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      US public school officials push back in congressional hearing on antisemitism

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      Some of America’s top school districts rebuffed charges of failing to counteract a surge of antisemitism on Wednesday in combative exchanges with a congressional committee that has been at the centre of high-profile interrogations of elite university chiefs.Having previously grilled the presidents of some of the country’s most prestigious seats of higher learning in politically charged settings, the House of Representatives’ education and workforce subcommittee switched the spotlight to the heads of three predominantly liberal school districts with sizable Jewish populations.The hearing was presented as an investigation into how the authorities were safeguarding Jewish staff and students in an atmosphere of rising bigotry against the backdrop of Israel’s war in Gaza.Calling the need for the hearing “a travesty”, Republican member Aaron Bean from Florida said 246 “very vile” antisemitic acts had been reported in the three districts – in New York City, Montgomery county in Maryland and Berkeley in California – since last October’s attack by Hamas on Israel.“Antisemitism is repugnant in all its forms but the topic of today’s hearing is pretty troubling,” he said. “It’s hard to grasp how antisemitism has become such a force in our kindergarten-through-12 [high] schools.”He cited instances of students marching through corridors chanting “kill the Jews”, a pupil caught on a security camera imitating Hitler and performing the Nazi salute, and Jewish children being told to pick up pennies.The three districts insisted in response that they did not tolerate antisemitism in their schools. They said they had taken educational and disciplinary steps to combat antisemitism following the 7 October attack, which led to an Israeli military offensive in Gaza that has triggered a wave of demonstrations on university campuses and beyond.However, the districts gave divergent answers on whether teachers had been fired for actions deemed antisemitic. Each district has received complaints over their handling of post-7 October allegations of antisemitism.David Banks, the chancellor of the New York City school system, engaged in a testy exchange with Republicans over an episode at Hillcrest high school, whose principal had been removed following a protest against a pro-Israel teacher but had been reassigned to an administrative role rather than fired.The Republican representative, Elise Stefanik – noted for her pointed questioning of three university presidents over free speech at a previous hearing last December – sparred with Banks and accused the school leaders of paying “lip service”.Banks stood his ground and appeared to challenge the committee, saying: “This convening feels like the ultimate ‘gotcha’ moment. It doesn’t sound like people trying to solve for something we actually solve for.”He added: “We cannot simply discipline our way out of this problem. The true antidote to ignorance and bias is to teach.”Banks said his district had “terminated people” over antisemitism.Karla Silvestre, president of Montgomery county public schools in Maryland – which includes schools in suburbs near Washington – said no teacher had been fired, prompting Bean to retort: “So you allow them to continue to teach hate?”Enikia Ford Morthel, superintendent of the Berkeley unified school district in California, said her authority’s adherence to state and federal privacy laws precluded her from giving details on disciplinary measures taken against staff and students.“As a result, some believe we do nothing. This is not true,” she said.“Since October 7, our district has had formal complaints alleging antisemitism arising from nine incidents without our jurisdiction. However, antisemitism is not pervasive in Berkeley unified school district.”Echoing previous hearings that featured the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia, Bean asked all three district heads whether they considered the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” antisemitic.Each said yes, although Silvestre and Morthel qualified this by saying their affirmation was dependent on whether it meant the elimination of the Jewish population in Israel – an interpretation disputed by many pro-Palestinian campaigners. Bean said tersely: “It does.”Responding to the three opening statements, Bean said: “Congratulations. You all have done a remarkable job testifying. But just like some college presidents before you that sat in the very same seat, they also in many instances said the right thing. They said they were protecting students when they were really not.”The subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon, accused Republicans of being selective in their stance against antisemitism, singling out the notorious white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, whose participants chanted “Jews will not replace us”. The then president Donald Trump later said the rally included some “very fine people” .She described one of those who took part, Nick Fuentes, as a “vile antisemite … who denied the scope of the Holocaust”, but noted that Trump hosted him at his Mar-a-Lago retreat in Florida in November 2022.“I will offer my colleagues on the other side of the aisle the opportunity to condemn these previous comments,” Bonamici said. “ Does anyone have the courage to stand up against this?”When committee members remained silent, she said: “Let the record show that no one spoke at this time.” More

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      Columbia president assailed at highly charged antisemitism Congress hearing

