Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona finally said the quiet part out loud.
On February 13, President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, did something Democratic officials seldom do in public: He spoke the truth about what’s behind the relentless attacks on public schools by rightwing advocacy groups and their financial backers.
As HuffPostreported, one of the topics that came up during a meeting between Cardona and Black journalists that took place at the Department of Education, was the recent wave of new laws passed in mostly red states that target programs in K-12 schools and institutions of higher education that address diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
Advocates for DEI programs say they are needed to ensure positive academic, health, and social outcomes for students who often face discrimination and fewer educational opportunities due to their race, class, religion, gender, or ability level. Opponents say they shame white students and cause “reverse discrimination.”
Cardona called new laws passed by Republican state lawmakers to eliminate DEI programs “a deliberate attack on efforts to try to make sure schools are inclusive, welcoming places for all students—in particular, students from different backgrounds.”
But more than just defending schools for embracing DEI, Cardona went further to call out the intention behind these attacks on the programs, calling them “very deliberate attempts to seek division in our schools so that a private option sounds better [emphasis added] for parents.”
“Every year, there’s something to stoke division in an attempt to disrupt our public schools and decrease the confidence in our public schools,” he said. “Four years ago were the masks. [Critical race theory] was a year after that. [Now,] DEI, [and] banning books.”
The serial crises that groups like Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation string together year after year to inflame the populace with fear and suspicion about public schools have been the subject of extensive reporting.
But when major news outlets report on these outbursts of rightwing rage, the articles tend to focus solely on the legitimacy of specific grievances rather than considering whether the attacks themselves could be a tactic in a much longer game.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
Photo Credit: U.S. Department of Education / Flickr
The Department of Education has separate grant programs for funding either charter or community schools; the latter provides money for what schools and families really need, the former, not so much.
Two education-related grant programs operated by the U.S. Department of Education—both of which dole out millions in federal tax dollars for educating K-12 children every year—present two opposing truths about government spending on public education: that it can be wasteful and misguided, or innovative and informed.
The first program enjoys the significant backing of industry lobbyists and wealthy foundations, and allows private education operators—some that operate for-profit—to skim public money off the top. It also adds to racial segregation in public schools, and squanders millions of dollars on education providers that come and quickly go, or simply fail to provide any education services at all.
The second program helps schools expand learning time and opportunities for students, especially in high-poverty and rural communities; promote parent engagement; encourage collaboration with local businesses and nonprofits; and become hubs for child- and family-related services that contribute to students’ health and well-being.
These strikingly different outcomes result from two different intentions: the first program’s goal to promote a type of school that is vaguely defined versus the second’s goal to expand a way of doing school that is supported by research and anecdotal evidence.
The first grant program is the Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds privately operated charter schools and their developers and advocacy organizations. The program, started during the Clinton Administration and greatly expanded during the Obama years, gives money directly to charter schools and to state education agencies and charter school-related organizations to distribute to new, existing, or proposed charters.
In October, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the nation’s top lobbyist for the charter school industry, hailed the federal government’s release of $572 million in taxpayer dollars from the CSP, calling the money “the most essential funding to enable the existence of public charter schools.”
In New Mexico, local press outlets reported that a $52 million CSP grant went to a charter industry advocacy group called the Public Charter Schools of New Mexico, which in turn would award subgrants to individual charter schools. One reporter quoted the group’s leader who said, “There was a large application with several requirements in there. And we were scored based on, you know, how well we met the requirements and a peer review process.”
In Idaho, Idaho Ed Newsreported about the $24.8 million CSP grant going to Bluum, which the reporter called “a nonprofit charter support organization.” The grant is to be used “to grow and strengthen Idaho’s charter school network,” the article said.
Maryland’s top charter school industry booster, the Maryland Alliance of Public Charter Schools, celebrated its $28.7 million CSP saying it would provide “subgrants to open new charter schools and/or replicate and expand charter schools.”
Not all CSP grants went to advocacy groups. The largest—totaling $109,740,731—went to the Indiana Department of Education. According to Chalkbeat, one out of three charter schools in Indiana have closed since 2001.
A 2019 analysis conducted by the Network for Public Education, a pro-public schools advocacy group, found that over its lifespan CSP has wasted as much as $1 billion on charter schools that never opened or opened and quickly closed.
Another CSP grant of $37,579,122 went to the Minnesota Department of Education. In Minnesota, courts have grappled for years with the question of whether racial imbalances in public schools, caused to a great extent by the expansion of racially segregated charter schools, violate the constitutional right of students of color to receive an adequate education.
Other CSP grants went to credit enhancement for charter school facilities, essentially giving public money to real estate development firms and investment companies that finance and build new charter schools.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
Propaganda scholars report few measures change partisan mindsets to avert vitriol or violence. But they hope online influencers will counter some rumor mills.
By Steven Rosenfeld
A decade ago, when Kate Starbird dove into studying how rumors spread online and how people use social media to make sense of what is happening during crises, the future co-founder of the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public had no idea that she would become a target of the darker dynamics and behavior she was studying.
Starbird, a Stanford University computer science graduate who turned professional basketball player, had returned to academia as an expert in “crisis informatics.” That emerging field looks at how people use online information and communication to respond to uncertain and chaotic events. Starbird initially looked at how social media could be helpful in crises. But she and her colleagues increasingly were drawn to how false rumors emerge and spread. They confirmed what many of us have long suspected. Mistaken online information tends to travel farther and faster than facts and corrections. “[B]reaking news” accounts often magnify rumors. People who fall for bogus storylines might correct themselves, but not before spreading them.
Those insights were jarring enough. But as Starbird and her colleagues turned to tracking the post-2020 attacks on America’s elections by Donald Trump, copycat Republicans, and right-wing media, they were no longer looking at the dynamics of misinformation and disinformation from the safety of academia. By scrutinizing millions of tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and Instagram pages for misleading and unsubstantiated claims, and alerting the platforms and federal cybersecurity officials about the most troubling examples, Starbird and her peers soon found themselves in the crosshairs of arch Trump loyalists. They were targeted and harassed much like election officials across the country.
Starbird was dragged before congressional inquisitions led by Ohio GOP Representative Jim Jordan. Her University of Washington e-mail account was targeted by dozens of public records requests. As her and other universities were sued, she and her peers spent more time with lawyers than students. In some cases, the intimidation worked, as some colleagues adopted a “strategy of silence,” Starbird recounted in a keynote address at the Stanford Internet Observatory’s 2023 Trust and Safety Research Conference in September. That response, while understandable, was not the best way to counter propagandists, she said, nor inform the public about their work’s core insights—which is how mistaken or false beliefs take shape online, and why they are so hard to shake.
“Some colleagues decided not to aggressively go after the false claims that we received about ourselves,” Starbird said—such as accusations that alleged they had colluded with the government to censor right-wing speech. “I don’t think that they should have gone directly at the people saying them. But we needed to get the truth out to the public… Online misinformation, disinformation, manipulation; they remain a critical concern for society.”
Barely a week after November 2023’s voting ended, the narratives dominating the news underscored her point. The reproductive rights victories and embrace of Democrats, led by growing numbers of anti-MAGA voters, had barely been parsed by the public before Trump grabbed the headlines by transgressing American political norms.
In a Veterans Day speech, of all settings, Trump, who is the leading 2024 Republican presidential candidate, attacked his domestic opponents with rhetoric that mimicked European fascist dictators that Americans had defeated in World War II. Trump called his domestic critics “vermin,” and pledged that, if reelected, he would use the Justice Department to “crush” them. Even the New York Times noted the similarity between Trump’s words to Adolph Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Trump’s outburst was one of many incidents and trends that have led election defenders and propaganda experts to say that their biggest worries about 2024 elections concern the reach of mistaken or deceptive propaganda—misinformation and disinformation—and its persuasive power to shape political identities, beliefs, ideologies, and provoke actions.
“It’s no secret that Republicans have a widespread strategy to undermine our democracy. But here’s what I’m worried about most for the 2024 election—election vigilantism,” Marc Elias, a top Democratic Party lawyer, said during a late October episode of his “Defending Democracy” podcast. “Election vigilantism, to put it simply, is when individuals or small groups act in a sort of loosely affiliated way to engage in voter harassment, voter intimidation, misinformation campaigns, or voter challenges.”
Elias has spent decades litigating the details of running elections. Since 2020, many Republican-run states have passed laws making voting harder, disqualifying voters and ballots, imposing gerrymanders to fabricate majorities, and challenging federal voting law. Democratic-led states have gone the other direction, essentially creating two Americas when it comes to running elections. Notably, this veteran civil rights litigator is more worried about partisan passions running amok than the voting war’s latest courtroom fights. And he’s not alone.
“It’s the minds of voters,” replied Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, when asked at the 2023 Aspen Cyber Summit in New York City about the biggest threat to the legitimacy of 2024 elections. Benson emphasized that it was not the reliability of the voting system or cybersecurity breaches. “It’s the confusion, and chaos, and the sense of division, and the sense of disengagement that bad actors are very much trying to instill in our citizenry.”
Information and Psychology
There are many factors driving the hand-wringing over the likelihood that political rumors, mistaken information, mischaracterizations, and intentional deceptions will play an outsized role in America’s 2024 elections. Academics like Starbird, whose work has buoyed guardrails, remain under attack. Some of the biggest social media platforms, led by X—formerly Twitter—have pulled back or gutted content policing efforts. These platforms, meanwhile, are integrating artificial intelligence-generated content, which some of these same researchers have shown can create newspaper-like articles that swaths of the public say are persuasive.
Additionally, the U.S. is involved in controversial wars in Ukraine and Israel invoking global rivalries, which may entice the hostile foreign governments that meddled in recent presidential elections to target key voting blocs in 2024’s battleground states, analysts at the Aspen Cyber Summit said. And domestically, federal efforts to debunk election- and vaccine-related disinformation have shrunk, as Trump loyalists have accused these fact-based initiatives of unconstitutional censorship and sued. These GOP-led lawsuits have led to conflicting federal court rulings that have not been resolved, but fan an atmosphere of lingering distrust.
It is “a real concern for 2024: That the feds and others who monitor and inform citizens about lies and false election information will unilaterally disarm, in the face of the constant bullying and harassment,” tweeted David Becker—who runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research and whose defense of election officials has made him a target of Trump loyalists—commenting after November 2023 Election Day.
What is less discussed in these warnings is what can be done to loosen online propaganda’s grip. That question, which involves the interplay of digitally delivered information and how we think and act, is where insights from scholarly research are clarifying and useful.
Debunking disinformation is not the same as changing minds, many researchers at the recent Trust and Safety conference explained. This understanding has emerged as online threats have evolved since the 2016 presidential election. That year, when Russian operatives created fake personas and pages on Facebook and elsewhere to discourage key Democratic blocs from voting, the scope of problem and solution mostly involved cybersecurity efforts, Starbird recalled in her keynote address during the conference.
At that time, the remedy was finding technical ways to quickly spot and shut down the forged accounts and fake pages. By 2020 election, the problem and its dynamics had shifted. The false narratives were coming from domestic sources. The president and his allies were people using authentic social media accounts. Trump set the tone. Influencers—right-wing personalities, pundits, and media outlets—followed his cues. Ordinary Americans not only believed their erroneous or false claims, and helped to spread them, but some Trump cultists went further and spun stolen election clichés into vast conspiracies and fabricated false evidence.
