, included details like its lessons on African American scientists, songwriters and artists during grades K-5. Dixie County, near the Florida Panhandle, submitted 1,600 words on how it teaches African American history to high schoolers. Madison County, a school district near the Florida-Georgia border, simply wrote: “Courses are taught on a daily basis by a Florida certified teacher. The district also stresses Black History Month with daily mini-lessons for all grade levels.”

    The Florida Association of School Superintendents did not respond to a request for comment.

    Democrats and advocates contend the state has done little with this information. They also say the administration has not yet indicated how it will ensure schools are complying with a new state law signed by DeSantis that requires annual instruction of the 1920 Ocoee massacre, when dozens of Black Floridians were murdered in a horrific Election Day racial cleansing.

    Democratic lawmakers say they intend to introduce legislation that would require the state to enforce whether school districts are teaching African American history as the law intends, though its supporters acknowledge any bill is unlikely to gain traction in a statehouse controlled by Republicans.

    “It won’t go anywhere,” said state Sen. Shevrin Jones, a member of the legislature’s Black caucus. “But it’ll be a helluva message that we’re getting behind true and accurate Black history being taught in the state of Florida.”

    Early in his first term, there was some hope from the state’s Black community that DeSantis would forge a different path than some of his Republican predecessors. In one of his first acts as governor, DeSantis voted to pardon the Groveland Four – two Black men who were lynched and two who received lengthy sentences for allegedly raping a White woman in 1949 – widely considered one of the darkest episodes in Florida’s violent past. Former Gov. Rick Scott, who served two terms prior to DeSantis taking office, had refused to pardon the four men despite overwhelming evidence of their innocence.

    But DeSantis’ posture changed following the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. DeSantis responded to the national unrest by mobilizing the state’s national guard and pushing through what he called an “anti-riot” law that included harsh new penalties for protesters if a demonstration turns violent.

    DeSantis then turned his attention to schools. In June 2021, he urged the state Board of Education to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory, an academic framework based around the idea that systemic racism is embedded in many American institutions and society. His administration then rejected math textbooks on the grounds that they included Critical Race Theory and other forbidden topics. Last year, lawmakers approved one of DeSantis’ top legislative priorities: the so-called “Stop WOKE Act,” which said schools cannot teach that anyone is inherently racist or responsible for past atrocities because of their skin color. The bill, which DeSantis signed into law, also said schools could teach that oppression of races has existed throughout US history but not persuade students to a particular point of view.

    The controversies around these actions have catapulted DeSantis into the national conversation on teaching race and helped fuel his rise as a potential presidential contender. Throughout these episodes, DeSantis has often maintained that African American history is built into Florida’s education framework.

    “Florida statutes require teaching all of American history including slavery, civil rights, segregation,” DeSantis contended during his debate against his Democratic opponent last year, Charlie Crist. “It’s important that that’s taught. But what I think is not good is to scapegoat students based on skin color.”

    Reginald Ellis, a professor of History and African-American Studies at Florida A&M University, said if students were adequately learning Black history, he would see it first hand in his classroom.

    “What I find, even at a historically Black college, the vast majority of students have not really been exposed to much African American history and experience,” Ellis said. “It is a law on the books. There is a task force. But, for the most part, it clearly isn’t a curriculum that is being enforced. School districts effectively have the option to opt-in or opt-out.”

    Bradley, the original bill sponsor, said the law’s shortcomings fall on those who have held power in Tallahassee and in school districts for the past three decades, and not DeSantis. Bradley, who changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican later in his political career, said he was supportive of DeSantis’ education agenda and accused activists of using schools to “drive a wedge between Blacks and Whites.”

    “The law is still a work in progress, but if we want to use it as a tool to divide then that is a total violation of the spirit of the law,” Bradley said. “When I passed that bill, it was designed to bring people together, not divide.”

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  • Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

    Republicans Need to Stop Being Jerks

    Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

    If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:

    “We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”

    Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

    A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.

    But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

    But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

    The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.

    Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point

    And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.

    Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.

    But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

    DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

    A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

    Ilana E. Strauss: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

    Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

    It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

    Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

    Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.

    All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-​weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

    Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

    In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

    Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.

    This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.

    This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.

    In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.

    The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

    Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

    Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

    So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

    There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

    * Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

    This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

    David Frum

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  • Ransomware attack closes schools in Nantucket | CNN Politics

    Ransomware attack closes schools in Nantucket | CNN Politics



    CNN
     — 

    A ransomware attack forced the closure Tuesday of four public schools serving 1,700 students on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the school district’s superintendent said in an email to parents.