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      The head of a prestigious US university clashed with members of Congress today in highly charged hearings over a reported upsurge in antisemitism on campus in the wake of Israel’s war in Gaza.Minouche Shafik, the president of Columbia University, appeared beleaguered and uncertain as one Congress member after another assailed her over her institution’s supposed inaction to stop it becoming what one called “a hotbed of antisemitism and hatred”.Wednesday’s hearing follows months of rising tensions between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrators on the Columbia campus, amid disputes over what constitutes antisemitism and controversy about whether it should encompass anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel as a Jewish state.The hearing of the House of Representatives’ education and workforce committee is being staged under the emotive title of “Columbia in Crisis: Columbia University’s Response to Anti-Semitism.” A group of Jewish academics at the university have denounced the hearing in advance as heralding “a new McCarthyism”.At the hearing Shafik was repeatedly asked to explain the continued presence of one faculty member, Joseph Massad, after he had reportedly praised Hamas’s attack last October that left around 1,200 Israelis dead.In one particularly aggressive line of questioning, Elise Stefanik pushed Shafik to commit to removing Massad as chair of an academic review committee.Stefanik also pressed a harried Shafik, who became Columbia’s president last July, into changing her testimony after she earlier told the Democratic representative Ilhan Omar that she was not aware of any anti-Jewish demonstrations at the university.Pressing relentlessly, Stefanik effectively drove a wedge between Shafik and her three fellow senior Columbia colleagues, David Schizer, Claire Shipman, and David Greenwald – all members of the university’s antisemitism taskforce – by leading them to testify that there had in fact been aggressive and threatening antisemitic statements in campus demonstrations.Earlier, Shafik – trying to straddle between condemning antisemitism and permitting statements that some defined as free speech – struggled when confronted by Lisa McClain, the Republican representative from Michigan over the slogan “from the river to the sea” and support for a Palestinian intifada (uprising).“Are mobs shouting from the River to the Sea Palestine will be free or long live the infitada [sic] …antisemitic comments?” McClain asked.“When I hear those terms, I find them very upsetting,” Shafik responded.“That’s a great answer to a question I didn’t ask, so let me repeat the question,” McClain persisted. Shafik answered: “I hear them as such. Some people don’t.”“Why is it so tough?” McClain pressed. In answer, Shafik said: “Because it’s a difficult issue because some hear it as antisemitic others do not.”She eventually appeared to fold under pressure, answering “yes” and laughing nervously after McClain posed the same question to the president’s fellow Columbia staff, all of whom agreed that it was antisemitic.The hearing was something of a reprise of the committee’s previous cross-examination of the heads of three other elite universities, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, last December.That hearing led to the resignation of the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Elizabeth Magill, after she gave what were deemed to be over-legalistic answers to pointed questions from Stefanik over whether her institution’s rules on free speech permitted slogans that supporters of Israel interpret as calling for genocide.It also intensified the pressure on Harvard’s then president, Claudine Gay, whose responses to Stefanik were similarly criticised. Gay survived the immediate outcry over the hearing but stepped down weeks later over plagiarism allegations.Columbia has set up a taskforce on antisemitism but its members have declined to establish a firm definition.Rightwingers have painted the university as a hotbed of antisemitism, while opponents have accused the institution’s authorities of disproportionately punishing pro-Palestinian students who criticise Israel. The university last year suspended two groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, over their protest activities.Shafik – an Egyptian-born, British-American economist and former deputy governor of the Bank of England – had reportedly prepared assiduously for Wednesday’s event in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of her fellow university heads.Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the hearing, Shafik said legitimate expression should occur “within specific parameters”.“Most of the people protesting do so from a place of genuine political disagreement, not from personal hatred or bias or support for terrorism,” she wrote.“Their passion, as long as it doesn’t cross the line into threats, discrimination or harassment, should be protected speech on our campus.“Calling for the genocide of a people – whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, Jews, Muslims or anyone else – has no place in a university community. Such words are outside the bounds of legitimate debate and unimaginably harmful,” the op-ed continued.Her remarks appeared aimed at avoiding the criticism drawn by Magill and Gay over their appearance before the committee, when both responded to Stefanik’s questions about theoretical calls for genocide by referring to context.In an effort to bolster Shafik, 23 Jewish faculty members wrote an open letter published in the campus newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, criticising the premise of the hearing.“Based on the committee’s previous hearings, we are gravely concerned about the false narratives that frame these proceedings to entrap witnesses,” they wrote. “We urge you, as the university president, to defend our shared commitment to universities as sites of learning, critical thinking, and knowledge production against this new McCarthyism.”The academics also questioned the credentials of Stefanik – an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump – on antisemitism, saying she had a history of “espousing white nationalist policies”.As Shafik and her colleagues testified, the unrest that has characterized university life over the past six months was on display on Columbia’s campus, where students set up approximately 60 tents on the campus’s south lawn in the early hours of Wednesday. The tents, many of which were covered in signs that read “Liberated Zone” and “Israel bombs, Columbia pays”, were set up to urge the university to divest its ties from Israel.The university perimeters were lined with metal barricades and a heavy police presence, and the campus, which is usually accessible to the public, was restricted to Columbia ID holders.Members of the media were prohibited from entering the university, instead restricted to a barricaded pen near a bus stop outside the campus as student chants could be heard from inside the grounds. “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” some students chanted, according to the Columbia Spectator. A handful of protesters also crowded around the university’s main gates, with many shouting: “We say no to genocide!”
