The National Rifle Association has dramatically increased its funding to schools in recent years amid a national debate over guns and school violence, an Associated Press analysis of tax records has found. But few say they plan to give up the money in the aftermath of the latest mass shooting.

The AP analysis of the NRA Foundation’s public tax records finds that about 500 schools received more than $7.3 million from 2010 through 2016, mostly through competitive grants meant to promote shooting sports. The grants have gone to an array of school programs, including the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, rifle teams, hunting safety courses and agriculture clubs.

In some ways, the grant distribution reflects the nation’s deep political divide over guns. Nearly three-quarters of the schools that received grants are in counties that voted for President Donald Trump in the 2016 election, while a quarter are in counties that voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, according to the AP analysis. Most are in medium-sized counties or rural areas, with few near major cities.

California received the most in school grants, more than $1 million, while Florida was a close second.

Florida’s Broward County school district is believed to be the first to stop accepting NRA money after a gunman killed 17 people at one of its schools Feb. 14. The teen charged in the shooting had been on a school rifle team that received NRA funding. School officials announced the change Tuesday but declined to comment further.

Denver Public Schools followed on Thursday, saying it won’t pursue NRA grants in the future and will turn down several that were to be awarded this year. But officials in many other districts say they have no plans to back away.

“Whatever I think of the NRA, they’re providing legitimate educational services,” said Billy Townsend, a school board member in Florida’s Polk County district, whose JROTC programs received $33,000, primarily to buy air rifles. “If the NRA wanted to provide air rifles for our ROTC folks in the future, I wouldn’t have a problem with that.”

The grants awarded to schools are just a small share of the $61 million the NRA Foundation has given to a variety of local groups since 2010. But it has grown rapidly, increasing nearly fourfold from 2010 to 2014 in what some opponents say is a thinly veiled attempt to recruit the next generation of NRA members.

The NRA Foundation did not return calls seeking comment.

Annual reports from the pro-gun group say its grant program was started in 1992 and raises money through local Friends of NRA chapters. It says half the proceeds from local fundraisers go to local grants and half goes to the national organization. Tax records show roughly $19 million in grants going to the group’s Virginia headquarters in 2015 and in 2016.

Besides schools, other typical recipients include 4-H groups, which have received $12.2 million since 2010, Boy Scout troops and councils, which received $4 million, and private gun clubs. Overall, about half the grants go to programs directed at youth.

Grant funding to schools rose sharply in the years after the 2012 shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School, fueled in part by a new grant program the NRA unrolled to help schools make safety improvements. Three districts received safety grants totaling $189,000 in 2014, tax records show, but none appears to have been awarded since then.

Nearly half of the 773 overall school grants have gone to JROTC programs, which put students through a basic military curriculum and offer an array of small competitive clubs, like the rifle team at Broward’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But JROTC leaders say few students ultimately enlist in the military, and the primary goal is to teach students skills like discipline and leadership.

“The safety that we’re teaching, the good citizenship that we’re teaching here, those are the things you don’t hear about,” said AP finds the NRA gave $7 million to hundreds of schools:

Sacramento-area schools have received $1.1 million from the NRA | The Sacramento Bee - http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article204340309.html 

The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools - Garn Press:

The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools is a book intended to challenge the authority of the policymakers and misanthropic funders who are wreaking havoc in public schools, closing schools in Black and Brown neighborhoods, and pushing segregated charter schools on communities that have every right to exceptional learning environments in fully funded public schools.

The book is in three parts. In Part One Susan DuFresne writes about the remarkable journey she took that resulted in the creation of the three 15 foot graphic panels that depict historically accurate pictures of racism in U.S. public schools. In Part Two the panels depicting racism and discrimination are transformed into a graphic novel in which the paintings Susan created tell the story of three hundred years of racial injustice that is still endemic today. In Part Three the information that Susan painted in the margins of the paintings is presented together with notes from Susan on suggested questions that could be asked and actions that could be taken.

At Garn Press we applaud Susan’s activism and commitment to racial justice, and we are convinced that this book is transformational and destined to be a lightning rod for justice in U.S. society. Susan, who is a teacher and activist as well as an artist of exceptional talent, writes of the three fifteen foot panels she produced:

“I felt on my brush the weight of historical injustice as I depicted the findings of my research. But I also felt the tugging of my brush to depict the fight for justice, which was also there throughout history. There have always been activists, many of them teachers, ready to fight for justice in U.S. public schools. Teachers especially have always been courageous in their resistance to racism and oppression, and I wanted to share this history to inspire others through the images I was painting to take up that truth and join the resistance movement to end institutional racism in public schools.”

The paintings Susan produced are truly works of art, which have already inspired strong reactions that could quite possibly result in policy makers recognizing the negative impact they are having on the lives of students and teachers in U.S. public schools.