Propaganda scholars now see disinformation as a participatory phenomenon. There is more going on than simply saying that flawed or fake content is intentionally created, intentionally spread, and intentionally reacted to, Starbird and others explained. To start, disinformation is not always entirely false. It often is a story built around a grain of truth or a plausible scenario, she said, but “layered with exaggerations and distortions to create a false sense of reality.”
Moreover, disinformation “rarely functions” as a single piece of content. It is part of a series of interactions or an ongoing campaign—such as Trump’s repeated claim that elections are rigged. Crucially, while propaganda and disinformation are often talked about as being deceptive, Starbird said that “when you actually look at disinformation campaigns online, most of the content that spreads doesn’t come from people—those that are part of it [the bogus campaign], it comes from unwitting actors or sincere believers in the content.”
These layered dynamics blur the lines between what is informational and what is psychological. The factors at play include how first impressions, memory, and beliefs can clash with the ground truth—or eclipse it. Starbird cited one example she has studied. In 2020 in Arizona’s Maricopa County, home to Phoenix, Trump supporters had been hearing for months that the November election would be stolen. When they saw that some pens given to voters bled through their paper ballot, that triggered fears and the so-called “Sharpiegate” conspiracy emerged and went viral. Election officials explained that ballots were printed in such a way that no vote would be undetected or misread. But that barely dented the erroneous assumption and false conclusion that a presidential election was being stolen before their eyes.
“Sometimes misinformation stands for false evidence, or even vague [evidence] or deep fakes [forged audio, photos or video], or whatever,” Starbird said. “But more often, misinformation comes in the form of misrepresentations, misinterpretations, and mischaracterizations… the frame that we use to interpret that evidence; and those frames are often strategically shaped by political actors and campaigns.”
In 2023, online influencers do not even have to mention the triggering frames, she said, as their audiences already know them. Influencers can pose questions, selectively surface evidence, and knowingly—in wink and nod fashion—create a collaboration where witting and unwitting actors produce and spread false content and conclusions. Additionally, the technical architecture of social media—where platforms endlessly profile users based on their posts, and those profiles help to customize and deliver targeted content—is another factor that amplifies its spread.
Starbird’s summary of the dynamics of disinformation is more nuanced than what one hears in election circles, where officials avoid commenting publicly on partisan passions. But she was not the only researcher with insights into how and where mis- and disinformation are likely to surface in 2024. Eviane Leidig, a postdoctoral fellow at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, described another conduit during the conference where “personal radicalization and recruitment narratives” may be hiding in plain sight: influencer-led lifestyle websites.
Leidig showed seemingly innocuous pages from influencers that use “the qualities of being relatable, authentic, accessible, and responsive to their audiences to cultivate the perception of intimacy.” As they shared their personal stories, Leidig pointed to instances where influencers’ extreme views filtered in and became part of the community experience. “The messaging [is] to sell both a lifestyle and an ideology in order to build a fundamental in-group identity,” she said, which, in turn, ends up “legitimizing and normalizing… their political ideology.”
The reality that many factors shape beliefs, identity, community, and a sense of belonging means that unwinding false rumors, misconceptions, and lies—indeed, changing minds—is more complicated than merely presenting facts, said Cristina López G., a senior analyst at Graphika, which maps social media, during her talk on the dynamics of rabid online fandom at the 2023 Trust and Safety Research Conference.
López G. studied how some of Taylor Swift’s online fans harassed and abused other fans over the superstar’s purported sexuality—whether she was “secretly queer.” The “Gaylors,” who believed Swift was gay or bisexual, shared “tips about how to preserve their anonymity online,” López G. said. They anonymously harassed others. They used coded language. They censored others. Their mob-like dynamics and behavior are not that different from what can be seen on pro-Trump platforms that attacked RINOs—the pejorative for “Republicans in Name Only”—or anyone else outside their sect.
“Fandoms are really microcosms of the internet,” López G. said. “Their members are driven by the same thing as every internet user, which is just establish their dominance, and safeguard their community beliefs, and beliefs become really closely tied to who they are online… who they identify as online.”
In other words, changing minds is neither easy nor quick, and, in many circles, not welcomed.
“What this means is that real-world events do very little to change this belief,” López G. concluded, adding this observation also applied to political circles. “If you change beliefs, you’re no longer part of that community… So, it’s not really, ‘what’s real?’ and ‘what’s not?’ It’s really the friends we’ve made along the way.”
“Once you begin to see this phenomenon through that lens [where disinformation is participatory and tribal], you realize it’s everywhere,” Starbird said.
‘Counter-influencers’
At the Aspen Cyber Summit, the elections panel offered a sober view of the strategies undertaken during the Trump era, and challenges facing election defenders in and outside of government in 2024.
To date, the response essentially has been twofold. As Chris Krebs explained, “Information warfare has two pillars. One is information technical; the other is information psychological.” Krebs ran CISA—the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—during the Trump administration. He was fired after 2020 Election Day for retweeting that the election was “the most secure in American history.” As he told the audience, “It was also the most litigated election. The most scrutinized election. The most audited election. I could go on…”
On the “information technical” side, Krebs said that officials have learned to protect election computers and data. There was no indication that anyone manipulated any jurisdictions’ computers in recent cycles. But that achievement mostly took place inside government offices and behind closed doors. It has not been fully appreciated by voters, especially by partisans who do not believe that their side lost.
Instead, what many disappointed voters have seen of election operations has preyed on their insecurities—such as Starbird’s Sharpiegate example. In other words, the technical successes have been offset by what Krebs called “information psychological.” The strategy to respond to this dynamic, he and others said, is to curtail propaganda’s rapid spread on both fronts.
Some of that challenge remains technical, such as having contacts in online platforms who can flag or remove bogus content, they said. But the most potentially impactful response, at least with interrupting propaganda’s viral dynamics, hinges on cultivating what Leidig called “counter-influencers,” and what election officials call “trusted voices.” These voices are credible people inside communities, online or otherwise, who will say “not so fast,” defend the democratic process, and hopefully be heard before passionate reactions trample facts or run amok.
“All the tools we need to instill confidence in our elections exist,” Benson said at the summit. “We just have to get them—not just in the hands of trusted voices, but then communicate effectively to the people who need to hear them.”
But Benson, whose hopes echo those heard from election officials across the country, was putting on a brave face. She soon told the audience that reining in runaway rumors was not easy—and said officials needed help.
“We need assistance in developing trusted voices,” Benson said. “Second, we need assistance, particularly from tech companies in both identifying false information and removing it. We know we’re farther away from that than we have ever been in the evolution of social media over the last several years. But at the same time, where artificial intelligence is going to be used to exponentially increase both the impact and reach of misinformation, we need partners in the tech industry to help us minimize the impact and rapidly mitigate any harm.”
Still, she pointed to some progress. Michigan’s legislature, like a handful of states, recently passed laws requiring disclosure of any AI-created content in election communications. It has criminalized using deep fake imagery or forged voices. Congress, in contrast, has yet to act—and probably won’t do so before 2024. The White House recently issued executive orders that impose restrictions on AI’s use. While the large platforms will likely comply with labeling and other requirements, 2024’s torrid political campaigns are likely to be less restrained.
And so, Benson and others have tried to be as concrete as possible in naming plausible threats. In November, she told the U.S. Senate’s AI Caucus they should “expect” AI to be used “to divide, deceive, and demobilize voters throughout our country over the next year.” Those scenarios included creating false non-English messages for minority voters, automating the harassment of election officials, and generating error-ridden analyses to purge voters.
But countering propaganda remains a steep climb. Even before AI’s arrival, the nuts and bolts of elections were an ideal target because the public has little idea of how elections are run—there is little prior knowledge to reject made-up claims and discern the truth. Moreover, political passions peak in presidential years, and every election cycle has a handful of errors by workers who set up the devices that check in voters, cast votes, and count ballots. This November’s election was no exception, according to this tally of administrative errors by ElectionLine.org. After Trump’s 2020 loss, operational mistakes like these—which caused some votes to be incorrectly counted before the error was found and corrected—were misinterpreted, mischaracterized, and became fodder for his stolen election tropes. Much the same scripts surfaced after this fall’s snafus.
As crisis informatics researchers like Starbird have confirmed, doubt is more easily provoked than trust. Nor do labels and fact-checking alone change minds. At the cyber summit, Raffi Krikorian, the CTO at the Emerson Collective, a charitable foundation—who held that role for the Democratic National Committee during the last presidential election—made the same point.
“Our election system, in a lot of ways, is built on trust—like we trust a lot of the portions of the mechanics will work together,” he said. “There’s a lot of humans involved. It’s not necessarily all codified. And so, [if there is] any break in the system, it’s really easy to lose trust in the entire system.”
Krikorian, who hosts the Collective’s “Technically Optimistic” podcast, was worried about 2024. Turning to Benson, he said that his research about “where people [in Michigan] are actually getting their information,” shows that it is increasingly from smaller and more obscure online platforms. Others at the summit noted that people were turning to encrypted channels like WhatsApp for political information. In other words, the propaganda pathways appear to be shifting.
“We’re actually, in some ways, spending our time maybe in the wrong places,” Krikorian said. “We need to be spending our time on these other smaller and up-and-coming platforms, that also don’t have the staff, don’t have the energy, don’t have the people and the resources needed in order to make sure that they’re secure in the process.”
Nonetheless, the remedy that Benson kept returning to was locally trusted voices. For example, her office has stationed observers within 5 miles of every voting site to investigate any problem or claim. She said that she has been engaging “faith leaders, sports leaders, business leaders, and community leaders about the truth about how to participate and how to trust our elections.”
“AI is a new technology, but the solution is an old one—it’s about developing trusted voices that people can turn to get accurate information,” Benson said. “All of this, everything we’re talking about, is about deceiving people, deceiving voters who then act on that deception.”
But rumors, misperceptions, mischaracterizations, deceptions, lies, and violence in politics are as old as America itself, as political historians like Heather Cox Richardson have noted. There is no simple or single solution, said Starbird. Nonetheless, she ended her Stanford address with a “call to action” urging everyone to redouble their efforts in 2024.
“We’re not going to solve the problem with misinformation, disinformation, manipulation… with one new label, or a new educational initiative, or a new research program,” she told trust and safety researchers. “It’s going to have to be all of the above… It’s going to be all these different things coming at it from different directions.”
Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, The Washington Monthly, and many others.
We are pleased to announce that Deborah Barsky, author and researcher of ancient stone tool technologies, joins the Independent Media Institute as a Human Bridges writing fellow.
The Human Bridges project brings discussions of human origins studies to a wider audience, illustrating how the latest findings in the field can inform our current social and political understanding. With her expertise on human prehistory, as well as her teaching background, Barsky is the perfect addition in achieving the project’s overall mission.
Newly enacted universal school vouchers are greatly exceeding state budgets, and it’s not clear where the money to pay for cost overruns will come from.
By Jeff Bryant
In 2023, Republican state governors went to unprecedented lengths to enact universal school voucher programs in legislative sessions across the country and made support for these programs into rigid party ideology. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, for instance, went so far as to recall the state’s legislature for a fourth special session, a historically unprecedented action in the Texas Legislature’s 176-year history, according to a November 7 article in the Texas Tribune. According to the report, “[t]he biggest point of contention” is a universal school voucher bill that House Republicans have repeatedly rejected. Previously, Abbott warned any Republican holdouts that they would be challenged from within the party in the 2024 primary elections if they didn’t get in line and extend their support for vouchers.
