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      Republicans give $101m to sports arena as myriad needs loom over Louisiana

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      Louisiana lawmakers have faced backlash for using some of their spring legislative session’s final moments not to address some of their state’s myriad needs – but instead to grant the multimillion-dollar wish of the state flagship university’s championship-winning women’s basketball coach.Poverty, poor education and insufficient healthcare have loomed over Louisiana for decades and have earned the state the country’s lowest rankings in each category, according to the US News and World Report. Louisiana ranks 50th – dead last – in crime and economy, 49th in infrastructure and 46th in education when compared to the rest of the nation, the report says.However, despite these jarring numbers, the budget approved by the Republican-dominated state legislature slated $101m to a foundation which financially supports Louisiana State University athletics – and it was earmarked to renovate the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, which is best known these days for hosting the women’s basketball team’s home games.The last-minute line funding renovations at the facility nicknamed the PMAC came at the request of Kim Mulkey, the women’s basketball team’s head coach who is known for her flamboyant fashion sense as well as her outspokenness about the venue’s need for repairs. But giving fees and self-generated revenue from the state to the private foundation in question would also be illegal, Louisiana’s Democratic governor John Bel Edwards has recently said.The commissioner of admission, Jay Dardenne, said in an interview that the PMAC could only receive such abundant funds – including self-generated revenue and non-cash state funding – if it was labeled as a university project in the budget.While that blocks the Tiger Athletic Foundation from receiving the full amount, the group is still in line to receive $50m, a substantial amount which could otherwise begin making a dent in Louisiana’s myriad other pressing needs, said former LSU faculty senate president Kevin Cope.“Such a sluicing of funds into a structure that serves primarily as a basketball court demonstrates that the leaders of our state grant a higher priority to chasing balls up and down a wooden court than to the improvement of its citizens,” Cope said.Edwards told the Louisiana Illuminator that he kept the illegal funding in the bill so that the foundation would still have money for project planning.Mulkey openly criticized the condition of the PMAC at a local meeting in April in the state’s capital of Baton Rouge, shortly after her players won the first national crown in their program’s history.“It’s time,” Mulkey declared. “That thing’s 48-years-old. It’s dangerous in there. Don’t grab a rail without holding onto somebody.”As the crowd broke out into laughter, Mulkey added, “I can say all of this now. I’ve won the national championship.”But Edwards was disinterested in Mulkey’s request. He said that his main priority for this year’s capital budget is to provide funding for a new LSU library due to the substandard status of the campus’s 68-year-old library.Robert Mann – an LSU professor, author, and political historian who frequently criticizes Louisiana’s government – said that school officials and advocates have spent years pleading for a new library. Despite those pleas, lawmakers allotted only a few million in project planning for a new library.However, lawmakers quickly delivered on Mulkey’s request for arena improvements, even though the university itself did not ask for PMAC funding.“If that disgraceful episode doesn’t convince people that our state’s priorities are out of whack, I don’t know what will,” Mann said.Stuart Bishop, the conservative state representative who authored the bill, assured that providing the PMAC tens of millions in renovation funds was not his main priority for the Louisiana budget. He said for years his top priorities for the state are improving water ports, airports, bridges and roads. But he included funding for the PMAC after multiple requests from colleagues.“It was a matter of, as it was explained to me, public safety for the PMAC, as well as having another venue on campus or in” the state’s capital, Baton Rouge, Bishop said.The Republican state representative Tanner Magee added that “women athletes deserve to know that we care just about them as we do” male athletes, including the school’s popular football team. A spokesperson for the athletic department – which generated nearly $200m in revenue last year – said helping the school’s sports teams carries a cultural and promotional benefit measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars.Edwards could veto the amount of money set aside for the PMAC. But Bishop and Magee were confident he’d avoid resorting to that measure, saying money for the PMAC doesn’t rule out eventual improvements to the library.“In a perfect world, in 10 years, we’re standing with a new library and a new event center for LSU,” Magee said. More

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      ‘There won’t be libraries left’: how a Florida county became the book ban heartland of the US