    The hacking incident shut down all student and staff devices, as well as safety and security systems at Nantucket Public Schools, forcing an early dismissal at noon on Tuesday, Superintendent Elizabeth Hallett said in the email, which she shared with CNN.

    The news came as Tucson Unified School District (TUSD), which calls itself the largest pre-K-12 school district in southern Arizona, also suffered a ransomware attack in recent days, according to local news reports. Representatives of TUSD did not respond to emails seeking comment. There was no evidence that the two incidents were related.

    Ransomware – malicious software that locks computers and holds them for ransom – has for years plagued US schools and other organizations that can be short on money and personnel to defend themselves from hacks.

    The hacks often force schools to temporarily close, further disrupting learning during the coronavirus pandemic. The lack of cybersecurity budgeting at primary schools is a “major constraint to implementing effective cybersecurity programs across all K–12 entities,” the federal US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned in a report this month.

    Nantucket Public Schools includes an elementary, middle and high school, and serves Nantucket, which is about 30 miles south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

    Athletic events at the school were still scheduled to proceed. “No school issued devices should be used at home until further notice, as it could compromise home networks,” Hallett said in her email to parents.

    “We do not have any updates yet on when we will return,” Hallett told CNN in a separate email.

    There have already been five ransomware attacks on US school districts in January, according to a tally from Brett Callow, threat analysts at cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. Forty-five US school districts operating 1,981 schools were hit by ransomware in 2022, according to Emsisoft.

    A year ago, New Mexico’s largest public school district had to close temporarily after a cyberattack hit computer systems that could affect learning and student safety.

    “The ransomware attacks on school districts across the country are a stark reminder that as a country we need to ensure our citizens are cyber literate,” Kevin Nolten, vice president of Cyber Innovation Center, a not-for-profit supported by federal grant money that promotes cybersecurity curricula in K-12 schools, told CNN.

    “Cybersecurity education is a national security issue and we must educate our country on protecting our most critical infrastructure from malicious attacks,” Nolten said in an email pointing to the high demand for cybersecurity skills in the workforce.

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  • Trump Calls For ‘Certifying’ Patriotic Teachers, Election Of Principals By School Parents

    Trump Calls For ‘Certifying’ Patriotic Teachers, Election Of Principals By School Parents

    Former President Donald Trump launched a fired-up culture war directly at American classrooms Thursday, calling in a video for certification of “patriotic teachers,” the firing of “radicals” and the “direct election” of school principals by students’ parents.

    The declared Republican candidate for president also demanded that funds be slashed for any school teaching “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content,” apparently as defined by him.

    Trump called for the creation of a “new credentialing body” that would “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values” while “radicals, zealots and Marxists” (and “pink-haired communists”) would be fired. (Trump has hailed the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021, as “great patriots.”)

    He also called for investigations of school districts that have engaged in race-based discrimination, including against Asian American students. Ironically, Trump himself has repeatedly fired anti-Asian slurs at Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell’s wife, Elaine Chao, his former secretary of transportation.

    The video, posted on Twitter, predictably triggered an uproar on the social media platform.

    Several posters referred to the so-called Trump University (which was never certified as any kind of school) that promised to teach adult students how to be successful businesspeople. Trump ended up paying $25 million to settle claims that students were swindled by the operation.

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  • A new partisan era of American education | CNN Politics

    A new partisan era of American education | CNN Politics

    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he’s protecting kids from indoctrination and political agendas, but the zeal with which he has pushed expansive efforts to remake the Florida education system also represents an effort to influence young minds.

    However you view DeSantis’ motivations, he is getting results.

    The College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees the Advanced Placement program offered across high schools, said it would change a new AP African American studies course that DeSantis said violated a state law to restrict certain lessons about race in schools.

    His state’s Department of Education complained the college-level course mentioned Black queer theory and the idea of intersectionality. Read more about why Florida rejected the course.

    “Governor DeSantis, are you really trying to lead us into an era akin to communism that provides censorship of free thoughts?” the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump said at a press conference on Wednesday in Florida, where he announced he would sue DeSantis on behalf of three high school students if DeSantis would not negotiate with the College Board about the AP course.

    DeSantis recently demanded a list of names of staff and programs related to diversity at public colleges and universities, part of a crackdown on “trendy ideology.”

    Separately, he wants details on students who sought gender dysphoria treatment at state universities.

    DeSantis also wants to remake the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal arts school, as a sort of “Hillsdale of the South,” according to Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz.