Abbott calls his voucher plan “education freedom,” echoing a term favored by former President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who used her office to push for a federally funded nationwide school voucher program.
School vouchers can take on many forms, including tax credit programs—which give tax credits to anyone who donates to nonprofits that provide school vouchers—and so-called education savings accounts (ESAs), which allow parents to withdraw their children from public schools and receive a deposit of public funds into an account that they can tap for education expenses. Abbott is attempting to push through an ESA in Texas.
When voucher programs were initially enacted in early adopting states, such as Florida and Arizona, eligibility was limited to low-income families or to children with special needs or circumstances. But the trend over the last few years has been to make these programs open to all or nearly all families. What Abbott is proposing, in fact, would allow all families to apply for vouchers.
Nine states have enacted universal school vouchers as of November 2023, including Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia, according to State Policy Network, a school choice advocacy group. Indiana’s voucher program is “near universal,” as 97 percent of families are eligible under the scheme.
Republicans who oppose universal school vouchers, in Texas and elsewhere, have expressed concerns about diverting tax dollars from public schools, especially in rural communities, to private education providers that have little or no accountability for how they spend the money. They’ve also questioned the constitutionality of giving parents public funds to spend on private religious schools.
But Republican state lawmakers who claim to be strict watchdogs on government purse strings should also be concerned about another consequence of enacting these programs—their potential to quickly run through estimated costs and produce sizable deficits.
According to multiple reports detailed below, states that have been among the earliest to adopt universal voucher programs are finding that their costs are far exceeding estimates primarily due to the high numbers of families taking advantage of the programs. These families mostly never had their children enrolled in public schools.
In state after state, the number of families using vouchers to “escape” so-called failed public schools—an original argument for vouchers—is dwarfed by a larger population of families who already had their children enrolled in private schools and are using voucher money to subsidize their private school tuition costs.
Another large percentage of voucher users are parents who homeschool their children and use voucher funds to cover expenses they would previously have been shouldering themselves. Vouchers also appear to be incentivizing parents with rising kindergartners to choose private schools instead of their local public schools.
Other reports have raised concerns about the financial wisdom of giving parents free sway over how they use voucher money, citing evidence that parents have used the funding to make extravagant purchases or buy products and services that have dubious educational value.
In the meantime, policy leaders and experts alike warn that universal voucher programs are sending states, which are constitutionally obligated to balance their budgets, into uncharted financial waters.
‘It Depends on the State and Is Hard to Know’
Where will funding to cover cost overruns of voucher programs come from?
“It depends on the funding mechanism in the voucher law,” according to Jessica Levin, an attorney and director of Public Funds Public Schools, an organization that opposes efforts to redirect public funds for education to private entities.
“For programs that divert funds earmarked for public schools… the voucher funding would dip further into public school funds and/or appropriations,” Levin explained in an email to Our Schools. “For vouchers that are funded with general revenue funds, more money would come out of the state general fund.”
Funding for Abbott’s proposed voucher plan, for example, draws from the state’s general revenue rather than the main source of funding for K-12 education.
Levin added that there could be other mechanisms to prevent cost overruns, including spending caps written into the voucher law and separate appropriations laws that could limit the total funding.
But in terms of what a state might cut to balance out the impact of voucher costs, Levin said, “It depends on the state and is hard to know.”
So far, Republican lawmakers have either denied the existence of these cost overruns, or they’ve been unclear about where money to cover the deficits will come from.
“I haven’t seen coverage of that question,” said Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, who replied to a query from Our Schools.
Cowen has been an outspoken critic of voucher programs primarily because of their tendency to have a negative impact on student achievement.
Cowen has also expressed concerns about the potential financial impacts of these programs, noting in an April 2023 interview, that “[T]he real issue is that you’re getting the state standing up new budgetary obligations to prop up private school tuition where otherwise [those costs] have been borne by the private sector.”
And he has warned of the dangers of vouchers to incentivize a market for “sub-prime” private schools that would quickly open to get the money but then prove to be unsustainable and just as quickly close.
On the issue of voucher program cost overruns, Cowen told Our Schools, “I assume states have different rules about what amounts to deficit spending. But I’m not sure. Arizona is obviously the massive one.”
‘Arizona… the Massive One’
In Arizona, the first state to pass a universal school voucher program, according to the New York Times, Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs has raised an alarm about the enormous cost overruns coming from ESAs, according to KTAR News.
In a memo issued from her office, Hobbs declared that the voucher program “may cost taxpayers up to $943,795,600 annually, resulting in a potential $319,795,600 general fund shortfall in FY 2024.”
It would appear that these cost overruns would have to eventually be covered by the state’s general fund. According to Common Sense Institute Arizona, an organization that advocates for school vouchers, “The ESA program is fully funded by the state’s general fund.”
For that reason, Hobbs maintained that the impact of these costs will go beyond funding for public schools, KTAR reported. “Public safety, all the big budget priorities are going to be impacted if [the cost overrun] continues to grow at this pace,” she said.
In May 2023, Andrés Cano, who was then the Democratic state representative and House Minority Leader, seemed to agree with Hobbs and told ABC15 Arizona, “We’ll either have to tap into the rainy day fund, or we’ll have to cut core state priorities.”
Despite these unplanned costs, “Republicans who have the majority in the state legislature refused any attempt to cap or cut ESAs,” ABC15 Arizona reported. Arizona’s universal voucher program was created by the state’s former Governor Doug Ducey who called it the “gold standard of educational freedom,” according to the Washington Examiner.
Republicans also offer differing opinions on whether the voucher program is leading to overruns, and if they are, where the funding to offset costs will come from.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne, a Republican, insisted that money to plug the budget breach for the voucher program “comes out of basics of state aid for the schools.”
He added, “The burden on the budget will be much less because we’re talking about students who would be educated in one place or another, and if they choose ESAs, it costs the state 10 percent less.”
Horne’s math seems suspect based on the memo issued by Hobbs, which blamed the cost overruns largely on the high percentage of parents who receive voucher money despite never having had their children enrolled in public schools.
“More than 50 percent of ESA voucher funding represents a newly incurred cost to the [s]tate,” the memo read, “due to new applicants that were previously enrolled in private school, homeschooling, or were attending non-state aid schools prior to transferring.”
Horne’s claims of savings are even more suspect given that the Arizona Association of School Business Officials, according to multiplereports from 2023, has calculated that the cost of a basic voucher for a student in elementary and middle schools is approximately $424 more per pupil than what the state pays to public school districts and around $540 more than what the state provides for high schoolers.
Arizona’s universal voucher program also seems to be incentivizing the private school market in Arizona to expand, as Cowen predicted.
ABC15 reported that an unknown number of new private education startups have recently opened to take advantage of the funding. The rapid expansion of unaccountable education providers prompted Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes to warn parents that many of the new vendors “may be fraudulent,” according to the news outlet.
Another concern among Arizona Democratic lawmakers and public school advocates has to do with what parents are spending their voucher money on.
ABC15 examined state records of what parents have bought with voucher money in October 2023 and found “millions of dollars in expenses that could be considered extracurricular.”
Examples include “approximately $57,000 in purchases to Universal Yums,” a subscription service that peddles snacks with a trivia hook from a different country monthly, and $400,000 on “aeroponic indoor gardens” which families use to grow their own food—at a cost of $900 each.
Parents used voucher funds to pay for passes to a ski resort, ninja warrior training, trampoline parks, climbing gyms, and martial arts instruction.
According to an investigation of the 2022-2023 ESA transactions by ABC15, families also made a $3,400 “transaction at a golf store,” incurred a “$10,000 expense at a sewing machine company,” and purchased appliances for freeze-drying food that cost around “$3,000 each.” Parents spent voucher funds on costly items such as pianos as well.
When public schools occasionally buy these kinds of items, the products are used to educate hundreds of students for a whole school year or more and are not meant for single-family use or for small groups of students.
When ABC15 asked whether these purchases qualified for taxpayer reimbursement, ESA Executive Director John Ward replied, “[I]f that’s how… [parents are] going to choose to use… [the money], that’s their prerogative.”
Universal voucher programs are quickly running up costs and exceeding budget estimates in other states that have adopted them as well.
A DeSantis ‘Priority’
Florida was an early pioneer of school voucher programs and now spends more on school vouchers than any other state, according to Public Funds Public Schools. The state offers five different programs that, historically, have targeted specific populations of school children, such as students with disabilities or those from low-income or middle-class families.
That changed in March 2023, when Governor Ron DeSantis opened Florida’s ESA-style voucher program, created in 2019, to every family in the state.
The new law, which also eliminated the program’s enrollment cap and exemptions, was a “priority” for DeSantis, according to the Washington Post. And on the day he signed the universal voucher bill into law, he declared it would ensure Florida remained “number one when it comes to education freedom.”
The cost of the new program, however, is far from clear. Florida’s Senate Appropriations Committee initially proposed that the universal voucher program would need a budget of $2.2 billion with an additional $350 million in reserve “in case more students then [sic] we expect enroll in the program.”
But an analysis by the independent nonprofit Florida Policy Institute (FPI) and the legal advocacy organization Education Law Center (ELC) puts costs of universal school vouchers far higher, requiring an additional $890 million to pay for new public school students enrolling in the program who were previously not eligible, an additional $1.9 billion for private school students enrolling in the program for the first time, and $85 million for homeschooled students who are newly eligible for vouchers.
Those additional costs, added to the $1.1 billion current costs of the ESA program, would result in the state spending nearly $4 billion to introduce a universal voucher program in the first year alone, according to the FPI-ELC analysis.
Should the FPI-ELC estimate for voucher costs be closer to the truth, the substantial cost overrun would have to be covered with dollars from the public school budget, according to a different analysis by FPI.
“While voucher programs are often funded as line-item appropriations in the state budget or through state tax credits,” FPI’s analysis found, “the… [universal] voucher is funded from [Florida Education Finance Program] state allocations that would otherwise be directed to the student’s resident public school district.”
FPI added, “The movement of public funding to private education occurs in the context of Florida’s substantial underfunding of the state’s public schools, as highlighted in Making the Grade 2021.” In that analysis, provided by ELC, “Florida receives an F on an A-F scale on all three funding metrics: funding level, funding distribution, and funding effort.”
As with Arizona’s universal voucher program, much of the estimated overrun in Florida can be sourced to new voucher users who were never enrolled in public schools. There are also similar concerns over what Florida parents are using voucher money to buy.
As the 2023-2024 school year got underway, NBC6 reported that the nonprofit agency tasked with administering Florida’s universal voucher program, Step Up for Students, issued a report finding that the program had attracted nearly 123,000 new students. Most new voucher users, 69 percent, previously attended private schools, and 18 percent were entering kindergarten. Only 13 percent of voucher recipients had used them to transfer from public schools. (There was no figure given for the percentage of homeschoolers using vouchers.)
The Step Up for Students report also found voucher money was used to purchase items that have questionable educational value such as “theme park passes, 55-inch TVs, and stand-up paddleboards,” according to the Orlando Sentinel.
‘A Grand Experiment’
Like Florida, Ohio is an early adopter of school voucher programs, having launched vouchers in Cleveland in 1996. In 2023, under the leadership of Republican Governor Mike DeWine, the state enacted an ESA-style statewide universal voucher program.