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      “Why do you need to know how to masturbate when you still got skid marks in your underwear?” asks Tia Bess, the newly appointed national director of outreach for the conservative advocacy group Moms for Liberty.Inside a squat Pentecostal church on a country road in Clay Hill, Florida, Bess flips through a large illustrated handbook titled It’s Perfectly Normal, marketed to kids ages 10 and up, intended as a primer about the onset of puberty.“This is not something you want your children to see if they are not developmentally ready,” she says, pointing at a rudimentary sketch of young adults masturbating. Bess sports a bright blue T-shirt with a Moms for Liberty logo plastered on the front, touting an organization which she refers to as an army of “joyful warriors” advocating for parental rights, and which the Southern Poverty Law Center considers a rightwing extremist group.Advancing the analogy, Bess pulls a copy of Hustler magazine from her bag, along with a copy of Gender Queer, the graphic novel by Maia Kobabe that PEN America ranks as the most banned book in the country.“Show me the difference,” she says, holding the two illustrated pages side by side.Both pages depict oral sex. Though, in the case of Gender Queer, it’s fairly obvious that the message is one of confusion and insecurity about sexuality, which contrasts with the superficially erotic scene in Hustler.Bess thinks these distinctions are too subtle for teenagers to understand. She wants to see Gender Queer and many other titles removed from shelves of public school libraries in her home district of Clay county, a rural, predominantly conservative swath of north-east Florida. And she’s had tremendous success.Clay county has become a flashpoint in the state of Florida on the topic of book challenges. According to recent tallies, more than 175 books have been permanently removed from its public school libraries – a number which ranks among the highest of any county in the US – and hundreds more remain unavailable to students due to a policy unique to the county, requiring that books are pulled from shelves as soon as a challenge form is filed with the school district. Conservative activists from two organizations have seized on that policy, often filing multiple challenge forms at a time, which inundates the systems and committees that process the claims.“The biggest issue facing Clay county right now is the backlog of challenges and the huge political divide that’s driving it. No other county is dealing with a similar problem,” says Jen Cousins, co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project (FFTRP) and a mother of four. “They’re creating fake outrage over what’s available in libraries.”Last year, Bess moved her family from Jacksonville to Clay county due to a “less restrictive” political and cultural climate. She’s since embedded herself locally in the fight for book removal, filing challenge forms, holding forth in school board meetings on the dangers of books like Gender Queer (which has since been removed from public school collections) by drawing salacious parallels with flatly pornographic material, and recording hammy YouTube videos reading selections from books that she deems inappropriate for middle- and high-school students.In her official capacity at Moms for Liberty, she advises other parents in Clay county on how to do the same. She is also a key player in advancing the mandate on a national level – going city to city, state to state, speaking at chapter meetings and conventions, recruiting new members and encouraging members to run for school board seats.“Empower and educate parents – that’s what we want to do,” says Bess. “And holding elected officials accountable for the decisions they’re making.”Bess first rose to prominence as a volunteer at Moms for Liberty in the spring of 2021, when she successfully sued Jacksonville’s school district for defying Governor Ron DeSantis’s anti-masking mandate on behalf of her then three-year-old son, who has autism and sensory issues. As a Black woman from downtown Jacksonville, who spent a portion of her teenage years homeless, she complicates the stereotype of Moms for Liberty members as a tidy bloc of predominantly white suburban housewives.“A lot of people in the Black community are afraid to speak up,” she says. “And I just didn’t care about that. It wasn’t about me or my feelings.”Despite the express mission of parental empowerment, it’s rare that book challenge forms are filed by individual parents. Instead, nearly all of the challenges in Clay county have been filed by activists affiliated with the same two organizations: Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess also chalks this up to fear over repercussions and a lack of knowledge about school board politics and procedures.“Parents are afraid. Even my own mother still has the mentality of a Black woman born in the 40s. There’s still that fear and intimidation,” she says. “The average person doesn’t know these books are out there. But if they knew how to challenge them, they would. And that’s my job.”Founded in central Florida in 2021, Moms for Liberty began as a critical mass of parents troubled by their school district’s Covid-19 mask mandates. With the help of well-organized campaigns of outrage (both in person and online) it has since spread rapidly, growing to 285 chapters in 45 states, with roughly 120,000 members, in two years.The group’s national profile has been built on combating what it deems the ills of society: gender ideology, critical race theory and the “sexualization” of children. For those critical of the group, these interpretations often translate to homophobia, racism and delusions of rampant pedophilia.Moms for Liberty purports to be a grassroots organization, but has attracted donations from political action committees such as Conservatives for Good Government. It also has longstanding connections to the Republican party. The founding mothers are Tina Descovich and Tiffany Justice, both former school board members from central Florida. The third founder is Bridget Ziegler. (She has since stepped back from her leadership role in the group, but continues to serve as chair of the Sarasota county school board.) She is married to Christian Ziegler, chair of the Florida Republican party. The pair are close friends with Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who recently appointed Bridget Ziegler to the board overseeing Disney World’s district after stripping the corporation of its power to self-govern.Ziegler’s advocacy for the “Parents’ Bill of Rights” laid the groundwork for last year’s Parental Rights in Education Act, better known by the “don’t say gay” moniker. She appeared behind DeSantis at the bill’s signing last year.Among its most controversial sections, the bill prohibits classroom discussions of gender identity or sexual orientation from kindergarten to third grade. An update to that legislation, HB 1069, was passed in the spring of this year, and went into effect on 1 July and extends those same prohibitions from third to 12th grade.Additionally, the new law emboldens book challenges by forcing all districts in Florida to adopt policies that were already in effect in Clay county, such as removing books from shelves five days after a challenge form has been filed, allowing parents to appeal a school district’s decision to return books to shelves, or refile the same challenge form repeatedly, and providing parents a path to limit their children’s access to public school libraries.