    Hillsdale, as USA Today points out, is a private, conservative Christian college in Michigan.

    A new DeSantis appointee to the New College of Florida board of trustees has clashed with board officials over his request to open every meeting with a prayer.

    Republicans across the country are focused on education. They want to guard against anything perceived as pushing equity rather than merit.

    Virginia’s governor sees a conspiracy in how school districts recognize distinction in a scholarship program based on scores on the PSAT.

    The state attorney general has launched a discrimination investigation into whether the Fairfax County Public Schools system – including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a nationally recognized Virginia magnet school – discriminated against students by not informing them of recognition under the National Merit Scholarship program.

    The students qualified for recognition but did not advance in the competition for a scholarship.

    Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, according to CNN’s report, claimed these revelations were a result of the “maniacal focus on equal outcomes for all students at all costs.”

    “The failure of numerous Fairfax County schools to inform students of their national merit awards could serve as a Virginia human rights violation,” the governor’s office said in a previous statement provided to CNN.

    Fairfax County Public Schools superintendent Michelle Reid told CNN the recognitions should have come earlier, but cited a lack of a “division-wide protocol” rather than any kind of mania about equity. Read more about the controversy.

    Texas officials also have their eyes on the state’s colleges and universities, according to CNN’s Eric Bradner.

    “Our public professors are accountable to the taxpayer because you pay their salary,” said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in an inauguration speech. Bradner notes Patrick has pushed to end tenure at Texas public colleges and universities.

    “I don’t want teachers in our colleges saying, ‘America is evil and capitalism is bad and socialism is better,’” he said. “And if that means some of those professors that want to teach that don’t come to Texas, I’m OK with that.” Read Bradner’s full report.

    Meanwhile, in South Dakota, lawmakers are looking to develop a social studies curriculum based on “American exceptionalism,” propelled by the governor’s desire to put more patriotism in the classroom.

    The focus by Republican politicians on issues of race in colleges and the classroom is mirrored by the potential for a court-mandated turnaround in how American students are viewed for admissions.

    The Supreme Court heard arguments in October in two separate cases regarding affirmative action and seems poised to say colleges and universities cannot consider race in admissions.

    Nine states have already outlawed affirmative action for public universities. Voters in California were the first to do so, and the end result was falling enrollment, in particular among Black students at top public schools in the University of California system and at the University of Michigan. Those states both encouraged the Supreme Court not to outlaw affirmative action.

    Florida, which also ended the practice, encouraged the court to throw affirmative action out.


    Education was a major focus for Republicans in the recent election. While it clearly worked for DeSantis in Florida and a year earlier for Youngkin in Virginia, the mixed results for Republicans writ large may call the strategy into question as the 2024 election looms.

    I read on the education news website Chalkbeat about a new study that predicts more politics in the classroom as Americans increasingly sort themselves by political ideology.

    In the working paper, David Houston, an education policy professor at George Mason University, argues that previous debates over desegregation, prayer and sex education in public schools were divisive but not inherently partisan.

    He points to the moderate positions of previous presidents as proof. Then-President George W. Bush worked with then-Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy on education reform in 2001. Former President Barack Obama was praised by Republicans in 2012 for his work on education.

    Those stories feel like they’re from a different universe when today’s Republican governors are looking to root out liberal extremism in schools.

    Houston argues in his study, which is based on survey data, that the US may be on the cusp of a new and divisive era with “heightened partisan animosity across all aspects of education politics.”

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  • Ron DeSantis’ ‘Anti-Woke’ Education Agenda Just Got A Big Boost

    Ron DeSantis’ ‘Anti-Woke’ Education Agenda Just Got A Big Boost

    When Yvette Benarroch, a leader in the conservative Moms for Liberty chapter in Collier County, Florida, addressed the state’s Board of Education meeting on Wednesday, she exuded gratitude.

    “Thank you for carrying out the governor’s parental rights agenda,” she said with a smile.

    The Republican-controlled Florida Legislature passed a law last year saying the board, a division of the state’s Department of Education, would need to approve a training program for public schools in the state. Training would be mandatory for all media specialists, who are in charge of finding and approving educational resources, and for teachers who have books in their classrooms.

    Beyond saying that schools needed to be transparent about why they had selected instructional materials, the law didn’t outline what that training should look like, and state education officials convened a working group — made up largely of parents, educators and school staff, including some people who have previously tried to ban books from schools — to draft the new training.

