Pamela Paul: Congratulations To Stanford University For Cancelling the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative

 

‘Hip Hip Hooray!’ Cheering News for Free Speech on Campus

OPINION, New York Times, Pamela Paul, February 3, 2023

The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of I.T. leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk.


Is the media addicted to bad news? It’s not a dumb question, nor are you crazy to ask. After all, we follow tragedy like hounds on the chase, whether it’s stories about teenagers who commit suicide, victims of domestic violence or survivors of accidents in which someone winds up quadriplegic, crippled for life or confined to a wheelchair. We report on the hurdles former convicts face after incarceration, hostile attitudes toward immigrants and the plight of prostitutes and the homeless. Given the perilous state of the planet, you might consider this barrage of ill tidings to be tone-deaf.

Well, I’m happy to report good news, for a change. You might call it a corrective, or a sanity check, but whatever you call it (and what you can call things here is crucial), there have been several positive developments on American campuses. The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

Matters looked especially grim in December, when the internet discovered the 13-page dystopically titled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.” A kind of white paper on contemporary illiberalism, it listed 161 verboten expressions, divided into categories of transgression, including “person-first,” “institutionalized racism” and the blissfully unironic “imprecise language.” The document offered preferred substitutions, many of which required feats of linguistic limbo to avoid simple terms like “insane,” “mentally ill” and — not to beat a dead horse, but I’ll add one more — “rule of thumb.” Naturally, it tore its way across the internet to widespread mockery despite a “content warning” in bold type: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

Before you get worked up, know this: A webmaster has taken the site down and the program has been aborted for re-evaluation. Last month, in a welcome display of clear leadership, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Stanford’s president, said the policy, brainchild of a select committee of I.T. leaders, had never been intended as a universitywide policy and reiterated the school’s commitment to free speech. “From the beginning of our time as Stanford leaders, Persis and I have vigorously affirmed the importance and centrality of academic freedom and the rights of voices from across the ideological and political spectrum to express their views at Stanford,” he wrote, referring to the school’s provost, Persis Drell. “I want to reaffirm those commitments today in the strongest terms.”

Could this be a seminal moment for academic freedom? Consider other bright spots: Harvard recently went ahead with its fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, which was earlier rejected, reportedly owing to his critical views on Israel. M.I.T.’s faculty voted to embrace a “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.” At Yale Law School, which has been roiled by repeated attempts to suppress speech, a conservative lawyer was allowed to appear on a panel with a former president of the A.C.L.U. after protests disrupted her visit the year before. And Hamline University, which had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive, walked back its characterization of her as “Islamophobic.”

Finally, when an office within the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California banned the terms “fieldwork” and “in the field” to describe research projects because their “anti-Black” associations might offend some descendants of American slavery, U.S.C.’s interim provost issued a statement that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words.”

It’s hard to know how much these shifting prohibitions distress students, whether freshman or senior, given how scared many are to speak up in the first place.

But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance?

Yet when in life is it more appropriate for people to take risks than in college — to test out ideas and encounter other points of view? College students should be encouraged to use their voices and colleges encouraged to let them be heard. It’s nearly impossible to do this while mastering speech codes, especially when the master lists employ a kind of tribal knowledge known only to their guru creators. A normal person of any age may have trouble submitting, let alone remembering that “African American” is not just discouraged but verboten, that he or she can’t refer to a professor’s “walk-in” hours or call for a brown bag lunch, powwow or stand-up meeting with peers.

“You can’t say that” should not be the common refrain.

According to a 2022 Knight Foundation report, the percentage of college students who say free speech rights are secure has fallen every year since 2016, while the percentage who believe free speech rights are threatened has risen. Nearly two-thirds think the climate at school prevents people from expressing views that others might find offensive. But here, too, let’s convey some good news: The number of students who say controversial speakers should be disinvited has fallen since 2019. And one more cheering note: The editors of The Stanford Review, a student publication, poked gleefully at the document before it was taken down, with the shared impulse — irresistible, really — of using a number of taboo terms in the process.

Surely my ancestors from the ghettos of Eastern Europe couldn’t anticipate that their American descendants would face this kind of policing of speech at institutions devoted to higher learning. (While we’re on history, per the document, but news to all the Jews I know: “Hip hip hooray” was a term “used by German citizens during the Holocaust as a rallying cry when they would hunt down Jewish citizens living in segregated neighborhoods.”)

Consider what learning can flourish under such constraints. In a speech last fall celebrating the 100th anniversary of PEN America, the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie noted: “Many American universities are well-meaning in wanting to keep students comfortable, but they do so at the risk not just of creating an insular, closed space but one where it is almost impossible to admit to ignorance — and in my opinion the ability to admit to ignorance is a wonderful thing. Because it creates an opportunity to learn.”

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will are not likely to be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.

Pamela Paul became an Opinion columnist for The Times in 2022. She was the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years and is the author of eight books, including “100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet.”

Manhattan Institute On the Power of Teacher Unions Over School Board Elections

 Are school boards under the influence of teacher unions?

Michael Hartney at the Manhattan Institute says yes.

He writes,

"school board elections in the large and diverse states of California, New York, and Florida are neither pluralist nor dominated by a new breed of corporate school reformers or parents’-rights advocacy groups. Instead, I find that, with one important exception, school board elections continue to be dominated by teachers’ unions."

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Still the Ones to Beat: Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections
Michael Hartney, October 27, 2022, Manhattan Institute Issue Brief

Introduction

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, the nation’s school boards were often praised as responsive and representative engines of American democracy. Especially when juxtaposed with our national and state political institutions, board members are portrayed as less polarized and less prone to special-interest capture. According to one widely cited study, not only are local school boards responsive to the preferences of ordinary Americans, but they are mostly immune from the influence of teachers’ unions that, these scholars conclude, do little to diminish the degree to which boards represent the public’s interest.[1]

Experts aren’t the only ones who have tended to paint this rosy, pluralist perspective.[2] Teachers’ unions have also been reluctant to admit that they dominate school board elections, calling their clout more myth than reality. For example, education reporter Sameea Kamal recently interviewed a California Teachers Association (CTA) spokesperson who, in Kamal’s characterization, “disputed that teachers’ unions have too much influence over school boards, saying that ‘the real power resides in parents, educators, students and communities working together.’”[3]

Occasionally, experts have acknowledged that school boards suffer from political inequality. Yet most of this criticism downplays union power and instead focuses on the lack of racial diversity on boards,[4] the power of business,[5] or the influence of homeowners.[6] Some scholars even claim that corporate influence in public education has grown stronger in recent years.[7] According to some of these critics, a neoliberal alliance of school choice advocates and corporate philanthropists is buying school board elections in its larger quest to privatize public education.[8]

Contrary to these assessments, this paper marshals an array of evidence to show that school board elections in the large and diverse states of California, New York, and Florida are neither pluralist nor dominated by a new breed of corporate school reformers or parents’-rights advocacy groups. Instead, I find that, with one important exception, school board elections continue to be dominated by teachers’ unions.