“It’s effectively a ban when you pull books out of circulation,” says Gargi Chipalkatti, a mother of two children in Clay county public schools. “I want my kids to have access to any book they want to read. I didn’t like the fact that somebody else was trying to dictate that.”Chipalkatti served as a volunteer on Clay county’s book review committee last school year, which rules on whether or not challenged books should be returned to shelves. “It boggles my mind that you had a couple of organizations flooding the system and holding everybody hostage.”All of this is particularly troubling for media specialists, who oversee library collections in public schools, and bear the full weight of the issue.Julie Miller, who serves as chair of the Clay county education association media specialist committee, is in charge of selecting and purchasing books for a high school library in Clay county. Her husband, Joel Miller, is likewise a career educator, and teaches media studies at a rival high school.“Prior to 2021, we’d gone over 20 years without a single challenge,” Julie Miller says. Midway through this summer, 706 books have been officially challenged, according to data provided by FFTRP. Many of the titles currently receiving negative attention have been in libraries for decades. Such is the case for Push by Sapphire, and Lucky by Alice Sebold, both of which contain granular depictions of rape. A handful of outliers, like those furnished by Tia Bess, have questionable illustrations and advice, which the Millers make no concessions for.“It all comes down to community standards,” Joel Miller says. “Portland, Oregon, may feel differently, but there’s probably no place for books like that in Orange Park, Florida.”The Millers note that a large percentage of challenges are for books that have LGBTQ+ themes, such as All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M Johnson. And yet more are challenged on the grounds of being critical race theory-adjacent and teaching “alternative history”, including canonical novels such as Native Son, Beloved and the anodyne children’s book Before She Was Harriet (which has since been returned to library shelves).“There are a few inappropriate books on that challenge list,” says Chipalkatti. “But 99.9% of those are really good books.”As is the case across the country, judging these books as roundly unsuitable for students and demanding their removal is a minority opinion. And Julie Miller feels that librarians are being unfairly maligned.“They’re calling her a groomer, a pornography peddler,” Joel Miller says.She has become the target of one conservative activist’s ire in particular – a former resident of New York named Bruce Friedman. Like Tia Bess, Friedman moved to Clay county in 2021 for political reasons. He now serves as the Florida chapter president of No Left Turn in Education, a rightwing advocacy group allied with Moms for Liberty.Last year, Friedman made headlines for having his microphone cut off at a school board meeting while attempting to read a rape scene from Alice Sebold’s memoir Lucky. At a Florida department of education meeting several months later, Friedman said he’d made a list of books in Clay county public school libraries that had “concerning content”, including “porn, critical race theory, social-emotional learning [and] fluid gender”.He has since become one of the most prolific book challengers in the country. A spreadsheet on his website compiles 4,623 titles that he labeled as problematic and intends to challenge. (Friedman declined to comment for this story.)In dozens of challenge forms provided by FFTRP, Friedman mentions Julie Miller by name – along with comments that the books will “DAMAGE SOULS”, declaring his need to “PROTECT CHILDREN”. In a school board meeting earlier this year, Friedman shared an anecdote about a friend of his son’s reading a library book aloud in his high school cafeteria that contained “steamy, erotic” scenes. Friedman said the experience “stole his son’s innocence”, but failed to provide the title of the book.Dubious, Julie Miller immediately requested an investigation. “I wanted to know if there was a book like that in my library so I could deal with it. If not, I wanted my name to be cleared,” she says.She found no record of any book that had been recently checked out matching Friedman’s description.The term “pornography” is the most bandied by Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education. Bess warns that these books violate statutes. “There’s a clear definition,” she says, citing Florida statute 847.012. “All materials must be free of pornography, the depiction of erotic behavior or pictures intended to cause excitement.”The caveat is statute 847.001, which clarifies that material can only be deemed pornographic if, “Taken as a whole, [it] is without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors,” making the question of age-appropriateness difficult to parse. If the state holds to the most conservative possible reading of that statute, then texts like the Bible, Shakespeare and countless others would have to be taken off shelves as well. (Since then, Shakespeare has actually come under scrutiny.)“You have to consider context. And if you don’t do that there are not going to be libraries left,” says Chipalkatti.Bess says that the chair of Clay county’s Moms for Liberty chapter introduced the idea of a rubric, like the one recently proposed in Texas, to determine at what age certain themes and language are permissible. “But there hasn’t been much feedback on it yet,” Bess says. “That’s something that I’m really going to push for. Where’s the parental advisory label for books?”Another proposed solution was introduced last school year, when the district advertised a new “individualized school library access plan”, which allows parents to limit what books their kids can borrow or ban library access outright. “What more could you want? It blows my mind as to why that’s not sufficient for [the activists],” Joel Miller says.However, out of 38,265 students enrolled in Clay county schools, only four parents signed up to limit or oversee their children’s library access. In nearby Citrus county, the school district introduced an “opt-in” access plan, where students are defaulted to having no library access until the form has been turned in to school officials by a parent. There were roughly 4,000 students who couldn’t use their school library last school year due to “parent error or lack of engagement”, according to FFTRP. Citrus county has yet to amend this policy.The future of public school libraries in Florida seems to be imperiled in the debate over book challenges. Last year, Julie Miller purchased chairs instead of new books. And she has not been cleared to make any acquisitions for the approaching school year either. DeSantis’s new law does away with earmark percentages of school district funding for specific departments, allowing school boards to curtail or redirect library funds to different categories if they so choose.All of this suggests it might be easier to defund libraries and winnow collections rather than venture the social and political risks associated with fighting a culture war with a governor who’s currently using the state legislature as his personal armory.In a Clay county school board workshop meeting from last month, the chief academic officer Roger Dailey seemed to cast aspersions on the very utility of libraries, referring to them as glorified copy rooms, and admitting that his own teenage children have never checked a book out of their high school library because they “consume their literature in different formats, most of it digitally on their devices”, he says.“I don’t even know if my own sons know where the library is in their school.” More