    The final training, which the Board of Education approved this week, focuses on shielding kids from books about racial justice and books with LGBTQ themes. This made many conservatives happy, and it was a victory for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender who has highlighted so-called parental rights and “anti-wokeness” in his political platform. He has sought to ax workplace diversity initiatives (an effort that was thwarted by a federal judge), has appointed conservatives to the board of a progressive college, pushed right-wing higher education officials to ban discussion of “critical race theory” and has championed the “Don’t Say Gay” law that prohibits public school teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity.

    His success in transforming Florida public schools into breeding grounds for far-right ideas wouldn’t be possible without the help of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit organization that advocates for parents’ rights — a term that has become synonymous with pushing conservative ideology in public schools. Moms for Liberty has been on a book-banning crusade since its inception, and at least two of the working group members on the media specialist training belonged to Florida chapters.

    This shift in Florida has taken place as public libraries and schools have been under attack around the U.S. Right-wing culture warriors have in particular pushed for institutions to ban books with LGBTQ themes, claiming they are inherently pornographic and that school librarians who don’t want to remove them from shelves are trying to abuse or “groom” children.

    “The attacks are more than just curating books that are a little too mature for young kids,” said Stephana Ferrell, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a nonprofit focused on fighting book bans and censorship. “They’re actually targeting the lived experiences of people who aren’t white, Christian, cis or straight.”

    New Guidance Sparks Fear

    The new training is supposed to pertain only to instructional materials. But because school librarians are also media specialists, some districts have begun citing the guidance — even before the final training was approved — as justification for removing books from their libraries.

    “It’s just another way for the far right to say that you can’t trust public schools to deliver an education to your children,” Ferrell said.

    The Florida Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment.

    The new training, which can be found on the Florida Department of Education’s website, includes 40 slides and a 52-minute video. The beginning of the training is dedicated to the subject of pornography and states that no one may provide minors with sexually explicit or other harmful material unless it has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

    Violating the state statute on providing harmful materials would be considered a felony, the training says. But it does not provide examples of works that meet this definition, and the vague language has left some educators worried that they could be found guilty of a crime if they don’t censor books that conservatives claim are harmful.

    “I see that some librarians self-censor because they’re afraid of getting in trouble, and that should not be a consideration as far as choosing books for our students,” Tania Rodriguez, a media specialist in Osceola County, told WFTV 9 in Orlando.

    The training also tells media specialists to “avoid” materials that may lead to student indoctrination. It does not provide a definition of what could be considered indoctrination or include any examples of material that could encourage it.

    Educators must allow anyone living in their district to challenge materials in schools, according to the training. It does not say if this includes library books or applies only to reading material in classrooms. The training also says media specialists should also check to see if a book has been removed or restricted in any other districts, then “carefully consider” whether to approve it for their own.

    “It’s very frustrating because all of this is unfounded,” said Kathleen Daniels, the president of the Florida Association for Media Education. “There is no book in the Florida schools that can be considered porn.”

    ‘13,000 More To Go’

    Many school board meetings across the country have made headlines in the past year for growing heated, with residents pushing back against right-wing school policies and book-banning attempts. But in Florida this week, almost all of the public comments were in support of the new rule.

    If anything, some people were worried the training didn’t go far enough.

    Many speakers took umbrage with the language saying books with sexually explicit language may be used as long as they have educational value.

    “Please tighten the language,” parent Kathleen Murray said, claiming the guidance contained a loophole that could allow students to read books that explain “how to conduct homosexual activities on each other.”

    Bruce Friedman, president of the Florida chapter of No Left Turn in Education, a conservative organization that fights for parental rights, is known in Clay County for repeatedly attempting to get his school district to ban books. He said Wednesday that the new training guidelines would allow him to continue his quest.

    “I have challenged 1,800 books,” he said. “I have 13,000 more to go.”

    Parents can already restrict their children from reading any book they don’t like — in fact, all districts in Florida offer a way for parents to prevent their children from checking out any book they deem inappropriate.

    “We support parents’ rights to have a guiding hand in their children’s education,” Daniels said. “But you can’t dictate what other children can do.”

    Conservatives claim the crackdowns on educational resources are meant to protect kids. But, Daniels said, it does children a disservice to keep them away from certain books and not expose them to different ideas.

    “It’s frustrating,” she said, “because it’s the students who are getting the short end of the stick.”

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  • New York City public schools ban access to AI tool that could help students cheat | CNN Business

    New York City public schools ban access to AI tool that could help students cheat | CNN Business


    New York
    CNN
     — 

    New York City public schools will ban students and teachers from using ChatGPT, a powerful new AI chatbot tool, on the district’s networks and devices, an official confirmed to CNN on Thursday.