Drawing on a variety of evidence, this paper shows that:Teachers’ unions dominate local school board elections: they win seven out of 10 races.

Union support makes the difference for incumbents as well as challengers and is often more powerful than the incumbency advantage.

Nonpartisan elections enable union-favored candidates to win board seats in deep blue as well as deep red communities.

Contrary to some expectations, the Supreme Court’s Janus decision has not reduced union power and influence in school board politics. A full decade after the Tea Party–led union retrenchment movement, union-backed candidates still remain the ones to beat.

As parents’-rights groups seek to influence school board elections, the best evidence so far points to electoral reforms and gubernatorial advocacy as the most promising ways for these groups to counterbalance union power.

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Why School Boards Matter

Inattention to teachers’-union power in school board elections is not surprising. It is challenging to study local elections. Measuring union influence in these backwater elections is exceedingly difficult. University of California–Berkeley political scientist Sarah Anzia observes: “Research on local politics in the United States tends to ignore interest groups, and research on interest groups tends to ignore local government.”[9]

But the lack of good data is just one reason for this inattention. In recent decades, the increased centralization of American education drew scholarly and public attention away from local school districts and emphasized education politics at the state and federal levels.[10] But there are two important reasons to keep a close eye on teachers’-union electioneering in local school politics.

First, the demise of local control in American education is greatly exaggerated. One need to look no further than the Covid-19 pandemic to see that the relationship between unions and school boards played a key role in prolonging school closures in the United States. Even after numerous studies showed that schools could reopen safely,[11] politicians learned how difficult it was to reopen schools when local boards and teachers’ unions resisted.[12] While more centralized education systems in other parts of the world reopened far more quickly, in America’s highly decentralized education system, the inability of school boards to ink reopening agreements with their local teachers’ unions played no small role in keeping half of all students out of school for a full year.[13] Education scholar Brad Marianno explains why we underestimate teachers’-union influence in education when we pay little attention to their power in school board politics: “There are far more education interest groups and competing education policy ideas at the state level, making it much more difficult for a single organization to garner a dominant voice among policymakers. When these [school reopening] decisions are brought down into local school board meetings, there remain only a few organizations that are organized enough to exert influence. The teachers’ unions are the largest elephant in the room.”[14]

Figure 1 illustrates these dynamics by comparing the amount of remote versus in-person instruction that students received relative to how generally active teachers reported that their local union is in local school board elections. As the figure shows, students who attended school in districts where their teachers’ unions are very active in electioneering were the least likely to receive significant in-person instruction during the 2020–21 school year.

Figure 1

Share of 2020–21 School Year Students Spent Learning Outside the Classroom by Teachers’ Unions Political Activity

A second reason to pay greater attention to unions in school board elections relates to their role in the policymaking process. Even when federal and state authorities enact promising reforms, school boards are often the ones that must implement them.[15] Implementation is not just a technocratic process immune from interest-group politics. To the contrary, school board members can, and often do, face pressure (including electoral pressure) to satisfy the preferences of groups (like teachers’ unions) that remain among the most organized and active players in district politics.[16] Narrowly focusing on federal and state politics will lead us to overlook all the important politicking that goes on beneath the radar.

Consider the claim that teachers’ unions lost political clout in recent years.[17] Proponents of this perspective often point to various education reform debates—on charter schools, teacher pay, and evaluation reform—that unions supposedly “lost” during the Bush and Obama years. But when one looks below the surface, many of those same reforms fizzled when local officials encountered resistance from teachers in the trenches. Even after states adopted tougher teacher evaluation laws, for example, most districts simply went through the motions—giving favorable ratings to most teachers and removing few low-performers.[18] Likewise, when states passed new laws encouraging districts to replace union-favored salary schedules with performance-based pay, districts tended to demur in the face of educator resistance.[19]

Altogether, elected boards provide unions with another, often less competitive, political arena for them to shape education policy. Union power in American education, therefore, still hinges on the degree of influence that teachers’ unions can exert in school board elections. It is these elections that determine whether the officials who will implement education policies will be sympathetic to unions’ concerns or resistant to them.

Union Supremacy or Political Pluralism: What Previous Research Shows

Teachers’ unions attempt to shape the composition of school boards in two basic ways. First, they endorse candidates who they believe will be responsive to their members’ interests. Second, they recruit sympathetic educators and union members to serve on school boards. Has it worked? Here’s what existing research shows.

The earliest studies were carried out by Stanford University’s Terry Moe in the early 2000s.[20] Drawing on a survey of about 500 candidates in more than 250 California school districts, Moe found that unions were enormously successful in getting their favored candidates (76% of them) elected to office. He also found that union support was as powerful a factor as incumbency in predicting whether a candidate won.

Moe’s studies offered additional insights. First, he showed that occupational self-interest promoted union mobilization efforts. Teachers who lived outside the district where they taught were not very likely to vote in school board elections, which would elect board members for a district where they are not employed. But teachers who lived where they worked turned out anywhere from two to seven times more than other citizens. In short, Moe showed that the ability of unions to mobilize teachers to elect sympathetic politicians is driven by the rational self-interest of school employees—the chance for them to help elect their employers.[21]

Evidence of this dynamic comes from other indicators, too. A few years after Moe did his California analysis, Rick Hess recalled how Moe’s 400-page treatise, Special Interest, “point[ed] out that the Michigan Education Association [had] distributed a 40-page instructional manual for local leaders that [was] entitled ‘Electing Your Own Employer, It’s as Easy as 1, 2, 3.’ ” Little wonder that “one high-ranking state union official” told Hess in an interview: “ ‘We knew the [public] school system wasn’t moving to Mexico,’ so there was no reason to work with the state negotiator on establishing a prudent salary structure.”[22]

Importantly, Moe’s research also showed that union electioneering creates the conditions for more union-friendly boards. Winning candidates who were endorsed by teachers’ unions held more pro-union attitudes, especially on collective bargaining issues, than unendorsed candidates who lost. A few years later, scholars Katharine Strunk and Jason Grissom found even more evidence that successful union electioneering begets more union-friendly board policymaking. Returning to California, these authors showed that school boards that were composed of more educators and more union-endorsed members adopted more union-friendly contracts.[23]

Other research shows that teachers’ unions are quite successful at electing current and former educators (including their own members) to serve on school boards. My recent book, for example, examined nearly a dozen surveys of school board members that showed that more than 20% of all school board seats are held by current or former educators. About one in 10 boards in California were held by educator-majorities.[24]

None of this is to say that teachers should not bring their expertise to the board table. Rather, it speaks to a lack of political pluralism in many districts. Former military officer Cara Marion, who lost her Florida school board election to a union-backed teacher-incumbent in August, put it this way: “We [elected school board members are] supposed to be a good cross-section of society. You know, people from all walks of life should sit on a board, not just career educators.”[25]

Marion is right on the trend. Educators are significantly overrepresented on the nation’s school boards relative to their share of the population. Does this state of affairs help teachers’ unions influence school board policy? There are certainly reasons to think so. Outside of education, research has shown that interest groups can secure more policy influence inside of government when they are able to elect public officials who share their occupational interests.[26] In a clever study that leveraged the order in which school board candidates’ names appeared on the ballot, economists Ying Shi and John Singleton found that California school districts that elected one additional teacher board member increased teachers’ salaries and authorized fewer charter schools.[27]