DeWine initially may have had some reservations about the potential cost of universal vouchers—warning it “would be very, very, very significant,” according to a February 2023 article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. But a spokesman quickly walked back the comment, saying, “the governor neither endorses nor opposes” universal vouchers, and his “attempts to expand vouchers [were] a possible precursor to seeking universal vouchers.”
Republicans in Ohio’s state legislature claimed that making the state’s voucher program universal “allows educational freedom.”
Supporters of universal vouchers in Ohio coined the name backpack scholarships to help promote the program. But regardless of the different branding, Ohio’s universal voucher program may come with the same financial problems other states adopting these programs are experiencing.
When the backpack program was still under consideration, the nonpartisan Ohio Legislative Service Commission (LSC) that monitors government spending warned that the program would need $1.13 billion in the fiscal year 2025 if all 185,400 newly eligible students applied for vouchers.
That report by LSC readily contends not all eligible students will take advantage of the program. For that reason, Aaron Churchill, of the Fordham Institute, an Ohio nonprofit that advocates for vouchers, called the $1.13 billion estimate a “ceiling,” according to the Dayton Daily News, and not a true cost assessment.
But after the backpack program was enacted in July 2023, the Associated Press reported that an analysis by the Columbus Dispatch found that by September the state had received applications totaling approximately $432 million for the 2023-2024 school year—$34 million more than what the Legislative Service Commission estimated.
“When Ohio’s two-year budget was drafted, the commission estimated income-based vouchers would cost $397.8 million for fiscal year 2024 and $439.1 million for fiscal year 2025,” stated the AP report.
In Ohio, the state’s contribution to education funding, including its voucher programs, comes from the state’s general revenue fund, which means overruns from the backpack program may need to come from the same source that funds public schools and other state expenses.
A similar story is playing out in Indiana, another state with a long history of vouchers that began to accept nearly all family applicants in 2023. A family income threshold that limited eligibility for the previous voucher program was lifted to allow all but a small percentage of the wealthiest households to qualify, according to Chalkbeat.
Making its voucher program nearly universal may cost Indiana as much as $1.1 billion over the next two years, according to The 74. But “no one knows” what the final tab may be, Chalkbeat reported.
“One reason for the uncertainty: Universal vouchers are, in effect, a grand experiment states are conducting in real time,” said Chalkbeat. “Budget analysts have scrambled to predict the programs’ eventual price tags, but they can only guess at how many freshly eligible families will participate.”
‘Open Season on Private Entities Spending Your Tax Dollars’
Iowa is yet another Midwestern state that enacted an ESA-style universal voucher program in 2023.
Republican Governor Kim Reynolds—who declared vouchers a “top priority,” according to the Des Moines Register—signed the state’s universal voucher program into law in January 2023, calling it “just the first step in giving educational freedom to Iowa’s students and parents.”
In June, the Des Moines Register reported, “More students have applied for Iowa’s state-funded education savings accounts than expected, meaning the cost of paying for the private school scholarships could exceed what the state budgeted.”
In July, Iowa Starting Line reported costs surpassing the original state estimate of $107 million and rising to $133.5 million based on 17,481 approved applications. In October, the Iowa Department of Education reported that 18,893 ESA applications had been approved, which, at $7,600 per voucher, brought costs to more than $143 million for the 2023-2024 school year.
As costs for universal vouchers soar, it’s also not clear where Iowa lawmakers will come up with funds to cover the program’s overruns.
According to Sioux Land Proud, when Iowa lawmakers passed the state’s budget, money for universal vouchers was already “spoken for” in the state general fund. But that doesn’t answer the question of where money to cover the cost overruns will come from.
Meanwhile, there are reports of private schools in Iowa jacking up tuition costs to take advantage of newly available voucher funds. Such revelations prompted Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand to warn that there will be “[o]pen season on private entities spending your tax dollars with no oversight.”
Education Freedom Has a Cost
In May 2023, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper declared a “state of emergency for public education” in a special address. “Legislative Republicans propose pouring billions of dollars in taxpayer money into private schools that are unaccountable to the public and can decide which students they want to admit,” Cooper warned.
Four months after Cooper’s declaration, Republican state lawmakers in the Tar Heel State passed a budget that included a universal voucher program, which Cooper allowed to become law, realizing his veto would quickly be overturned.
Cooper’s warning, absent from any kind of national campaign by Democrats against school vouchers, was a lone voice lost in the chorus of calls for “education freedom” coming from Republicans. And Democratic party leaders remain all over the place on education policy.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona has been openly opposed to vouchers, calling them a form of “privatization,” according to Politico. But other prominent Democrats, such as Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, have spoken in favor of vouchers—although Shapiro reversed his position on vouchers when confronted with a budget that included them.
When voucher programs result in cost overruns in multiple states, Republican lawmakers will likely conceive of some sort of unified strategy to shift the focus from the issue. But the financial fallout of universal voucher programs will give Democrats an opportunity to call out their political opponents for being reckless with public money intended for children.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
The “lungs of North America,” the Tongass National Forest is the Earth’s largest intact temperate rainforest. Protecting it means protecting the entire planet.
By Reynard Loki
Spanning 16.7 million acres that stretch across most of southeast Alaska, the Tongass National Forest is the largest national forest in the United States by far and part of the world’s largest temperate rainforest. Humans barely inhabit it: About the size of West Virginia, the Tongass has around 70,000 residents spread across 32 communities.
The Tongass is a pristine region that supports a vast array of stunning ecosystems, including old-growth forests, imposing mountains, granite cliffs, deep fjords, remnants of ancient glaciers that carved much of the North American landscape, and more than 1,000 named islands facing the open Pacific Ocean—a unique feature in America’s national forest system.
The Tongass “is the crown jewel of America’s natural forests,” declared then-Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) during Senate deliberations of Interior Department budget appropriations in 2003. “When I was up there, I saw glaciers, mountains, growths of hemlock and cedar that grow to be over 200 feet tall. The trees can live as long as a thousand years.”
Carbon sinks absorb more carbon from the atmosphere than they release, making them essential to maintaining natural ecosystems and an invaluable nature-based solution to the climate crisis. Between 2001 and 2019, the Earth’s forests safely stored about twice as much carbon dioxide as they emitted, according to research published in 2021 in the journal Nature Climate Change and available on Global Forest Watch.
The planet’s forests absorb 1.5 times more carbon than the United States emits annually—around 7.6 billion metric tons. Consequently, maintaining the health of the world’s forests is central to humanity’s fight against climate change. But rampant deforestation and land degradation are not only removing this invaluable climate-regulating ecosystem service and supporter of biodiversity but also disturbing a healthy, natural planetary system that has existed for millennia.
“There is a natural carbon cycle on our planet,” said Vlad Macovei, a postdoctoral researcher at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Germany. “Every year, some atmospheric carbon gets taken up by land biosphere, some by the ocean, and then cycled back out. These processes had been in balance for the last 10,000 years.”
Carbon sinks like the Tongass are vital environmental protectors by sequestering carbon dioxide and preventing this greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere, where it can fuel global warming. And because “it contains the [Earth’s] largest intact stands of coastal temperate rainforest,” the Tongass acts as one of the world’s most effective carbon sinks. In this way, the Tongass provides a key “ecosystem service”—a benefit humans receive from nature that helps sustain life—not just for the U.S. but also for the entire planet.
“Basically, when you go through an old-growth forest, you’re walking through a stick of carbon that has been built up into the forest for many, many decades, [even] centuries,” said Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at Wild Heritage, a project of Earth Island Institute, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Berkeley, California. DellaSala was part of a research team that found that the Tongass holds approximately 44 percent of all carbon stored by U.S. national forests. The team’s research was published in 2021 by the Woodwell Climate Research Center, based in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
“[T]he largest trees in those forests store about 50 percent of the above-ground carbon, so they are enormously important from a carbon standpoint,” said DellaSala.
These undisturbed forest lands are increasingly scarce and, therefore, increasingly valuable ecosystems. “While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass… [acts as] the lungs of North America,” DellaSala told PBS in 2020. He calls the Tongass “America’s last climate sanctuary.”
“The Tongass National Forest provides us with the greatest opportunity in the nation, if not the world, for protecting temperate rainforest at the ecosystem scale, in the face of climate change,” according to Audubon Alaska, a nonprofit conservation organization. “It sequesters more carbon than any other type of forest on Earth, providing a much-needed opportunity for climate solutions that can simultaneously bolster regional economies.”
Unfortunately, as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency points out, “ecosystem services are important to environmental and human health and well-being… [but they are] often taken for granted.”
Impact of Logging
Jerry Melillo, a scientist at the Ecosystems Center of the Marine Biological Laboratory at the University of Chicago, noted, “[o]ver the past 8,000 years, humans have cleared up to half of the forests on our planet, mostly to make room for agriculture.” This has hampered the Earth’s natural ability to regulate the climate, allowing more greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere, thus exacerbating global warming.
“Cutting down or burning forests releases the carbon stored in their trees and soil and prevents them from absorbing more CO2 in the future,” he wrote. “Since 1850, about 30 percent of all CO2 emissions have come from deforestation. Deforestation can also have more local climate impacts. Because trees release moisture that cools the air around them, scientists have found that deforestation has led to more intense heat waves in North America and Eurasia.”
In the 1950s, the Forest Service contracted with two U.S. timber companies to build pulp mills near Ketchikan and Sitka. As part of the agreements, the agency promised to sell the firms a total of 13.5 billion board feet of Tongass timber over a 55-year period. These contracts massively accelerated logging in the region.
Since these contracts were signed, “more than 1 million acres of the Tongass have been clearcut,” according to the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. Adding economic insult to ecological injury, the federal government consistently loses money from logging contracts in the Tongass. According to a 2020 report by Taxpayers for Common Sense, an independent, nonpartisan advocacy group, the Forest Service has lost more than $1.7 billion on Tongass timber sales since 1980. “It actually costs taxpayers millions to ‘sell’ timber that we collectively own, which makes no sense,” said Autumn Hanna, the group’s vice president.
“Scientists have long understood that logging old-growth forests triggers a cascade of negative effects on wildlife, eroding the biodiversity of places like the Tongass,” wrote Rebecca Bowe of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental organization headquartered in San Francisco, in 2021. “Clear-cutting old-growth… transforms ancient forests into carbon emitters.”
Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, International (WECAN International) is a climate activist group that works with Earthjustice to end the destruction of old-growth logging in the Tongass. “The Tongass has been called ‘America’s Climate Forest’ due to its unsurpassed ability to mitigate climate impacts,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, WECAN’s executive director, in 2021. “For decades, however, industrial-scale logging has been destroying this precious ecosystem and disrupting the traditional lifeways, medicine, and food systems of the region’s Indigenous communities.”
“One of the things that the Forest Service is interested in doing is estimating the value of the different activities and services that national forests provide,” said J. Ryan Bellmore, a biologist who co-authored a 2019 study, the first of its kind, that estimated the value of the Tongass and the Chugach National Forests to the commercial salmon industry in Alaska. “And the Tongass and the Chugach provide a lot of salmon.”
According to the study, the wild salmon born within the boundaries of the Tongass and the Chugach make up around 25 percent of Alaska’s commercial Pacific salmon catch and 16 percent of the total commercial value of salmon caught in the state every year. Commercial fishermen caught an average of 48 million “forest salmon” in Alaska yearly during the 10-year-long study period. That amount of salmon translated to an annual average commercial value of $88 million.
