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Typically a new year brings optimism, but so far, Americans are experiencing widespread malaise. Covids unpredictable nature continues to pummel whatever hopeful outlook people attempt to muster. As we trudge onward into a politically significant year, it is wise for candidates and political parties to keep in mind how this outlook can create unpredictable behavior at the ballot boxes.

One common assumption that doesnt hold true this year is that education is not a major election issue. While the economy will certainly be on the minds of voters, whats happening in the schoolroom is going to be the issue that is flying under the radar for many political candidates.

In November of last year, the Virginia Governors race was certainly a wake up call for Democrats. Exit polls showed that a rising number of college educated suburban voters cast their ballot for the Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin, despite proclamations in 2020 that Democrats had secured this demographic. A poll by Monmouth showed that 41% of all voters felt education was the most important issue in the Governors race. This is especially surprising since the economy and inflation only scored 4 points higher.

Election results soon confirmed what the polls predicted. In Virginia, heavily suburban counties that went for Biden turned to Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe, largely because of education issues. McAuliffe may have seen the writing on the wall, but he responded inadequately, equating parental concern over education as personal culture wars. Obviously, this response did not resonate.

Like Virginia, Nevada is a swing state with Democrats dependent upon groups of suburban voters and nonpartisans to carry the day, especially in the more moderate Washoe County. This year, the suburban vote is not a shoo-in for Democrats. In the wake of the Virginia defeat, Democrats in Nevada should heed the warning signs and resist simplifying Republican education campaign issues as cultural calls to action that only appeal to racists or, simply as misinformation about the teaching of Critical Race Theory. Many voters will be impacted by education issues that have very little to do with CRT. Centrist think tank Third Way emphasized this point in a recent memo about the Virginia election. While the teaching of CRT itself wasnt a primary issue for most voters, it tapped into a general frustration with inconsistent school closure policies and concerns over learning loss.

Traditionally, the Democratic Party is an avid supporter of public education. But their messaging has proved insufficient in the last two years. Education issues extend far beyond funding. Since 2020, Nevada has received over $1.07 billion dollars in additional federal assistance for school Covid relief. And yet, districts still struggle with staff shortages that significantly impact the day-to-day instruction of students. Repeating the mantra that schools need more funding is an overly simplistic message that fails to address the problems parents, teachers, and students are facing today.

In late 2020, a UNR survey of parents found that only 47% were satisfied with their school districts pandemic response.

Conversely, in March of 2021, the US Secretary of Education predicted that, by the fall, school will look more like what it was before Covid.

Fast forward to January 9th, 2022, there are 5,409 schools in the US that have returned to distance learning. Some because of the rapidly spreading Omicron variant. But many other districts simply dont have enough staff to weather even small increases in the number calling in sick. Still reeling from earlier periodic closures due to wildfire smoke, students in Washoe County School District now contend with centralized bus stop locations due to driver shortages. Students in Clark County Schools District have reported waiting up to seventy-five minutes for buses. While Governor Sisolak urges schools to stay open, schools nevertheless may be forced to close due to lack of substitute teachers. With continuing instability, parents are becoming more frustrated.

The Omicron variant, as well as current labor shortages have further stressed a system that has already been struggling for years under a lack of sufficient funding and dwindling qualified applicants. And Nevadans notice.

In 2021, Education Week ranked Nevada schools as last in the nation in regards to educational opportunities and performance. NAEP, the national gold standard for academic assessment, shows test scores for Nevada students continue to lag behind most other states. Despite Nevada schools receiving a necessary injection of federal funding and a 22% jump in student-specific spending from the Nevada Legislature, education leaders say the money is a drop in the bucket due to years of public neglect.

Granted, most parents may not be aware of all these details, but they are aware of large class sizes. In 2020, according to the National Education Association, Nevada had some of the highest class sizes in the country.

