Derek W. Black
@DerekWBlack
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@UofSCLaw Professor focusing on constitutional law, education rights, school funding, and equal opportunities for disadvantaged students.
Joined October 2013
Derek Black “has written a gem of a book with his latest, Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy. [The] book arrives at the right time… [i]n the age of MAGA and Donald Trump.”
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If states pushing vouchers didn’t have the lowest public school spending rates, you might listen when they say they want to help kids. But when they have all the $$ in the world for vouchers & little for pub schools, it’s hard to stomach. Texas ranks 43.
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Great news from Supreme Court. It leaves in tact a lower court holding that charter schools are state actors and, thus, must comply with the US Constitution. This is devastating news for those who think states can authorize religious charter schools.
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Couldn’t believe this was true, so I read the bill myself. Sure enough, TX Senate just passed a bill to remove Frederick Douglass, MLK, Cesar Chavez, Susan B. Anthony, the Civil Rights Movement and more from the required reading in social studies. 1/x
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The fact that private school voucher programs benefit wealthy families more than needy families is no longer news. But the data is still obscene. New report reveals that the wealthiest 6% in Oklahoma receive 33% of voucher funds.
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AZ taxpayers face a $400 million shortfall for voucher program they were told would only cost $65 million. Gap will be bigger next year. These programs aren’t targeting the needy either. More than half of voucher recipients are already in private school.
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Vouchers supposedly help poor kids but they “chiefly subsidize” kids who already attend private schools & their cost is borne by students “who attend the state’s underfunded public schools.” That’s what you call robbing the poor to help the rich. 1/2
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Harris to address teachers in one of her first campaign events. You might recall that she proposed an average $13,500 raise for teachers in her 2020 campaign, which was the first major teacher salary initiative from a presidential candidate in two decades.
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Twenty of the private white academies formed in NC during desegregation are now drawing state funds through vouchers—$20 million a year. And 83% of families receiving vouchers across the state are white. Hard to say vouchers are expanding access.
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Fearing the venom of the angriest parents, a SC school district removed 97 books. This December, it returned 92 of them to the shelves. This interview reveals just how empty the attacks actually were. And yet we are still recovering from deep wounds.
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Not that better education or fairness were ever the point, but politicians pushing vouchers should take note that Sweden went down this road 30 years ago and just declared its publicly financed private school program a “system failure.”
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Ultra conservative ran against racial & sexual indoctrination, but on school board found there wasn’t any, & socio-emotional materials taught children “how to be a good friend, a good human.” Realized claims had been ploy to lay groundwork for vouchers.
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Beyond me how new school board members can show up at first meeting & fire superintendent & general counsel w/out any justification or forewarning. This is a superintendent who drove buses when there were no drivers & told gen counsel to do same. 1/x
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Ohio investigating a network of Nazi homeschools. Disturbing that it got this far. Just another example why state programs that incentivize families to leave public schools are a terrible idea, but must be regulated if states make that mistake.
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One man’s liberty is another man’s school closure. West Virginia’s voucher program sent 10,000 students to private school last year. One school community lost $1 million. Now the state is closing 24 schools.
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KY trial court declares charter law unconstitutional, finding that charters do not meet the constitutional definition of “common schools” and thus state cannot spend public education funds on them.
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In some unnamed TX school district, a shelf is secretly stocked with banned books. And the students pulling books from that shelf meet at an unnamed coffee shop to discuss them. TX did a disservice to millions, but this group is learning something special.
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This stat says it all: $239,000 of the $279,000 spent on book banners came from a single donor. The democrats who unseated them relied on a local county association, teachers, & individual donations ranging from $50 to $250.
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Touted as the way to give poor families the same school choice as others, this sobering study of AZ vouchers shows they have really just made private school cheaper & more attractive for wealthy families. The long-term structural impact of this social stratification on public.
New research out of @BrookingsInst Arizona vouchers are overwhelmingly going to wealthier families. The graphs in here are devastating.
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“Confidential docs reveal that a group of school privatization groups, each claiming to be separate entities w/ separate agendas, work together…to buy seats in TN legislature for candidates who are willing to vote against traditional public schools.”