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      Six Arkansas schools to offer African American AP course despite restrictions

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      The six Arkansas schools that planned to offer an Advanced Placement (AP) course on African American studies say they will continue to do so despite state officials saying the class will not count toward a student’s graduation credit.The North Little Rock and Jacksonville North Pulaski school districts and eStem charter schools said on Thursday they would offer the course as a “local elective” despite the Arkansas education department saying it is not considered a state-approved course. They join two other school districts that have said they will continue offering the class.Education officials have said the class could not be part of the state’s advanced placement course offerings because it is still a pilot program and has not been vetted by the state yet to determine whether it complies with a law placing restrictions on how race is taught in the classroom.The state, however, has said that schools can still offer the course and it can count toward a student’s grade-point average.“District leaders believe that the AP African American Studies course will be a valuable addition to the district’s curriculum, and will help our young people understand and appreciate the rich diversity of our society,” the Jacksonville North Pulaski superintendent, Jeremy S Owoh, said in a statement.Arkansas and other Republican-led states have placed restrictions on how race is taught in the classroom, including prohibitions on critical race theory.The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, earlier this year blocked high schools in his state from teaching the AP African American studies course.The Little Rock school district on Wednesday said it planned to continue teaching the course at Central high, site of the historic 1957 racial desegregation crisis. Central is one of six schools in the state that had been slated to offer the course this year. The Jonesboro school district told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette it also planned to continue offering the course.The website of the College Board, the non-profit organization which oversees AP courses, describes the course as interdisciplinary, touching on literature, arts, humanities, political science, geography and science. The pilot program debuted last school year at 60 schools across the country, and it was set to expand to more this year.The Little Rock school district has said it will ensure students in the class don’t have to pay the AP exam fee, and eStem said it will cover the exam cost. Because it is not state approved, Arkansas will not pay for the AP exam like it does other advanced placement courses. North Little Rock has said it is considering options to cover the costs of the exam.In addition, eStem said students who pass the course and take the exam will be awarded a medal of historical pursuit and valor that can be worn as part of graduation regalia.The state told districts last week that the course would not count toward graduation credit, days before the start of school for most students. The state has said students could still earn high school graduation credit through an African American history course the state offers, though it is not advanced placement. More

