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Opinion: The courts have overturned Proposition 208, but voters are paying attention - and we are furious over how our leaders are treating Arizona schools.

Beth Lewis| opinion contributor

Why bypassing Proposition 208 is a big political mistake

Columnist Robert Robb did not support Proposition 208. But pretending voters didn't approve the tax hike for education is a massive mistake, he says.

Arizona Republic

Arizona voters were dealt yet another devastating blow when the courts struck down Proposition 208, a voter-approved ballot initiative that would have infused $1 billion annually into our states K-12 classrooms.

These critically needed funds would have finally given Arizona schools a chance to compete with other states, providing our students with the high-quality resources and support they need to succeed.

Instead, Gov. Doug Ducey, Senate President Karen Fann and House Speaker Rusty Bowers opted to ignore the will of Arizona voters, engaging in political gamesmanshipon the backs of Arizona kids.

The impacts of this decision hold far-reaching consequences for real children, families and educators.

The courts ruling is an important, but painful, reminder that our current Legislature and state leadership have utterly failed in the constitutional obligation to fund Arizona schools.

Even more insulting that the loss of Proposition 208 was our lawmakers unabashed glee at the loss of these desperately needed funds a disdainful affront to every voter who simply wants to see kids supported and classrooms funded.

Another view: Ignore that Proposition 208 passed? Big mistake

Its well past time for Arizona voters to connect the dots and vote their values by supporting pro-public education candidates up and down the ballot.

To heap further insult onto injury, Gov. Ducey and legislative leadership are threatening to repeal and replacethe ruinous tax structure that hundreds of thousands of voters referred to the 2022 ballot as Proposition 307.

Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers are doubling down with intrusive education policy proposals, including threatening school closures in low-income communities, punishing teachers, banning books and attacking trans and LGBTQ youth.

This is the party of limited government?

Gov. Ducey claims our state is awash with cash. The Arizona Legislature has a $2 billion surplusand $1.4 billion in the rainy day fund, which it could use to honor voter intent by funding Proposition 208 dollars for classrooms.

However, Arizonas majority lawmakers have demonstrated time and again that they care more about lining the pockets of special interests than they care about the 1.1 million children in Arizona classrooms who are being denied the resources and tools that they deserve.

What they dont realize is that Arizona voters are paying attention and we are furious. Emboldened lawmakers, thoroughly out of touch with their constituents, are overplaying their hands.

Just last week, voters in New Hampshire and Vermont roundly rejected school board candidates seeking to capitalize on culture wars and school privatization. Small-minded, regressive ideologists lost; truth, honesty and democracy won.

Now its our turn, Arizona. Public education advocates have done our part to educate and inform lawmakers about the realities Arizona children are facing.

Parents, students and educators have poured their hearts out to lawmakers.

Weve hosted legislative school tours and forums. Weve collected signatures summer after summer using the constitutional pathways of citizen initiatives and referenda. Weve been reasonable, rational and collaborative to no avail.

Enough is enough.

The Nov. 8 elections cant come soon enough. We will knock on every door. We will call every voter. We will elect candidates who truly support public schools and our kids up and down the ballot.

Its time to get on the right side of history for our students and our state. Join our statewide movement to achieve fully funded public schools in every community at sosarizona.org/volunteer.

Beth Lewis is executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona.

Originally posted here:
Gloat over the demise of Arizona school funding. We'll rally voters in the fall - The Arizona Republic

Jonah GoldbergTribune Content Agency

Its hard to pick up a foreign policy journal or even turn on the TV without encountering someone predicting, recommending or lamenting a new Cold War with Russia, China or both.

This is entirely understandable and even justifiable, if you mean a new period of strategic competition, pressure and geopolitical tension that falls short of all-out war. Such a lower-case cold war is already on display.

The U.S. and our allies are doing nearly everything short of declaring a hot war on Russia for its immoral aggression against Ukraine. Things are not so tense with China, but theres a broad consensus, particularly among Republicans, that containing China to use a Cold War term should become central to American foreign policy. And even many who disagree believe we are entering a new Cold War with China whether we want one or not. After all, sometimes wars, cold or hot, are not wars of choice.

I agree that new cold wars with Russia and China are simultaneously necessary and not necessarily desirable. But I worry that the semantic confusion of the historic Cold War and this new cold war could get us into trouble. George Orwell observed in Politics and the English Language that if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

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The Cold War was wholly a creature of its time. Indeed, as Orwell himself observed in his 1945 essay You and the Atom Bomb, our conflict with the Soviet Union was a product of the nuclear age, and he predicted that nuclear weapons would make the kind of war that had just concluded a few months earlier unlikely.

