by Terri Jo Neff | Jul 1, 2021 | Education, News
By Terri Jo Neff |
The Democrats in the Arizona Legislature may have held firm on their complete opposition to the proposed K-12 budget bill, but all 47 Republicans worked through their differences in the House and Senate to get the multi-faceted House Bill 2898 to Gov. Doug Ducey’s desk Wednesday.
The major holdup with the 200-plus page HB2898 involved a Senate amendment which expanded eligibility for Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) from about 250,000 students to more than 700,000. ESAs give credit to an eligible child for most of the government education funding that would have been paid to that student’s public or charter school.
Those funds can then be used toward expenses at private schools as well as other educational costs.
Most House Republicans supported the Senate’s amended version of the K-12 bill but opposition from Reps. Joel John (R-LD4), Michelle Udall (R-LD25), and Joanne Osborne (R-LD13) meant the House ended up approving a K-12 bill which differed from the Senate’s version.
The 16 Republican senators and 31 Republican representatives could pass any bills if they all vote together. But the differing positions on HB2898 required members of both chambers to negotiate a compromise. The result was changes to how soon certain students can qualify for an ESA, although the bill will not benefit another 450,000 students.
Rep. Bret Roberts (R-LD11) supported a larger ESA expansion in the Senate’s bill, but noted the final version still “gives parents more choices.” He added that it “brings the free market into the education system.” Meanwhile, Rep. Jake Hoffman (R-LD12) liked the “opportunities and power” the new legislation gives to parents.
Ducey signed HB2898 on Wednesday along with the 10 other bills which make up the $12.8 billion Fiscal Year 2022 budget package. The new fiscal year starts Thursday.
ESA eligibility was not the only compromise necessary to get HB2898 to Ducey’s desk. An amendment added to the bill with limited debate earlier this week mandated controversial standards for civics curriculum. It faced pushback from Sen. Paul Boyer (R-LD20). Without Boyer’s vote, the entire K-12 budget bill was in peril.
Another compromise led to removal of the last minute civics amendment and Boyer then voted for HB2898.
Other education-related bills were sent to Ducey on Wednesday, including HB2241 which requires information about the Holocaust and other genocides to be taught at least twice between grades 7 and 12. The bill passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support.
The other bill, SB1572, involves early literacy policy at the State Board of Education and the Arizona Department of Education. It impacts dyslexia training and screening requirements, establishes a literacy endorsement for qualified teachers, creates an entry evaluation tool for kindergarten pupils with parental notification requirements, and mandates a K-3 Reading Program report.
by AZ Free News | Jun 28, 2021 | Education, News
Republican Arizona State Reps. Michelle Udall, Joanne Osbourne, and Joel John are coming under fire for their decision to deny over 700,000 kids school choice opportunities. The trio voted with all House Democrats to reject a proposal to expand the Empowerment Scholarship Account program.
Specifically, Udall, Osbourne, and John voted against an amendment offered by Rep. Shawnna Bolick that would have expanded the Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program to low-income students (about 80% of whom are minorities) and kids of Veterans.
ESAs allow families to utilize their education tax dollars and spend those funds on education choices that they deem best for their children. These dollars can be used to attend micro/pod schools, private schools, hiring tutors, purchasing online curriculum, and other options that may work best for each unique student.
Critics say that by voting no on the Bolick amendment, Udall, Osborne, and John became the only three Republicans to vote against this measure and sided with the teachers’ union and anti-school choice groups like Save Our Schools.
Additionally, a poll conducted by the #1 pollster in the country according to the NY Times showed that 75% of Arizonan’s support school choice and that 73% of Arizonans support this specific effort of helping low-income children. This means that the vast majority of Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters all support school choice.
Supporters of ESAs say students in Arizona needed this expansion especially in light of the drastic learning loss from Covid due to the sub-standard “virtual” education provided due to the refusal of teachers to return to in-class learning.
RELATED ARTICLE: This Pastor And Former NFL Player Believes All Students Deserve School Choice
by Chloe Anagnos | Jun 27, 2021 | Education, Opinion
By Chloe Anagnos |
A recent GoBankingRates survey found that over 50% of Americans want student-loan forgiveness for everyone with any student-loan debt. Considering Democratic lawmakers are hoping President Joe Biden will keep his promise to cancel $50,000 in student debt per person, this data could certainly be used for leverage. But while the number of Americans who now want to see all higher ed-related debt simply erased from the books is growing, it doesn’t mean that we should follow along.
Pandemic and lockdown-related unemployment coupled with a slow economic growth following the low reopening of most states have, indeed, made it difficult for countless Americans to pay off their debt. It is thus natural to see U.S. residents wanting to help those in difficult situations. However, blanket loan forgiveness isn’t a response to hardship. It isn’t even a response to the broken American higher education system. Instead, loan forgiveness will only remove our attention from the errors of subsidized higher education.