And its not only K-12 parents and students struggling. During the 2020-21 school year, the national number of high school graduates enrolling in college was down by 21.7% compared with last year. Low income and minority students were hit hardest. While the Nevada State Board of Health attempted to ensure that campuses would no longer close by mandating Covid vaccinations for students, the Nevada Legislative Commission blocked their move, making viral spread once again a concern. Unfortunately, like K-12 schools, colleges may again face disruptions to learning due to the pandemic.

Last fall, Nevada students, teachers, and parents were promised a better year with an influx of funding and newly approved vaccinations, but they are still largely dealing with large class sizes and potential further disruptions caused by Covid. If schools go back to distance learning, despite a general agreement of the need to take Covid seriously, parents will burn out. And whoever is in power will, fairly or unfairly, take the blame. Despite the fact most school decisions are made by districts, incumbents will face the brunt of voter discontent.

Republicans are two steps ahead already. They are banging the parent discontent drum, and despite their use of trigger phrases such as CRT and cancel culture, its not the words that are drawing voters, its the overall weariness with education.

If Democrats want to win this election, they need to talk about whats happening with students and parents in our schools. They need to acknowledge the frustrations parents are experiencing. While most parents say they like their childs school and they understand the need for Covid precautions, they are still worn out. All it takes is one more round of distance learning to push them over the edge. So who is waiting at the bottom to catch them?

As of 01/12/2022, Clark County School District announced that due to staffing shortages, they will be extending the Martin Luther King holiday break another two days.

As of 01/12/2022, Washoe County School District announced they will minimize the 10-day exclusion period due to COVID to 5 days for staff and students.

Shelley Buchanan is the Sierra Nevada Allys education reporter. She is a forty-year resident of Northern Nevada. After working as an English teacher, school librarian, and school technology specialist, she now writes about education, technology, and social justice issues. Support her work here.

Founded in 2020, the Sierra Nevada Ally is a self-reliant publication that offers unique, differentiated reporting on the environment, conservation, education, and public policy, and gives voice to writers, visual artists, and performers.We rely on the generosity of our readers and aligned partners.

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Education Will Be A Central Issue for Nevada Voters This Year - The Sierra Nevada Ally

Both of these bills have been born from the phony Critical Race Theory outcry. Republicans admit that theyre harping on race in schools because they see it as a winning issue among suburban moms who can help them take back the U.S. House and Senate in 2022.

But the naked ambition for political gain hides a more sinister truth the deliberate attempt to thwart an honest examination of this countrys past and the impact it carries today, despite what the bills proponents say.

HB 322 sponsor Don Jones, (R-Freeport) has 27-co-sponsors, including Plummer, but no lawmakers of color. There are four lawmakers, including Plummer, who come from fairly diverse districts, meaning their populations mirror or exceed state averages for people of color. The remainder represents districts that are, when averaged out, overwhelmingly white 88%.

Of course, white lawmakers can introduce legislation thats fair to everyone (see: 1964 Civil Rights Act and many more). But this situation does call into question the purpose behind the focus on race-based politics and highlights why no people of color have not signed on.

Democratic Rep. Catherine Ingram, a member of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus, neatly summed up whats at stake, from the perspective of the sponsors and co-sponsors:

This is a way that we will control what happens in society, and were going to get rid of this nonsense about you thinking that Black people have been mistreated, or Hispanics have been mistreated, or even poor coal miners in (West) Virginia were mistreated. Were not going to tell that part of history because it makes people uncomfortable when there is an oppressor and someone whos being oppressed.

I give Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur all the credit in the world for doing what so many of her colleagues wont stepping forward, even if her comments should be taken with a grain of salt. In an interview with WHBC radio, posted on Facebook on July 22, 2021, she justified HB 327 by saying students shouldnt have to adhere to a Marxist ideology to get a passing grade. She then linked CRT (which isnt taught K-12) to Marxism, bundling two of the rights favorite boogeymen. So really, its her ideology that drives her, not whats best for students.