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      Outrage as Arkansas tells high schools to drop AP African American course

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      Advocacy groups are outraged after the Arkansas department of education warned state high schools not to offer an advanced placement course on African American history.The admonition from Arkansas education officials is the latest example of conservative lawmakers limiting education on racial history, sexual orientation and other topics they label as “indoctrination”.The Arkansas Education Association (AEA), a professional organization of educators in the state, said the latest decision is of “grave concern” to its members and other citizens worried about “the abandonment of teaching African American history and culture”.“Having this course pulled out from under our students at this late juncture is just another marginalizing move that has already played out in other states,” said a statement from AEA president April Reisma, which was shared with the Guardian.In a statement to the Guardian, NAACP president and chief executive officer Derrick Johnson called the decision “abhorrent” and an “attempt to strip high school students of an opportunity to get a jumpstart on their college degree”.“Let’s be clear – the continued, state-level attacks on Black history are undemocratic and regressive,” Johnson said. “The sad reality is that these politicians are determined to neglect our nation’s youth in service of their own political agendas.”On Monday, the first day of the 2023-2024 school year for many Arkansas public schools, the state education department announced that it would not be granting credit for the AP African American history class, the Arkansas Times reported.The official announcement came after department officials called educators on Friday, alerting them that the AP course would not be recognized for college credit in the same manner that similar courses on other topics are.The department said that the course may violate state’s Literacy, Empowerment, Accountability, Networking and Safety (Learns) Act, a new law passed this spring under Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee, a Republican and former White House press secretary during Donald Trump’s presidency.The Learns Act limits curriculum on a range of topics including gender, sexual orientation and subjects that would “indoctrinate students with ideologies, such as Critical Race Theory”.“Arkansas law contains provisions regarding prohibited topics. Without clarity, we cannot approve a pilot that may unintentionally put a teacher at risk of violating [state] law,” the department said in a statement about the pulled course to the Arkansas Times.Officials also announced that the state would not be covering the cost of the end-of-year exam on the course that allows high school students to earn college credit.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe cost of the credit qualifying exam is usually covered for other AP courses.Two high schools already offered a pilot version of the course last year, Axios reported. Six schools were scheduled to offer the course this year, including Little Rock’s Central high school, the epicenter of forced desegregation in 1957, NBC News reported.The latest challenge to the AP course comes after Florida’s department of education rejected the class in January.Florida’s department of education under Governor Ron DeSantis officially banned the course from that state’s high schools in January.In a letter to the College Board, the nonprofit organization that oversees AP courses and other university readiness exams, the Florida education department wrote that the course violated state law and “lacked educational value”. More