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Restoring confederate names to public schools after they had already been removed a few years ago takes real gumption. Coming up with a non-racial reason for doing it requires even more.
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Most insane thing about DeVos telling public schools to share their federal emergency funds w/ private schools is that privates are already eligible for fed emergency funds for small businesses. So not only taking $$ money from poor kids, double dipping.
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To be clear, it doesn’t ban discussions or readings on these people & topics, but it makes them optional. This begs the question of whether it is possible to teach civics w/o discussing the people & movements that expanded the civic body to include more than just white men. 2/2.
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Don’t buy education snake oil. IN said vouchers were for poor students but now families making $220,000 qualify. AZ’s voucher bill has ballooned to $943 million & will create a $319 million budget deficit & 53% of all new education $ is going to vouchers.
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Speechless: Child w/disability was in his lunch spot. SRO bodycam goes blank. When it returns, SRO has screaming, bleeding child pinned on floor, repeatedly saying, “I give up.” SRO: “No, it’s all me! Do you understand me! I should be taking you to jail!”
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The first sighs of relief & exclamations of joy today were that Trump will no longer be president, but for millions there is near equal joy that @Betsydevosed will no longer lead @USDEducation.
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“States cannot continue to ask public schools to work with whatever is left over and then criticize them for doing a poor job. This cycle creates a circular justification for dismantling public education when states should be repairing it.”
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No state has ever written a blank check to ensure an adequate public education for every student, but Arizona did write a blank check for its private school voucher program. Now a perverse set of incentives are draining AZ public education.
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“Give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. Give them a voucher system, they’ll take your public school system…[In multiple states] limited voucher programs… targeted to poorer students have blown into entitlement programs for upper-middle class families.”
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Florida just doubled number of private school vouchers. Hypocrisy of rationale is staggering. Claims it won’t stop until every kid can choose private school, but has never funded public schools at level that would give kids full opportunity there.
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Florida invited a curricular virus to its schools to replace the history materials it was removing. Now the virus is spreading to other states. Fortunately, some teachers are refusing the materials.
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Primavera charter school took 2.2 million in federal payroll protection loans designed for needy businesses. Had $8.8 million in bank this summer—almost twice its annual teacher salary cost, & then gave $10 million to its sole shareholder. 1/x
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Teachers reveal the effects of politically motivated CRT craze on their daily life: from harassment and loss of joy to disillusionment and a lower quality curriculum. Not sure how any honest person could say this agenda produced anything positive for kids.
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Turning fed agents away, superintendent said “I’m still mystified as to how a 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th or 6th-grader would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation. We will not allow abuse, intimidation of our children or our workforce.”
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For those who see only blue & red states, for those who think high courts deal more in politics than the rule of law, you may find refuge in the South Carolina Supreme Court today. It declared the state’s private school voucher law unconstitutional.
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Study shows student essays w/ exact same answer scored differently depending on whether name in story sounded white or black. Controlled studies of school discipline have shown an even larger gap when only difference was literally the name of the child.
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Calling all state superintendents of ed, school districts, & board members. As I read US Secretary of Ed @teachcardona’s newest letter, if states threaten your $ for masking up, you are free to spend billions in COVID aid to cover the gap. 1/x
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But getting rid of DeVos will not ensure quality ed for all. There are funding gaps to fill, anti-discrimination laws to enforce, a schoolhouse-to-jailhouse track to break, a teacher pipeline to rebuild, & schools to diversify. Much of this preceded her. She just made it worse.
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The firing of a teacher who read a book on gender fluidity to her fifth grade class was upheld Thursday by the Georgia Board of Education. She says the book was about inclusiveness. They say it was a prohibited “divisive concept.”
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Florida Students Walk Out of School to Protest DeSantis Education Policies. Reports say 300 schools were involved. I had hard a hard time just getting friends to the movie theater before the previews ended. These kids have taken it to another level.
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Rather than using bully pulpit, special sessions, & veto power to cram public ed attacks down legislative throats, Governor Evers used his veto power to shore up funding streams for public education. Stands out in an era of public ed bashing governors.