But at least she speaks, which we cant say (yet) for Plummer. Heres what I want to ask him:

It could be he has really good answers that Im not thinking about. My guess is hes not answering Don Jones didnt either, by the way because they cant defend the indefensible.

Those of us who see these bills for what they are need to stop playing into the culture wars narrative and be far more aggressive in our description.

This is race-baiting and a shameless political effort designed to pit one group of people against another. So call it what it is. How does anybody in elected office justify that?

Maybe, one day, Phil Plummer will tell us his side.

Ray Marcano is a long-time journalist whose column appears on these pages each Sunday. He can be reached at raymarcanoddn@gmail.com.

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MARCANO: State representatives cant defend the indefensible - Dayton Daily News

In December my daughter brought Covid home from school as if a folded permission slip. The feeling, on seeing the two pink lines come up on her test, was complicated and raw, containing both bad memories and relief. Finally (a part of me thought, a part of me quite low down and bloodied), finally the thing we have been waiting for has arrived. I breathed out a breath I had been holding for two years.

There were six or seven other feelings, too, including a now-familiar sense of doom brought on by the realisation that for us, lockdown was to begin again. A gentle PTSD crawled in and made itself comfortable on my lap as I briefly mapped out the next two months of arguments and pasta in my mind. Of course, with rude inevitability, the virus took its time spreading through the house, lingering on our daughter, only taking up residence with our boy toddler when her isolation was nearing its end. He stopped sleeping, his temperature leaping up and down like a cat when the doorbell goes.

Midway through our sons isolation my partner looked at me and regretfully said, I feel odd. He had it, I did not, on we went, greyly. On Christmas Day, having tested relentlessly, I took the children to my parents house where the five of us had a token celebration, but at some point after the crackers I started to feel not good. By the time I got home I was feverish and slightly wild, my throat swollen, my mood vile. Had a faulty test meant Id put my parents at risk? I went to bed.

Im used to pain. I can deal with migraines, even those that are clattery and awful or must be taken personally. Im used to grimly carrying on, one eye shut. But Im unaccustomed to illness like this, where, wheezing and achy, I have no choice but to pass over all caregiving duties in order to lie down and doze through the new series of Sex and the City, on which I formed many sharp yet neurologically suspect opinions.

I slept for days, getting up only to eat muesli and do lateral flow tests, all negative. The lack of a positive result made me feel a little mad, as if I had somehow slipped through realitys fine gauze to another timeline where Wuhans animal market had been closed that day.

That week Id been reading Hanya Yanagiharas new novel, To Paradise, the final third of which is set in New York at the end of the 21st century, a place where increasingly deadly pandemics have ushered in totalitarianism.

It was a bad time, I see now, to read a story about a future defined by sickness, to read about sterilisation, state surveillance, where a mother isolates her immuno-compromised twins for their entire life as yet another virus threatens their society, and how, when she catches it, leaving them without care, the two boys leave their compound for the first time and die in the garden, their lives becoming glorious for once even as they ended.

A bad time. Lying in the linen darkness of a winter afternoon while the government blustered its way through unprecedented levels of Covid infections and my baby coughed downstairs. A bad time, Hanya!

When my second PCR test came back negative, too, I left the house, shakily but with intent. If I wasnt going to have Covid then I sure as hell wasnt going to stay inside that germ-thick house one second longer. I didnt last long; outside there was mostly mud. When I got back to bed I read about a case of flurona, a rare new double infection of coronavirus and influenza thats been discovered in a young, pregnant, unvaccinated Israeli woman. Lol, I croaked, to nobody.

Im much better now, thank you for asking. My cough, while rancid, no longer rattles the cutlery, and my limbs, while still aching, are now entirely capable of navigating at least a staircase. My mood, though, remains in limbo, vigilant to the slightest interior shift.