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      Oklahoma sued for funding US’s first ‘state-sponsored’ religious charter school

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      The American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of civil organizations have filed a lawsuit to stop the Oklahoma state government from funding the US’s first religious public charter school, in turn setting up a fierce debate surrounding religious liberties.On Monday, the ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Education Law Center and Freedom From Religion Foundation filed a lawsuit on behalf of nearly a dozen plaintiffs including parents, education activists and faith leaders seeking to stop Oklahoma from sponsoring and funding St Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School.The lawsuit, which names the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, the state education department, the state superintendent of public instruction and St Isidore as defendants, argues that the SVCSB violated the state constitution, the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, and the board’s own regulations when it voted 3-2 in June to approve St Isidore’s charter-school sponsorship application.Charter schools in the US are publicly funded but independently run. If opened next year, St Isidore will join two dozen charter schools in Oklahoma.According to the lawsuit, St Isidore refused to agree to comply with legal requirements applicable to state charter schools, including prohibitions against discrimination. It states that St Isidore will in fact “discriminate in admissions, discipline, and employment based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other protected characteristics”.The lawsuit argues that the online public school “asserts a right to discriminate against students on the basis of disability”, and that its application failed to comply with the board’s regulations that require the school to “demonstrate that it would provide adequate services to students with disabilities”.The suit also alleges that St Isidore will violate board regulations that require a charter school to be independent of its educational management organization, as the school will hire the department of Catholic education of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City as its educational management organization. The school will also be overseen by the Diocese of Tulsa.Additionally, the lawsuit argues that in violation of the state constitution and the Charters Schools Act, St Isidore will “provide a religious education and indoctrinate its students in Catholic religious beliefs,” adding that its application states that the school “will be a place…of evangelization” that “participates in the evangelizing mission of the Church”.St Isidore, which plans to open in August 2024, describes itself as a school that puts “the church at the service of the community in the realm of education” and that it envisions a learning opportunity for “all students whose parents desire a quality Catholic education for their child”.Speaking to the Guardian, Erin Brewer, the vice-chair of the Oklahoma parent legislative action committee, a nonprofit statewide organization and the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, condemned what she called “state-sponsored religion”.“Our kids have the right to religious freedom and for the state to sponsor religious education and indoctrination, I think it is wrong,” said Brewer.“I think it’s a misunderstanding of what religious freedom means. Religious freedom is an individual right. There’s nothing preventing the Catholic Archdiocese in Oklahoma City from operating as a school … but to request the government to fund that religion … that is not religious freedom because now the government is compelling religion upon students. That is a violation of those students’ rights as well as of the rights of taxpayers who may or may not agree with those religious tenets,” she added.Other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Krystal Bonsall, a parent of a public school student who has disabilities that require speech and occupational therapy, as well as Michele Medley, a parent of three children, two of whom are autistic and one of whom is part of the LGBTQ community.Bonsall, whose child requires the accompaniment of a paraprofessional in class, released a statement saying, “Our public tax dollars should not be sent to a religious school that asserts a right to discriminate against students with disabilities. St Isidore should not be allowed to divert scarce resources away from public schools that are open to all children regardless of ability, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or religion.”Medley echoed similar sentiments, saying: “As the mother of two children on the autism spectrum, I have firsthand experience with private religious schools’ unwillingness to accept and meet the educational needs of students with autism and other developmental disabilities.”“I am also aware of the possible religious discrimination against LGBTQIA+ students that could harm my child and others. I don’t want my tax dollars to fund a charter school that won’t commit to adequately accepting and educating all students,” she added.Faith leaders involved in the lawsuit have also weighed in on the debate, with many arguing that such funding is contradictory to religious freedoms.Bruce Prescott, a retired Baptist minister who served as executive director of Mainstream Oklahoma Baptists, said, “Religious schools – like houses of worship – should be funded through voluntary contributions from their own membership, not money extracted involuntarily with state taxes from members of a religiously diverse community.”Lori Walke, another plaintiff and senior minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ also pushed back against the state-funded school, saying, “As a pastor, I care deeply about religious freedom. But creating a religious public charter school is not religious freedom. Forcing taxpayers to fund a religious school that will be a ‘place of evangelization’ for one specific religion is not religious freedom.”In June, the state’s attorney general Gentner Drummond said in a statement that St Isidore’s approval was “unconstitutional”.“The approval of any publicly funded religious school is contrary to Oklahoma law and not in the best interest of taxpayers … It’s extremely disappointing that board members violated their oath in order to fund religious schools with our tax dollars,” Drummond added.Speaking to KFOR, Drummond said that St Isidore’s approval marks a “step down a slippery slope that will result someday in state funded Satanic schools, state funded Sharia schools”.The Guardian has reached out to both the archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. The SVCSB said that it “does not comment on pending litigation”.Meanwhile, Oklahoma’s Republican governor Kevin Stitt praised the SVCSB’s decision back in June when it approved St Isidore’s application, calling it a “win for religious liberty and education freedom in our great state”.State superintendent Ryan Walters, who is named in the lawsuit, condemned the legal action as “religious persecution”, saying, “Suing and targeting the Catholic Virtual Charter School is religious persecution because of one’s faith, which is the very reason that religious freedom is constitutionally protected. A warped perversion of history has created a modern day concept that all religious freedom is driven from the classrooms,” Public Radio Tulsa reports.Other defendants of the school include Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, who told the National Catholic Register in June that the school will be “elevating the soul” of students.Farley also doubled down on the state’s funding of St Isidore, saying, “The only thing that would stop this is a court decision telling us we can’t do it.” More

