Tag: Norm

  • Book bans becoming the new norm for districts, report says

    Book bans becoming the new norm for districts, report says

    Dive Brief:

    • In the fourth school year since book bans proliferated on local school board levels, districts are now also facing federal and state pressures to ban books, according to a report released Oct. 1 by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech. 
    • The organization noted that federal efforts to influence education issues are repeating state and local book banning rhetoric, which it calls a “a new vector of book banning pressure.” For example, the parental rights movement behind book banning is being repeated at the federal level in executive orders leading to the reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and LGBTQ+ inclusion. 
    • The escalating book censorship campaigns usurp educators’ time that would otherwise be used for instruction, can subject them to harassment, and also leads to them spending long hours cataloging books and dedicating more administrative time to comply with bans, the report said. Districts are also incurring “significant” legal costs navigating lawsuits. 

    Dive Insight:

    There were 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts in the 2024-25 school year, according to PEN America. That totals 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since the organization began tracking the issue in July 2021.

    PEN America’s definition of “bans” includes books that have been taken off the shelf pending investigation, and any other steps taken against books as a result of parent, community or government pushback leading to limited student access.

    “From a birds’ eye view, school districts today are surrounded by multiple and persistent local, state, and now federal pressures to ban books, with diminishing reasons not to,” the report said. 

    At the federal level, the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Education in January rescinded Biden-era guidance. That guidance had warned school districts that they could violate civil rights law by implementing book bans, and it said that removing “age-inappropriate” books from schools is a parent and community decision that the federal government “has no role in.” 

    At the same time, the department dismissed 11 civil rights complaints related to book bans.

    It also eliminated the position of a book ban coordinator, created by the Biden administration in 2023 to develop training for schools on navigating book bans. 

    Four years after the initial wave of book bans swept localities, communities and educators “have been conditioned to expect book challenges and bans as part of the U.S. education system,” PEN America said in a statement. 

    “A disturbing ‘everyday banning’ and normalization of censorship has worsened and spread over the last four years,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, in an Oct. 1 statement. “The result is unprecedented.” 

    Districts are responding by removing books to comply out of fear of losing funding, staff being fired or harassed, and sometimes having police involvement, the organization said. 

    In an August 2024 report, the Knight Foundation found in a survey of over 4,500 adults that two-thirds of Americans oppose book restrictions in schools and even more are confident in public schools’ book selection. More Americans said in that survey that it was more concerning to restrict students’ access to books with educational value than it was to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.

    However, a majority (6 in 10) also said that age appropriateness — as opposed to parents’ political views, religious beliefs or moral values — was a legitimate reason to restrict students’ book access. The survey included responses from over 1,100 pre-K-12 parents.

    Source link

  • Is international strife the norm?

    Is international strife the norm?

    A war that couldn’t be stopped

    When Russia invaded Ukraine, hopes for action by “the international community” were dashed within days when the UN General Assembly failed to pass a resolution demanding the immediate withdrawal of invasion forces: five countries voted against it and 35 others abstained.

    They included two of the five countries that have permanent seats on the UN Security Council. Any of those five countries can veto any joint measure even if the entire rest of the world is in favour.

    But even as the UN failed to intervene in the Ukraine conflict in the role of “the international community” as it was perceived by many during the Cold War, a group of countries — led by the United States but including NATO and the European Union — have since supported Ukraine with billions worth of weapons and economic aid.

    On an anniversary of the civil war in Syria, meanwhile, the advocacy group Amnesty International blamed “the international community’s catastrophic failure to act” for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in that conflict. It was Russian air power that turned the tide of war in favour of President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

    Assad might be a pariah in the West. But he was embraced by the Arab League in May. That’s a 22-member organization of nations in North Africa, West Asia and parts of East Africa. It had expelled Syria in 2011 for cracking down on anti-government protestors with a brutality so savage it was shocking even to an organisation with a poor record of concern for human rights.

    If the United Nations is powerless because it can’t reach unanimity of its members and if Russia and its allies have different world views than the member nations of NATO and these views differ from the concerns of the members of the Arab League, what “international community” is there?

    Democracy battles tyranny.

    As for the shared vision for a better world visualized by Annan: is it becoming dimmer or brighter?

    There is reason for pessimism. Around the world, democracy is in decline and authoritarian leaders, such as Syria’s Assad and Russia’s Putin, are literally getting away with murder.

    Freedom House, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation that keeps track of global freedom and peace, says in its latest report that global freedom has declined for 17 consecutive years.

    The United States was once considered a model for others to follow. But Donald Trump, in his four years as president, has encouraged authoritarian leaders. After he lost the presidential election in 2020, he attempted to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

    Trump loathed international agreements and pulled the United States out of the International Criminal Court, the UN Human Rights Council, the global compact on migration and the Paris Climate Accords.

    Every country in the world has signed the Paris agreement, making it one of the few actions that can be ascribed to the entire international community. Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, signed the paperwork to bring the United States back into the Paris agreement on his first day in office.

    Can regional organisations come together?

    As far as the more routine use of the phrase is concerned, Richard Haas, long-time president of the New York-based think tank Council on Foreign Relations until he retired in June, once described the dilemma in unusually blunt terms:

    “The problem is that no international community exists,” he said. “It would require that there be widespread agreement on what needs to be done and a readiness to do it. Banning the term would mean that people and governments assume a greater responsibility for what takes place in the world.”