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Vouchers aren’t about freedom. They are about disunion. “If we are to continue as 1 society, we must have 1 publicly funded educational system, not 1,000s of other types similarly funded. After all, this nation’s motto is e pluribus unum – from many, one.”
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Reporter embedded in Moms for Liberty sheds scary light onto their xenophobia, anti-civic values, and anti-public education stance. Those same things, however, mean they are not the most powerful moms in America, just the loudest and most-misguided. 1/x
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In a landslide vote, Vermont Senate rejects Governor’s pro-charter nominee for state superintendent of education—the first rejection of any cabinet member in a long time.
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In Amite County, Mississippi, 84% of the 900 students in public school are students of color, while 96% of the private school students are white. Maybe most disturbing is that whites still run the public schools—from board members to principals.
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Most disturbing thing about this Gulf of America business is speed w/ which OK’s state superintendent of ed changed history standards to include the term. Would expect super to be minding schools, not waiting on exec orders that don’t even apply to him. /1
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SC teacher thrown into national spotlight when district punished her for teaching Ta-Nahesi Coates book. Rather than give up, she taught it again this year, but this time alongside an author w/ a different perspective. I’d call that great teaching.
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Half of teachers are considering quitting. That stat has been high for at least a decade. But if more than a small % actually quit, we’d have a catastrophe. One easy thing that would help: “Take stuff off teachers’ plates,” busy work in particular. 1/x
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@mccormickforgov is just the 2nd politician I have ever formally endorsed. I respect her not for a particular policy but bc when she was a republican she stood for the rule of law—long before the rest of us realized just how important that was.
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Teaching profession pipeline fixes have backfired. Study finds removing entry barriers lowered all teachers’ salaries over past 20 years: devalued teachers w/ credentials, spurred attrition & fueled cycles of shortage & surplus that stagnated wages. 1/x
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Judge strikes down Florida’s Stop Woke Education law. Calls it “positively dystopian” and finds it violates free speech and due-process rights on college campuses.
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When schools wouldn’t desegregate, the Office for Civil Rights made them. When they ignored sexual harassment, OCR made them look. When they shut doors to students w/ disabilities, OCR opened them. Trump just closed OCR’s regional offices. /x
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Fed court orders books put back on shelves. “Although libraries are afforded great discretion” in selecting books, “the First Amendment prohibits the removal of books from libraries based on either viewpoint or content discrimination.” Schools take note.
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Hard to take seriously TX legislators’ claims of caring about students. When they receive reports on teacher shortages & districts struggling to keep the lights on, they do nothing. When they hear rumors of kids role playing animals, they jump to action.
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This is the day every young voter should remember. For several years running, young people said they needed mental health counselors more than anything—while legislators fawned over vouchers. Washington finally listened in 2022. Trump just cut the program.
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In 2021, TN’s budget office found that, under TN’s own formulas, it had been underfunding its HBCUs for decades. US Department of Ed did its own digging on the rest of the South & just sent out letters calling on them to make up billions in lost funding.
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Victim of anti-CRT furor was never going to be CRT itself; it was going to be faith in our schools & conversations about race. What I didn’t appreciate was the personal toll this would take on teachers. Like I said before, they are playing w/ fire. 1/x
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If new board has legitimate reason for its action, citizens deserve to hear it. The fact that so many were shocked is telling in and of itself. If they can’t offer one, I worry about the irreparable damage they may have just done. 3/3.
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Georgia’s perversely self-fulfilling prophecy: after underfunding public schools for years (spending less than its poorer neighbor SC), it claims it needs vouchers b/c its public schools are inadequate. To make matters worse, $ is coming from public ed.
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New Indiana bill would dissolve public schools in any district where 51% of students attend a private school, charter, or homeschool. Remaining district schools would become charters. I see 101 constitutional, policy, & financial problems.
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Michigan charter schools received $1.4 billion in funding last year. How they spent it is a mystery, even to state officials overseeing them. Documents have so few details can’t tell how much money goes toward education & how much companies keep as profit.