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      Biden choice of economic adviser shows focus on education ahead of 2024 bid

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      Joe Biden is tapping C Kirabo Jackson, a labor economist whose research advocates robust public spending on schools, to fill out the president’s three-member Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), according to a White House official.The selection suggests public education will be a key area of focus for Biden’s brain-trust ahead of a 2024 re-election bid expected to turn on the strength of the economy. The position does not require Senate confirmation.Jackson, who will take a leave from Northwestern University, where the professor focused on economics, education and public policy, is best known for research on what draws good teachers to certain schools as well as other data showing that raising school spending increases students’ future wages.The US unemployment rate is at 3.5%, and the economy grew at a 2.4% rate last quarter. Meanwhile, consumer prices are rising at a 3.2% annual clip.While the Biden administration sees those numbers as a positive sign of a move to steadier momentum with slower growth and inflation, voters are largely dissatisfied with Biden’s handling of the economy, creating a challenge for his economic policymakers.Biden has argued that more US government investment in early childhood education programs like preschool for three- and four-year-olds would lift wages and decrease poverty, views that agree with some of Jackson’s own research.But the president’s efforts to dramatically increase such funding have consistently failed to win sufficient support in Congress.Jackson’s pick also comes as the Biden administration is thinking through how to boost lagging educational performance since the Covid-19 pandemic.Lengthy public school closures, staffing shortages and other issues during the pandemic are believed to have contributed to the sharp declines registered in US children’s reading and mathematics test scores since 2020.Cecilia Rouse, the Princeton University economist who used to be Biden’s CEA chair, said Jackson’s work would be critical given the country’s biggest long-term economic challenges, including an ageing workforce, declining fertility rates, a lack of childcare and learning loss.“Coming out of this pandemic, one of the big consequences that we will be addressing for some time is the learning loss,” she said. The choice of Jackson “may signal that the administration is looking for creative ways to address what can be a huge loss in human capital for this country for quite some time”. More

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      Florida schools plan to use only excerpts from Shakespeare to avoid ‘raunchiness’