      This article was amended on 17 April 2024 to correctly identify the school where Elizabeth Magill resigned as president last year. The school was the University of Pennsylvania, not Pennsylvania University. More

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      Professors’ union sanctions Florida college over ‘political’ DeSantis takeover

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      A national university professors union has voted to sanction New College of Florida, the former liberal arts school where Ron DeSantis orchestrated an unprecedented “aggressively ideological and politically motivated” takeover by a group of ultra-conservative cronies.The vote to sanction New College came after an investigation by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which has placed only 12 other universities on its sanctioned list since 1995.The AAUP created a special committee to investigate the “apparent pattern of politically, racially, and ideologically motivated attacks on public higher education” by DeSantis, the far-right Florida governor who waged war on so-called “wokeness” at schools and colleges after his resounding re-election in 2022.The investigation was launched in January 2023 after DeSantis appointed six allies to the school’s board of trustees, which at breakneck speed restructured academic courses without meaningful faculty involvement, eliminated the gender studies major, and cancelled a slew of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, including canceling meals during Ramadan, the holy month of daytime fasting for Muslims.The new board imposed the sweeping reforms after ousting the president and inserting a confidant of DeSantis – at double the predecessor’s previous annual salary.AAUP sanctions have no regulatory consequence, but they are published on the union’s website “for the purpose of informing association members, the profession at large, and the public that unsatisfactory conditions of academic government exist at the institutions in question”. Sanctions can also be removed.In a statement to the Tampa Bay Times, a New College spokesperson, Nathan March, said the union “lacks the authority” to issue sanctions and called the announcement “a headline grab, echoing the sensationalistic tone of their report”.DeSantis, in conjunction with Republican-controlled state legislatures, targeted K-12 and college level education in the run-up to his failed bid for the Republican presidential nomination, dismantling DEI initiatives and disciplines that offended ultra Christian rights groups.According to the AAUP’s final report, the assault by the state government “reflects not only a blatant disregard for academic standards of governance and academic freedom but also a discriminatory and biased assault on the rights of racial minorities and LGBTQ communities”.“It represents a throwback to Florida’s darker past that must be repudiated,” the report said.“What we are witnessing in Florida is an intellectual reign of terror,” LeRoy Pernell, a law professor at Florida A&M Law, told the inquiry. “There is a tremendous sense of dread right now, not just among faculty; it’s tangible among students and staff as well. People are intellectually and physically scared. We are being named an enemy of the state.”Another faculty member and union leader said: “The human toll in Florida is catastrophic. We are tired of being demonized by our government. Many of us are looking to leave Florida, and if we don’t, we will leave academia, and nobody wants our jobs. Faculty are suffering. And when we leave, our communities, our students, families – they will all suffer. So, when we fight for faculty, we are also fighting for the people in our communities.”The AAUP report also found that “academic freedom, tenure, and shared governance in Florida’s public colleges and universities currently face a politically and ideologically driven assault unparalleled in US history, which, if sustained, threatens the very survival of meaningful higher education in the state, with dire implications for the entire country”. More

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      Giuliani defamation trial live: election worker testifies ex-Trump lawyer’s 2020 lies ruined her life and left her ‘in a dark place’

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      Shaye Moss just ended approximately two hours of haunting testimony detailing how her life has been ruined ever since Rudy Giuliani spread lies about her after the 2020 election.Her worst fear, she said, is that her teenage son will come home to find her and her mother hanging from a tree in front of their home. She still pulls over in her neighborhood because she feels like someone is following them. She doesn’t go out alone. She has panic attacks. She left the job that she worked hard to get because she had become a “pariah” in the office. When her son started getting harassing messages and failed all of his classes in the 9th grade, she felt responsible and like “the worst mom in the world”.“I feel like I’m in a dark place and the only thing that surrounds me are the conspiracy and the lies,” she said.She ended her direct testimony by talking about how she’s trapped in a cycle of eating, sleeping, and crying. “Sadly that’s my life.”Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer will cross-examine her when court resumes this afternoon at 2pm.