Its a strange feeling to be ill with the wrong thing. To live in a state immersed in a single virus a sickness that provokes outrage and dry coughs, and shuts down schools and burns out the NHS, and inspires protesters to storm testing centres in a selection of quite bad jeans but to be struck down by another one altogether, one with similar symptoms but fewer culture wars.

Here I found the modern version of Fomo, less bothered by smoky parties and the potential of sex, more concerned with missing out on the hottest new variant, especially when the rest of your family are now happily immune for at least a fortnight.

Why did everyone else in the house get it and not me, I mutter into a tissue had I been such a bad wife and mother that I hadnt been within their breathing spaces all month? What was the point of the night sweats, the hacking cough, the headaches and breathlessness if not to have been a brave little soldier and survived a pandemic? Honestly.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman

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Being ill is no fun, especially if you dont even have Covid - The Guardian

This is the book cover of Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America, edited by Darren Dochuk. The book is reviewed by Agostino Bono. (CNS photo/courtesy University of Notre Dame Press)

By Agostino Bono Catholic News Service Posted January 14, 2022

Religion and Politics Beyond the Culture Wars: New Directions in a Divided America, edited by Darren Dochuk. University of Notre Dame Press. (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2021). 359 pp. $55.

Mixing religion, politics, the culture wars and division in America can make for an explosive cocktail in a country where many people see issues and often the people espousing them in black and white.

This worsened during the presidency of Donald Trump, who demonized opponents and used ridicule more than arguments to shoot down ideas.

The result is todays society in which such hot-button topics as abortion, immigration, race, climate change and who can use which public bathroom are treated as a tug-of-war producing only winners and losers.

Little room exists for gray areas, thoughtful compromise and negotiations to resolve problems. Its universal truths versus moral relativism.

This book a collection of 14 essays mostly by academics doesnt solve any problems, but it shows that divisions and culture wars are nothing new in a society where religion and politics often combust. The difference today is a more polarized citizenry.

The essays avoid dealing directly with current incendiary issues or in some cases how they are framed today. Instead, many essays delve into the previous century and the beginnings of this one to show how various religious communities and individuals intertwined with politics on key issues such as the Cold War and the environment.

Sometimes the issues divided different religions or produced splits within some, such as opposition to the Vietnam War. The essays are based on presentations at a 2014 Beyond the Culture War conference at Washington University in St. Louis.

As these are essays, there is no common thread running through the book nor is there a clear formula as to how religion and politics can go beyond culture wars and heal divisions. But individual essays present some interesting facts.

Early in the previous century there was a struggle as to who should lead Christian workers in their labor struggles: the workers themselves or clergy arbiters.

Catholics, Jews and some Protestants were favorable to immigration. Other Protestants were opposed, however, because it would open the door to more southern European Catholics in a country considered white Anglo-Saxon Protestant now and forever.

One tantalizing essay shows how the CIA recruited Catholic and Protestant missionaries on overseas assignments as spies.

But it commits an enormous historical error. It says a CIA-aided Catholic movement helped replace Chilean Marxist President Salvador Allende with a Christian Democrat president. Allende was overthrown in 1973 by a military coup that inaugurated a brutal military regime headed by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Perhaps the most interesting fact to emerge in the book is the difficulty in tagging people with preconceived political labels even in divisive times. Many Catholics, especially priests and nuns, were actively engaged in Vietnam War protests, an activity considered politically liberal at the time.

Yet, they strongly opposed abortion, considered a conservative view, but didnt align themselves with the anti-abortion Republican Party. Their reason for both positions was the same: opposition to the destruction of human life.

The book, while not offering solutions to todays dilemmas, indicates that we may learn some lessons about polarization and culture wars by studying the past.

***

Also of interest: Faith and Reckoning After Trump, edited by Miguel A. De La Torre. Orbis Books (Maryknoll, New York, 2021). 304 pp., $26.

***

Bono is a retired CNS staff writer.

