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education
State-Level GOP Attacks on Public Schools Decried as 'Part of a National Playbook'
The latest Republican efforts include an Indiana bill to dissolve entire school districts where over half the students are enrolled in private or charter schools.
Jan 12, 2025
Critics are sounding the alarm on a fresh wave of attacks on public schools by Republican state lawmakers, calling their efforts part of a broader agenda to privatize public education.
Indiana's H.B. 1136—introduced by Reps. Jake Teshka (R-7), Jeffrey Thompson (R-28), and Timothy O'Brien (R-78)—would dissolve public school districts in which more than 50% of students attend private or charter schools based on fall 2024 averages. All remaining public schools in affected districts would be converted to charter schools, which are privately owned and operated but taxpayer-funded.
According toCapital B Gary, "The bill's provisions are estimated to dissolve five school corporations statewide, including Indianapolis Public Schools, Tri-Township Consolidated School Corporation in LaPorte County, Union School Corporation southeast of Muncie, and Cannelton City Schools near the Kentucky border in Perry County."
Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) condemned the proposal,
saying it "strongly opposes House Bill 1136 or any bill this legislative session that threatens local authority and community control of public schools."
Anyone who believes that the Right only wants to bring "choice" and is not about destroying public schools, read this. (and please don't tell me that a charter school is a public school) www.chalkbeat.org/indiana/2025...
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— CarolCorbettBurris (@carolburris.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 5:16 AM
"H.B. 1136 proposes dissolving five school corporations, including IPS, by converting schools to charter status and eliminating local school boards," the district continued. "This harmful legislation would strip communities of their voice, destabilize our financial foundations, and further jeopardize the education of approximately 42,000 students."
IPS asserted: "H.B. 1136 threatens to cause massive disruption to our public school system, diverting attention and resources away from the vital education and support our students need to succeed. This legislation is not student-focused and fails to reflect the community's input on how they envision their public schools thriving."
"Instead of fostering growth and innovation, H.B. 1136 risks dismantling the very foundation that supports student success and community collaboration," the district added.
"H.B. 1136 threatens to cause massive disruption to our public school system."
The Indiana Democratic Party
said on social media in response to the bill: "The GOP supermajority is continuing their attacks on local public schools. This time, they're threatening to dissolve dozens of schools across the state into charters, leaving around a million Hoosiers without a traditional public school option."
"For years, many public schools have struggled with funds being diverted to charter schools with no accountability," the party added in a separate post. "Our public schools are the backbone of communities across the state, and we must protect them. More charter schools means less oversight for taxpayers."
Indiana state Sen. Andrea Hunley (D-46), a former IPS teacher and principal, told Capital B Gary: "My children have been attending IPS schools for 11 years. And I am so concerned about the fact that in this place where the majority likes to say that they want choice for families, that they would be threatening to take away choice from a family like mine right here in the middle of our city."
"We've got to make sure that we stop this before it goes any further," she added.
Indiana state Sen. Fady Qaddoura (D-30), who also represents Indianapolis, toldWXIN last week, "I think this bill has a racial component by advancing discriminatory policies that are targeting the two largest minority communities in the state of Indiana."
"In my view," he added, "this piece of legislation had nothing to do with choice and has everything to do to continue to dismantle public education as we know it today in Indiana."
It's not just Indiana. Attacks on public education are afoot in states across the nation, including neighboring Ohio and Kentucky.
At the national level, progressives are warning that the imminent Republican trifecta—with GOP control of both chambers of Congress and, later this month, the White House—likely portends a massive attack on public education that could include ending the Department of Education, as advised in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a far-right overhaul of the federal government.
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In 'Attack on Trans Students,' Federal Judge Strikes Down Biden's Title IX Protections
The Republican judge cited the Supreme Court's recent decision that stripped federal agencies of their regulatory power.
Jan 10, 2025
In a decision that was partially underpinned by the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of a 40-year-old legal precedent last year, a federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Joe Biden's expanded protections for transgender youths and other vulnerable students, saying the administration overstepped in introducing the rules.
Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky ruled that the Education Department did not have the authority to expand the protections provided by Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, which since 1972 has prohibited sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding.