      It was a day of emotional testimony in a Washington courtroom, where Shaye Moss took the stand in the defamation trial against Rudy Giuliani. She recounted in devastating detail the ways the former New York City mayor’s lies and the ensuing harassment upended her life, destroyed her sense of security and self-worth and hurt her family.
      Under cross-examination, Moss pointedly noted that the harm caused by Giuliani continues to this day as the former mayor repeated his lies about her to reporters as recently as Monday. Giuliani’s comments to reporters drew a sharp rebuke from the judge.
      Beyond the trial, other big stories today:
      New York’s top court said the state must redraw its congressional maps, in a decision widely seen as a victory for Democrats in the battle to win control of the narrowly divided House of Representatives.
      The Texas supreme court overturned a lower court order that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion for a fetus with a fatal condition. Cox went out of state for the procedure.
      Claudine Gay will remain the president of Harvard University despite calls for her removal following testimony before a congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus last week.
      US inflation ticked down again last month, with cheaper gas helping further lighten the weight of consumer price increases in the US.
      Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenskiy failed to persuade congressional Republicans to rush aid to Ukraine as Russia’s war nears its third year. During a visit to Washington, Zelenskiy met with members of Congress and Joe Biden on Tuesday.
      Still to come: CNN will host a presidential town hall in Iowa with Republican White House hopeful Ron DeSantis.
      Sam reports that Shaye Moss has completed her testimony after taking the witness stand to answer questions from Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer and her own.Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Sibley, sought to undercut the idea millions of dollars in damages were required to repair her reputation. He also sought to distance Giuliani from any harm Moss suffered.John Langford, one of Moss’s attorneys, asked her to further explain why she was not looking for work.“I definitely would have to start off again at the bottom and work my way up. I am wanting to do that but I am not mentally able to do that with things are the way are now,” Moss said. “Most days I pray that God does not wake me up and I just disappear.”She also explained that she does not go out alone, except for one instance in which she did it as homework for her therapist.“I did it so terrified. I felt extremely nauseous. But thankfully there was this guy at the bar,” she said. “He was a Jewish guy. He literally talked the entire time about this movie about this family that is in the pharmaceuticals. The guy was just talking. And I did it. I was very proud of myself. But unfortunately I have not been able to do that again. But I did do it once.”Plaintiffs are now playing a videotaped deposition from Bernard Kerik.Here’s some background on the situation in New York written by our in-house expert on redistricting, Sam Levine (yes, the same one in court covering the election case).Despite outperforming expectations on election night last year, Republicans made stunning gains across New York, one of the nation’s most liberal states. They won four toss-up races and picked off congressman Sean Patrick Maloney, the House Democratic campaign chairman charged with protecting his party’s hold on Congress.That was possible under the map that will now be redrawn.Breaking from the Giuliani trial to mark a new legal development out of New York, where a court has agreed to allow the state to redraw its congressional map in a decision widely seen as a victory for Democrats.In an opinion issued on Tuesday afternoon, the liberal-leaning New York State Court of Appeals ordered the state’s redistricting commission to draw new maps by February 28, 2024. The court is effectively tossing out the highly competitive electoral map that gave Republicans an edge in several key House races last cycle – just enough to win the majority.The commission is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, but the Democratic-controlled state legislature has final say over the redrawn map. Given the narrow divide in the US House, New York Democrats will be under pressure to reject any proposal that does not improve their electoral odds, particularly after Republicans aggressive gerrymanders in states like North Carolina.Giuliani’s lawyer is pressing Moss to disclose additional details about her medical health as a result of the former mayor’s lies.Here’s some more back-and-forth in what appears to be a somewhat combative round of questioning.More from our man on the ground:
      I personally cannot repair my reputation at the moment because your client is still lying on me and ruining my reputation further. How could I do that? How could you work in law everyone was saying you’re a horrible lawyer? Moss said under questioning.