Despite politicians’ best efforts, there’s simply no bottomless pit of money anywhere. Taxpayers, and even the Federal Reserve, will eventually run dry.
>> READ MORE >>>
by Terri Jo Neff | Jun 24, 2021 | Education, News
By Terri Jo Neff |
The State Senate worked into the early hours Wednesday to pass an 11-bill budget packet, and now all eyes turn to the 60 members of the House which is slated to take up the bills Thursday.
But questions remain as to whether House Speaker Rusty Bowers can ensure 31 votes on the budget bill involving K-12 Education funding.
The Senate pushed its bills through a marathon of 16 to 14 party line votes which started Tuesday and did not end until 2:30 a.m. Wednesday. Many of those bills included amendments, including SB1826, the Senate’s K-12 budget bill, which as passed includes a major expansion of eligibility for Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs).
An ESA allows an eligible child to receive credit for most of the government education funding that would have been paid to the student’s public or charter school. Those funds can then be used toward private school expenses, including tuition, counseling, tuition, and other necessary costs.
The Senate’s K-12 bill jumps the number of students eligible for an ESA from 256,000 to nearly 726,000. However, the House K-12 budget bill, HB2898, does not currently expand ESA eligibility. And two Republicans whose votes are needed to pass any budget bill have been staunchly opposed an ESA expansion.
Those Republicans are Rep. Joel John (R-LD4) and Rep. Michelle Udall (R-LD25). Both have worked as educators, and it was their opposition earlier in the session that killed an ESA expansion bill introduced by Sen. Paul Boyer.
How strong the opposition of John and Udall is to expanding ESA criteria will be tested Thursday due to the fact Senate President Karen Fann included one of Udall’s own education-related bills in the same Senate’s K-12 budget amendment. There are also items in the amendment that John is known to support.
Less than 10,000 of the students in K-12 who are currently eligible for an ESA utilize the program. Assuming the same percent of eligible students enroll under the new criteria as under the current criteria, then nearly 2,000 new students would benefit in Fiscal Year 2022. That number of new students could grow to nearly 6,000 in Fiscal year 2024, according to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.
Boyer, an educator for a charter school, introduced his bill back in February and was able to get it through the Senate on a 16 to 14 party line vote. It then stalled in the House when it became clear Bowers did not have the necessary 31 votes for passage due to John and Udall’s opposition.
For the last few weeks Boyer had withheld support for the Senate’s 11-bill budget package, which he believed needed to provide more funding for education and paying down Arizona’s debt. With ESA and other expenditures added as amendments his vote turned to a yes. Whether Bowers can find a way to bring John and Udall on board for Thursday’s vote remains to be seen.
Those who support the ESA expansion include the Center for Arizona Policy, the Barry Goldwater Institute for Public Policy Research, and the Republican Liberty Caucus- Arizona.
by Dr. Thomas Patterson | Jun 22, 2021 | Education, Opinion
By Dr. Tom Patterson |
Yale, which protects its fragile students from dead white authors and offensive Halloween costumes, nevertheless featured a psychiatrist lecturing at Grand Rounds of her fantasies “unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, wiping my bloody hands, like I did the world a f___ing big favor.”
Grand Rounds is an educational presentation by which teaching hospitals augment routine clinical training with presentations of unusual cases or medical advances. It’s not a political forum nor a venue to permit social causes.
Yet Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a New York psychiatrist, gave a widely-advertised speech on “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.“ “There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil“ she informed the assembled doctors-in-training.
She backed up her opinions by “taking some actions. I systematically white-ghosted most of my white friends “including some “white BIPOCs.” Talking to white people is a “waste of time. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks they are saints or superheroes to accept responsibility. It ain’t going to happen. They have five holes in their brain.”
We’re well aware that there are bigots with pathological tendencies from both political extremes out there. Until now they haven’t been featured in legitimate academic settings. Not only that, her lecture was well received in some quarters.
A Yale psychologist pronounced her talk “absolutely brilliant”. A woman thanked the doctor for “giving voice to us as people of color.”
Dr. Khilanani was given space in the Washington Post to explain that any negative reactions were mistaken. She simply was concerned about “minority mental health“. She hoped to stimulate “more serious conversations about race,“ rather remarkable considering she had just claimed reasoning with whites was impossible due to their inherent evil.
After some faculty members expressed concern, the medical school leadership allowed that “the tone and continent were antithetical to the values of the school.” Their response was to limit access to the lecture video to members of the Yale community.
But their concerns were primarily with the vulgarity and lack of respect in the speech. They never apologized for or condemned the speech, instead stating that the School of Medicine doesn’t condone violence or racism. Which is nice.