The ruling applies to the new definition in Title IX that was proposed by the department last April, which prohibited "discrimination on the basis of sex stereotypes, sex-related characteristics (including intersex traits), pregnancy or related conditions, sexual orientation, and gender identity."
Right-wing activists and politicians objected in particular to the protections for gender identity.
The rules stopped short of requiring schools to allow transgender students to play on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity—a key fixation of the far right—but required schools and staffers to accept students' identities on a daily basis, for example by calling them by their preferred pronouns rather than according to their sex assigned at birth.
The rules have been blocked in 26 states as Republican leaders in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and other states have filed legal challenges.
In his ruling, Reeves, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, wrote that "the entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex."
"Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless," he said.
Reeves wrote that "the final rule and its corresponding regulations exceed the department's authority," citing Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Supreme Court case in which the court's right-wing majority overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine. The legal precedent held that judges should defer to federal agencies' reasonable interpretation of a law if Congress has not specifically addressed the issue at hand.
The judge also rejected the Education Department's position that protections for transgender people against workplace discrimination—which were established in 2020 in the Supreme Court case Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia—should also apply in schools that receive federal funding.
At Law Dork, journalist Chris Geidner wrote that Reeves rejected "Bostock's application to Title IX and [cited] his newfound authority in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo to determine 'the statute's single, best meaning' himself."
"As such, he took that authority to decide what Title IX means, the department's view notwithstanding, and set aside the rule," wrote Geidner.
Reeves also wrote that requiring teachers and schools to use students' preferred pronouns and names "offends the First Amendment" and violates the free speech rights of teachers.
That assertion, said Jennifer Berkshire, author of The Education Wars, "really shows you how fake the rhetoric of 'parents rights' is."
"The idea that using a student's preferred pronouns is in any way an imposition on teachers is patently absurd," added Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Massachusetts. "If you can handle using nicknames, you can handle correct pronouns."
Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, said the judge turned "longstanding legal precedent on its head in a direct, disproportionate attack on trans students," and noted that the harm caused by the ruling will extend beyond transgender students.
"Today's decision displays extraordinary disregard for students who are most vulnerable to discrimination and are in the most need for federal protections under the Title IX rule," said Goss Graves. "The Biden administration's Title IX rule is essential to ensure that all students—including survivors of sexual assault and harassment, pregnant and parenting students, and LGBTQI+ students—are able to learn in a safe and welcoming environment. With these protections already removed in some states, students who experience sexual assault have had their complaints dismissed, or worse, been punished by their schools after reporting; pregnant students have been unfairly penalized for taking time off to give birth to a child; and LGBTQI+ students have faced vicious bullying and harassment just for being who they are."
Melanie Willingham-Jaggers, executive director of the LGBTQ rights group GLSEN, told The New York Timesthat the ruling "shows a stunning indifference to marginalized youth facing harassment and discrimination, as well as hardworking school administrators and principals who are working to build safer learning environments for their increasingly diverse student populations."
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Climbing the Mountain of My Emerging Life
Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on.
Dec 29, 2024
Dig, ponder, dig some more.
A year ago I wrote a column about some of the early moments of my growing up—not just memories but profound moments of awareness; flickers, you might say, of becoming who I am. I was 77 at the time. Now I’m... oh yeah, 78. Can you believe it? Another year is almost over. Holiday season shimmers, the smell of pine is in the air. It’s Christmas: a perfect time to open, once again, the stocking known as memory.
In last year’s column, I wrote about three childhood moments that created me as a person—or informed me that I had changed, moved forward in the process of becoming. These were moments of self-awareness. Gosh! I had no idea such a thing existed, but there I was at age six, playing “Red Rover” on my elementary-school playground with a bunch of other kids and I realized: I was part of something bigger than myself; I wasn’t alone. Run and play, laugh and love! It’s called “community” (I later learned).
The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present.
A second moment of becoming: I was 10 and had gotten into a fight after school—with a good pal. Huh? I rode my bike home, parked in the alley behind my house, and stood there rubbing my bruised elbow, aswirl in confusion. Fighting is so stupid! I decided I would never fight again—or rather, knew I would never fight again. I knew I had changed.