      She added, per Sam: “We need to make a statement. We need to ensure that the election workers that are still there don’t have to go through this. Hopefully by hitting someone in their pockets, for someone whose whole career has been about their pockets, we will send a message.”Sam is back in the courtroom in the defamation trial in Washington DC, where Moss is being cross-examined.It’s unclear where exactly Sibley is going with his questions, Sam reports.A lot of his questions seem to be trying to get Moss to concede that there was confusion or uncertainty about what happened immediately after the 2020 election. The US district judge Beryl Howell has already found Giuliani liable for defamation, so whether or not Giuliani had grounds to make his outlandish claims is not really at issue in the trial.It cannot be easy to be the lawyer for the voluble former New York mayor. Moss is back on the stand for cross-examination from Giuliani’s attorney, Joseph Sibley.While we await the return of the Giuliani trial in DC, we’re linking to our Israel-Hamas war blog, where Biden has said Israel is “starting to lose support” of international community over its bombardment of Gaza.Biden also said that Netanyahu needs to change his hardline government.Biden’s comments come as Netanyahu thanked the US for its support on Tuesday, but noted that the US and Israel have had disagreements about “the day after Hamas”, said Israel’s prime minister on X.It is 1.20pm in Washington DC. Here is a round-up of what’s happened today:
      Georgia election worker Shaye Moss took the stand in the defamation trial against Rudy Giuliani, giving a haunting testimony of the ways the former New York City mayor’s lies and the ensuing harassment ruined her life and affected her family.
      Moss told the court she was a “bubbly, outgoing, happy Shaye” before she first became aware of lies Giuliani was spreading about her – and that threats left her feeling scared for her life. She recalled how she started receiving racist text messages and threats. “I was afraid for my life. I literally felt like someone was going to come and attempt to hang me and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”
      Moss also told the court how her life has been ruined and she often still feels like she is being followed. She doesn’t go out alone and has panic attacks. She had to leave her job because she says she became a “pariah” in the office. Moss told the court her ordeal has left her feeling “in a dark place”.
      Giuliani’s mental fitness was questioned by the judge after he again told lies about Moss and Ruby Freeman in response to media questions after court last night. His comments entered into the court case Tuesday when Moss brought up how he had never apologized and continued to lie about her.
      Moss will be back on the stand at 2pm in Washington for cross-examination from Giuliani’s attorney.
      Beyond the trial, other big stories today …
      The Texas supreme court overturned a lower court order that would have allowed Kate Cox to get an abortion for a fetus with a fatal condition. Cox went out of state for the procedure.
      Claudine Gay will remain the president of Harvard University despite calls for her removal following testimony before a congressional hearing about antisemitism on campus last week.
