The Republican Party has an albatross around its neck, namely, the need to feed the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen. This canard has given them leeway to enact restrictions on the right to vote, typically targeting groups likely to vote for Democrats. DeSantis created a special force to arrest former felons who voted when they were not supposed to, but most of the handful who were arrested were released because the state had sent them registration cards encouraging them to vote. The latest crazy maneuver by Republicans is to remove their state from a national database that p ..read more

Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Mercedes Schneider’s wonderful blog! I learned about it last night, too late to mark the actual blog birthday. Mercedes is one of the sharpest, smartest voices of the Resistance to privatization. She is a hero of the Resistance thanks to her incisive, brilliant exposés of “reform” hoaxes. She is a high school English teacher in Louisiana. She has a Ph.D. in statistics and research methodology. She could have been a professor but she wanted to teach high school students. I started my blog in April 2012; she started hers in January 2013. We exchanged emails ..read more

Mercedes Schneider takes issue with the new authoritarians who are imposing book bans in the name of “freedom” and limiting free expressions of views they disagree with in the name of of “choice.” She writes: We are certainly in an age in which the term, “free speech,” is indeed not free because of increasing conservative pressure to shape speech into that which a minority of extreme, right-wing conservatives would agree with. Of course, that is not “free speech” at all. In my school district, the St. Tammany Library Alliance is combating the right-wing conservative push to ban library books n ..read more

The New Orleans Tribune pulled the mask off the charade of reform in New Orleans. The much-heralded experiment of turning every public school into a charter school is a failure. In the latest state ratings, more than half the schools received a grade of D or F. The newspaper’s editorial board writes: It has been said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Well, NOLA Public Schools must be certifiably insane; because here we are — 17 years deep into a so-called education reform movement; and this year’s recently released school ..read more

In Louisiana, a middle school librarian has said. “Enough is enough.” She is standing up and fighting against the vigilantes who have targeted school libraries. Amanda Jones has filed a lawsuit against two men who have harassed her and other librarians. Amanda Jones, a librarian at a middle school in Denham Springs, Louisiana, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday, arguing that Facebook pages run by Michael Lunsford and Ryan Thames falsely labeled her a pedophile who wants to teach 11-year-olds about anal sex. Jones, the president of the Louisiana Association of School Librarians, was alarmed a ..read more

Stephen Sawchuk wrote in Education Week about the ways that public controversy about “critical race theory” is affecting the drafting and revision of state history standards. He looks closely at three states that revised their history standards in 2021: Louisiana, New Mexico, and South Dakota. For months, GOP officials and FOX news kept up a steady and alarming drumbeat, falsely claiming that public schools were indoctrinating white students to hate America and to be ashamed of their race. This weird notion was suddenly discovered in the last year of the Trump regime, when beating up on public ..read more

This post is Mercedes Schneider at her best, pulling together the strings of a tangled web involving money, power, TFA, Chiefs for Change, John White, the Rhode Island $5 million contract, and Julia Rafael-Baer. Read it to the end. It’s rich with details that show how an ambitious young person can monetize her TFA experience and her network. There is big money to be made in the education industry. Unfortunately, not for classroom teachers who devote their lives to their students ..read more

Mercedes Schneider teaches high school English in Louisiana. Here is her report on life after Hurricane Ida: Hurricane Ida hit four days ago. I’m able to post this using my phone, which I can recharge by plugging into 200 feet of extension cord coming from my neighbors’ house. (They installed a generator that runs on natural gas just two weeks ago.) it’s 85 degrees in my house, but as a result of that generous extension cord offer, I have the luxury of an oscillating fan. My mother is staying with me, as are her five chicks hatched a few weeks ago. They are in a cage in my living room, with a ..read more

Louisiana hIgh school teacher Mercedes Schneider is required by law to file a financial disclosure form every year, and she never misses the deadline. State board member Kira Orange-Jones is also required to file a financial disclosure form but she misses the deadline year after year, even thought is supposed to be fined for late filing. Orange-Jones is also a senior Vice President of Teach for America. Another mystery in her paperwork is her residence. Her husband, writes Schneider, resides in New Mexico. Where does Orange-Jones live? Schneider writes: Orange-Jones is notorious for failing to ..read more

I recently interviewed Raynard Sanders, a veteran educator in New Orleans, about his new book The Coup D’etat of the New Orleans Public Schools: Money, Power, and the Illegal of a Public School System. You can watch it here. He spoke at length about the blatant racism involved in the takeover and privatization of the city’s public schools. The state leaders (white) had been eager to find a reason to seize control of the district, which had a majority black school board. Ray says that the state commissioner cooked up a tale about missing millions of federal dollars. This same commissioner obtai ..read more