    The move comes amid growing concerns that the tool, which generates eerily convincing responses and even essays in response to user prompts, could make it easier for students to cheat on assignments. Some also worry that ChatGPT could be used to spread inaccurate information.

    “Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices,” Jenna Lyle, the deputy press secretary for the New York public schools, said in a statement. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

    Although the chatbot is restricted under the new policy, New York City public schools can request to gain specific access to the tool for AI and tech-related educational purposes.

    Education publication ChalkBeat first reported the news.

    New York City appears to be one of the first major school districts to crack down on ChatGPT, barely a month after the tool first launched. Last month, the Los Angeles Unified School District moved to preemptively block the site on all networks and devices in their system “to protect academic honesty while a risk/benefit assessment is conducted,” a spokesperson for the district told CNN this week.

    While there are genuine concerns about how ChatGPT could be used, it’s unclear how widely adopted it is among students. Other districts, meanwhile, appear to be moving more slowly.

    Peter Feng, the public information officer for the South San Francisco Unified School District, said the district is aware of the potential for its students to use ChatGPT but it has “not yet instituted an outright ban.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the School District of Philadelphia said it has “no knowledge of students using the ChatGPT nor have we received any complaints from principals or teachers.”

    In a statement shared with CNN after publication, a spokesperson for OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab behind the tool, said it made ChatGPT available as a research preview to learn from real-world use. The spokesperson called that step a “critical part of developing and deploying capable, safe AI systems.”

    “We are constantly incorporating feedback and lessons learned,” the spokesperson added.

    The company said it aims to work with educators on ways to help teachers and students benefit from artificial intelligence. “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the spokesperson said.

    OpenAI opened up access to ChatGPT in late November. It is able to provide lengthy, thoughtful and thorough responses to questions and prompts, ranging from factual questions like “Who was the president of the United States in 1955” to more open-ended questions such as “What’s the meaning of life?”

    The tool stunned users, including academics and some in the tech industry. ChatGPT is a large language model trained on a massive trove of information online to create its responses. It comes from the same company behind DALL-E, which generates a seemingly limitless range of images in response to prompts from users.

    ChatGPT went viral just days after its launch. Open AI co-founder Sam Altman, a prominent Silicon Valley investor, said on Twitter in early December that ChatGPT had topped one million users.

    But many educators fear students will use the tool to cheat on assignments. One user, for example, fed ChatGPT an AP English exam question; it responded with a 5 paragraph essay about Wuthering Heights. Another user asked the chat bot to write an essay about the life of William Shakespeare four times; he received a unique version with the same prompt each time.

    Darren Hicks, assistant professor of philosophy at Furman University, previously told CNN it will be harder to prove when a student misuses ChatGPT than with other forms of cheating.

    “In more traditional forms of plagiarism – cheating off the internet, copy pasting stuff – I can go and find additional proof, evidence that I can then bring into a board hearing,” he said. “In this case, there’s nothing out there that I can point to and say, ‘Here’s the material they took.’”

    “It’s really a new form of an old problem where students would pay somebody or get somebody to write their paper for them – say an essay farm or a friend that has taken a course before,” Hicks added. “This is like that only it’s instantaneous and free.”

    Feng, from the South San Francisco Unified School District, told CNN that “some teachers have responded to the rise of AI text generators by using tools of their own to check whether work submitted by students has been plagiarized or generated via AI.”

    Some companies such as Turnitin – a detection tool that thousands of school districts use to scan the internet for signs of plagiarism – are now looking into how its software could detect the usage of AI generated text in student submissions.

    Hicks said teachers will need to rethink assignments so they couldn’t be easily written by the tool. “The bigger issue,” Hicks added, “is going to be administrations who have to figure out how they’re going to adjudicate these kinds of cases.”

    – CNN’s Abby Phillip contributed to this report.

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  • Seattle public schools sue social media companies for allegedly harming students’ mental health | CNN Business

    Seattle public schools sue social media companies for allegedly harming students’ mental health | CNN Business



    CNN
     — 

    Seattle’s public school system on Friday filed a lawsuit against several Big Tech companies alleging their platforms have a negative impact on students’ mental health and claiming that has impeded the ability of its schools “to fulfill its educational mission.”

    The lawsuit was filed against the parent companies of some of the most popular social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.