But make no mistake this is a book of hope as well as condemnation, which is destined to be studied by teachers and parents who want a re-Visioning of the role of public education in their children’s lives, for the emphasis is also on restorative justice and reconciliation. The graphic depictions of the history of racism and discrimination unite the struggles of resistance movements – including Black Lives Matter and Continue reading The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools - Garn Press:

The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools - Garn Press:

Susan DuFresne is an artist and educator who advocates across all intersectional groups, organizing for social justice. She works alongside colleagues and friends who are leaders in the Black Lives Matter Movement and the Badass Teachers Association. She is a vocal supporter of Indigenous peoples, the Women’s Movement, and LGBTQIA activists, and cares deeply about environmental issues. She visualizes a future where these diverse groups join together to successfully return power to the people.

Susan is currently teaching children in an integrated kindergarten classroom as both a general education and special education teacher. She is active on social media and can often be found participating in marches and rallies for social justice locally and at the state and national levels. One of the important battles she fights is for democratically run schools, as well as a child’s right to play. She pushes against the use of high stakes testing, agreeing with many students, parents, and educators who denounce these tests as racially biased, advocating for their right to opt out.

Susan and her husband live in Washington State. They have one son, three daughters and three grandchildren.

Connect with Susan. Follow on Twitter @GetUpStandUp2.

The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools - Garn Press:

The Gates Foundation is regrouping after its latest school improvement disappointment, but it’s not bowing out of the education reform business.

As the philanthropic powerhouse led by Bill and Melinda Gates explained in their latest annual letter to the public, it ended its effort to overhaul teacher evaluation systems after determining that these efforts were failing to generate intended results.

“We haven’t seen the large impact we had hoped for,” the Microsoft founder and his wife wrote in the note they published in February.

It’s a familiar storyline. Again and again, policymakers and philanthropists have teamed up to reform public education, only to find that their bold projects have fallen short.

Like other educational policy scholars, we have observedthis pattern for years. And we have identified a few reasons why school reform efforts so persistently get lackluster results, despite consistent bipartisan support and roughly US$4 billion a year in philanthropic funding derived from some of the nation’s biggest fortunes.

The Gates Foundation (which is a strategic partner of The Conversation US and provides funding for The Conversation internationally) poured at least $700 millioninto upgrading teacher evaluation systems between 2008 and 2013, before quietly pulling the plug. The move echoed a similar about-face that occurred decade ago, when the funder acknowledged that the $2 billion it had spent on making America’s large high schools smaller hadn’t achieved the desired results.

But Gates is hardly the only major philanthropist to come up short. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan spent $100 million of their own money to improve the Newark school system, in an effort that attracted another $100 million from other donors. Their goal in New Jersey, according to journalist Dale Russakoff, was to “develop a model for saving public education in all of urban America.” The results, chronicled in Russakoff’s 2016 book “The Prize,” were mixed at best. Though some education scholars have detected improvements in Newark, and test scores have edged up since the experiment, it generally failed to meet the funders’ lofty goals.

Leaders in government have also been active in the school reform game.

Ever since 1983, when the Reagan administration published its “A Nation at Risk” report bemoaning the quality of American public education, politicians have rallied public support for plans to overhaul the nation’s education system. Over the past quarter century, they have backed the creation of curricular standards and high-stakes standardized tests. And they have championed privately operated charter schools as a replacement for traditional public schools, along with vouchers and other subsidies to defray the cost of private school tuition.

Along the way, reformers – those in government and the philanthropic world alike – have Why big bets on educational reform haven't fixed the US school system:

Betsy DeVos’ Brief, Confusing Visit to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 

Her press conference lasted a grand total of eight minutes.

On Wednesday, education secretary Betsy DeVos toured Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and met with students and faculty weeks after they survived a mass shooting that left 17 dead at their school. She said she saw therapy dogs, talked to “a small group of students that are having a particularly tough time,” and let students who worked with the school newspaper trail her. 

After the visit, she held an eight-minute press conference. When asked about her support for the idea of letting teachers carry firearms in schools, DeVos said that interpretation was an “oversimplification” and that schools should consider marshal programs like the one in Texas as a model, noting that it may not be for everybody.

DeVos answered a few more questions, including one about her plans to improve school safety. “It’s appropriate to take a robust inventory of what states are doing and what local communities are doing and elevate those things that are working well,” she said. She didn’t elaborate on specific proposals. 

After the press conference, journalists and students took to Twitter to express their confusion and frustration: Continue Reading: Betsy DeVos’ Brief, Confusing Visit to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School – Mother Jones: 

Recently in the lead up to the Janus vs. AFSCME case that hit the Supreme Court last week, I wrote several columns focusing on the impact of the Koch brothers’ network’s attack on the union movement, the Democratic Party, and public education.  Thus, I was cheered to learn that the California Democratic Party overwhelmingly endorsed the stalwart progressive Tony Thurmond over Marshall Tuck for State Superintendent of Public Instruction.