What these Alaskan fisheries provide goes beyond their quantifiable and significant economic benefit and food source for the people of Alaska and beyond. The salmon have also been part of the traditional way of life for the Indigenous Tribes of the region for millennia. “For over 9,000 years, the [I]ndigenous people of the region have survived because of the salmon,” wrote Brian Footen, a fish biologist who has worked with Tribal, federal, and state fishery departments in Washington state for over two decades. And the fish are also critical for the survival of wildlife, supporting healthy populations of bald eagles, wolves, and brown bears, which in turn, support the entire web of life across the region.
Importance to Indigenous Tribes
The Tongass contains the traditional homelands of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples, and its well-being is essential to these groups’ traditional way of life, health, and cultural identity. Even the name of the forest itself is wrapped up in Indigenous identity: Translated, “Tongass” means “Sea Lion Tribe,” one of the main divisions of the Tlingit people living at Portland Canal, located at the border between southeastern Alaska and British Columbia.
Joel Jackson, president of the Organized Village of Kake Tribal Council, noted that these Indigenous groups are “tied to our lands that our ancestors walked on thousands of years ago. … The land still provides food security—deer, moose, salmon, berries, our medicines. The old-growth timber is important in keeping all these things coming back year after year,” Jackson said, adding, “especially our salmon, because the trees keep our streams cool.” Maintaining these plentiful resources season after season requires a healthy Tongass.
“I identify my ancestry through descent-based kin groups indigenous to the Tongass Forest and recognize that we are all tied to each other—not independents,” said Wanda “Kashudoha” Loescher Culp, a Tlingit activist, in a statement to federal lawmakers in 2019 urging increased protections for the Tongass.
“Our food gathering and all other resource harvesting methods seriously involve the thanking of the recognized life we are taking for our benefit. We successfully use every ‘resource’ the Tongass offers wisely, efficiently, without waste, and in gratitude,” said Culp, who is also the coordinator for WECAN Tongass.
In addition to being a year-round natural “supermarket,” the Tongass is a powerful spiritual place for the Tribes who have called it home for generations.
Importance to Jobs and Economy
Because of its natural beauty and opportunity for outdoor recreational activities like camping, boating, canoeing, fishing, hiking, and birdwatching, the Tongass is home to a vigorous and ever-expanding tourism industry.
The Tongass welcomes more than 2.8 million visitors each year, which generates “more than $380 million in spending and over 5,000 jobs,” according to the USFS. In particular, the cruise industry provides vital economic inputs to the local economies across southeast Alaska. “The vast majority of visitors to Southeast Alaska are cruise ship passengers,” according to the USFS.
“Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit the Tongass each summer in the hopes of experiencing its magnificence: 200-foot-tall spruce and 500-year-old cedar trees soaring overhead,” states Alaska Conservation Foundation, the only public foundation dedicated solely to conservation in Alaska. “Amid the lush ferns and mossy remnants of fallen trees, one might see a brown bear ambling its way to a salmon stream, in search of its next meal. There is simply no place else like it.”
Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990
In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Tongass Timber Reform Act (TTRA), which was crafted as an amendment to the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980, a federal law signed by President Jimmy Carter that established protection for more than 100 million acres of federal land in Alaska from development by designating “conservation system units,” including national parks, national wildlife refuges, and designated wilderness areas.
The main goal of the TTRA—which enjoyed massive congressional support, passing in the Senate 99 to 0—was to increase the protection of the Tongass National Forest from the ecological harms of industrial logging by designating approximately 856,000 acres as roadless areas so that large swaths of old-growth forest would “retain their wildland character.” Specifically, the act was intended “to protect certain lands in the Tongass National Forest in perpetuity, to modify certain long-term timber contracts, [and] to provide for [the] protection of riparian habitat.”
Following the law’s enactment, Alaska Pulp Corporation and Ketchikan Pulp Company, two industrial pulp mills located in southeast Alaska, ended their operations in 1993 and 1997, respectively. Alaska’s congressional delegation blamed the closures on environmentalists, the TTRA, and the Clinton administration “for destroying an industry that had been the region’s largest private employer,” wrote Rich Moniak, in a column for Juneau Empire in which he called that narrative a “fiction.”
The “TTRA was not a substantial factor—indeed, no factor at all—in the closure of the pulp mill and the resulting termination of the contract,” concluded Lawrence M. Baskir, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge who presided over the lawsuit that Alaska Pulp Corporation filed in 1994, a year after it closed its mill, in part due to declining demand for softwood pulp.
Bart Koehler, the executive director of Southeast Alaska Conservation Council from 1984 to 1991 and from 1995 to 1999, who was part of the grassroots effort to pass the Tongass Timber Reform Act, called the law “the most significant piece of conservation law signed by President George H.W. Bush.”
The Roadless Rule of 2001
In 1999, President Bill Clinton instructed the USFS to develop regulations to protect the nation’s roadless areas. The administration aimed to protect the nation’s biodiversity, air and water quality, opportunities for public recreational activities, and local economies. “In the final regulations, the nature and degree of protection afforded should reflect the best available science and a careful consideration of the full range of ecological, economic, and social values inherent in these lands,” Clinton stated at the time.
Issued in 2001, the Forest Service’s “Roadless Rule” is a federal regulation prohibiting most timber cutting and road building in specific forest lands known as “Inventoried Roadless Areas.” The Roadless Rule protects 58.5 million acres or 31 percent of lands within the federal National Forest System (NFS), which together amounts to about 2 percent of the total land base of the United States.
“Inventoried roadless areas provide benefits to over 220 wildlife species listed as either threatened, endangered, or proposed by the Endangered Species Act—approximately 25 percent of all animal species and 13 percent of all plant species,” according to the USFS. “The intent of the 2001 Roadless Rule is to provide lasting protection for inventoried roadless areas within the National Forest System,” the agency states.
Trump Administration Rollback of Roadless Rule
The 2001 Roadless Rule designates and manages as inventoried roadless areas more than half of the Tongass National Forest—around 9.2 million acres. On October 29, 2020, in the final days of his presidency, Trump repealed the Roadless Rule from the Tongass, opening up a section of the forest to road-building and industrial activity. Trump’s USDA issued a notice saying that the final plan would open up 186,000 acres for timber production.
GOP leaders welcomed the decision.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who was at the time the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, noted that Trump’s repeal of the Roadless Rule would help the state develop not only public infrastructure to help connect the isolated communities in the area but also cheaper sources of energy.
Industry groups also supported the decision. “There’s a handful of small operators that are working on the Tongass, harvesting timber,” Tessa Axelson of the Alaska Forest Association, a timber industry group, told Alaska Public Media. “In order to continue to survive, those businesses are dependent on a predictable supply of timber.”
Frank Bergstrom, a mining consultant in Juneau, said the rollback could attract investors to mineral exploration in the region. “There’s no roadmap to these things,” he said. “Maybe it’ll lead to a little more optimism. … This is one obstacle that has at least been diminished.”
Environmental groups decried the move. “Logging the Tongass is an unconscionable leap in the wrong direction,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director for the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy group.
“Americans already pay $30 million annually to subsidize commercial logging operations on the portion of the Tongass not covered by the roadless rule. This proposed decision would increase the costs to taxpayers by opening the most remote areas of the forest to clear-cutting,” said Ken Rait, project director for U.S. public lands and rivers conservation at Pew Charitable Trusts. “The Tongass is a global gem. Once these pristine forests are gone, they’re gone forever.”
The Trump administration rollback went against overwhelming public opposition: Only 1 percent of public comments submitted to the federal government during the U.S. Forest Service’s environmental review supported lifting the existing safeguards on the Tongass.
Statewide polling in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all battleground states—conducted in 2020 also revealed strong opposition to the Trump administration’s decision to lift longtime environmental protections and open the Tongass to expanded logging operations.
Following the poll’s release, J.D. Hayworth, a Republican former member of Congress who represented Arizona from 1995 to 2007 and spent the majority of his six terms in office on the House Resources Committee, warned the Trump campaign months before Trump’s decision to lift the Roadless Rule in the Tongass was finalized that the move would hurt his chances at reelection.
“Now, with less than 75 days until election day, the Trump campaign needs to listen to the concerned voices of their base whose wavering support for Trump could be pushed further into the Biden camp if Trump moves forward with lifting protections in America’s largest and most important national forest,” Hayworth wrote in an opinion piece published by Bloomberg Law in August 2020.
After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, his revocation of the Roadless Rule would remain for about two more years. The Roadless Rule was important enough to the incoming Biden administration that on his first day in office, Biden committed to reviewing the 2020 Alaska Roadless Rule of his predecessor as one “that may conflict with important national objectives including protecting the environment.” Still, reinstating the 2001 rule would still take around two years, as the Biden administration went through the lengthy federal review process, including months of allowing the public to comment. In addition, there was an ultimately failed lawsuit filed by the resource industries and the state of Alaska attempting to maintain Trump’s rollback that had to make its way through the court system.
Photo Credit: Flickr / jimmywayne
Biden Administration Reinstatement of the Roadless Rule
In July 2021, six months after he took office, President Biden froze old-growth timber sales in the Tongass as the administration began the lengthy process to reinstate the Roadless Rule. “The announcement that large-scale, old-growth logging is going to be ceased is very positive… because those mass clear cuts are not going to occur here anymore,” said Marina Anderson, Tribal administrator for the Organized Village of Kasaan on Prince of Wales Island.
Finally, in January 2023, the Biden administration was able to reinstate the Roadless Rule on Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, which brought back the 2001 protections that had been in place. The decision made constructing roads and harvesting timber inventoried roadless areas illegal, with limited exceptions.
“As our nation’s largest national forest and the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world, the Tongass National Forest is key to conserving biodiversity and addressing the climate crisis,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “Restoring roadless protections listens to the voices of Tribal Nations and the people of Southeast Alaska while recognizing the importance of fishing and tourism to the region’s economy.”
In a press release issued on January 25, 2023, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said that the reinstatement of the Roadless Rule in the Tongass was “based on the multiple ecological, social, cultural, and economic values supported by roadless areas on the Tongass, and… [followed] months of engagement with Tribes, rural communities, and partners.” The agency noted that the majority of the approximately 112,000 comments that the Forest Service received from organizations and individuals during the public comment period (from November 2021 to January 2022) were in favor of the reinstatement of the Roadless Rule, adding that the USDA consulted with the Tribal Nations of Southeast Alaska before the decision was made.
This executive order protects not only a pristine, climate-protecting ecosystem and source of economic stability and growth for Alaska but also the traditional and customary hunting, fishing, and gathering areas for future generations of Southeast Alaska Tribes. It also protects an attraction for the millions of visitors whom it welcomes every year from across the nation and the globe. In addition to securing important wildlife and fish habitat, opportunities for recreation, and traditional and sacred sites, roadless areas in the Tongass will prevent the kind of intensive industrial development and resource extraction that have destroyed forests worldwide, many of which are damaged beyond repair.
As mentioned, preventing roads from being built in the Tongass has widespread popular support. According to the USFS, 96 percent of the 1.6 million letters and comments submitted during 600 public meetings supported the roadless initiative in the Tongass. Notably, most Alaskans were in support of maintaining roadless areas.
Republicans Denounce Reinstatement
Unsurprisingly, several leading Alaskan Republicans were quick to slam the Biden administration’s decision to reinstate the Roadless Rule in the Tongass.