    The school district, which is the largest in the state of Washington with nearly 50,000 students, alleges in the suit that the companies “have successfully exploited the vulnerable brains of youth” to maximize how much time users spend on their platforms in order to boost profits. The actions taken by the platforms, according to the suit, have “been a substantial factor in causing a youth mental health crisis, which has been marked by higher and higher proportions of youth struggling with anxiety, depression, thoughts of self-harm, and suicidal ideation.”

    The school district said students experiencing anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues perform worse in school, are less likely to attend school, more likely to engage in substance use, and to act out. The district said it continues to take additional steps to train teachers and screen students for mental health symptoms who may need further support but it needs a comprehensive, long-term plan and funding amid the growing mental health crisis today’s “youth are experiencing at [the companies’] hands.”

    The school district is seeking unspecified monetary damages.

    The lawsuit comes more than a year after executives from social media platforms faced tough questions from lawmakers during a series of congressional hearings over how their platforms may direct younger users – and particularly teenage girls – to harmful content, damaging their mental health and body image. While a growing number of families have filed lawsuits against social media companies for their alleged impact on the mental health of their children, it’s unusual to see a school district take such a step.

    In a statement sent to CNN on Monday, Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, said it continues to pour resources into ensuring its young users are safe online. She said the platforms have more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including supervision tools that let parents limit the amount of time their teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences.

    “We’ll continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues,” she said.

    The other companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

    In the past year, a number of prominent social media platforms have introduced more tools and parental control options aimed at better protecting younger users amid mounting scrutiny.

    TikTok, which has faced pressure from lawmaker both for its potential impact on younger users and its ties to China, announced in July that it would introduce new ways to filter out mature or “potentially problematic” videos. The added safeguards allocate a “maturity score” to videos detected as potentially containing mature or complex themes. TikTok also rolled out a tool that aims to help people decide how much time they want to spend on the app.

    Snapchat, meanwhile, has introduced a parent guide and hub aimed at giving guardians more insight into how their teens use the app. That includes more information about who their kids have been talking to over the last week, without divulging the content of those conversations.

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  • A Virginia superintendent is fired after a state report into handling of sexual assaults at school is issued | CNN

    A Virginia superintendent is fired after a state report into handling of sexual assaults at school is issued | CNN



    CNN
     — 

    A Virginia school superintendent was fired Tuesday, a day after a report from the state accused him of lying about a sexual assault involving a student in May 2021.

    The special grand jury report, conducted by the office of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, also criticized former school superintendent Dr. Scott Ziegler and other school officials for mishandling the investigation of an October sexual assault allegedly by the same student that year.

    The superintendent said of the May sexual assault “to my knowledge we don’t have any records of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” at a June 2021 school board meeting, according to the report. At the time, Ziegler said he misunderstood the question.

    The Loudoun County Public School Board voted unanimously to fire Ziegler Tuesday night, but provided no reason for the firing, school spokesman Wayde Byard told CNN.

    “The Special Grand Jury’s report contains important recommendations and information,” Miyares said in a statement to CNN Wednesday. “I’m glad to see that the school board is taking the report seriously, and hope it results in positive change for the LCPS community.”

    CNN has attempted to reach Ziegler for comment. Byard would not comment further regarding allegations into LCPS mishandling of the sexual assault cases outlined in the special grand jury report.

    A teenage student had been arrested for sexual battery and abduction of another student at a Loudoun County public school in October 2021, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office said, according to the report.

    The teenager also allegedly sexually assaulted another student in May 2021, according to the report. In that assault, the grand jury report alleged that the sexual assault occurred in a women’s bathroom while the perpetrator was wearing a skirt.

    “National outrage focused on Loudoun County because the student was labeled as gender fluid, LCPS had recently passed a transgender policy to conform with the Virginia Department of Education’s model policy,” said the report.

    CNN could not find evidence substantiating that the student identified as transgender or gender-fluid.

    The 2021 Virginia Department of Education’s Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools outlined that transgender students should be allowed to use bathrooms and staff should use the personal pronouns that were most consistent with their gender identity.

    In 2022, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the Department of Education replaced the policy with an updated one stating that students should use bathrooms according to his or her sex.

    On his first day in office on January 15, Youngkin passed an executive order authorizing an investigation of Loudoun County Public Schools by the Attorney General. Youngkin had mentioned the sexual assault cases at Loudoun schools several times while campaigning for governor.

    “The special grand jury’s report on the horrific sexual assaults in Loudoun has exposed wrongdoing, prompted disciplinary actions, & provided families with the truth. I will continue to empower parents & push for accountability on behalf of our students,” Youngkin tweeted Wednesday.

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