      Shaye Moss just ended approximately two hours of haunting testimony detailing how her life has been ruined ever since Rudy Giuliani spread lies about her after the 2020 election.Her worst fear, she said, is that her teenage son will come home to find her and her mother hanging from a tree in front of their home. She still pulls over in her neighborhood because she feels like someone is following them. She doesn’t go out alone. She has panic attacks. She left the job that she worked hard to get because she had become a “pariah” in the office. When her son started getting harassing messages and failed all of his classes in the 9th grade, she felt responsible and like “the worst mom in the world”.“I feel like I’m in a dark place and the only thing that surrounds me are the conspiracy and the lies,” she said.She ended her direct testimony by talking about how she’s trapped in a cycle of eating, sleeping, and crying. “Sadly that’s my life.”Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer will cross-examine her when court resumes this afternoon at 2pm.Though Giuliani has already been found liable for defaming Moss and Freeman, his comments last night to the media where he claimed his lies about them were true will likely factor into the trial.Already, the US district judge Beryl Howell asked about Giuliani’s mental fitness, given his comments: “everything I said about them is true.”And on the stand this afternoon, Moss brought up his remarks, saying he was still “spreading lies about us last night”. Politico’s Kyle Cheney wrote on X that the judge is permitting Moss to talk about these comments, despite an objection from Giuliani’s lawyer. More

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      Republicans tout ‘school choice’ as issue to attract parents across party divide

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      Beyond the tumult surrounding Donald Trump’s presidential bid and his threats to seek revenge against his political enemies should he win, the Republican frontrunner has seized on an issue that even some Democrats say could attract new voters in 2024.Trump is backing “school choice” programs that use taxpayer dollars to send students to private and religious schools. It is a stance with wide appeal as parents have become increasingly fed up with the state of US public education.Polls show that about 70% of parents favor greater education options. The issue resonates strongly enough with some voters that Trump’s support could make a difference in the presidential election as well as help Republicans in state and congressional races.“It’s popular among the Republican base, it’s popular among independents and even popular among the Democratic base – in particular African Americans and Hispanics,” said Jason Bedrick, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.In a banner year for the school-choice movement, 10 states, all governed by Republicans, enacted or expanded programs in 2023 that allow varying uses of public tax dollars for private education assistance, from tuition to tutoring and therapy.For reform advocates, the momentum is a natural outgrowth of the conservative “parents’ rights” movement born of the Covid-19 pandemic, when concerns about safety mushroomed into screaming matches at school board meetings over curriculum, learning loss and diversity initiatives.Many Democrats, backed by powerful teachers’ unions, continue to view such programs with suspicion, however, saying they are attempts by Republicans to weaken public education while further enriching wealthy families.But some Democrats warn that their candidates must embrace education options or risk ceding their historic edge over Republicans on the issue.“If we don’t offer an alternative to private school choice, we are going to lose more voters on this issue,” said Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, which favors school-choice options such as charter schools. “We’re going to lose close elections on this issue.”Polling by Elorza’s group in four 2024 battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina – showed Republicans held a three-point advantage on the question of which party people trust most on education.Elorza said he was concerned particularly about Black voters in states like Georgia, where a slight shift in the 2020 elections would have tilted the state toward Trump.After Republicans in Arizona enacted a sweeping state-funded voucher plan last year, enrollment in the program exceeded budget projections, prompting the Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, to argue that it clashes with other state priorities.In Florida, about 123,000 students joined a similar program after it was expanded in March with the backing of the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, another presidential candidate who regularly touts it on the campaign trail and in debates.The majority of those students were already attending private schools – a statistic jumped on by critics who argued the program mainly benefits wealthy parents.According to Step Up for Students, the non-profit that administers the Florida program, of the close to 227,000 total students who now receive assistance, about 108,000 are from families who qualify for free or reduced-price school lunches.The makeup of the program reflects a broad cross-section of demographic groups: 36% of the students are Hispanic and 20% are Black.Shemeika Williams, a Black mother of three who works in a south Florida hospital, said she would not be able to afford the private Christian academy her 17-year-old daughter attends if the state did not cover transportation and tuition costs.Williams, 41, calls herself an independent and said the legislation will make it more likely she will back Republican candidates in the future.