“The Roadless Rule should never have applied to the Tongass, and the Biden administration’s decision to reinstate it is federal paternalism at its worst,” said Senator Murkowski. “Roughly 80 percent of the Tongass is already protected through existing law, land use designations, and the forest planning process, and there is no threat of large-scale development from timber harvesting or any other activity.”
This, of course, is not true. In fact, the reinstated rule does not stop public road-building or other necessary projects. Since 2009, the USFS received and approved 59 project proposals under the Roadless Rule that support power generation, access between communities, and other priorities.
Road-building of any sort is a direct threat to wildlife habitat. While much of the Tongass does have federal protection, what Murkowski fails to recognize is that existing manmade structures in the forest have already hampered the ability of wildlife to live in their natural state. Manmade road-stream crossings, including bridges and culverts, have fragmented natural aquatic habitats that impeded fish migrations. As of 2019, according to the USFS, 1,120 fish stream crossings—30 percent of the total surveyed within the Tongass—fail to meet current standards for fish passage. Adding noncritical roads would only increase this kind of wildlife habitat fragmentation and add undue stress to many species.
Indigenous Tribes Welcome Reinstatement of Roadless Rule
The return of Roadless Rule protections to the Tongass represents a commitment from the USFS not only to address the climate crisis but also to respect the natural integrity of the ancestral homeland of Southeast Alaska Tribes, who—like so many Indigenous groups across the globe—continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change.
“As the Forest Service works to repair relationships with Southeast Tribes,” the leaders wrote in a press statement sent to the Independent Media Institute on January 25, 2023, “it is critical that the federal government ensure that the Southeast Tribal leaders be integral partners in creating a future for the Tongass that is guided by Indigenous values, a genuinely sustainable economy, and a healthy ecosystem—all of which will sustain the Tongass for future generations.”
In January 2023, following the reinstatement of the Roadless Rule, a group of Tribal leaders from the Tongass region issued a statement that said, in part, “We have engaged tirelessly throughout the Roadless Rule process—some of us for more than 20 years—to bring Tribal concerns to the forefront of the conversation through consultation and legal means.”
“Throughout time, many of our concerns fell on deaf ears,” said the Organized Village of Kake’s Joel Jackson in a statement emailed to the Independent Media Institute on March 21, 2023. “Now that the U.S. Forest Service is listening to Tribal concerns and reinstating the Tongass Roadless Rule, we are optimistic that we will be able to create long-term protections.”
“The return of 2001 Roadless Rule protections [to the Tongass also] signals a commitment from the… [U.S. Forest Service] to address the climate crisis and finally listen to the Southeast Tribes that will continue to be most impacted by climate change effects,” said Jackson.
These federal protections include possible co-management compact agreements “for areas inherent to our traditional and cultural uses through our Administrative Procedures Act Petition to Create a Traditional Homelands Conservation Rule,” the leaders’ statement said. Tribes also support the 2021 Southeast Alaska Sustainability Strategy (SASS). The strategy will end large-scale old-growth timber sales in the Tongass National Forest. It will instead focus on forest restoration, recreation, and resilience while identifying opportunities for investments through meaningful consultation with Tribes.
Going even further, Southeast Alaska Tribes will continue working toward permanent forest protection. The Roadless Area Conservation Act was introduced in the House in 2021 to put these protections in place.
The seesaw of the Roadless Rule between presidential administrations shows that executive orders can be issued and rescinded. The only way to prevent this back-and-forth policy would be for lawmakers to enshrine protections for the Tongass in state and federal law or for the judiciary to clarify the Roadless Rule’s original intent to protect the Tongass.
“The uncertainty with the Roadless Rule has been a debilitating factor for the last 20 years, and I do not see that ending unless the courts put a stop to it—the political revolving door will keep it in play as long as there are elections,” wrote Robert Venables, executive director of the Southeast Conference. This southeast Alaska regional economic development group supported the Roadless Rule revision in 2020.
“Conserving our forests and other critical ecosystems is… an indispensable piece of keeping our climate goals within reach,” said U.S. President Joe Biden at the Glasgow conference. “If we all work together to make sure these precious resources are conserved… forests have the potential to reduce… carbon globally by more than one-third… So, we need to approach this issue with the same seriousness of purpose as decarbonizing our economies. That’s what we’re doing in the United States.”
Biden went on to mention the Tongass specifically, saying, “We have put in place protections for the Tongass Forest in Alaska, the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest.” He also announced a “new plan to conserve global forests, which will bring together a full range of U.S. government tools—diplomatic, financial, and policy—to halt forest loss, restore our critical carbon sinks, and improve land management. Through this plan, the United States will help the world deliver on our shared goal of halting natural forest loss and restoring at least an additional 200 million hectares of forests and other ecosystems by the year 2030.”
That is a massive amount of land. To put that figure into context, 200 million hectares is about 770,000 square miles—eclipsing the size of the state of Alaska by more than 100,000 square miles. The area is bigger than many nations, including Mongolia, Indonesia, and Mexico.
Environmental advocates cheered the move. Darci Vetter, global head of policy and government relations at the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, called Biden’s executive order “a clear recognition of the critical role forests play for our climate and our communities. This science-based, cooperative approach to forest conservation and restoration is a smart strategy we should accelerate and amplify.”
Conclusion
Based on scientific evidence, it is clear that the Tongass National Forest is an important carbon sink not just for the United States—where it stores more than 40 percent of all the carbon stored by all the national forests—but also for the world at large, being the Earth’s largest remaining temperate rainforest.
The Tongass is also home to a rich diversity of plant and animal species, many of which are unique and found nowhere else in the world. It is a refuge for numerous endangered and threatened species, including the iconic bald eagle and the Alexander Archipelago wolf. Preserving this habitat ensures the continuation of these species and maintains the ecosystem’s delicate balance.
If the Tongass were subject to large-scale development, irreversible damage would be inflicted upon this unique ecosystem. Deforestation and infrastructure projects could lead to habitat fragmentation, loss of biodiversity, and disruption of critical ecological processes.
Additionally, the Tongass National Forest is a significant driver of Alaska’s sustainable economy, particularly fishing, tourism, and recreation. The forest attracts visitors worldwide, drawn to its stunning landscapes, abundant wildlife, and outdoor recreational opportunities. The commercial fishing industry, which heavily depends on the health of the forest’s rivers and streams, also benefits from its protection.
Crucially, the forest is deeply woven into the cultural fabric of Indigenous communities like the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples, who have relied on its resources for millennia. It holds spiritual, cultural, and traditional values, making its preservation essential for respecting the rights and heritage of these native groups.
Following the Biden administration’s reinstatement of the Roadless Rule in January 2023, Dr. Homer Wilkes, the USDA under-secretary for natural resources and environment, said, “Protecting the Tongass will support watershed protection, climate benefits, and ecosystem health and protect areas important for jobs and community well-being—and it is directly responsive to input from Tribal Nations.”
In their January 2023 statement, Southeast Alaskan Tribal leaders said, “As the USDA works to repair its relationship with our Tribal governments and communities on the ground, the agency will continue to be an integral partner in creating a future for the Tongass that is guided by collaboration, Indigenous leadership and values, the needs of future generations, and sustainable economies that will heal the divisions of the past.”
Preserving the integrity of Tongass National Forest is crucial for the Earth’s well-being. By safeguarding this irreplaceable ecosystem and awe-inspiring landscape, humanity can achieve many positive outcomes, from combatting the impacts of the climate crisis and protecting biodiversity to honoring Indigenous cultures and sustainably supporting local economies. As the Tongass is part of the United States, it is the responsibility of all Americans to act as stewards of this natural treasure, ensuring that future generations can continue to benefit from its immense ecological and cultural value.
Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory, where he is the environment and animal rights editor. He is also a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor and chief correspondent of Earth | Food | Life. He previously served as the environment, food, and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media, covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s Top 50 Health and Environmental Journalists to Follow in 2016. His work has been published by Yes! Magazine, Salon, Truthout, BillMoyers.com, Asia Times, Pressenza, and EcoWatch, among many others. He volunteers with New York City Pigeon Rescue Central.
Recent developments in the study of human prehistory hold clues about our times, our world, and ourselves.
ByDeborah BarskyandJan Ritch-Frel
We can all agree that most people want to know about their origins—spanning from their family and ancestral history and even, occasionally, deeper into the evolutionary story.
Lately, this desire has become more palpable in society at large and even taken on urgent tones as we drift away from the lifestyle patterns and traditions that humans relied on for millions of years toward a technoculture that is highly addictive, and hard to understand or break away from.
But the desire to know the deep past doesn’t translate so easily into understanding, especially since the information we encounter is necessarily filtered by our own sociohistorical context. One of the biggest obstacles to gaining a true understanding of the unfolding of humanity’s past is the way that modern societies foster a superficial understanding of the passage of time.
To delve deeply into human prehistory requires adopting a different kind of chronological stance than most of us are accustomed to—not just a longer period of time, but also a sense of evolution infused by the operating rules of biology and its externalities, such as technology and culture. But exploring the past enables us to observe long-term evolutionary trends that are also pertinent in today’s world, elucidating that novel technological behaviors that our ancestors adopted and transformed into culture were not necessarily better, nor more sustainable over time.
Nature is indifferent to the recency of things: whatever promotes our survival is passed on and proliferated through future generations. This Darwinian axiom includes not only anatomical traits, but also cultural norms and technologies.
Shared culture and technologies give people the ongoing sensation of the synchronization of time with each other. The museums and historical sites we visit, as well as the books and documentaries on the human story, overwhelmingly present the past to their audiences through simultaneous or synchronized stages that follow a kind of metric system of conformity in importance. Human events are charted along the direction of either progress or failure.
The archeological record shows us, however, that even though human evolution appears to have taken place as a series of sequential stages advancing our species toward “progress,” in fact, there is no inherent hierarchy to these processes of development.
This takes a while to sink in, especially if you’ve been educated within a cultural framework that explains prehistory as a linear and codependent set of chronological milestones, whose successive stages may be understood by historically elaborated logical systems of cause and effect. It takes an intellectual leap to reject such hierarchical constructions of prehistory and to perceive the past as a diachronous system of nonsynchronous events closely tied to ecological and biological phenomena.
But this endeavor is well worth the effort if it allows people to recognize and make use of the lessons that can be learned from the past.
If we can pinpoint the time, place, and circumstances under which specific technological or social behaviors were adopted by hominins and then follow their evolution through time, then we can more easily understand not only why they were selected in the first place, but also how they evolved and even what their links with the modern human condition may be.
Taking on this approach can help us understand how the reproductive success of our genus, Homo, eventually led up to the emergence of our own species, sapiens, through a complex process that caused some traits to disappear or be replaced, while others were transformed or perpetuated into defining human traits.
While new discoveries are popularizing the exciting new findings dating as far back as the Middle Paleolithic, the public is typically presented with a compressed prehistory that starts at the end of the last ice age some 12,000 years ago. This is understandable, since the more recent archeological register consists of objects and buildings that are in many ways analogous to our own patterns of living. Ignoring the more distant phases of the shared human past, however, has a wider effect of converting our interpretations of prehistory into a sort of timeless mass, almost totally lacking in chronological and even geographical context.
