The conservative War on Children keeps getting worse

You don't need to fund schools if you kick all the kids out

Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.

First things first: Here’s my latest piece on the Teamsters’ pending strike, the issues driving the discord, and an up-close look Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s visit to a practice picket in Queens. It covers a lot in a short time and hopefully fills in some gaps that the mainstream media has left in public understanding of the conflict.

OK, now that you’ve watched that, tonight’s story is about the latest chapter in the Republican Party’s War on Children, the long-term damage that it is likely to cause, and how to get things back on track.

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In Arizona, a new law allows schools to suspend children as young as five-years-old. A cruel and unproductive policy that does nothing to improve student behavior, the suspension may come as a relief to some kids in the state, where the new Superintendent of Schools is instituting a “zero-tolerance” regime designed to threaten, terrify, and humiliate.

The new superintendent, a walking corpse and hell expat named Tom Horne, wants to do away with social and emotional learning, which he claims — in official state documents — is a “gateway to Critical Race Theory.” One of his deputy superintendents, a creep named Sid Bailey, has spent the year training teachers in his own personal demented method of discipline.

The approach includes tactics like pausing class to isolate, stand over, and stare menacingly at an individual student, as well as putting a kid’s desk in the corner and forcing them to stare at the wall all day. They’re designed to strike fear into the heart of children, who Bailey seems to believe are naturally misbehaved trolls.

"When that kid walks into your classroom the first day of school, they got one question in their mind: Why should I trade in the joys of goofing off for the rigors of responsibility?" Bailey said at a recent training, displaying the attitude of a prison warden more than that of an educator.

Horne has insisted that this no-nonsense approach will help fill the state’s massive teacher shortage, though it is probably unlikely to outweigh four decades of underfunding public schools, some of the lowest teacher pay in the nation, and Horne’s introduction of a statewide hotline for conservative parents who want to snitch on teachers.

People put this man in charge of their children

Each of Arizona’s statewide elections last fall came down to the wire, but Horne, who won his race by around 8,000 votes, was the only Republican to emerge victorious. Having served already served as Arizona’s superintendent from 2003 to 2011, he used his pre-existing platform and outrageously racist past to cast himself as the ultimate enemy of CRT and squeak his way to victory. Horne’s support for more punitive measures against students was a far-less prominent part of his campaign, but it’s hardly a unique quirk of an old crank.

Arizona’s harsh new approach to discipline is part of a larger national movement toward “zero-tolerance” policies in schools. The trend comes largely in response to the rising rates of disruption and violence that have plagued some schools since students returned to the classroom after a year of pandemic-driven remote learning. Students have fallen behind in

Republicans in North Carolina last week introduced an education bill that includes a number of their typical culture war obsessions as well as eliminating the language that prevented suspending students for a litany of non-violent matters like cursing and violating dress code. As in many places, talking back to the teacher is also on the list of infractions that could soon lead to suspension.

In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a new bill that authorized teachers to use “reasonable force” on disruptive students and grants them the presumption of innocence should their actions lead to charges being filed against them. For a state that has all but banished LGBTQ teachers, policed educator speech for any hint of social justice commentary, and accused math books of being too woke, suggesting that this new law was enacted out of deep concern for teachers’ well-being seems a bit far-fetched.

Lo and behold, the far-right lunatic parent group Moms for Liberty has infiltrated Florida’s school boards, fought for stricter punishments, and in at least one county allied with advocates of violence against children.

“They know they’re not going to be given after-school detention, they’re not going to be suspended,” Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey said at a press conference in December. “They’re not going to be expelled or, like in the old days, they’re not gonna have the cheeks of their ass torn off for not doing right in class.”

Ivey was standing next to Brevard’s new far-right school board chair when he made the psychotic comment, and the school district hardly disavowed the statement when asked.

Brevard has also moved to make it easier to suspend and expel students, over the urgent protests of the local NAACP and other civil rights groups. Studies have shown that Black and Latino students are exponentially more likely to be subjected to harsh penalties like suspension from school, and that suspension is far more likely to result in long-term harm than lead to any improvement in their classroom conduct.

Here’s what one study, published this summer, found:

Students assigned to middle schools that are one standard deviation stricter—equivalent to being at the 84th percentile of strictness versus the mean—are 3.2 percentage points more likely to have ever been arrested and 2.5 percentage points more likely to have ever been incarcerated as adults. They also are 1.7 percentage points more likely to drop out of high school and 2.4 percentage points less likely to attend a 4-year college. These impacts are much larger for Black and Hispanic male students.

President Biden’s Department of Education alluded to those disparities in a letter to schools designed to provide guidance on discipline and equal opportunity. The recommendations, however, were vague and lacked conviction, a huge disappointment to civil rights groups that anticipated a far more definitive return to the Obama-era guidance that had been withdrawn by Betsy DeVos.

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That Biden, who has largely been a more progressive president than Obama, is taking a more timid stance on school discipline is indicative of a more complicated political calculation. Young people have faced a profound mental health crisis Conservatives have led the sharp shift away from the more holistic approach that had become the standard during the 2010s, but in some places, teachers’ unions have been right behind them on it.

The union in Brevard County disavowed Sheriff Ivey’s enthusiasm for tearing the cheeks off kids’ asses, but not his support for zero-tolerance disciplinary measures.

Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, a Republican, pushed hard for changes to a progressive discipline law signed by his Democratic predecessor in 2019. Ultimately, was able to convince the Democratic-controlled legislature to eliminate the requirement that schools create restorative justice plans for troubled students before suspending them, while making children as early as six-years-old eligible to be suspended from school.

The Clark County Education Association officially backed the new law and had members testify on its behalf. As they work under increasingly deteriorating conditions and fear for their safety, it’s understandable that educators have backed some of the more immediate laws designed to enhance their self-defense and remove troublemakers from class.

But those restraints and expulsions are only temporary solutions, if that, and will only fuel a crisis of stratification and abandonment. Districts that have devoted the time and resources to restorative justice have had far more success in preventing a flare-up in conflicts in the aftermath of Covid-driven remote learning; Kansas City is a prime example of what’s possible when these practices are implemented and taken seriously.

In many states, punitive measures in schools are being paired with policies designed to damage students outside of the classroom. The war on children continues unabated in Republican states, and now includes a vicious ongoing assault on kids’ access to health care.

In Texas, half a million people were stripped of Medicaid last month, a vast majority of which were children. Florida, too, is largely kicking kids off of the insurance program. You can just see it now: children are going to be coming to school sick and exhausted, perhaps angered by the fact that their school district suddenly won’t acknowledge their humanity in the books that are permitted in the library and classroom.

It’s enough to make anybody act out, or at least talk back to a teacher out of frustration. One wrong move, though, and they’ll find themselves expelled, and potentially doomed in their adulthood. It’s a vicious cycle, and one that must be broken in 2024 as school boards across the country are up for election.

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