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TX school suspends Black student for his hairstyle again. Looks like he won’t get an education until a court steps in. Sadly reminds me of black students in Virginia in 60s who missed 2yrs of school rather than accept a segregated private school voucher.
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The AP—the gateway to college credit for high school classes—just poured water on the hysterics around CRT and related matters: “if a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course.” 1/2
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AZ’s private school vouchers are what Brokow used to call “The Fleecing of America.” Now tuition hikes far outpacing inflation in half of schools are business as usual, padding profits, & doing less & less to expand access.
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We don’t have a “teacher shortage.” We have decade long #WarOnTeachers, underfunded schools & false reform. Result is classroom conditions that run off qualified & certified teachers. States’ failures, not teacher shortage, is problem. @palan57
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Riddle me this: Why is it that teacher shortages are not uniform across the United States? Why is it that the Southeast has a teacher vacancy rate three or more times that of the Northeast?
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Plaintiffs file federal lawsuit, alleging that Arkansas’s anti-indoctrination law and delisting AP African American Studies violates their First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
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150 yrs ago, state constitutional conventions banned aid to private schools bc they worried religious & other factions would hound legislators for $ & public ed—vital to democracy—wouldn’t get off the ground. Their nightmare—slightly altered—is upon us.
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DeSantis’s Department of Ed wanted to give $4 million of a small school district’s $8.5 annual million budget to a charter school company—to consult while district was under state control. Now fed grand jury is investigating irregularities in bid process.
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KY Supreme Court declares neo-voucher for private schools unconstitutional. This one is special. Whereas other courts have allowed states to skirt prohibitions on funding private schools through convoluted tax schemes, KY court sees right through it.
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@ProudTwinkie says school is “investigating” his presentation on LGBTQ history. Chilling or censoring his speech bc they don’t like it violates his free speech rights. Allowing other students to harass him would violate his Title IX rights. 1/2
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While candidates are attuned to issues long plaguing SC’s schools, @ewarren plan “is a cut above the rest. w/ potential to break vicious cycle of underfunded & segregated schools.” Stakes couldn’t be higher for state’s half-million poor kids.”
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Five years in & three special sessions this year alone, rural republicans still voting against vouchers bc they “pose a serious threat to the long-term financial health” of their schools “w/o providing a meaningful benefit to [their] constituents.” 1/
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Illinois law requires prisons to offer civics courses, which focus on voting and voting history. A teacher says he was fired for trying to teach students that literacy tests during the Jim Crow era were an attempt to suppress the Black vote.
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SC Supreme Court just declared Governor’s private voucher program unconstitutional! As has been the case since 1868, our constitution says public funds are for public schools—end of story. Add this to @BetsyDeVosED’s list of failed schemes.
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I have known the General Counsel, Tiffany Richardson, for a decade. She is a rare one who also has a phd in education & has practiced ed law since the day she graduated. So she knows all sides of the legal issues and is someone a superintendent can trust. 2/x.
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Six weeks ago, I said @BetsyDeVosED was about to meet her match in this case. On Friday, the federal court blocked her plan to force public schools to spend their federal coronavirus aid on private schools.
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Just as the president is bound by the constitution, so too is Oklahoma state superintendent bound by the federal & state constitutions. OK constitution obligates him to care for & uphold public schools. Hard to see recent events as anything but violation.
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@BetsyDeVosED says it’s not her job to track school districts' reopening plans or their coronavirus cases. Strange, b/c I distinctly recall her threatening to terminate their funding if they didn’t open.
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New Jersey gets thrown under the bus a lot but deserves huge credit for this one. I’ve called, as a democratic imperative, for schools to teach critical media literacy for four years. NJ is first state to mandate it—and in kindergarten. 1//x
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After winning $1 million prize, Indian teacher visits US. Is shocked by lack of respect for teachers at the federal, state, & local level. In US, parents can come in classroom & say, “Hey, don’t teach my kids these things. I don’t like these things.”1/2
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We are already 13yrs in but governor @RoyCooperNC is 1st top official to call it what it is. Declares public ed in a “state of emergency.” Says GOP will “starve public ed” & “drops an atomic bomb on public education” w/ tax cuts & vouchers. 1/
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Anti-LGBTQ & Anti-CRT laws have severely chilled speech & that was ultimately the downfall of Iowa’s law. Judge found its unconstitutional breadth banned books on AP exams & “even books designed to help students avoid being victimized by sexual assault.”