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Can religion and politics get us beyond the culture wars? - CatholicPhilly.com

There's an inherent contradiction at the heart of liberal thinking that perpetually raises its head. It's one which has become ever-more pronounced in our age of ultra-progressive politics: the tension between equality and liberty. Many progressives think you can have both. Alas not. You can only have either, or a greater emphasis upon one at the expense of the other.

This contradiction has once more been made evident today amidst reports of a lecturer who says he is the latest victim of 'cancel culture'. James Treadwell, a professor of criminology at Staffordshire University, says that he is 'being investigated for transphobia' after his employer received 'formal and official' complaints about his gender-critical views on Twitter.

Staffordshire University has confirmed that his case is indeed being reviewed. It has said:

'As a university we are committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion to ensure we promote a positive culture where everyone is able to be themselves. We are equally committed to academic freedom and lawful freedom of speech.'

Here in two adjoining sentences are embodied this contradiction between equality and liberty, or to put it another way, between tolerance and freedom. Either we can have a world in which transgender people or any other minority section of society have a right for their identities to be equally tolerated, respected and protected by the state. Or we can have a society in which individuals have their right to speak their minds, in which their opinions are also tolerated, respected and protected. You can live in a society in which no-one is allowed to be offended, or one in which everyone has the right to be offensive. You can't have both.

As a pragmatic compromise, liberal societies forever choose a middle path, between individual-based liberty and state-enforced equality, oscillating in various degrees between one to the other. Our culture today places emphasis on the latter, of collective safety before individual liberty. This is at the root of 'cancel culture', in which individuals are censured or censored for saying the wrong thing because it might be hurtful to groups of people. Yet our sensitive so-called 'snowflake' world elevates the right not to be offended over the right to be offensive.

For many years it seemed that the libertarians were on the ascendency. In the arts especially there has been a growing consensus since the 1960s that the right to expression trumps societal taboos, sentiment or reactionary outrage. This is why Mary Whitehouse was such a figure of fun in her time: she seemed a dinosaur out of kilter in an age of untrammelled liberation. Theatre censorship ended in Britain in 1968 and even as late as 1995 it was legally impossible to obtain a home video of Reservoir Dogs. Even the idea of banning Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), which some councils did on account of its perceived blasphemy, would be unthinkable now.

Yet the trend has since swung the other way, mostly in conjunction with the rise of identity politics, which seeks to protect all swathes of society, first from discrimination and acts of violence, but increasingly now from hurt feelings or disagreeable opinions. This shift has been enshrined in equality legislation and in 'hate speech', which protects groups and abstract nouns against individuals.

This has thrown up many problems and objections, not only from those who believe free speech is sacrosanct. It has exposed the related tensions between the rights of groups themselves to be offensive against each other. The 'gay-cake' controversy in Northern Ireland was a case in point: should Christians be allowed the right to act in accordance with their identity and beliefs, even if it might be offensive to gay customers?

Another recent eruption in the culture wars has been between Trans campaigners and gender-critical feminists, with the latter objecting as women that biological men be allowed into female prisons, rape shelters or participate in female sports. Then there is the old matter of some opinions held by somereligious fundamentalistsin regards to women and homosexuals. Which group should be protected? The offended or the offensive?

We see this conflict between safety and freedom in wider society. Lockdowns and the matter of mandatory vaccinations have pitted two camps against each other, between those who believe the safety of society is utterly paramount, and those who believe foremost in bodily autonomy. It's a debate that was previously played out over banning smoking in pubs, and, before that, the compulsory wearing of seat-belts.

In the political sphere, at least, there is implicit recognition that there has to be a compromise between the two aspirations. In the cultural sphere, alas not. Ever since the French revolutionaries issued their contradictory and self-refuting call to arms, 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', progressives have been living in the shadow of this fraudulent banality.

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James Treadwell and the true meaning of 'cancel culture' - Spectator.co.uk