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I will support anyone who will benefit me and my family,” she said. “They are helping people who don’t have the resources.”School choice has long been championed by conservatives, including Betsy DeVos, who served as Trump’s education secretary.Trump supports a bill pending in the US House of Representatives that would provide tax relief to corporations and individuals who provide scholarships to allow students to attend private and religious schools.He has also called for more federal support of home schooling, the fastest-growing form of K-12 education in the nation, by providing tax incentives.A Trump campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said Trump seeks to “liberate students from failing schools and raise the quality of education across the board”.School choice, Cheung said, “is an issue that should unify voters of all backgrounds”.Public policy thinktanks such as the Brookings Institution have conducted studies that show vouchers and other choice programs do not produce gains in academic performance and education attainment, largely because the quality of schools that receive private money vary wildly.Conservative advocacy groups argue otherwise, saying there is a measurable improvement in student performance without a corresponding negative effect on public schools.Some Democratic-leaning groups say recent elections showed voters were rejecting the Republican message on education.In a memo last month, the National Education Association, a teachers’ union, noted that voters re-elected the Democratic governor in Kentucky in November in a race in which the Republican candidate’s support for a voucher plan became a top campaign issue.Education was a central issue in races across the country this year. But frequently, Republican candidates who favored private school-choice programs were portrayed by Democrats as supporting efforts to ban controversial education materials and diversity efforts, making it difficult to measure the viability of the issue on its own. More

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      US university presidents face firestorm over evasive answers on antisemitism

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      The presidents of three of the nation’s top universities are facing intense backlash, including from the White House, after they appeared to evade questions during a congressional hearing about whether calls by students for the genocide of Jews would constitute harassment under the schools’ codes of conduct.In a contentious, hours-long debate on Tuesday, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) sought to address the steps they were taking to combat rising antisemitism on campus since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. But it was their careful, indirect response to a question posed by the Republican congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York that drew scathing criticism.In an exchange that has now gone viral, Stefanik, a graduate of Harvard, pressed Elizabeth Magill, the president of UPenn, on Tuesday to say whether students calling for the genocide of Jews would be disciplined under the university’s code of conduct. In her line of questioning, Stefanik appeared to be conflating chants calling for “intifada” – a word that in Arabic means uprising, and has been used in reference to both peaceful and violent Palestinian protest – with hypothetical calls for genocide.“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Magill replied, in a reference to distinctions in first amendment law. “It is a context-dependent decision.” Stefanik pushed her to answer “yes” or “no”, which Magill did not.The backlash was swift and bipartisan.“It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesperson. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting – and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”The White House was joined by several Jewish officials and leaders in condemning the university presidents’ testimony before the US House committee on education and the workforce, at a hearing called by Republicans titled Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, said the simple response was “yes, that violates our policy.” Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Shapiro urged UPenn’s board to meet soon, as a petition calling for Magill’s resignation garnered thousands of signatures. According to CNN, Penn’s board of trustees held an “emergency meeting” on Thursday.The liberal Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe noted that he rarely agreed with Stefanik, a far-right Trump ally, but wrote: “I’m with her here.”The Harvard president Claudine Gay’s “hesitant, formulaic, and bizarrely evasive answers were deeply troubling to me and many of my colleagues, students, and friends”. Tribe added.Republican presidential candidates also seized on the episode, folding it into their broader criticism of the US’s elite institutions as too “woke” and liberal.In an interview with the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Thursday, Ron DeSantis, who has led the rightwing crackdown on higher education as Florida’s governor, said the college presidents’ lack of moral clarity was a reflection of the liberal orthodoxy permeating higher education.“I think what this has revealed is the rot and the sickness that’s been festering inside higher education for a long time,” said DeSantis, a graduate of Harvard Law School who is running for president. He continued: “They should not be these hotbeds of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. But that’s what they’ve become.”Amid a surge in youth activism around the conflict, university leaders have struggled to balance the free speech of some pro-Palestinian activists with the fears of Jewish students who say the rhetoric crosses a line into antisemitism. In a number of cases, schools have responded by banning campus groups supportive of Palestinian rights.During their appearances, Magill, Gay and Sally Kornbluth of MIT all expressed alarm at the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia on college campuses, some of which have triggered federal investigations by the Department of Education. In response, the presidents said they had taken steps to increase security measures and reporting tools while expanding mental health and counseling services. They also said it was their responsibility to ensure college campuses remain a place of free expression and free thought.In a new statement on Wednesday, Gay stated: “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Let me be clear: calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”Magill also sought to clarify her remarks to the committee in a video statement, in which she said her response to Stefanik’s question was an attempt to parse the university policies stating that speech alone is not punishable. But in doing so she said she failed to acknowledge the “irrefutable fact” that such speech represents a “call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.“I want to be clear, a call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening – deeply so,” she said, adding: “In my view, it would be harassment or intimidation.”In the video, posted to X, Magill said the university’s policies “need to be clarified and evaluated” and committed to immediately convening a process to do so.Some free speech advocates expressed alarm at the possibility that universities may respond to the backlash by adopting speech-restrictive policies that depart from the protections of the first amendment, which governs government actors including public schools. But the universities at issue in Tuesday’s hearing are all private. Fire, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, called Magill’s comments on re-evaluating Penn’s policies a “deeply troubling, profoundly counterproductive response” to the anger.“Were Penn to retreat from the robust protection of expressive rights, university administrators would make inevitably political decisions about who may speak and what may be said on campus,” it said in a statement. The result of placing new limits on speech, it said, would mean “dissenting and unpopular speech – whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, conservative or liberal – will be silenced”. More

