(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post)
Being our semi-regular weekly survey of what’s goin’ down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin’ gets done, and where a businessman named Red was cast out of heaven and he’s out of his head.
We begin in Wisconsin, where Scott Walker’s gerrymandered legacy state legislature has decided that schoolteachers do not necessarily have to have the credentials we all once presumed they had. Like, say, the ability to read. From Wisconsin Public Radio:
The new bipartisan plan working its way through the Legislature would exempt teachers from having to pass the Foundations of Reading test, commonly called FORT, before entering the classroom. It’s not the first time legislators are revisiting the testing requirement. Legislation was passed in 2019 exempting special education applicants from the FORT exam as long as they could demonstrate to the Department of Public Instruction they have completed a course of study that “satisfies several criteria including competency in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.” The proposed bill, authored by Sen. Mary Felzkowski, R-Irma, and state Rep. Jeff Mursau, R-Crivitz, extends that exception to applicants for all licenses that require the FORT exam.
In fairness, dumping the exam is not strictly a Republican position. School boards all over the state are being squeezed for personnel, and they say that the (frankly astounding) failure rate on the FORT test is choking off their ability to hire new teachers.
Lawmakers, DPI and the Wisconsin Association of School Boards say the change is necessary to help alleviate the state’s teacher shortage. For years, the FORT test has had dismal results. Only 54 percent of first-time test takers passed for the 2020-21 school year. That’s down from 66 percent in 2014-15. “Passing the FORT examination can be a costly and time-consuming process, with a relatively high failure rate, especially among teacher license applicants of color and applicants whose first language is not English,” according to the Wisconsin Association of School Boards. “There is also little credible evidence that passing the FORT exam, by itself, improves teacher performance or produces any positive impact on students’ literacy skills or reading achievement.”
The other side argues, not unreasonably, that colleges and universities should better prepare their students who are going into education. The National Council on Teacher Quality thinks very highly of the FORT exam. Its president, Heather Peske is confused about why Wisconsin is abandoning its highly effective testing. Not to brag, but up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), they’ve used a similar test for teachers and students have shown tangible improvement in reading scores.
“My question is, how will you ensure that your aspiring teachers have the knowledge and skills aligned with the research on how to effectively teach reading before they enter the classroom?” Peske said. Peske said if less than half of teachers pass the test, then that means those teachers are not prepared to teach children to read. “It’s kind of odd timing for the state to be implementing a comprehensive reading bill that is trying to better teach kids to read and better align to the science of reading, and simultaneously introducing bills that would lower the guard rails for teachers to enter the classroom,” Peske said.
Suspicions abound that this curious decision is part and parcel to the ongoing attempt to privatize public education in Wisconsin. But there is enough budgetary pain in the state’s public education system makes at least some of the support for abandoning the test worth a serious hearing. It would take some good faith cooperation from the legislature. Yeah, I know. But I had to say it.
We move along to Alabama, where we have another horror story from the state’s horror show prison system found their way into the light. From Al.com:
Daniel Terry Williams was serving a 12-month sentence for second degree theft when the attack occurred. The post on GoFundMe said he was beaten, tortured, and sexually assaulted. “On Sunday, October 22, 2023, a possible inmate-on-inmate assault was reported at Staton Correctional Facility,” according to a statement from the Alabama Department of Corrections. “Inmate Williams was discovered unresponsive in his dorm and was transported to the Health Care Unit. Medical personnel treated Williams and monitored his condition. The decision was made to transfer him to an area hospital for further evaluation and treatment.” The family removed life support on Nov. 5 after doctors said Williams was brain dead. He was transferred to the medical unit at Kilby Correctional Facility a few days later and died on Nov. 9.
Williams was due to be released in two weeks.
Federal authorities have been investigating violence in Alabama prisons since 2019, when the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report saying the conditions violated the civil rights of inmates. The department sued in 2020. The state does not do enough to prevent prison-on-prisoner violence and sexual assault, according to the report… Leaders of the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery-based nonprofit that advocates on behalf of inmates, said the state could do more to prevent prisoner deaths. “Deaths like that of Mr. Williams are tragic, preventable, and happen all too frequently in Alabama’s prisons,” said EJI Director Bryan Stevenson. “EJI receives reports from medical care providers, family members, and other incarcerated witnesses every month, about prisoners whose medical emergencies are dismissed by untrained officers as intoxication or somehow their own fault. In many of these cases, had the person been treated in time, they would have survived.”
“Guest of the state” never has been more of a joke.
We haven’t visited Tennessee for a while, so let’s check in on one of America’s more underrated nervous hospitals. From the New Republic:
Murfreesboro passed an ordinance in June banning “indecent behavior,” including “indecent exposure, public indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct.” As journalist Erin Reed first reported, this ordinance specifically mentions Section 21-72 of the city code. The city code states that sexual conduct includes homosexuality. Anyone who violates the new ordinance is barred from hosting public events or selling goods and services at public events for two years. Anyone who violates the ordinance “in the presence of minors” is barred for five years. An ACLU-backed challenge to the ordinance has already been launched, but that hasn’t stopped city officials from implementing the measure. Last Monday, the Rutherford County steering committee met to discuss removing all books that might potentially violate the ordinance from the public library. The resolution was met with widespread outcry from city residents.
I’ve been to Murfreesboro, Middle Tennessee State University is there, and its men’s basketball team was good enough to pique my interest a couple of times. It seemed like a nice town; there’s a graveyard there holding 6000 Union soldiers from the Battle of Stones River, which is also called the Second Battle of Murfreesboro. In a brutal three-day fight beginning on New Year’s Eve in 1862, Union General William Rosecrans won the sanguinary contest when he duped Confederate incompetent Braxton Bragg into retreating. Of all the major battles of the Civil War, Stones River had the highest percentage of casualties on both sides. This is a place where the stones themselves remember the consequences of division. The stones, likely, are embarrassed by this whole business.
And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, whence, in between lining up Markwayne Mullin’s next payday, Blog Official Congressional Matchmaker Friedman of the Plains has brought us the tale of how the indigenous tribes are kicking back against the city of Tulsa. From nondoc:
“Tulsa’s ongoing criminal prosecutions of Indians for conduct within the Creek Reservation are causing irreparable injury to the nation by interfering with its sovereignty and undermining the authority of its own criminal justice system, including the authority of its attorney general, Lighthorse Police, and courts to prosecute under the nation’s own laws criminal offenses committed by Indians within its Reservation,” the petition filed Wednesday states. “Tulsa has made plain, by word and deed, that absent judicial intervention it will persist with its unlawful prosecutions.” Wednesday’s lawsuit comes as other questions about state-tribal jurisdiction continue to be the subject of public policy discussions, including a dispute over motor vehicle license plates issued by some tribes. In the three years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in McGirt v. Oklahoma affirmed the continued existence of the Muscogee Nation Reservation — and, subsequently, other reservations in eastern Oklahoma — a series of civil law questions have arisen.
You bet it has, and the settler community in Oklahoma has not been thrilled about it. Tough luck, white guys. Boot on the other foot now. Oh, and Senator Mullin, I don’t care how many MMA matches you had, you don’t want to throw down with a fourth-generation Irish Teamster from the town of Meffa. (Non-Massachusetts translation: Medford.) No, you don’t want to do that at all.
This is your democracy, America. Cherish it.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
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