Based on their own behavior, union leaders seem to believe that electing more educators, as well as more of their own members to school boards, can help them influence district decision-making. In New York, for example, the state’s largest teachers’ union, New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), launched “Pipeline Project,” which can be used to help them “groom union friendly candidates.”[28] In 2018, NYSUT described the operation as one that has “encouraged, trained and helped elect more than 100 educators to public office over the last four years.” In 2022 alone, the union reported that the program helped elect “60 NYSUT members … to school boards in every corner of the state.”[29]

Still, many have argued that the nation’s teachers’ unions’ most powerful days are behind them.[30] After all, a lot has happened in both American politics and education since the earlier studies of union electioneering were carried out. For example, the political environment facing teachers’ unions in the aftermath of the Great Recession has been characterized by greater austerity and significant labor retrenchment. Teachers have also faced greater competition from new education reform advocacy groups and, most recently, from parents’-rights groups during the pandemic. In 2018, teachers’ unions were dealt a major financial blow with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which overturned state laws obliging nonunion employees to pay fees to unions that are their “exclusive bargaining representative.”[31]

Consequently, some scholars have begun to speculate that these changes may have narrowed union power in school board elections. In a recent study of board elections in five large districts, political scientist Sarah Reckhow and her colleagues found that networks of wealthy donors enabled reform candidates to match or exceed the funds raised by union-backed candidates. While these authors were careful to acknowledge that these competitive dynamics are probably not representative of “the broad universe of districts with elected boards,” they nevertheless see more pluralist dynamics at work in school board elections today. “Teacher unions,” they argue, “have often been portrayed as the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in local school politics—and our evidence already shows that this image is overblown—but the Janus decision throws up new barriers for unions’ political efforts.”[32]

Ultimately, quantifying how influential teachers’ unions are in school board elections is an empirical question. But until now, the absence of good data has made it an impossible one to answer with much certainty. In what follows, I discuss the creation of a new data set tracking union electioneering efforts in school board elections.

Research Design to Analyze Union Electioneering

As part of a few different research projects over a period of several years, I collected data on nearly 5,000 union endorsements in school board elections.[33] These endorsements were gathered for three of the nation’s four largest states: California, Florida, and New York. The California data include endorsements in contests held annually between 1995 and 2020. In Florida, where board elections are held in even-numbered years, the panel runs biennially, from 2010 to 2022. In New York, I have detailed data for 2022 elections, along with some aggregate results reported by the Empire State’s largest teachers’ union for 2015 and 2019.

These three states were chosen for strategic reasons, with each state offering specific advantages and disadvantages. One goal of this paper is to compare the state of union influence today with that of the past; therefore, returning to California for comparison makes sense because the majority of research on board elections comes from the Golden State.

However, one concern with focusing exclusively on California and New York is that public-sector unions are especially powerful there. These states’ labor laws provide some of the most teachers’-union-friendly environments in the country. Florida provides an attractive alternative. It, too, is a large and diverse state; but labor law in the Sunshine State has historically been less favorable to teachers’ unions. Although Florida teachers have enjoyed collective bargaining rights since the mid-1970s, the state’s long-standing right-to-work law has made it more challenging to organize teachers. In contrast to New York and (until recently) California, Florida’s elections are held “on-cycle,” when voter turnout is higher and research shows that unions may be less dominant.

The process of gathering endorsements required triangulating from several sources.[34] In California, this approach yielded 4,075 endorsements conferred on 3,336 unique individuals running in 2,345 elections in 468 of the state’s 977 public school districts. Notably, these 468 districts—while by no means perfectly representative of California districts as a whole—combine to represent roughly half the state’s regular local school districts. Moreover, the 2,345 elections where I was able to find evidence of union electioneering combine to represent a little over 26% of all competitive school board elections held between 1995 and 2020 in the Golden State. In Florida, 1,109 board seats were up for election between 2010 and 2020. However, just 722 of those seats generated any competition. I was able to identify union electioneering in 361 of these 722 races (50% coverage).[35] These 361 contests took place in 36 of the state’s 67 public school districts. For New York’s 2022 elections, NYSUT released information on just over 340 candidate endorsements. However, after eliminating write-in candidates and endorsements in noncompetitive elections, my roster of Empire State endorsements shrank to just under 320.[36]

How representative are the school districts in my sample? With one exception, the districts are highly representative of districts in their respective states. The one exception is that endorsements were less numerous in smaller rural districts. On the one hand, this limits my ability to generalize my findings to very small rural communities. On the other hand, the districts in my sample—those where unions regularly make endorsements—are the ones that educate the majority of all public school students in each state (roughly 90% in California and Florida and about 50% in New York, after excluding New York City, which does not have an elected board).[37]

Before proceeding to the results of the report’s analyses, it is important to mention a few key differences related to how board elections work in these states. With the exception of districts that use ward-based elections, New York and California hold “multi-seat elections,” where citizens vote for several candidates in a single contest. By contrast, like many Southern states, Florida districts are large and countywide, meaning that voters vote only for a single candidate in each contest. Importantly, Florida holds its board elections entirely in even-numbered years, whereas California has only recently transitioned to a system where elections are uniformly held “on-cycle” and New York holds elections in May.[38] These two factors (the use of on-cycle elections combined with larger countywide districts) should, if anything, make it harder for any single interest—including teachers’ unions—to dominate district politics in Florida.

Key Findings on Union Power

Teachers’ Unions Win Most Competitive School Board Elections

Consistent with Terry Moe’s findings from his early California studies, union-backed candidates are the ones to beat. As Table 1 shows, union-endorsed board candidates have done exceptionally well in competitive elections held across all three states. In New York, unions won 80% of competitive races in 2022 (that bumps up to 88% when one includes elections in which the union-backed candidate, typically a union-favored incumbent, scared off any would-be challengers). In California, union-backed candidates took seven out of every 10 seats. Finally, in Florida, where we should expect that unions won’t make much of a showing, they do surprisingly well: 64% of endorsed candidates there prevailed. Despite the fact that Florida’s teachers’ unions operate at a comparative disadvantage (relative to unions in California and New York), they appear to more than overcome the dual headwinds of on-cycle elections and a more conservative-friendly electorate.

Table 1

Percentage of Union-Endorsed Candidates Winning School Board Seats, by State

Union Support Is Often Pivotal, for Both Incumbents and Challengers

Figure 2 disaggregates the results shown in Table 1 separately by candidate type, showing just how well incumbents and challengers fare when they run with (or without) union support. Three patterns in the data stand out.