Among recent breakthroughs reaching the public eye, it has been shown that H. sapiens emerged in Africa much earlier than previously thought, some 300,000 years ago. We now know that the first groups of anatomically modern humans arrived on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea as early as 200,000 years ago, a fact that implies a far longer cohabitation of our species in territories already occupied by other forms of Homo, such as the Neandertals and the Denisovans.
Genomic research is progressively telling us something about what our interactions with these species might have been like, proving not only that these encounters took place, but even that they sometimes involved interbreeding and the conceiving of reproductively viable offspring. Such knowledge about our distant past is therefore making us keenly aware that we only very recently became the last surviving species of a very bushy human family tree.
Because of their great antiquity, these very ancient phases of the human evolutionary story are more difficult to interpret and involve hominins who were physically, cognitively, and behaviorally very different from ourselves.
For this reason, events postdating the onset of the Neolithic Period tend to be more readily shared in our society’s communication venues (e.g., museums and schools), while the older phases of human prehistory often remain shrouded in scientific journals, inaccessible to the general public.
But rendering prehistory without providing the complete picture of the evidence is like reading only the last chapter of a book. In this truncated vision, the vast majority of human development becomes a mere prelude before we move on to be amazed at how modern humans began to create monumental structures, sewage systems, and grain storage silos, for example. Just how we got there remains largely undisclosed to the public at large.
Bringing Prehistory Into the Open
The good news is that the rapid development of modern technologies is presently revolutionizing archeology and the ways that scientific data can be conveyed to society. This revolution is finally making ancient human prehistory understandable to a wider audience.
While many of the world’s prehistory museums still display only the most spectacular finds of classical or other “recent” forms of modern human archeology, we are finally beginning to see more exhibits dedicated to some of the older chapters of the human story. By generating awareness, the public is finally awakening to their meaning and significance, enabling themselves to gain a better understanding of the global condition of humanity and its links with the past.
People are finally beginning to understand why the emergence of the first stone tool technologies some 3 million years ago in Africa was such a landmark innovation that would eventually embark our ancestors onto an alternative evolutionary route that would sharply distinguish us from all other species on the planet.
By developing their stone tool technologies, early hominins provided the basis for what would eventually be recognized as a culture: a transformative trait that transformed us into the technology-dependent species we have become and that continues to shape our lives in unpredictable ways.
Archeologists provide interpretations of these first phases of the human technological adventure thanks to the stone tools left behind by hominins very different from ourselves and the contexts in which they are discovered. Among the authors of these groundbreaking ancient technologies are Homo habilis, the first species attributed to our genus—precisely because of their ability to intentionally modify stone into tools—but also other non-Homo primates, such as Paranthropus and Australopithecines, with which they shared the African landscape for many millennia.
Surprisingly, even at a very early stage beginning some 2,600,000 years ago in Africa, scientists have found that some hominins were systematizing stone toolmaking into a coherent cultural complex grouped under the denomination “Oldowan,” after the eponymous sites situated at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. This implies that stone toolmaking was being transformed at a very early date into an adaptive strategy, because it must have provided hominins with some advantages. From this time onward, our ancestors continued to produce and transmit culture with increasing intensity, a phenomenon that was eventually accompanied by demographic growth and expansions into new lands beyond Africa—as their nascent technologies transformed every aspect of their lives.
Unevenly through time and space, this hugely significant development branched out into the increasingly diverse manifestations of culture that came to characterize the successive hominin species composing the human family tree. Each technocomplex of the Lower Paleolithic, from the Oldowan to the subsequent Acheulian phase (beginning in Africa some 1,750,000 years ago and then spreading into Eurasia up to around 350,000 years ago), and onward into the Middle Paleolithic and beyond, is defined by specific sets of skills and accompanying behavioral shifts. The tools developed in service of those skills reveal to us the sociocultural practices of the hominins who used them.
Fossilized human remains, and the stone tool technologies they developed, provide the keys to understanding more about ourselves. We can comprehend the changes we observe in the archeological register through time thanks to the bodies of material evidence that tell the story of how humans evolved up to the present. It gives us a frame of reference to recognize the directions that our species might be taking as we move into the future.
To see more clearly, we need to explore how this evolution took place, understanding the transformations diachronically, with change often occurring in nonlinear ways. To do so, we need to leave behind models of path dependence that condition our thinking, leading us to believe that particular aspects recognizable to us through our lens of modernity have a forcing effect of change on the next stages of technosocial development.
Human prehistory widens our conceptual lens by taking into consideration not only innate human traits particular to each phase of hominin ancestral evolution, but also the exterior forces at play throughout the shifting climatic conditions that characterize the long time periods we are considering.
In much the same way as biological evolution, some technosocial innovations can emerge and persist, while others may remain latent in the human developmental repertory, providing a baseline for new creations that can be further developed. If proven to be favorable under specific conditions, selected behavioral capacities can be developed to the point of becoming defining aspects of the human condition.
The latent aspects of technology can, in different regions or time frames, be selected for, used, and refined, leading human groups to choose divergent evolutionary pathways and even triggering technological revolutions: when the changes lead to positive results, they can set off wider cultural developments in the populations that use them.
This way of thinking about technosocial evolution also helps to explain why, more often than not, specific cultural phases generally appear in some kind of coherent successive order through space and time, even though the transitions from one to the other—and the related social processes they engender—can appear blurry as we try to make sense of the archeological evidence.
In this case, it is essential to keep in mind that, through time, different hominins also evolved biologically, as toolmaking and its associated social implications had effects on the evolution of the brain. Developing stone tool technologies provided hominins with an evolutionary edge, enabling them to carve out a unique niche in the scheme of things since it improved their capacity to compete for resources with other kinds of animals. Technological and behavioral developments occurred and evolved in a nonlinear fashion because they were unevenly packed in accordance with each specific paleoecological and community setting.
When we look deeper into our prehistory, it is important to remember that the degree of complexity of human achievements was largely dependent upon particular stages of cognitive readiness. Human technosocial evolution thus appears to have global coherency through time because it reflects the successive phases of cognitive readiness attained on an anatomical level by distinct groups of hominins thriving in different paleoecological settings in diverse geographical regions.
While drawing straight lines between specific hominin species and particular kinds of tools presents some pitfalls, science has already demonstrated that cerebral development was (and is) tightly linked to technological evolution. Specific areas of the brain—the neocortical regions of the frontal and temporal lobes responsible for language, symbolic thought, volumetric planning, and other abstract cerebral functions—were merged with toolmaking. Toolmaking contributed to endowing hominins with unique cerebral capacities—in particular, the abilities to communicate complex abstract notions and create multifaceted sociocultural environments.
Different types of symbolic behavior—the use of a system of symbols to communicate—were employed by different hominin species who found them to be positively adaptive. As a result, cerebral and technological evolution were linked into a co-evolutionary process by which early Homo and subsequent hominins developed idiosyncratic brain structures relative to other animals.
Following the Oldowan, the Acheulian cultural phase is commonly (but not uniquely) linked with the arrival of the successful and widely dispersed Homo erectus. It is during this era that humanity produced some of its most significant technological and behavioral breakthroughs, like fire making and the capacity to predetermine the forms they created in stone. The archeological record attributed to the Acheulian bears witness to advanced technosocial standardization, with the advent of symmetrical tools like spheroids or handaxes attesting to the emergence of aesthetic sensitivity.
The expanding repertory of tool types that appeared at this time suggests that hominins were carrying out more diverse activities, while subtle differences observed in the ways of making and doing began to appear in specific regions, forming the foundation of land-linked traditions and social identities.
The fact that these breakthroughs occurred on comparable timescales in widely separate regions of the globe—South Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent—underpins that hominins already living in these regions had reached a comparable stage of cognitive readiness and that the specific conditions favoring the emergence of analogous latent technosocial capacities were ripe for the taking. The huge expanses separating the geographical hotbeds suggest that the Acheulian emerged without interpopulational contact.
The explanation that better fits the evidence is that there was a convergent development in the transition from a fairly simple form of Oldowan stone toolmaking to the more complex and sophisticated Acheulian—when Oldowan toolmakers spread out over the planet, they carried the seeds of the Acheulian with them in their minds, their culture, and in the shapes of the stone tools they brought with them.
Indeed, it was only during the later phases of the Acheulian, when we observe denser demographic trends in Africa and Eurasia, that hominin populations would have developed the social networking necessary for technologies to migrate from place to place through direct communication networking.
A similar process of latency and development is in fact observed even in more recent phases of the human evolutionary process—for example, with the emergence of such complex technosocial achievements as the intentional burial of congeners, the construction of monumental structures, the practices of agriculture and animal husbandry, or the invention of writing.
A diachronous approach to time permits more valuable insights from 7 million years of evidence we have of human development. How we structure our understanding of it can create big opportunities to have a better future.
One of the main corporate participants in Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s multibillion-dollar crash program to create and produce a Covid-19 vaccine, was Moderna. The federal government gave Moderna, which in 2019 was a small, unprofitable pharmaceutical firm, some $2.48 billion for vaccine development and bought millions of doses at $26 each for essentially free distribution to US residents. Moderna’s profits soared to $21 billion over the course of the pandemic. In late 2022, when federal subsidies seemed on the verge of ending, the company announced that it would soon offer an updated version of its vaccine at as much as $130 per dose. Many Americans were outraged.
Moderna’s behavior will not surprise readers of the journalist Alexander Zaitchik’s Owning the Sun, an indictment of American drug companies and the federal government for all too often privileging profits over health, and of the research universities, medical professionals, and philanthropists who have been deeply complicit with them. Ranging for the most part from the early years of the United States to the Covid-19 pandemic, the book shows how the drug industry and its affiliates operated in a state of ethical grace through much of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth fell from it with accelerating speed.
Zaitchik relies heavily upon recent studies that have called the prescription drug industry and its allies to account, for example Paul Farmer’s Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2003) and Graham Dutfield’s That High Design of Purest Gold: A Critical History of the Pharmaceutical Industry, 1880–2020 (2020). What distinguishes Owning the Sun is its aim to be a “people’s history” that tells the interrelated stories of drug commerce and the patent system “from the perspective of the dissenters, critics, and antagonists.”
Many people are already investing themselves in the local peace economy as they divest from the economy of war.
By April M. Short
War is not innate to humanity; it is learned culturally, and intentional systems of peace can prevent it from happening, according to anthropological research. We are living at a critical time in the history of humanity in which preventing and divesting from war are essential to our future existence—especially given the realities of the global climate crisis and the fact that the U.S. military is the worst single polluter that exists (and not even mentioning the unspeakable potential for destruction that nuclear weapons pose). If war is cultural, then we can prevent it by intentionally moving ourselves into a culture of peace. How do we do this? We begin with ourselves. We begin to break our war economy habits, and actively divest ourselves, wherever possible, from the ways in which the war economy takes hold in our lives. And we purposefully invest ourselves at the local level in what is often called the peace economy—the caring, sharing, supportive economies that already exist all around us.
The economy of war thrives on extraction and materialism, so it has—for thousands of years, and by no accident—made trite (or violently stifled) the things that are most valuable and important about living: caring; nurturing; love; art; peace; expression; and connection with nature, our bodies, and each other. The war economy, which is the overarching economic system of our times, promotes a culture that actively devalues play and community, and overly values hard work and individualism—to the grave detriment of mental and physical health. It uplifts money hoarding, competition, and the flaunting of one’s material wealth over generosity, sharing, collaboration, and appreciation. It stifles grief and asks us to harden ourselves against the expression of feeling rather than inviting us into depths of emotion where we can realize the gift of being alive in this world, together, for just a brief time.