The third moment I wrote about was when I was 13. I had just seen a strange, disturbing movie with my mother and sister called Imitation of Life. We had car trouble on the way home and as we waited for the repair work to be finished, a puzzling awareness hit me, totally out of the blue. “I’m a genius,” I told myself—not with a smirk that I’m smarter than you are, but just the opposite. I was overwhelmed. Life isn’t preset. It’s an endless flow of God-knows-what, and it’s up to me—it’s up to all of us—to assign meaning, as best we can, to what’s going on. We’re all creating the future, moment by moment, whether we know it or not.
Yikes. This was far more responsibility than I was comfortable with, but I was stuck with it. I pushed on with growing up. These were all private moments, quietly “me” in a way that was no one else’s business. But some inner balloon (pardon the childish metaphor) was getting ready to burst. I had lousy penmanship, but I was turning into a writer, even though I hardly knew it. In fact, I got a “D” in English in eighth grade because I just couldn’t grasp the rules of grammar that were dumped on us out of the bag of marbles called education. What the heck is a participle? What’s an indirect object?
Attention, grade fanatics: We all learn at our own speed and in our own way. Two years later, in 10th grade, one of the books we were assigned to read was The Diary of Anne Frank. Birth of a writer! Well, sort of. I was riveted by her words, by the details of her life she bequeathed the world—and I felt a deep compulsion to start my own journal.
It literally took a year of trying. I’d buy a 39-cent notebook and start putting pieces of my life into words, usually prefaced with the warning: “Private. Do not read!” I felt compelled to pump up the importance of what I was saying, to write from the perspective that my life was significant. And the journal would never last more than a day or two. I could feel the phoniness in my words and would stash the notebook on a shelf, to be forgotten. But I kept trying! Something in me was determined to make this process work—solely for myself, of course. Turns out that may be the hardest audience of all to win over.
And then—I’m 16 at this point, in 11th grade—something happened: I was certain, I was terrified, that I had failed a solid geometry test one day. When I got home, I opened a notebook and scribbled the words: “God, I am worried. Scared to death is more like it.”
And the words simply flowed. I couldn’t stop. I went on for four pages, writing about the test, writing about how lousy I was doing in my English class, and then... yee-haw! I started writing about my “barren social life”: about the all the parties I hadn’t been invited to and my fear that I was a lousy dancer. I wasn’t “trying” to say anything; I was just letting it all out, spewing my feelings with unchecked honesty.
Two days later I wrote a second entry. Turns out I actually did OK on the math test, much to my amazement. And I was feeling good. I wrote about driving to a Junior Achievement meeting with some friends and singing a bunch of inappropriate songs on the way home. I even inserted the lyrics into the notebook. Something was happening: I wasn’t trying to churn out “good writing.” I was simply writing—giving words to my emotions and bringing them to life. I was finding, as I put it many years later, my voice.
And yeah, this is what growing up is all about. There’s nothing special or unique about any of this—it’s just a smattering of specificity. The interesting part, for me, as I write about it six-plus decades later, is to be able to feel the moment of becoming—to feel it as a new chunk of being, given to me almost as a Christmas present, not by Santa but by Anne Frank... and so many others: my parents, of course. My friends. My teachers.
Indeed, I must take a moment to honor Mom and Dad. They gave me life, home, family—and something more: the permission, you might say, to go my own direction. This was not easy for them, especially for my mother, who was a devout Lutheran, who had to watch her son break from the church and head off in his own spiritual direction.
Among the books I read in high school, three of them had a serious impact on my becoming: The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, 1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Their words were rocks for me to grab as I climbed the mountain of my emerging life. At one point, as I was writing in my journal, I made the declaration that I was a non-conformist. And one of the final tasks I had to fulfill before I graduated was to write my senior paper: a big-deal assignment. The topic could be of my choosing, but I had to quote a number of recognized authors. I chose the above trio. The paper was called “Is a Man’s Mind His Own?”
Yes, I wrote, it is.
I had sort of known this all along, though without necessarily even wanting it to be the case, except, as a boy, having the right to misbehave. But this was a serious step beyond boyhood. It was my first real step into the public domain. Uh oh. Now what?
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