Bear witness for education and voter rights: This week, read how policymakers in Florida, Alabama and Ohio are working to suppress honest instruction on American history, and subverting laws to protect fair electoral districts, and how you can bear witness.
Here are the topics:
- Florida and Alabama adopt policies that suppress truth, equal representation. Is Ohio next?
- Sign up as a nonpartisan poll monitor for early voting and Ohio’s Aug. 8 Special Election
Florida and Alabama adopt policies that suppress truth, equal representation. Is Ohio next? The first discipline of the Episcopal Church’s four-way path to Becoming Beloved Community is to Tell the Truth. Please be prepared to bear witness in Ohio’s debates over how to teach the history of race relations to our children and college students.
Here’s why:
- Florida’s new social studies curriculum: will Ohio copy it?
- Ohio bills to curtail training on DEI and teaching “divisive content,” and the fact that
- Ohio’s Legislature and Governor have now deprived our state school board of any authority over curriculum.
Local school boards have some leeway on how to implement state curriculum standards, so curriculum battles at the district level could get even worse, with Forest Hills Schools (Anderson Township) and Lebanon serving as painful examples within our Diocese.
The Florida Board of Education adopted new social studies standards in July which include major distortions in its descriptions of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and African-Americans’ access to civil rights. In her July 22 “Letters from an American” blog, Boston College American history professor Heather Cox Richardson – whose specialty is Reconstruction – gives quotes and page numbers illustrating the curriculum’s assertion that American chattel slavery was comparable to other labor systems in the world at the time, and that it helped African-Americans develop “skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” Richardson shows how the curriculum glosses over the incredible years of struggle it has taken to win any progress in protecting African-Americans’ physical safety and extending them civil rights after the constitutional amendments specifically defending their citizenship and right to protection. Instead the new Florida social studies standards describe the expansion of civil rights to Afridan-Americans as if this progress was inevitable, and granted by white people in a law-abiding manner.
“Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals….It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t,” Richardson writes, then documents her points.
Please read her article to be prepared if similar concepts are introduced into Ohio’s curriculum. As people working for Beloved Community, we have to be prepared to fight any attempt to teach our children lies about the history of racist oppression and violence and the tremendous work generations of Americans – often risking death or other harm – have put into trying to bring our society into harmony with our stated principles.
In an in-depth story July 24, Laura Hancock of the Cleveland Plain Dealer documented how Ohio’s controversial SB 83 to remove a perceived liberal agenda in public universities draws from model legislation drafted by conservative organizations – the Civics Alliance, Manhattan Institute, and Goldwater Institute – who oppose diversity, equity and inclusion training, and taking a position on issues like climate change. The Civics Alliance issued a statement after sponsor Senator Jerry Cirino introduced SB 83: “We are delighted and we are proud, because SB 83 takes some of its language and its concerns from different bills in the Civics Alliance’s Model Higher Education Code, drafted by the National Association of Scholars. We intended for these bills to inspire state legislators to craft their own legislation, adapted to meet their political circumstances. It is an honor that Senator Cirino has considered that our model language could be useful for Ohio.” SB 83 has generated huge numbers of opponent testimony during hearings. It hasn’t passed yet, and efforts to include it in the state budget failed.
In the same detailed and rigorously researched story, Hancock reports that “the Civics Alliance is also involved in changing K-12 social studies standards – believing the left has taken over social studies with race and identity politics and systematic racism lessons. It has a model “birthright” bill that has been included in parts of Ohio House Bill 103, which creates a nine-member task force that must develop social science standards based on the standards published in “American Birthright: The Civics Alliance’s Model K-12 Social Studies Standards.”
Defending honesty in education is now harder because the Ohio Legislature just deprived the Ohio School Board – the majority of whose members are elected – of any control over K-12 curriculum. The Legislature did this as part of the biennial budget because the separate bill to make the change, SB 1, was causing huge controversy and had not passed in the House. Control over curriculum now goes to the Governor’s administration, and it’s not yet clear to me what ways citizens will be able to have any influence on curriculum standards.
Meanwhile, on July 21, the Alabama Legislature passed, and the Governor immediately signed – a new Congressional District map which defies the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Allen v Milligan. This ruling upheld a lower court order that Alabama create a second majority-Black Congressional district or one in which Black voters have “the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.” Only one of the seven districts in the new map is over 50% Black, though African-Americans make up 26.8% of the state population. An NBC news article cites Kareem Crayton, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, whose research team looked at voting in 15 recent elections to see how Alabama’s new Congressional map would have performed. They found that a candidate preferred by Black voters would have won just once in thse 15 elections. The map adopted sets up a showdown between the State and the Federal Government on civil rights, one of many playing out now. A federal court will hold a hearing on the new map Aug. 14.
Also by order of the US Supreme Court, Ohio’s Supreme Court will review the compliance of our current Congressional district map with Ohio’s constitutional requirements for fair districts. The criteria are designed to prevent unfair partisan advantage – they don’t explicitly address racial gerrymandering. Two factors to remember here:
- The US Supreme Court upheld the authority of state constitutions and state courts as a check on the power of state legislatures.
- Last year Ohio’s Supreme Court found the current Congressional map to be unconstitutional, but the composition of the Court has changed because then Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor completed her term. Because she was ineligible to run again because of age limits, O’Connor was replaced by a justice appointed by Gov. DeWine. As a member of Ohio’s Redistricting Commission, DeWine voted for every redistricting plan which the Court found illegal. O’Connor was the only Republican who wrote or joined the seven successive Ohio Supreme Court rulings that the state and Congressional district plans adopted by the Redistricting Commission were all unconstitutional as partisan gerrymanders.
Sign up as a nonpartisan poll monitor for early voting and/or election day. The Ohio Voter Rights Coalition is calling for volunteers to help ensure that eligible voters can cast their votes in the Aug. 8 special election on the rules for amending Ohio’s constitution (Issue 1) Local and Poll monitor shifts start on 7/31 and will run each day of early voting and on Election Day. You will be able to sign up for a 3 hour shift on the day of your choice. If you’d like to sign up, please register for training for either Early Vote Poll Monitoring or Election Day Poll Monitoring. At the training, you’ll learn how to sign up for your shift and learn about your role and get connected with a regional lead who will be your main point of contact and support.
Poll Monitor Training Dates:
Early Vote: July 24th: 7pm, (training registration link: here)
Election Day: August 3rd: 12pm, (training registration link: here)
*If you can’t make these dates, please register anyway and we will send you a recording of the training afterwards.
Advocacy briefings are compiled by Ariel Miller, a longtime community advocate and member of Ascension & Holy Trinity, Wyoming. Connect with her at arielmillerwriter@gmail.com