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      The Moms for Liberty platform is extreme – and most voters are loudly rejecting it | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Off-year elections, like the ones that took place earlier this month, can fall under the radar – or at least, that’s what far-right reactionary groups like Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project might have been hoping. Organizations like these spent the better part of this year pushing to elect school board members who would enact a rightwing agenda in the name of “abolishing critical race theory”.But, for the most part, they failed. Per the American Federation of Teachers, groups like these lost close to 70% of the races where they made endorsements this November. And while conservatives made some inroads in places like the Houston suburbs, they fell short in some of the most high-profile races in swing states, like Pennsylvania – where Democrats swept several school boards while rejecting the culture war – as well as Iowa, Ohio and Virginia.The failure of rightwing ideologues to take over local school boards shows that voters simply don’t want to buy what they’re selling. As Keenan Crow of LGBTQ+ organization One Iowa Action said: “There is a basic decency left in the electorate that recognizes that every kid deserves a safe, inclusive space to learn.” And as the countdown to 2024 begins in earnest, progressives could benefit from embracing that decency in school board battles and beyond.Moms for Liberty was formed in 2021 to oppose Covid-19 restrictions in schools, like mask requirements and vaccine mandates. Supercharged by funding from national conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, it has since expanded its mission to include fighting school “wokeness”– otherwise known as “acknowledgment that racism exists” – and touting “parental rights” as their justification for trying to privatize the public school system.As I wrote in September, they are one of the organizations behind the latest wave of book bans across the United States. The pastor who leads their Philadelphia faith-based outreach was recently outed as a registered sex offender; he has resigned as a city ward leader, but remains a Moms for Liberty member. The Southern Poverty Law Center categorized Moms for Liberty as an extremist group earlier this year – and that was before an Indiana chapter opened a newsletter by literally quoting Hitler.The group has generous funding and chapters in almost every state. It has mainstream Republican support; former president Donald Trump, plus four other 2024 GOP also-rans, spoke at a Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia this summer.So why did they perform so poorly? For one thing, the Moms for Liberty agenda was simply too extreme for most voters outside of the deepest-red districts. National polling from earlier this year found that the majority of Americans oppose book bans, trust teachers to make curricular decisions, and think schools should teach the history of slavery, racism and segregation.This dynamic was reflected in the repudiation of figures like Teri Patrick – a school board candidate in West Des Moines, Iowa, who once fought to criminally charge a school district because its library had two books about LGBTQ+ issues. Patrick was endorsed by Moms for Liberty but crushed in the election, receiving a measly 9% of the vote.As well-organized as Moms for Liberty may be, teachers unions are organized better. In Iowa, more than 85% of candidates endorsed by the local teachers union, the Iowa State Education Association, won a seat in the 7 November school board elections. On the same night, only one of the 13 candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty was elected. Moms for Liberty founder Tina Descovich herself partially blamed the strength of teachers unions for their recent losses.If anything, the intense attention and resources that the right gave to school board races only motivated the labor movement to match those efforts. Last summer, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said that Moms for Liberty has “created more action and more energy” within unions.When a group of concerned parents in the small suburb of Madeira, Ohio, saw the campaign materials being shared by Moms for Liberty, they formed their own Pac, Madeira United, and communicated a simple message: “No culture wars. No extremism”. On 7 November, their nonpartisan candidates prevailed.For all the fear-mongering about the woke mind virus infiltrating our schools, millions of parents across the country trust, respect and admire their children’s teachers. This month’s election results ought to be a wake-up call: progressives can still win the education debate, but it will take full-throated support and organizing of teachers and their unions.Conservatives aren’t giving up this fight any time soon. Shortly after the election, the Leadership Institute hosted a training in Colorado to plot next steps for the rightwing board members who were successfully elected. And just last week, Moms for Liberty’s Oklahoma chapter called for the deplatforming of an institution that they say is “largely focused on indoctrinating youth with radical viewpoints and sexual ideologies”. You guessed it: they’re talking about the Scholastic Book Fair.But between teachers unions, enterprising parents, progressive leaders across the country, and an enduring majority of voters, there remains a robust national coalition that favors a pluralistic education system. As Weingarten said shortly after the election: “These results underline what families have been telling us for the last two years: They don’t want culture wars; they want safe and welcoming public schools … They reject division and want to seize the future together.”
      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editor and publisher of the Nation and serves on the Council on Foreign Relations More