    In some ways governments are assuming greater responsibility, if not as one giant international bloc than by an alphabet soup of sub-groups. There is the G-7, an informal bloc of wealthy democracies (the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Italy and Japan). There is the G-20 of 19 countries and the European Union. There is ASEAN, the Association of 10 South East Asian Nations. There is the OAS, the Organization of American States. Finally, there is the African Union which brings together 55 countries across that continent.

    In theory, they could work towards agreement on what needs to be done to make the world a safe, secure and prosperous place.

    Much of their emphasis tends to be on economic matters, none more than BRICS, an acronym coined by Goldman Sachs banker Jim O’Neill for a grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Moves are underway to widen that group and turn it into a counterweight to the industrialized West.

    Could all those groups, working on parallel tracks, result in a true international community? Perhaps the next generation of politicians and citizen activists will succeed where their elders failed.

     

    Questions to consider:

    1. Can you think of a way to replace the phrase “the international community”?

    2. Do you consider your own country part of it?

    3. Can you think of cases where engaged citizens changed their governments’ policies?

     

    Source link

  • When American Greed is the Norm

    When American Greed is the Norm

    Greed is no longer a sin in America—it’s a system. It’s a curriculum. It’s a badge of success. In the American higher education marketplace, greed is not the exception. It’s the norm.

    We see it in the bloated salaries of university presidents who deliver austerity to everyone but themselves. We see it in billion-dollar endowments hoarded like dragon’s gold while students drown in debt. We see it in the metastasizing ranks of middlemen—consultants, online program managers, enrollment optimization firms—who profit off the dreams and desperation of working-class families.

    But greed in American higher education is more than a few bad actors or golden parachutes. It is institutionalized, normalized, and weaponized.

    The Student as Customer, the Campus as Marketplace

    It began with the rebranding of education as a “return on investment,” a transaction rather than a transformation. The purpose of college was no longer to liberate the mind but to monetize the degree.

    By the 1990s, under bipartisan neoliberal consensus, public colleges were defunded and forced to adopt the private sector’s logic: cut costs, raise prices, sell more. Tuition rose. Debt exploded. The ranks of administrators swelled while faculty were downsized and adjunctified. The market had spoken.

    But even that wasn’t enough. A generation of edu-preneurs emerged—Silicon Valley-funded disruptors, for-profit college chains, and online program managers—who turned learning into a scalable commodity. Robocolleges like Southern New Hampshire University, Purdue Global, and the University of Phoenix began operating more like tech platforms than institutions of thought.

    The result? Diploma mills at the front end and collection agencies at the back.

    Greed in the Name of God and Country

    Greed doesn’t always look like Wall Street. Sometimes it wears the face of morality. Religious colleges, some of them under the protection of nonprofit status, have become breeding grounds for political operatives and ideological grooming—while raking in millions through taxpayer-funded financial aid.

    Liberty University, Grand Canyon University, and a host of lesser-known Bible colleges operate under a warped theology of prosperity, turning salvation into a subscription plan. Meanwhile, they push anti-democratic ideologies and funnel money toward political causes far removed from the mission of education.

    Accreditation as a Shell Game

    The accreditors—the supposed watchdogs of educational quality—have been largely asleep at the wheel or complicit. When greed is the norm, accountability is an inconvenience. For-profit schools regularly reinvent themselves as nonprofits. Online program managers operate in regulatory gray zones. Mergers and acquisitions disguise collapse as growth.

    Accreditation agencies rubber-stamp it all, as long as the paperwork is tidy and the lobbyists are well-compensated.

    Debt as Discipline

    More than 43 million Americans carry federal student loan debt. Many will never escape it. This debt is not just financial—it’s ideological. It keeps the workforce compliant. It disciplines dissent. It renders critical thought a luxury.

    And those who push for debt relief? They are met with moral lectures about personal responsibility—from the same lawmakers who handed trillions to banks, defense contractors, and fossil fuel companies.

    Silicon Valley’s Hungry Mouth

    The new frontier of greed is AI. Tech giants like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Meta are embedding themselves deeper into education—not to empower learning, but to extract data, monetize behavior, and deepen surveillance. Every click, every quiz, every attendance record is a monetizable moment.

    Universities, starved for funding and afraid of obsolescence, are selling access to students in exchange for access to cloud infrastructure and algorithmic tools they barely understand.

    Greed Isn’t Broken—It’s Working as Designed

    In this system, who wins? Not students. Not faculty. Not society.

    The winners are those who turn knowledge into a commodity, compliance into virtue, and inequality into inevitability. Those who build castles from the bones of public education, then retreat behind walls of donor-backed endowments and think tanks. The winners are few. But they write the rules.

    A Different Future Is Possible

    If American greed is the norm, then what remains of education’s soul must be found in the margins—in the community college professor working three jobs. In the librarian defending open access. In the adjunct organizing a union. In the students refusing to be pawns in someone else’s game.

    The antidote to greed is not charity—it’s solidarity.

    Until justice is funded as well as football. Until learning is valued more than branding. Until access is more than a talking point on a donor brochure—then greed will remain not just a sin, but a system.

    Sources

    • U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

    • The Century Foundation, “The OPM Industry: Profits Over Students” (2023)

    • Chronicle of Higher Education, “Administrative Bloat and the Adjunct Crisis”

    • IRS Nonprofit Filings, Liberty University and Grand Canyon University

    • Debt Collective, “The State of Student Debt” (2025)

    • Public records and audits of Title IV institutions, 2022–2024

    • Higher Education Inquirer archives

    Source link