The fear of nuclear war still constrains our actions and I hope our adversaries but the differences between the Cold War era and today are profound.

To start, the Cold War was not a time of sustained peace. The Korean and Vietnam wars were part of the Cold War, as were the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

It was very easy to cut off economic relations with the Soviet Union, because we had so few to begin with. The same holds to a large extent with contemporary Russia, which may be a nuclear superpower but is an economic piker. Its GDP is less than half of Californias (Russias per capita GDP is an eighth of Californias).

Meanwhile, China is the worlds second largest economy and a global manufacturing powerhouse. Any expectation that the U.S. and the international community would sever ties with China over a Taiwan invasion the way they have over Russias invasion of Ukraine seems overly optimistic. China crushed democracy in Hong Kong and is putting Uyghurs in concentration camps, and the international business community has for the most part shrugged.

The Soviets vowed to liberate the world from capitalism, bourgeois democracy and religion. That kind of ideology made it comparatively easy to garner political support for containment yet even then, there was ample domestic and international opposition to Americas anti-communist policies.

Indeed, under God was officially inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance to differentiate America from the godless Communists. When Sen. Homer Ferguson, R-Mich., introduced the legislation, he said, I believe this modification of the pledge is important because it highlights one of the real fundamental differences between the free world and the Communist world, namely belief in God.

No one in the House or Senate spoke in opposition to the change.

For good or ill, it seems implausible anything like that would be possible today. Religion no longer binds the nation the same way and our domestic culture wars whether over COVID-19 pandemic response or school curricula or Vladimir Putin as anti-woke hero do not seem very compatible with a new cold war. And freedom itself is no longer the rallying cry it once was on either the left or the right.

Orwell argued that some phrases come to us like parts of a prefabricated hen-house and end up doing our thinking for us. We may indeed face a new cold war, but we need fresh thinking that doesnt necessarily flow from old phrases like Cold War.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch. Goldbergs column is provided by Tribune Content Agency.

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Jonah Goldberg: Let's not confuse the Cold War of the 1950s with what's happening today - Lynchburg News and Advance

The attack on democracy in Ukraine should bring an end to the culture wars including debates about statues and pronouns in the UK, the Foreign Secretary has said.

Liz Truss also said Russias aggression in Ukraine showed the UK end its dependency on cheap goods from authoritarian regimes.

The Cabinet minister, who is being increasingly touted as a successor to Boris Johnson, said Vladimir Putins invasion of Ukraine showed the UK should be proud of its longstanding commitment to freedom and democracy.

This is what is important, this is what matters, she said.

Ms Truss, who holds the post of equalities minister alongside her role as Foreign Secretary, continued: Now is the time to end the culture of self-doubt, the constant self-questioning and introspection the ludicrous debates about languages, statues and pronouns.

She added: Our history, warts and all, is what makes us what we are today.

Ms Truss also insisted that the conflict in eastern Europe showed that the West needed to change how functions economically.

Were ending our dependency on authoritarian regimes, she said. The West focused on cheap goods at the expense of freedom and security. Never again.

Her comments came at the Conservative Spring Conference in Blackpool, where Defence Secretary Ben Wallace compared Mr Putin to the leader of Argentina during the Falklands War 40 years ago.

He said that like Leopoldo Galtieri, Mr Putin had sent young soldiers to die for his own political reasons.

Just like in 1982, Putins arrogant assumptions have directly led to the casualties and attrition among the Russian army, Mr Wallace told the Tory spring conference in Blackpool.

The Kremlin assumed that Ukraine would not fight he was wrong. The Kremlin assumed his army was invincible they were wrong.

And they assumed the international community would splinter and theyve been proven wrong.

Mr Wallace said that during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, mothers of those killed in action called the dead their boys in zinc because of the metal coffins they used.

None of us should let todays Russian president forget despite dozens of presidents and prime ministers urging him not to invade, the international communitys calls for peace, he chose zinc.

See more here:
Liz Truss says war in Ukraine should bring end to debates about 'statues and pronouns' - iNews

As the primaries wrap up and we prepare for the November elections, Texas teachers suddenly find themselves in the headlines. Talk to any teacher, and we'll confess: the last two years in the classroom have been the most brutal of our careers. Our voices and our votes should be more important than ever as we try to fix the current teacher exodus.

Not only have we faced great challenges in our classrooms, but were suffering from wild whiplash. Two years ago this month, educators were hailed as heroes for our ability to adapt and overcome like the Marines.

Down my street, our local elementary school led a caravan of cars covered in balloons with teachers hanging out of windows and poking out of sun roofs holding posters with messages of hope and persistence. We miss you! they called to our children. As a mother and a high school English teacher, I struggled to keep my own classroom going while making sure my two daughters kept up with online and in-person classes.