First, it is almost always better to be an endorsed challenger than an unendorsed incumbent. Although the incumbency advantage is typically huge in American politics, union support matters far more in school board elections. This finding is robust to more sophisticated statistical analyses that use multivariate regression to compare the effects of endorsements and incumbency directly. In fact, whereas previous studies have estimated union support to be equal to the power of incumbency,[39] I find that union support matters more than incumbency, particularly in more recent elections.[40]

Figure 2

Rate of Electoral Victory for School Board Candidates, by Incumbency Status and State

Second, endorsed incumbents rarely lose, while unendorsed challengers are a long shot to win. These findings speak directly to why some of the new parents’-rights groups that emerged during the pandemic have found only mixed success in their first years of supporting candidate slates.[41] Getting challengers elected to school boards is tough sledding, unless you have the resources and voter mobilization operations that can compete with establishment union interests.

Third, I probed whether union-backed candidates tend to win simply because the unions strategically support candidates who are already more likely to win. By following the same candidates over time, I compared how they performed in races where they received union support relative to ones where they were not endorsed. This analysis revealed that union support matters: gaining an endorsement enabled losers to become winners, and losing union support cost incumbents from winning reelection.[42] In other words, union-endorsed candidates are not more likely to win school board elections simply because they are stronger candidates ex ante but rather because union support confers an advantage that makes endorsed candidates more formidable on Election Day.

Teachers’ Unions Win in Both Blue and Red School Districts

The results presented in Table 1 and Figure 2 are just a starting point. Remember, some have claimed that union power has weakened in recent years, especially on the heels of a decade of labor retrenchment capped off by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus decision. To evaluate how influential unions are today relative to the past, I next examine: (1) whether their influence has narrowed to liberal districts; and (2) how successful union electioneering has been over time.

Given increases in partisan polarization, the rise of culture-war issues in education during the pandemic, and more nationalization of local U.S. politics,[43] it is worth seeing whether union influence is geographically narrow. To investigate whether union electioneering packs a punch only in districts with liberal, pro-labor electorates, I calculated union electoral outcomes separately for Republican-, Independent-, and Democratic-leaning school districts. Drawing on two proprietary industry data sets that classify and predict every registered voter’s political party, I geocoded all registered voters to their school district of residence. After measuring the two-party registration advantage held by Republicans in each school district, I cut these data into terciles that range from strong GOP districts, independent-leaning districts, and strong Democratic districts.[44] Figure 3 shows how union-endorsed candidates fare in these various political environments.

On the whole, union electioneering is successful in liberal, moderate, and conservative districts.[45] For example, union-backed candidates never win less than 60% of their elections, even in the most GOP-leaning districts. Only in New York (where data are the most current, since the elections occurred in May 2022) do we see union-backed candidates fare somewhat worse in Republican districts. Still, they win nearly 70% of the time in these GOP-friendly districts. This suggests that while partisanship may have begun to collide with union strength in our current political environment, it is constraining union power only at the margins. These findings are important because they suggest that—given our current system of nonpartisan school board elections—partisanship in and of itself is not enough to act as a check on union power in local school politics.

Figure 3

Union-Backed Candidates’ Election Rate by Partisan Lean of School District

Union Endorsements Still Matter

What about the claim that teachers’ unions have grown less powerful over the last decade?

There appears to be little support for this claim when we look at union electioneering outcomes over time, as illustrated in Figure 4, which highlights a number of important trends. First, union-endorsed candidates are consistently more successful than are unendorsed candidates, irrespective of the prevailing national political environment facing teachers’ unions at any particular point in time. For example, union-backed candidates did just as well during 2010 (when antiunion governors, such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin, rose to power) as they did during 2018–22, when the conservative brand was arguably weakening in national politics.

Figure 4

Union-Endorsed Candidates’ Electoral Success over Time, by State

Across nine election cycles in California, in no year do union-endorsed candidates win less than 60% of the time. In Florida, union-backed candidates meet or exceed the 60% win rate in all but one election cycle (where they narrowly miss it in 2012). In New York, the unions report winning nearly nine out of every 10 contests where they get involved—an even higher clip than in California.

Second, careful attention to Figure 4 highlights the resilience of teachers’ unions in the post-Janus era. The comparison between Florida and California in 2016 and 2020, as well as Florida and New York between 2015 and 2019–20, is instructive. Florida’s right-to-work law always prohibited teachers’ unions from charging nonmember teachers agency fees prior to the court’s 2018 Janus decision. The ruling, therefore, had no direct effect on Florida’s unions. California and New York are an entirely different story. The labor laws in these states previously required that all teachers—union member and nonmember alike—pay union fees. To the extent that Janus weakened teachers’ unions politically, then, we should see a decline in their power in California and New York. Yet the data show no such reversal in either state.

Political Lesson: Change the Electoral Environment for Voters

For political conservatives, parents’-rights groups, education reformers, and school-choice advocates wishing to counteract union dominance in local school politics, there are important lessons to be learned. These groups cannot simply rely on favorable partisan tides in national politics or narrow legal decisions that weaken unions to advance their cause. After all, school board elections are fought and won in the trenches.

According to American Enterprise Institute’s Max Eden:

The fact that school board members are … elected in off-cycle, nonpartisan elections renders local control largely chimerical. If we want a public education system that caters to the cultural, policy, and pedagogical preferences of communities, then we should ensure that more citizens participate in local school board elections—and that they have a clear idea about what the candidates stand for. To boost election turnout, school board elections should be moved on cycle (i.e., held on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November of an even year). And to boost the signal as to what candidates stand for, school board ballots should allow partisan affiliation to appear next to candidates’ names.[46]

Taking Eden’s two points in turn, what about the timing of school board elections?

Looking back at Figure 4, union-endorsed candidates are far more likely to win their elections in off-year races. The difference is significant, and it is far more likely to be a story of causation rather than one of simple correlation. How can we know? In 2015, California enacted a sweeping election consolidation law (SB-415) that forced numerous school districts to move their elections from odd to even years.[47] By comparing changes in union win rates in districts that were forced to switch to on-cycle elections with changes in win rates for districts that always used on-cycle elections, I estimate that on-cycle elections reduce the share of union-endorsed winners by about 8 percentage points.

But reforming the election calendar isn’t the only way to inject more balance and political pluralism into local school politics. Eden’s second idea—partisan school board elections—can be achieved without enacting a single actual electoral reform.

Earlier in this report, I noted that in examining decades of union electioneering in three of the nation’s four largest states, I found just one exception to union dominance in school board elections. That exception was something of a natural experiment that took place in Florida’s 2022 primary contests (the de-facto general election for school board races with just two candidates). Although Florida’s school board elections are nonpartisan, something unprecedented happened in this most recent election: Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican Party of Florida put school board elections on their agenda.[48]

During the summer leading up to the August primary election, DeSantis unveiled a 10-point education agenda and asked local school board candidates to pledge their support for it. After candidates decided whether to align with the governor’s conservative education agenda, DeSantis chose 30 candidates, offering them his official endorsement and financial support.[49] In certain hotly contested races, DeSantis even campaigned locally on behalf of the candidates. The move was unprecedented. “This is new, particularly for Republicans,” DeSantis told the News Service of Florida. “Because … [traditionally] unions would back candidates and that would be it. And so now, I think more parents are interested, some of our voters are interested. We have no consequential races, really, statewide that are competitive. So you have a situation where this may be one reason why people are motivated. So we tried to help out.”[50]

Figure 5 shows the share of union-endorsed candidates in Florida who won a school board seat in 2022 when facing an opponent backed by DeSantis, compared with the share of union-endorsed candidates who won in the very same districts in the decade prior (2010–20) to the governor challenging union-backed slates.