The results of this unsustainable and unnatural lifestyle are ugly: Clear-cut, monocropped tree farms where once thrived biodiverse FernGully-esque old grove forests in the Pacific Northwest, the Amazon, and around the world; endless mining and building projects that plunder habitats, natural wonders, and Indigenous communities; worsening mental health afflictions, an opioid addiction epidemic, and soaring suicide rates; toxic chemicals and microplastics in our soils, oceans, streams, and bloodstreams that are causing irreparable damage to the planet and our bodies; people treated like criminals for experiencing homelessness, even amidst a devastating cost of living crisis; racist, militarized police murdering people in broad daylight, and often walking free even when they’re caught on camera; hustle and greed culture and the agony that comes with living a daily grind; so much unnecessary loneliness and stress… and this list could go on and on.
But a movement is building from the commons to break with these war economy ways and replenish ways of being that are actually livable. Around the world, there are projects, people, and organizations creating solutions to the problems of our times. They are actively helping in divesting from the war economy in powerful ways. These examples of the local peace economy in action demonstrate that it is possible to create systems in which wealth and worth are rooted in equitable, community-centered care practices like health care for all, farming and feeding each other, parenting and education that are entrenched in love and engagement, and a culture that uplifts us and inspires interconnection.
The peace economy is built brick by brick, through the commitments of individual people and communities. What follows are some examples (of many more that exist worldwide) showing how people and communities are divesting from the war economy and investing in a future centered in peace, love, and aliveness:
Our globalized, Big Ag, monoculture food systems—which are monopolized by a handful of megacorporations owned by billionaires responsible for the war economy—are unraveling. The COVID-19 pandemic cast a bright light on the fragility of those systems. But the issues the pandemic exposed were present prior to 2020, and they promise to continue into the future. People in communities around the world are relocalizing food supply chains to create food sovereignty and reclaim culture in these times of fraying global food systems:
Communities in the Pacific Northwest have been working to regionalize food supply chains through relocalized flour mills, sustainable livestock ranches, a creative chicken farming model, and community garden programs. These efforts have paid off in creating food security for communities while also leading to greater job opportunities and a thriving ecosystem.
Palestinian farmers have been rekindling connections with Indigenous farming practices and creating community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs to resist Israeli colonialism. This has helped Palestinians to reconnect with their land and economically support locally grown food.
Black, formerly incarcerated people in Chicago are challenging the megacorporations that tend to dominate food contracting with schools and other large facilities in America by prepping locally sourced meals for schools, nursing homes, and transitional housing. The Chicago worker cooperative ChiFresh Kitchen is 100 percent employee-owned and provides nutritious and culturally appropriate food to these institutions and facilities.
There are many networks of Indigenous seed savers and others keeping and propagating seeds in community gardens and cooperative programs in the U.S. and around the world. Indigenous-led communities like Seeding Sovereignty and many others are keeping their spiritual connections and cultural practices alive through their connections with seeds, and seed savers are challenging the monocrop-based Big Ag industry that is responsible for so much deforestation and other climate destruction. These networks have also helped bring back “Indigenous foodways that were lost during genocide and forced relocation” inflicted by European colonizers.
The Deep Medicine Circle in the San Francisco Bay Area, a women of color-led, worker-directed 501(c)(3) nonprofit, is one group that is rethinking health care at its roots, and healing the ways U.S. colonial extraction is making people sick. Local community members who make up Deep Medicine Circle are creating systems of health and care, through the lens of community food justice. They’re planting community gardens and thinking up long-term models of localized food and community engagement that uplift Indigenous practices, provide access to healthy foods in poor urban neighborhoods, and dismantle colonialist ways of thinking and being in the world.
Neighbors are voluntarily keeping free-food fridges stocked in cities around the world, in a mutual aid movement that gained speed in response to the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. People have fed and cared for each other through the pandemic and beyond, creating a free-fridge movement that has raised awareness about racial inequity in food systems.
Sallie Calhoun’s Paicines Ranch in California is working to bring agricultural business and investment up to date with our times and closer to nature by prioritizing ecosystem health, habitat, and the sequestration of carbon through soil practices. The project was founded with the aim of working with the dynamic natural world to explore ways of building healthy ecosystems while growing crops and supporting community through food. Paicines Ranch is intentionally creating a model of doing business that is focused on managing complexities rather than solving problems, and is centered on adding true value over profits.
Outside of the food system, examples of other applications of mutual aid, social justice, creative arts, community resilience, and activism for human rights and the environment that all embrace the peace economy include:
People are reimagining safety through alternatives to policing. Safety in the peace economy comes from the engagement of community and the reallocation of resources and funding into programs of care—not militarized police forces and punitive systems of justice. While many alternatives to policing already exist, recent initiatives after the murder of George Floyd by police in May 2020 have introduced changes, both big and small, across the U.S., and the global uprisings against systemic racism have led to these issues being part of the mainstream conversation.
Creative cooperatives are reclaiming real estate and bringing access to art, living spaces, and community spaces back to marginalized Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in Oakland and elsewhere who have played an integral part in shaping the culture of cities across the U.S.
Fire recovery efforts in Oregon, California, and elsewhere have depended on people-led mutual aid projects and local volunteer networks. Devastating fires, worsened by climate change and the criminal negligence of public utilities like Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have been increasing in recent years, some of them incinerating entire towns. Fire recovery efforts in Oregon and California have largely been community-led, and networks have formed among neighbors to create resilience and support—including grief spaces like those created in Ashland, Oregon, which provide a space for people to share their experiences of loss.
People are fighting the fossil fuel industry while building community spaces and support for people who are homeless in New Mexico. The grassroots project is part of a larger project in New Mexico. SOL for All has brought solar power to various locations across the state in an effort to support alternative energy solutions, which are necessary to combat climate change.
The largest dam removal in historystarted in 2023 in southern Oregon and Northern California, thanks to years of Indigenous-led community activism. The Karuk, Yurok, and other Native American groups for whom the Klamath River Basin is their ancestral home since time immemorial have been organizing against the dams since they were proposed in the 1910s—which have had disastrous results for people, salmon, and other wildlife—for decades. After multigenerational efforts, the massive dam removal project is expected to be completed by 2024.
Many people are also building a peace economy through creative sharing efforts and alternatives to money-based exchanges. This includes community gardens, mutual aid groups, and participation in the solidarity economy, and just transition efforts like those of Americans with jobs sharing their stimulus checks with those in need in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. People are also creating skill share networks like Kola Nut Collaborative and others, and millions of people daily are sharing tools and operating in a moneyless economy via “free” signs on street corners, Craigslist’s “free stuff” page, Freecycle, and other creative routes.
The above are just some of the countless examples of the peace economy in action—and most of these efforts were started by just one or two people deciding to do something about the problems they saw happening in their local community.
April M. Short is an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. She is a co-founder of the Observatory, where she is the Local Peace Economy editor, and she is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she was a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Good Times, a weekly newspaper in Santa Cruz, California. Her work has been published with the San Francisco Chronicle, In These Times, LA Yoga, Pressenza, the Conversation, Salon, and many other publications.
Tricia Cotham’s defection to the Republican Party wasn’t about her relationships with fellow lawmakers; it was about the influence of big money and the charter school industry.
By Jeff Bryant
A July 30, 2023, headline in the New York Times promised to give readers an “inside” story about why North Carolina lawmaker Tricia Cotham changed her political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in April and handed conservatives a veto-proof majority in the state House. But the ensuing story shed little new light on what motivated her decision to flip and overlooked how her deep dive into the right-wing networks promoting charter schools was likely instrumental in steering her change in political leanings.
For sure, Times journalists Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt are correct in reporting Cotham’s actions as having profound impacts in a purple state, but they erred in adopting an unlikely storyline about who and what lured her to jump.
As I’ve previously reported, Cotham’s own explanation for her party switch strains credibility. And just because Republican officials encouraged her to run in 2022—the Times article’s supposed big reveal—doesn’t mean they, or the Democrats with whom she had purportedly grown disenchanted, were the only, or most important, actors who mattered in her decision.
Yet Kelly and Perlmutt chose to amplify that narrative rather than delve more deeply into Cotham’s legislative record and the business associates she cultivated in the years she was out of office, from 2016 to 2022.
As I reported, Cotham’s split from the Democratic Party first became evident toward the end of her legislative tenure from 2007 to 2016. At the end of that period, Cotham had already decided to leave the North Carolina House to seek office in Congress. But she was soundly drubbed in the Democratic primary contest and returned to Raleigh, perhaps facing joblessness.
It was at that time that Cotham, who had voted strictly the Democratic Party line on legislation related to charter schools, chose to buck her party’s majority to join with just four other Democrats to vote for the creation of the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD, whose name was eventually changed to Innovative School District (ISD), was created to take charge of low-performing schools and hand them over to charter school management companies.
But Kelly and Perlmutt either didn’t look back that far into Cotham’s legislative record or didn’t believe that vote was important. “In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools,” was their open-and-shut assessment.
Nor did they bother to note to whom that vote would have mattered the most—Oregon billionaire John Bryan, who not only bankrolled the lobbying effort to enact the ASD/ISD but also founded the Challenge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for charter schools, operates a firm that builds charter schools, and started a charter school management company called TeamCFA.
Bryan has also been described as “a national figure in libertarian circles when it comes to charter schools” and a donor who “contributes heavily and regularly to conservative causes.”
Cotham’s vote for the ISD preceded a series of career opportunities for her, which the Times article mostly ignored.
The first, beginning in 2017, was a stint at McGuireWoods Consulting, a highly influential lobbying firm whose clients include a long list of organizations closely associated with the charter school industry and right-wing school choice advocacy, including at least one organization funded by the Challenge Foundation. McGuireWoods was also the lobbying firm pushing the bill to create the ISD.
The second in Cotham’s series of business opportunities, which Kelly and Perlmutt did report on, came in 2019 when she was hired to lead Achievement for All Children. Achievement for All Children, the reporters noted, was picked to “turn around” Southside-Ashpole Elementary, a “foundering public school” in the state.
But what Kelly and Perlmutt left out of their reporting was that Achievement for All Children was a charter management company previously led by Tony Helton, who, as I reported, had previously worked for Bryan’s firm TeamCFA. Also, they completely left out the fact that Southside-Ashpole was under the control of the state because it was a school—the only school—incorporated into the ISD.
While Kelly and Perlmutt noted Cotham’s years as a lobbyist included a business relationship with C. Philip Byers, whom the article called “a major donor to state Republicans” and “president of a company that built charter schools,” the reporters didn’t mention that the company he led (Challenge Foundation Properties) was part of Bryan’s Challenge Foundation enterprises.
Cotham’s ties to right-wing individuals and organizations promoting charter schools don’t stop there, as my article reported. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if Kelly and Perlmutt were to examine all the various possible influencers in Cotham’s decision to switch parties, then focusing on the billionaire in the room would make the most sense?Further, reporting that Cotham’s switch to the Republican Party was mostly because of her changing relationships with fellow legislators, on both sides of the aisle, as the Times article suggests, trivializes a matter of huge import in a state that figures to be pivotal in the 2024 elections. It also overlooks the growing influence of the big money behind the charter school industry in American politics and its destructive force in the Democratic Party.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.
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