Commercials celebrated us, families thanked us and we landed the plane despite the uncertainty of the end of that school year.

Today, Gov. Greg Abbott accuses us of distributing pornography. He introduced an adversarial Parents Bill of Rights whose main tenets already exist in both law and practice to pit parents against teachers.

Why, our Texas leaders have gone as far as calling university professors loony Marxists (to the shock of many of my conservative friends in education).

So when the news came out that Abbott wants to initiate a task force to investigate the teacher shortage in Texas, its no wonder so many of us laughed out loud.

For one, Abbotts task forces are simply political stunts. After countless mass and school shootings in Texas, his roundtables on gun violence amounted to nothing. Hes signed a bill allowing permitless carry despite the aggressive outcry of police officers and Texas License to Carry instructors. We educators see this task force as another empty gesture.

The wild whiplash of the last two years delivers a pain no chiropractor can fix.

One week, Abbott is threatening jail time and the next he wonders why teachers are leaving in droves. He need only reflect on his agenda to understand why educators have no patience for political games right now.

Before there was a vaccine to protect vulnerable adults, we were there. Despite a shortage of nurses, substitute teachers and mental health professionals, we were there. Texans with children were able to return to work and regain some normalcy during these turbulent times in large part because teachers were there while the governors mansion was still closed for tours and visitors.

Instead of supporting bans on books and threatening to defund schools, our governor could have thrown us a life jacket.

Any of your teacher friends or acquaintances can share the long list of resources that couldve made a difference in our classrooms during this crisis:

We needed more nurses to handle the influx of testing, contact tracing, and care our students and staff required.

We needed more mental health professionals. This year, Ive had multiple students drop out because of suicidal thoughts, self-harm and other heartbreaking diagnoses that we couldve helped treat or manage at school. We have more anxious (and even violent) students than ever before.

We needed more personnel: more teachers, more administrators, more support staff. But there was no plan to entice retired educators to come back and help, or propositions to encourage college students to get teaching experience by stepping up as teachers assistants or substitutes. From cost-of-living adjustments for retired teachers to student loan forgiveness for those studying to become teachers, our leaders had a buffet of options to help attract true educators to come to our aid instead of sending military personnel, police officers or anyone with a pulse to babysit the countless classrooms who had a teacher out with COVID.

But instead of a life jacket, we got thrown anchors: extra STAAR tests through House Bill 4545, bans on critical race theory curricula that arent taught until law or graduate school and attacks on our very character.

Framing educators as pornographers and indoctrinators is not a joke. Our state is hyper-aware of the consequences of rabid rhetoric. In August 2019, a Texas terrorist took to heart President Trumps propaganda repeating the decades-old Great Replacement theory and drove 650 miles to kill innocent people in El Paso. Just last week, the former president encouraged his supporters at a rally to lay down their very lives to fight CRT. American classrooms are already targets of terrorism, but Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick put a bullseye on Texas teachers when they perpetuate propaganda.

Maybe we need a task force on the effects of the GOPs demoralizing and dangerous attacks on educators and how that impacts teacher recruitment and retention.

A teachers true task: vote. The truth is that we Texas teachers can heal this whiplash. We can take the reigns from a mercurial governor who cant decide if he wants to attack us or play pretend and waste our time with task forces.

Teachers need to show a united front to save our profession. This week, educator Amy Lambert charted the backgrounds of the 28 members initially selected for the TEA task force: she exposed their experience, compensation and years since leaving the classroom (if these administrators spent any time there at all). After it was evident that only one of the two teachers selected actually spent time in a classroom during the last two turbulent years, TEA expanded the task force to include more teachers.

The truth is, teachers dont need a task force; we need a show of force at the ballot booth in November. We need leaders who will commit to raising teacher pay, update retired educators cost of living and stop the culture wars that do nothing to improve our classrooms and everything to drive good teachers away.

Research candidates, rally your peers to elect leaders who value educators and volunteer to support these campaigns to ensure that we build a future for Texas where our schools are a priority and our teachers are respected once again.

Gabriela Diaz is a high school English teacher in Houston. This is her 16th year in a Texas public school classroom.

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Opinion: Teachers don't need a task force. We need a new governor. - Houston Chronicle

There is a feeling of powerlessness that can quickly take hold when watching awful images from conflict zones in the comfort and security of your own home. Whether its in Kyiv, Damascus or Kabul, its hard to know how to respond to stories of families being ripped apart, of people fleeing from being shot in cold blood, of children deliberately targeted in war crimes.