Figure 5

Union Influence in School Board Races Before and After DeSantis’s Endorsements

DeSantis’s move worked on a scale unlike anything seen before. In the 19 elections where one of the governor’s candidates went head-to-head with a teachers’-union-backed opponent, the unions won just four races (and advanced to a general-election runoff in just three). Figure 5 shows how effective muscular gubernatorial advocacy proved to upset establishment union interests in Florida. The figure compares how union-backed candidates performed in the very same districts where DeSantis made his endorsements prior to 2022 with their showing in the most recent August primary. In those previous elections where voters did not have the same cues to follow, teachers’ unions won over 70% of the time when they made an endorsement. In contrast, the very best outcome that Florida’s teachers’ unions will be able to achieve in 2022 in districts where DeSantis got involved will be about 40% (depending on how they fare in the November runoffs).

The key advantage of the DeSantis strategy is that it requires no electoral reforms. Moreover, the DeSantis approach is available to both Democratic and Republican governors who believe that their education agendas are sufficiently popular with voters to provide coattails to local school board candidates who buy in. Although some election law scholars have made a good case for adopting electoral reforms that would allow political executives (mayors, governors) to make on-ballot endorsements,[51] DeSantis proved that, even absent these formal legal changes, a recognizable political figure with a clearly articulated education policy agenda can make races more competitive by endorsing aligned school board candidates and campaigning on their behalf.

Conclusion

The academic, media, and political establishment talk unremittingly about political inequality in the United States. To be sure, studies have shown that politicians often respond more to the preferences of wealthy elites than to the poor or downtrodden in state and national politics.[52] Similarly, using data from California, New York, and Florida, I find that school boards are characterized by a great degree of political inequality. But it is not the sort of inequality that critics of the education reform movement, parents’-rights groups, and the business sector decry when they raise concerns about democracy in public education today.

Instead, the findings of this report build on a growing body of research showing that it is teachers’ unions and other public-sector unions that often wield unequal power in municipal and local school politics.[53] To summarize, my findings underscore how the dominance of teachers’ unions in school board elections challenge pluralist characterizations of school board politics.Union-endorsed candidates still win roughly 70% of all competitive races.

Union support appears to exert a strong causal effect on election outcomes. By examining how the same candidates perform over time, I show that gaining a union endorsement enables losers to become winners the next time around.

Union-favored candidates tend to win in both strong (CA, NY) and weak (FL) union states and in conservative and liberal school districts. There is no evidence that the unions’ electioneering success is narrowly confined to districts where voters hold politically liberal, pro-union attitudes.

There is no evidence that the unions’ impressive win rates have declined in recent years. Neither the Great Recession nor the loss of agency fees has materially weakened their electioneering successes.

The best way to bring pluralism to school board elections is to move elections on-cycle and provide voters with more information (including partisan cues) that help counteract the low-information environment that is characteristic of nonpartisan contests.

Taken together, the bigger-picture landscape of interest-group competition in school board politics is … well, that there isn’t much competition.

It’s little wonder that, just when education-reform and parents’-rights groups have gotten more involved in school board elections because of the pandemic, the education establishment has begun to cry foul. Earlier this year, when Governor Ron DeSantis became involved in endorsing school board candidates, his detractors said that he was “politicizing” school boards. One Florida-based columnist even called it “a little scary,” asking, “Wouldn’t we rather have [school board] candidates who commit to serving our children and local taxpayers/communities first, rather than the governor? This isn’t some banana republic or socialist or fascist state, right?”[54]

One wonders where these critics were for the past three decades, when research showed (and continues to show) that teachers’ unions dominate local school board elections. While that dynamic is unlikely to change anytime soon, there appears to be a reasonable blueprint for advocates of more pluralism in local school politics on which to build.

Endnotes

Please see Endnotes in PDF

Poverty and Change in Troy, N.Y.

 

Brenda Ann Kenneally’s sprawling chronicle of life in Troy, New York, is a tribute to her subjects and an indictment of our times.Photographs by Brenda Ann Kenneally

A Portrait of Love and Struggle in Post-Industrial, Small-City America

By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

November 16, 2018

 In 2014, Slate published ten photographs from a work in progress by the artist Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting the lives of a group of twenty-first-century American teen-agers in Troy, a city in upstate New York. The subjects in her images were not doing much: in one, an obese teen-age boy lay on a mattress in a homeless shelter, disconsolate; an exhausted child at a kitchen table waited for his bottle to be filled with coffee, his favorite drink; a young woman named Kayla, one of Kenneally’s central subjects, smoked a cigarette as she held her baby son.

Some of Slate’s readers responded to these scenes with expressions of anger and disgust—they indicted the choices of the people depicted and accused Kenneally of exploiting them. Usually, people living in poverty are newsworthy only when their actions are criminal—meriting a few lines in a police blotter—but now it seemed that living was an offense in itself. The debate surrounding the work became the story, reducing the photographs with obfuscating commentary, like grime. The images had been in the public domain for years by then, but never in a way that could be so easily and thoughtlessly consumed. The attacks on Kayla’s parenting became so malignant that Kenneally asked that the photograph of her be removed.

Tony Stocklas was three months old when his mother, Kayla, returned to high school.

Kenneally was born in Albany, but she left the area when she was a teen-ager and didn’t return for many years. In 2002, she and I worked together on a magazine assignment that brought us to Troy. She had recently finished a book that she’d been working on for ten years, about a community in Brooklyn. I had completed my own ten-year project, about an extended family from a poor section of the Bronx. Our upstate assignment, for the Times Magazine, stemmed from that work. Kenneally met Kayla on our first trip; after that, she couldn’t stop going back.

Big Jessie celebrated her twenty-third birthday with pellet guns, which were given to her by a girlfriend.

As she writes in a newly published book of the resulting work, “Upstate Girls,” Troy was once a wealthy industrial city, the kind of place that “embodied the idea of America as a land where every person’s dreams were realized.” But, by the time Kenneally was a teen-ager, in the nineteen-seventies, the industrialization that originally distinguished the city had contributed to its demise, as factories left the region to chase overseas deals. Except for one aunt, who became a teacher, no one in Kenneally’s family had any higher education. Kenneally herself quit high school and hitchhiked to Miami when she was around the same age that many of her subjects were when she met them. But she found her way to A.A. and then, through her sponsor, to photography; the process of applying to college, where she studied sociology and photojournalism, further transformed her life. All of this granted her enough perspective to keep her from being destroyed by misplaced shame.

DJ with her oldest daughter, Little Vic, on her prom day, in June, 2009.

Laurie with her son, Darien, and her daughters, Megan and Katie.