To Dr. Khilanani “this was “suppression of my talk on race.” But she made an obvious point. Yale should not claim surprise because “they knew the topic, they knew the title, they knew the speaker,” Exactly. They bought it, they own it.
The doctor is hardly a lone wolf. A paper accepted by the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association instructed that “whiteness is a malignant, parasitic-like condition that renders its hosts’ appetite voracious, insatiable and perverse” and to which white people have a particular susceptibility.
Corporations spend millions demanding their employees accept that they’re secret, unacknowledged bigots. School children are called-out and demeaned simply for belonging to the wrong race.
Yet in spite of all the provocation to hate raining down from the cultural heights, America is not a racist nation. Look around you. Of course there’s racism (see above). But normal Americans today bear no ill will personally to people of other races and accept them implicitly. Racism doesn’t drive policymaking. Judging people on the basis of their skin color is considered unacceptable by most of us.
Even though America is the least racist nation on the planet, it’s still a work in progress. But among the woke population, emerging voices are urging an ethos of resegregation. The renowned “anti-racist“ Ibram X. Kendi openly teaches that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Free Americans have traditionally favored the opposite, liberal mindset of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and MLK , urging true equality and comity among the races. Chief Justice John Roberts expressed this ethos in his opinion that “the way to stop racial discrimination is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
It’s time for choosing. Roberts and Kendi can’t both be right. Hopefully Americans will decide to work together for a future of yet greater equality and opportunity.
We can’t afford to lose the progress we have made. Bigotry is not OK, no matter what.
Dr. Thomas Patterson, former Chairman of the Goldwater Institute, is a retired emergency physician. He served as an Arizona State senator for 10 years in the 1990s, and as Majority Leader from 93-96. He is the author of Arizona’s original charter schools bill.
by azfreenews1 | Jun 21, 2021 | Education, News
By Corinne Murdock |
One of the latest diversity hires by Arizona State University (ASU) for their Shakespeare program researches and promotes critical race theory. She is one of five others hired recently on the basis of their race and similar perspectives on that race within academia.
Soon-to-be assistant professor Dr. Brandi Adams shared with ASU in an interview that she’s especially excited about her ongoing work in premodern critical race studies, and how that intersects with the history of reading.
The first search return for “premodern critical race studies” is a website on Ayanna Thompson – the same Regents Professor of English and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies director that hired Adams and four other “diverse” professors.
According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, premodern critical race studies argues that there were times in history that perceptions of race didn’t exist. Instead, other aspects like faith and family were scrutinized.
“Today, premodern critical race studies scholars are offering new insights into the prehistory of modern racialized thinking and racism. They are helping to create anti-racist spaces.”
Adams spoke at the Folger Shakespeare Library on the subject in March.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk0efa_6PF4&t=4s
As for application of Adams’ research in premodern critical race studies, she shared in the ASU interview that the research would be part of a chapter for a collected volume on the relationship between premodern critical race theory and the histories of books and reading.
Adams’ dissertation, Representations of Books and Readers in English Renaissance Drama, didn’t focus on premodern critical race theory.
Additionally, Adams recommended four novels. All of the recommendations were steeped in social justice messaging such as race and climate change. These were: “American Spy” by Lauren Wilkinson, “Broken Earth” by N.K. Jemisin, “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee, and “The Old Drift” by Namwali Serpell.
Last June, Adams published a piece on Medium that relayed a postmodernist approach. She criticized Senator Tom Cotton’s (R-AK) remarks implying that Shakespeare’s works were an integral influence on American principles, linking Cotton’s physical attributes such as his skin color to his perspectives, beliefs, and morality.
Adams took offense to Cotton’s “effortless alignment of Shakespeare with both the casual and systemic racism woven into our national landscape.” She decried the universal conflation of Shakespeare and “whiteness.”
“Cotton remains wholly unoriginal in claiming Shakespeare as fundamental to a white American university education,” wrote Adams. “He is, however, part of a disappointing recent trend of public figures, critics, filmmakers, and even scholars who have continued to adapt, appropriate, or write about Shakespeare’s plays with a problematic central tenet – that there is a specific perspective needed to regard them. More often than not, the lens through which we are asked to consider these plays is that of a white, cisgender, able-bodies, man who often vociferously insists that he embodies the universal interpretive mode for all conversations about Shakespeare.”
Adams will work under the Department of English and the Arizona Center for Medieval Renaissance Studies. Some of her forthcoming works include chapters, articles, or reviews focused on premodern critical race studies, inclusivity, “Blackness,” and race.
Adams didn’t respond to AZ Free News’ request for comment by press time.
Corinne Murdock is a contributing reporter for AZ Free News. In her free time, she works on her books and podcasts. Follow her on Twitter, @CorinneMurdock or email tips to corinnejournalist@gmail.com.