While this is a low-profile affair as statewide races go, it is important because lots of moneyed interests see it as a way to push their agenda under the radar here in super blue California.  As I noted during Tuck’s last failed campaign for the same office, he is a stealth front man, “the pure embodiment of the reckless, unaccountable arrogance of corporate education reform”:

As Diane Ravitch recently put it in her blog, “What qualifies Tuck to run the state education department? Well, he was an investment banker. The rich and powerful like him. He has friends in Hollywood. He thinks no teacher should have tenure. He failed as leader of Green Dot. He failed running the mayor’s takeover schools. That means he is an expert on reform.”

And just in case you might be thinking she exaggerates the extent to which Tuck is a tool of plutocrats, last week’s campaign report from “Parents and Teachers for Tuck for State Superintendent 2014” showed that his support is not so much from Mom and Dad and the kindergarten teachers as it is from rich folks with big plans to “disrupt” California’s schools.

And despite his earlier loss, Tuck, a former Wall Street investment banker and CEO for a charter school company who has no classroom teaching experience or any expertise whatsoever with regard to education, is back with his robust privatization agenda.  That agenda, and the fact that he is a registered Democrat with     Continue reading: Marshall Tuck’s Dirty Secret: How Right-Wing Money Infiltrates Democratic Politics:

Members of Massachusetts' congressional delegation who have previously raised concerns about Betsy DeVos leading the Department of Education, released a new report Thursday suggesting that the secretary's tenure has "been a boon for shady for-profit colleges, student loan companies and school privatization advocates."

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Melrose, unveiled their first "DeVos Watch" annual review, a 17-page report that examines the education secretary's work since being confirmed to President Donald Trump's cabinet in February 2017. 

The Massachusetts Democrats, in announcing their review, said the report reveals that DeVos' actions "have raised serious ethical questions, prioritized for-profit colleges over student borrowers, weakened traditional public education in favor of non-public schools and reversed civil rights protections for students."

The report accuses DeVos of: having "damaging conflicts of interest;" working to limit, delay and revoke regulations that seek to hold colleges accountable; rolling back relief for students ripped off by for-profit colleges; and undermining key protections for public school students contained in the Every Student Succeeds Act. 

It also suggests that she "has spent her time in office meeting with school choice and privatization advocates, while largely ignoring the needs of public school students and teachers."

Further, the report alleges that the education secretary has "curtailed protections for victims of sexual harassment and sexual violence; eliminated protections for transgender students; weakened protections for students of color; and weakened enforcement of civil rights protections by the department's Office for Civil Rights."

The Department of Education did not immediately respond to Elizabeth Warren, Katherine Clark release report criticizing Betsy DeVos' work at Education Department | masslive.com:

Nearly two full years before the walkouts, eighteen demonstrators picketed in front of Lincoln High School in 1966 to protest against the lack of counseling services and educational opportunities for Latino students. COURTESY OF THE LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY

On March 6, 2013 — just like she did almost every year on the 6th of March — Paula Crisostomo called her former teacher, Sal Castro, to wish him a "happy anniversary." That year, it was the last time they ever spoke.

Castro was dying of thyroid cancer. "He did not have a voice any longer," Crisostomo remembered; a phone call with "Sal" meant speaking to his wife, Charlotte Lerchenmuller, who would read her husband's written replies aloud.

But this phone call was important. She called Castro every year on the anniversary of the day in 1968 that students first walked out of Crisostomo’s alma mater, Lincoln High School. That year, Castro was central to organizing walkouts at Lincoln and four other East Los Angeles high schools to protest the unequal education Latino students received — and Crisostomo, a senior in 1968, had helped organize too.

"Tell Paula," Castro dictated to his wife, "it's been a great ride, but the fight isn't over." Castro died a month later.

"Those were his last words to me," Crisostomo said.

All this month, politicians, dignitaries, educators, students and community leaders will hold various ceremonies and gatherings to mark the 50th anniversary of the student walkouts — or "blowouts," as some students called them — at Lincoln, Wilson, Garfield, Roosevelt and Belmont high schools.

The blowouts were pivotal moments in the history of the L.A. Unified School District. Some historians even argue the walkouts, led by teenagers, were the beginning of an urban Chicano rights movement to parallel the political awakening already underway for rural farm workers.

In measuring how far the city, the schools and Latinos have come in the fifty years since, Crisostomo says Castro's last words still ring true — the fight isn't over.

"We still have to be vigilant," she said. "We still have to resist."

Six days after the Parkland school shooting, the student activists travelled to the state capitol to meet with one of the most pro-gun state legislatures in the country.Photograph by Audra Melton / NYT / Redux