“Upstate Girls” has taken many forms over the years—hundreds of hours of video and audio, an archive of local vocabulary, collaborations with the local historical society, a nonprofit arts camp, even a museum. Kenneally launched the North Troy Peoples’ History Museum in 2016, with “Upstate Girls” as its inaugural show. The museum was housed in an apartment where several of her subjects had once lived, until the bank foreclosed and they had to move; their absentee landlord had stopped paying the mortgage. Other subjects had lived next door, and down the block. While Kenneally hoped that the museum might bring middle-class residents into a neighborhood they ordinarily avoided, and in so doing seed an exchange, she most wanted it to give the kids she’d documented a perspective on their own lives, and to do so in the places where both she and they had been raised.

Tony was in crisis—he was hyper, wouldn’t sleep or eat, and his medical trials had intensified. Playing video games was one of the only ways to quiet him down.

The show’s artifacts and ephemera included letters and art from incarcerated loved ones, receipts for furniture leased from rent-to-own businesses, prescriptions for the medications dispensed—in formidable doses—to the kids. One bedroom housed a library of scrapbooks made by the families who’d grown up in Kenneally’s photographs. There were also historical pictures of children in orphanages and in the crowded assembly lines on factory floors. A time line hung in the living room, like a monstrous mobile, tracking the decline in public health alongside once-lauded American products—tobacco, high-fructose corn syrup—and their code-switching, class-based marketing campaigns. These products had a particularly ruinous impact when they trickled down to North Troy residents, whose safety nets were being eroded by attacks on public education and other social supports. Kenneally had been studying inequality long enough to know that countering arguments about “personal responsibility” required that she expand the frame of her work to show exactly how lies about meritocracy cloak, and normalize, corporate greed. She obsessively gathered evidence—she calls it “hoarding”—to make us see these lives as she saw them, and to memorialize them as part of our nation’s history. At the Peoples’ Museum, this exhaustive contextualizing made it impossible to treat her subjects with contempt.

Terri and Big Jessie in their home.

Robert Stocklas on his twentieth birthday, after a fight with his baby’s mother.

The museum’s exhibition spread into every corner of the apartment, but it still represented only a portion of Kenneally’s sprawling multimedia archive. There are so many bodies in her images, in cramped back yards and on mattresses; exhausted, sleeping, loving, playing video games, dulled by pills, busting out, giving up, being born. So many bodies contained in physical spaces without enough light, or fresh air, or room to thrive.

While Big Jessie was in jail, her sister Stacey became pregnant.

Dasaun, Billie Jean, and Nanny Rose in the basement room at Deb’s.

Once shuttered and neglected, many of the buildings of Troy are now stirring again, reviving hope, as they are gutted and reclaimed by a wave of gentrification. Creatives—having pushed northward after getting priced out of Brooklyn—have begun making homes downtown. The young arrivals want the same thing that the subjects of Kenneally’s series want: a job, a home with a yard for the children, a safe neighborhood and a decent school, a place one can lay claim to. Is there a vision for the city sufficiently expansive to encompass former residents and newcomers alike?

During the winter of 2005, Kayla had been infatuated with Pops.

Chantelle and Kayla began dating in October, 2009.

Just as the book was going to press, one of the most ambitious young mothers in “Upstate Girls” was blindsided by the arrest of her husband, who is currently in detention, awaiting trial on numerous charges of rape and sexual abuse, including sexual assault of a child. (He denies them all.) Kenneally thought that “Upstate Girls” might be her parting gift to Troy, but this devastating news compelled her to return. She has been photographing the young woman—newly tattooed—and encouraging her to write through the crisis, to use art, as Kenneally had, to become an activist in her own life. How do we teach ourselves to fully apprehend the horrors we live among?

Dana Schubart nurses her baby.

Destiny looks out the window of her new bedroom.

Shaming people who live in poverty is an old reflex in America. Kenneally reminds us that the fault lines of capitalism are everywhere within our nation, running through the very foundation we keep building upon. Her excavations blast through any attempt to deny it. In her book’s opening essay, she refers to her photographs as “new fossils.” With taking pictures, Kenneally writes, “comes the power to manufacture a record that future generations will consider fact.” Whether we choose to look or not, these images are facts.

Dana and Elliot in the supermarket.

Laurie’s daughter Katie found her Spider-Man costume among the boxes packed for the family’s move from their last apartment in Troy.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is a journalist living in New York. She will be the Elias Ghanem Chair at the Black Mountain Institute, in Las Vegas, in February, 2019.

UNESCO Initiative Attacks 'Conspiracy Theories' Which "Foster Harmful Thinking Patterns and Exclusive Worldviews"

Rational scrutiny and debate must not be placed into a sieve for truth by a single truth-finder. Even the word "rational" needs debating.

In the widely publicized initiative posted here below, critics are quoted:

Organisation for Propaganda Studies Co-Director Piers Robinson said these kinds of developments are “extremely dangerous.”

“Basic principles of freedom of expression remind us that, because we can never be sure who is right and who is wrong, all ideas and arguments need to be evaluated through a process of rational scrutiny and debate,” Robinson told The Epoch Times. “Censoring arguments and opinions believed to be wrong means we risk censoring the truth.”

Explaining that these dangers have long been understood, Robinson quoted the great 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible,” Mill said. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

 Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ.com

Editor, ADVOCATZ Blog

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

UN Education Agency Launches War on ‘Conspiracy Theories' 

According to the Paris-based U.N. education agency, which released a major report on the subject for educators this summer, conspiracy theories cause “significant harm” and form “the backbone of many populist movements.”

Among other concerns, conspiracy theories “foster and reinforce harmful thinking patterns and exclusive worldviews,” the report said.

They also “reduce trust in public institutions” and “scientific institutions,” which can drive people to violence or decrease their desire to “reduce their carbon footprint,” UN officials argued in the document.

While “all conspiratorial thinking threatens human rights values,” the document says without elaborating, some conspiracy theories are more dangerous than others.

In some cases, teachers are even encouraged to report their students to authorities.

Examples of “conspiracy theories” cited in the report include everything from widely held and respectable beliefs such as “climate change denial” and “manipulation of federal elections” in the United States, to more far-fetched notions such as the “earth is flat” or “Michelle Obama is actually a lizard.”

“There are plenty of crazy thoughts on the Internet, many of which are patently false,” explained Citizens for Free Speech Director Patrick Wood. “The only thoughts being ‘corrected’ are those contrary to the globalist narrative. This proves that the focus is on protecting their own narratives and nothing else.”

“UNESCO joins a censorship cartel that now includes the European Union, the U.S. government, the World Economic Forum, social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, and notably, Google,” Wood told The Epoch Times. “Anyone who does not parrot the globalist narrative is by default considered to be a ‘conspiracy theorist.'”

At the heart of the global program to combat these ideas and theories are teachers and schools, according to the U.N. agency. Also central is the battle online and in the media, UNESCO documents explain.

The latest strategy was unveiled at UNESCO’s “International Symposium on Addressing Conspiracy Theories through Education.” Held in late June in Brussels, the summit brought together academia, governments, civil society, and the private sector to promote “joint action” against conspiracy theories and those who believe or spread them.