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How can Heritage Foundation devise a plan to dismantle public education when public ed’s heritage dates to a 1785 federal founding document—a year before the Constitution was penned? Goal isn’t heritage, tradition, or rule of law, but prerogative & power.
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AZ bill would literally force kids to pledge allegiance to the flag, the one very specific thing the Supreme Court held schools cannot do. Strange bill coming from those throwing around accusations of indoctrination for the past two years. 1/x
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Florida crosses yet another threshold. Banning materials is one (bad) thing. Replacing them w/ unaccredited propaganda is another. My heart goes out to all FL’s public school families, whose pillar of democracy has devolved into a political platform. 1/
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And then there were two. Maine’s Education Chief joins Indiana’s in defying DeVos directive to share big chunk of public schools’ federal emergency funds w/ private schools. In short, Maine will follow the CARES Act, not DeVos.
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The geniuses banning books inadvertently offer a pre-made reading list & gave students who would otherwise probably be doing something other than reading a reason to activate & form groups. Though I object to book bans, I guess we can say job well done.
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As DeSantis doubled down w/ statement that some enslaved people “parlayed” the skills they picked up, I am wondering if anyone in the admin knows that there were a lot of skills that enslaved people taught whites, not the other way around. 1/
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The list of ways FL has likely violated students’ & teachers’ constitutional & statutory rights recently is long but this one doesn’t require an attorney to understand. Equal Access Act of 1984 explicitly guarantees everyone use of school facilities. 1/x
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For two decades, favorable state law and a natural disaster allowed charter schools to take over New Orleans. By 2019, there were no traditional public schools left. In August, the city opened its first new traditional public school since before Katrina.
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Been called naive on this platform before. Normally take it as compliment of my civility, but I really feel naive today. Shocked by stories defending FL slavery “benefit” standard & attacking Harris. As southerner, let me set one thing straight… 1/x
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In “predominately white states, there’s almost no privatization. But [in] the Southeast & Southwest, privatization is off the charts. It is tapping into” white fears that we’re going to tax them & “spend it on public schools for African American kids.”
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Stop blaming schools; Fund them! “Reopening plans show that while some wealthier districts are bankrolling expensive changes to buildings & staff to safeguard against coronavirus, [poor] districts are planning to make the most of low-budget precautions.”
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Bipartisan support for public education is still alive: “6 in 10 Americans say they will support political candidates who vow to increase public school funding.” And charter schools have eroded even among Republicans, w/ only 1 in 3 wanting more charters.
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After a decade of what I believe was a blatant violation of the Colorado Constitution’s school funding rules, the state just might fully fund schools for the first time in a decade. And would be proof that 49 other states can do better.
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TX Governor’s plan to put the nail in the coffin of public education: cut the main source of public school funding & expand vouchers. And this is in a state that already underfunds ed. One can only hope rural districts rebel like they did in 2018.
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Governor Abbott still trying to bully TX House into vouchers well after the bill failed. Now he’s randomly vetoing bills from republicans who are anti-voucher. If only governors would press that hard for public schools, we might shore up our democracy.
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For the first time in my life (and unexpectedly), a federal court of appeals has breathed life into a federal fundamental right to education. OMG—and that is also the first time I’ve used that abbreviation in my life.
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The school choice movement is on the verge of devouring itself. B/c it wants it all—the public schools, the charter schools, the vouchers, the tax credits & religion—they leave less & less space for those in the middle who tolerate their special pleas. 1/
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Over 100 chaplains urge TX school boards to not replace counselors w/ chaplains. “As trained chaplains, we are not qualified for the duties envisioned [for school counselors]. We cooperate with mental health counselors—we do not compete with them.”
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