The case for military intervention on humanitarian grounds is rarely as open and shut as its strongest proponents and detractors would have us believe. However, there is one aspect of the humanitarian response that could not be easier to get right. How wealthy countries that can offer safety choose to treat those fleeing war and terror is a reliable test of the moral character of a government: and it is one that Britain is failing comprehensively.

More than three million people have fled Ukraine since the conflict started just under a month ago. The EU responded swiftly, waiving all visa requirements for Ukrainians. Poland is now host to almost two million Ukrainian refugees; Romania half a million. Ireland, a country with less than 10% of the UK population, has offered refuge to 6,500.

Britain stands in contrast to the rest of Europe by the mean-heartedness of our response. Ukrainians with family members settled in the UK can obtain a visa to join them but they have reported long delays, which left vulnerable refugees scrabbling to fund hotel stays as they wait for Home Office bureaucracy to creak into action. Those arriving in Calais were being told to go back to visa centres in Paris or Brussels. Just 4,000 visas for Ukrainians, out of 17,100 applications, have been granted so far. In the first week of the crisis, a Home Office minister posted a now-deleted tweet suggesting that Ukrainians could apply for fruit-picking visas.

It quickly became clear that the public were not going to stand for this. And so the government, last week, introduced an additional resettlement route, Homes for Ukraine, that allows those without family members in the UK to come, so long as they are sponsored by a named individual in the UK willing to house them for at least six months, who will be paid 350 a month for doing so.

There are things to like about this scheme. Perhaps most of all, it shows the strength of public feeling that Britain should be doing more: 150,000 potential hosts registered their interest ahead of its launch on Friday. Placing refugees in peoples homes on a temporary basis can have great mutual benefit: helping them make friends and settle into life in their new communities as well as being incredibly enriching for host families. Unlike refugees who apply for asylum once they reach the UK, people on this scheme will be pre-approved to work, although only for three years.

To realise these benefits though, the scheme must be thoughtfully developed as part of a wider, more generous offer to Ukrainians and others fleeing conflict. Instead, the government appears to have rushed it through in response to a public demand for action, without addressing its risks.

Those risks are serious. Without a trace of irony, given the significant administrative hurdles faced by Ukrainians who are eligible for visas and are trying to get here, Michael Gove told MPs that the government wanted to minimise bureaucracy in matching refugees to sponsors. That means only light-touch vetting checks, although the government has now bowed to pressure to, in time, run more extended checks on those who will be hosting families with children. Refugees must be sponsored by an individual, in many cases someone they have never met. The government has said it envisages the scheme applying to individuals who have hotels or Airbnbs with empty rooms as well as spare rooms in their own homes.

This is a recipe for abuse of female and child refugees: for sex trafficking, sexual exploitation and modern slavery. Unsavoury people including criminal gangs fronting this with individuals without criminal records will see this as an opportunity to get paid as refugee sponsors while using the hold they have as named sponsors on the visa to exploit women for sex and free labour. There is no justification for asking refugees fleeing conflict to accept an individual they have never met as a visa sponsor indeed, the Scottish and Welsh governments will act as super-sponsors to avoid this. There are no details about what will happen if the relationship between sponsor and refugee breaks down; though the government has said refugees will not be allowed to apply for housing benefit, which risks allowing sponsors using the threat of homelessness to exploit vulnerable adults.

To realise the benefits while minimising the risks, this scheme should have been part of a wider visa-free offer not capped at the number of people willing to offer accommodation. Refugees placed with hosts should have access to a case manager either in a local council or charity to help manage the placement and get them out at the first signs of exploitation.

That the government has not done this suggests it is driven more by headlines and less by a concern for refugee welfare. It is in keeping with a government whose driving motivation for immigration policy has been to make the UK as hostile as possible to those not born here, even though it came at the price of terrible consequences for the Windrush generation, who have legitimately lived here for decades, or of cruel levels of bureaucracy and extortion for young people who have grown up in the UK hoping to secure their status when they turn 18. Indeed, Priti Patels nationality and borders bill which the Commons will vote on this week seeks to break the spirit and the letter of international law by criminalising those arriving in the UK to claim asylum, and sending them to be processed offshore to a territory like Ascension Island.

It is very revealing that Boris Johnson appeared to treat the safe evacuation of cats and dogs from Afghanistan as a higher political priority than getting out individuals who had worked to support British forces. However, the scale of the response to Homes for Ukraine is a reminder that while the government may see refugees as legitimate fodder for its culture wars, the British public are more generous in their approach to asylum than successive Conservative prime ministers have given them credit for.

Originally posted here:
The publics urge to help Ukrainians pitched them against the governments miserly response - The Guardian