The plan includes strategies to prevent people from believing in conspiracy theories in the first place as well as tools for dealing with those who already believe them.

Several experts on propaganda and free speech, however, warned that the U.N. effort represents a “dangerous” escalation in what they portrayed as a global war on free speech, free expression, questioning official narratives, and dissent more broadly.

“What they mean by ‘conspiracy theory’ is any claim or argument or evidence that differs from the propaganda pumped out by the government and media,” warned New York University Professor of Media Studies Mark Crispin Miller, who studies propaganda and government misinformation.

“I can’t think of anything more dangerous to free speech and free thought—and, therefore, democracy—than this effort by the U.N., which has no business telling us what’s true and what is not,” Miller told The Epoch Times. “That distinction is not theirs to make, but ours, as free people capable of thinking for ourselves, and unafraid of civil argument.”

The Global War on Conspiracy Theories

Official efforts to clamp down on “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation” are not new. In fact, Western governments—including the U.S. government—have for years been leading the charge.

In 2010, the U.S. State Department, with help from its “Counter Misinformation Team,” published “Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation” on America.gov claiming to debunk various “conspiracy theories.”

More recently, the Biden administration has also turned its focus to “conspiracy theories.” Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security repeatedly suggested that belief in widespread voter fraud or alternative views on COVID-19 and public health measures represented a major terrorism threat to the United States.

While the Biden administration’s proposed “Disinformation Governance Board” appears to have been shelved for now following a public outcry, the U.S. government has been working closely with technology giants to suppress speech surrounding election fraud, Hunter Biden’s laptop, alternative views on COVID-19, and more.

National Public Radio, a tax-funded operation, has published numerous pieces over the last month echoing UNESCO’s talking points about the alleged danger and prevalence of conspiracy theories in schools and beyond.

Outgoing senior health official Dr. Anthony Fauci has chimed in recently, too. “What we’re dealing with now is just a distortion of reality, conspiracy theories which don’t make any sense at all pushing back on sound public health measures, making it look like trying to save lives is encroaching on people’s freedom,” he said on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” on Aug. 22.

The World Economic Forum, which has become a lightning rod for criticism around the world over its “Great Reset” agenda, is also working to counter ideas it labels misinformation and conspiracy theories.

“Key to stopping the spread of conspiracy theories is educating people to be on the lookout for misleading information—and teaching them to be suspicious of certain sources,” senior WEF writer Charlotte Edmond wrote two years ago in a piece for the organization’s website.

The U.N. has been central to the global effort. Indeed, the new program is actually an extension of a 2020 initiative by UNESCO and the European Commission dubbed #ThinkBeforeSharing to combat conspiracy theories online.

That effort included urging citizens to post links to fact-checking services and even report journalists who may be engaged in conspiracy theorizing to “your local/national press council or press ombudsperson.”

In an October 2020 World Economic Forum podcast on “Seeking a cure for the infodemic,” U.N. global communications chief Melissa Fleming boasts of having enlisted over 100,000 volunteers to amplify the U.N.’s views and squelch competing narratives.

“So far, we’ve recruited 110,000 information volunteers, and we equip these information volunteers with the kind of knowledge about how misinformation spreads and ask them to serve as kind of ‘digital first-responders’ in those spaces where misinformation travels,” the U.N. communications chief said.

The revelation came after years of U.N. and governmental efforts to quash what it describes as extremism, misinformation, and more on the internet. In 2016, the U.N. Security Council launched a “framework” to fight “extremism” online on the heels of a program from the previous year to battle “ideologies” that could lead to violence.

But the fresh UNESCO efforts in education signal a dramatic escalation in the battle—especially in the targeting of school children.

Combating ‘Conspiracy Theories’ at School

Education and schools are at the center of the new UNESCO plan to combat conspiracy theories.

“The fight against conspiracy theories, and the antisemitic and racist ideologies they often convey, begins at school, yet teachers worldwide lack the adequate training,” said UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay about the new effort. “That is why today, UNESCO is launching a practical guide for educators, so they can better teach students how to identify and debunk conspiracy theories.”

Beyond working through education, the U.N. agency also hopes to expand its efforts to combat the spread of what it refers to as conspiracy theories in the realms of press and social media.

“This builds on the wider work we’re doing to strengthen media and information literacy to better prepare learners to navigate a world of algorithms, artificial intelligence and invasive data collection,” added Azoulay, who served in the French government as a member of the Socialist Party before taking over the UN education organization.

The UN strategy for fighting conspiracy theories in education lists a number of major objectives for educators.

These include teaching teachers how to “identify and dismantle conspiracy theories,” how to develop students’ “resilience to conspiracy theories,” and how to tell the difference between a “real conspiracy” and a “conspiracy theory.”

One of the ways offered for educators to determine the veracity of information is to check fact-checking services, which have come under repeated criticism in recent years for being highly politicized and often inaccurate. Many of the services are funded by individuals, such as billionaire founder of Microsoft Bill Gates, who UNESCO says are frequently the target of conspiracy theories.

The document also contains multiple strategies for combating conspiracy theories. To fight “harmful information” among students, for example, UNESCO urges teachers to engage in what the agency describes as “prebunking.”

“Prebunking is also sometimes called ‘inoculation,’” the report reads. “Psychologists have proven that weakened forms of harmful information, carefully introduced and framed, can help to strengthen the resilience against wider harmful messages, much like a vaccine.”

When students believe in ideas because of parental influence, teachers are instructed to seek help from school officials and consider a “mediated conversation with parents.”

If a student were to express concerns about the COVID-19 vaccine, teachers are instructed to “state that the vaccine has been scientifically proven to be safe” and “that it is important to get vaccinated to curb the pandemic.”

It was not immediately clear whether the relevant section of the UNESCO document was written before public health authorities in the United States and around the world began acknowledging that the COVID-19 injections do not prevent infection from or transmission of the CCP virus that causes COVID-19.

In some cases where conspiracy theories involve alleged hate or discrimination, teachers are urged to consider reporting students to “safeguarding authorities or safeguarding officers.”

What Is a Conspiracy Theory?

The document, titled “Addressing conspiracy theories – what teachers need to know,” defines a conspiracy theory as: “The belief that events are being secretly manipulated by powerful forces with negative intent. Typically, conspiracy theories involve an imagined group of conspirators colluding to implement an alleged secret plot.”

The UNESCO report moves on to offer warnings about, and definitions for, misinformation, disinformation, hate speech, and fake news.

One term that is not defined in the document, however, is the word “conspiracy” itself. Most dictionaries define it as an illegal or immoral plot carried out in secret involving two or more individuals. State and federal law-enforcement authorities charge large numbers of people with the crime of “conspiracy” each year.

In its short guide for telling the difference between “real” conspiracies and mere “theories,” the U.N. report divides the thinking into two broad categories.

The first, dubbed “conventional thinking” in the UNESCO document, uses Watergate as an example of a real conspiracy uncovered by following evidence and having “healthy” skepticism.

The other mode of thinking, labeled “conspiratorial thinking,” features a “birds aren’t real” theory that concludes birds are robots spying on people and the government creates replica eggs to cover it all up. This conclusion is reached as a result of “overriding suspicion” and “over interpreting evidence,” UNESCO said.