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      Teachers in a Florida county are preparing to use only excerpts of works by William Shakespeare, rather than whole plays, as part of an attempt to conform to hardline rightwing legislation on teaching about sex .“There’s some raunchiness in Shakespeare,” Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither high school in Hillsborough county, told the Tampa Bay Times. “Because that’s what sold tickets during his time.”But, the newspaper said: “In staying with excerpts, the schools can teach about Shakespeare while avoiding anything racy or sexual.”The legislation at issue is the Parental Rights in Education Act, commonly known as the “don’t say gay” law for its clampdown on teaching about LGBTQ+ and gender issues.The act was signed in March 2022 by Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Republican governor who is now running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, and expanded in April this year.The law has fueled widely reported culture-war clashes, including parental pushes for book bans in public school libraries and a legal battle between DeSantis and Disney, a major state employer which opposes the law.According to the Tampa Bay Times, the Hillsborough county school district has also switched to using excerpts as a way to help students meet state Benchmarks for Excellent Student Thinking, teachers aiming to give pupils a broad range of knowledge based on one whole novel and excerpts from five to seven novels or plays.But the Parental Rights in Education Act also says material that is sexual in nature should not be used in classes not concerning sexual health or reproduction.Prudishness towards Shakespeare’s discussion of sex or use of sexual slang is not new. As the Royal Shakespeare Company notes, “Early editions of Shakespeare’s plays sometimes ignored or censored slang and sexual language.“But the First Folio [published in 1623] reveals a text full of innuendo and rudeness.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSuggesting that some sexual references may yet creep unwittingly into Florida classrooms, the RSC gives extensive examples of “slang or sexual language which were clearly understood by Shakespeare’s original audiences but may be less obvious to audiences today”.In Florida, rightwing groups such as Moms For Liberty also offer reading lists, selections more likely to include fellow travelers of the far-right John Birch Society than the works of Shakespeare.Cool, the Hillsborough county high-school reading teacher, told the Tampa Bay Times: “I think the rest of the nation – no, the world, is laughing us. Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd.” More

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      Black US journalism professor wins $1m over botched university appointment

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      A Black journalism professor who was hired by Texas A&M University before objections in some quarters over her history of promoting diversity foiled the job offer has secured a $1m settlement from the institution.Kathleen McElroy also received an apology from officials at Texas A&M, the largest public school in the US, who in a statement Thursday acknowledged “mistakes … made during the process”.In her own statement, McElroy said she would remain in a tenured teaching position at the University of Texas at Austin, and hoped the settlement would “reinforce A&M’s allegiance to excellence in higher education and its commitment to academic freedom and journalism”.“I will never forget that … students, members, former students and staff voiced support for me from many sectors,” McElroy’s statement also said.The payment and apology to McElroy all but closed an episode that unfolded as Republican lawmakers across the US eye the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at college campuses. Such programs are in conservatives’ crosshairs after the Republican supermajority on the US supreme court’s bench ruled in June that race-conscious college admissions decisions were unconstitutional.That court ruling effectively ended affirmative action in the US’s higher education system.Texas A&M announced in June that it had hired McElroy – a school alum and former New York Times editor – to refurbish its journalism department in June. Hiring McElroy away from a more liberal rival at the University of Texas won the school plaudits from some sectors.But then, in a July interview with the Texas Tribune, McElroy revealed that she had encountered pushback at Texas A&M because she had previously worked to diversify newsrooms and make them more inclusive.Documents released Thursday to media organizations including the Associated Press and the local news outlet KVUE showed that six of the school governing board’s members had expressed “concerns” about McElroy after the right-leaning website Texas Scorecard reported on her prior diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.Alums and active students had also called and emailed the university president’s office to challenge the hiring of “a DEI proponent … to serve as director of the new journalism program,” said the documents, which summarized Texas A&M’s investigation into the McElroy matter, according to the AP.Subsequently, as the professor told it, the school president Katherine Banks reduced McElroy’s job offer to a five-year position as opposed to one that was on track to be tenured, which implies certain longer-term employment protections. McElroy told the Tribune that the five-year position – from which she could be fired at any time – was then reduced to a one-year post.At that point, McElroy rejected the job and indicated that she would stay in her teaching role at the University of Texas at Austin.Banks maintained she was not involved in modifications to the contract offered to McElroy. Nonetheless, she resigned from the presidency on 21 July, and the Texas A&M board later negotiated a settlement with McElroy.McElroy was one of two reasons why Texas A&M drew national headlines in July. In a separate case, A&M professor Joy Alonzo was suspended within hours of speaking critically about Texas’s lieutenant governor Dan Patrick during a lecture on the ongoing opioid crisis.Alonzo’s suspension, along with McElroy’s botched hiring, have prompted concerns among many in higher education that colleges are increasingly clamping down on free speech at campuses in the face of political pressure.The Associated Press contributed reporting More