In the real world, experts say the line between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact is far less obvious.

According to a 2020 YouGov-Cambridge Globalism poll cited in the UNESCO document, strong majorities believe in overarching “conspiracy theories” in many nations. Almost eight in 10 Nigerians, for example, said they believed in “a single group of people who controlled world events.” Almost six out of 10 Mexicans, 56 percent of Greeks and 55 percent of Egyptians believed that, too, the poll showed.

One of the reports at the center of the new UNESCO effort, “The Conspiracy Theory Handbook” by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook, also acknowledges that conspiracies exist and are not uncommon.

“Real conspiracies do exist,” the report admits at the start. “Volkswagen conspired to cheat emissions tests for their diesel engines. The U.S. National Security Agency secretly spied on civilian internet users. The tobacco industry deceived the public about the harmful health effects of smoking. We know about these conspiracies through internal industry documents, government investigations, or whistleblowers.”

The U.N. documents also outline various reasons why people believe in conspiracy theories. These include feelings of powerlessness, coping mechanisms for handling uncertainty, or seeking to claim minority status. Evidence is not listed as a reason why people might believe in a conspiracy theory.

One of the “case studies” listed in the UNESCO document refers to Mikki Willis’s documentary “Plandemic.” Among other points, the film and the experts who are interviewed argue that COVID-19 may have been created in a laboratory for sinister purposes.

Reached by The Epoch Times, Willis slammed the U.N. and its effort to “indoctrinate” people.

“When I hear that the U.N. is now directing its indoctrination towards teachers, I become concerned about the well-being of our future generations,” he said, adding that the U.N.’s attack on “conspiracy theories” was an effort to stop the truth.

“The fact that they continue to use my film series as an example of what they’re fighting against says everything we need to know,” continued Willis, saying the vast majority of scientists now agree with key points in his film and yet “propagandists” keep trying to “perpetuate the lies.”

Critics Sound the Alarm

Multiple experts in the field of propaganda warned The Epoch Times that the UNESCO initiative was a major threat to free expression.

Organisation for Propaganda Studies Co-Director Piers Robinson said these kinds of developments are “extremely dangerous.”

“Basic principles of freedom of expression remind us that, because we can never be sure who is right and who is wrong, all ideas and arguments need to be evaluated through a process of rational scrutiny and debate,” Robinson told The Epoch Times. “Censoring arguments and opinions believed to be wrong means we risk censoring the truth.”

Explaining that these dangers have long been understood, Robinson quoted the great 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“First: the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course deny its truth; but they are not infallible,” Mill said. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”

Robinson, who also serves as co-editor of Propaganda in Focus and sits on the executive committee of Pandemics Data & Analytics (PANDATA.org), also cautioned that powerful actors with large budgets would likely be involved in deciding what is true and not.

“This means allowing powerful actors to define reality and, as history shows, they will define reality in a way that serves their own interests,” he said. “This is all contradictory to democracy and, of course, the reason why freedom of expression is understood to be so important: we must be free to scrutinize and criticize those in power in order to guard against tyranny and abuse of power.”

Robinson also blasted the use of the term “conspiracy theory” as “deeply problematic,” saying it was a term often used to shut down discussion on serious issues and questions about powerful actors.

“If we value democracy and the ideas of freedom of expression and rational debate, UNESCO could do useful work on helping people of the world to think for themselves, and develop their own critical skills,” he concluded. “They should not be in the business of telling people what to think.”

Another expert on propaganda, environmental political theory Professor Tim Hayward at the University of Edinburgh, also warned that efforts to demonize and silence “conspiracy theories” was really an effort to pathologize dissent and inconvenient lines of questioning.

“Instead of reasoned arguments put forward by critics and dissidents being met with proper consideration and rebuttal, they are just dismissed out of hand; and the critics themselves are smeared with the name conspiracy theorists,” warned Hayward, who has written a number of peer-reviewed academic papers on the subject in recent years.

“Worse, of course, is that the general denigration of dissent is used to whip up moral panic about ‘disinformation’ and to try and justify increased censorship,” he added.

Hayward views the focus on education to combat “conspiracy theories” as particularly concerning.

“It is truly worrying when those responsible for the strategic communications challenged by dissidents get to infiltrate education systems and implant prejudices in favor of ‘official stories’ which are only official because they are backed by political authority rather than actual epistemic authority,” he said.

While Hayward cautioned that he was not necessarily accusing UNESCO of doing this, he warned that the organization and its programs needed to be watched as this was a troubling trend.

It would be better to teach children “the fundamentals of critical reasoning” so they can detect falsehoods on their own, he told The Epoch Times.

“You cannot reasonably identify disinformation or reject a ‘conspiracy theory’ unless you have a robust and defensible grip on what is reliable information,” he said, calling for “logical thinking” and “broad knowledge” to help people guard against disinformation from adversaries or even their own leaders. “That should be the focus of education.”

Truth or Misinformation?

The fresh push to quash “misinformation” and “conspiracy theories” online comes as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies increasingly admit that much of what was labeled false during the pandemic turned out to be correct.

For instance, today, the CDC admits that the COVID-19 vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission—an idea that was censored by multiple social media companies relying on government as “misinformation” as recently as a few months ago.

Also widely acknowledged by federal officials today is that the CCP virus may have, in fact, been created through “gain-of-function” research taking place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in communist China. This, too, was blocked, censored, and labeled as misinformation.

Alleged conspiracy “theories” being ultimately proven correct is hardly a new phenomenon. Just this summer, Reader’s Digest published a list of “12 Conspiracy Theories That Actually Turned Out to Be True.” The list includes everything from CIA mind-control programs and government spying to tobacco companies conspiring to hide the negative health effects of their products.

Despite the escalating UN concern about conspiracy theories and the claims that they are proliferating at an unprecedented rate, new research by the University of Miami suggests that is simply not true.

Critics, though, have repeatedly raised concerns about UNESCO’s leadership, and even those behind the new effort, including a number of individuals from autocratic nations and with ties to dictatorial regimes.

There are numerous Chinese communists embedded in the agency’s senior leadership such as Qu Xing, who serves as deputy director-general of the agency.

The agency itself has been regularly condemned for extremism by U.S. authorities, including by the Ronald Reagan administration when it withdrew from UNESCO.

The Trump administration ended U.S. membership in the controversial U.N. organization in 2018, citing anti-Semitism, “extreme politicization,” hostility to fundamental American values, and other concerns.

However, as reported by The Epoch Times, the Biden administration is seeking ways to circumvent federal statutes barring U.S. re-engagement in the global organization.

None of the press officers, media liaisons, or spokespeople for UNESCO responded to requests for comment on the plan.

 

Alex Newman

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Alex Newman is a freelance contributor. Newman is an award-winning international journalist, educator, author, and consultant who co-wrote the book “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.” He is the executive director of Public School Exit, serves as CEO of Liberty Sentinel Media, and writes for diverse publications in the United States and abroad.