Derek Black, Jack Schneider, and Jennifer Berkshire wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the future of public education is on the ballot on November 3 (for the record, I got a credit for doing some minor editing).
Should Trump be re-elected, you can count on him and Betsy DeVos to continue their brazen assault on public schools and to continue their demand to transfer public funds to private and religious schools as well as to pour hundreds of millions of federal dollars into charter school expansion. Draining public dollars away from public school has been Betsy DeVos’s life work and she would have four more years to staff the U.S. Department of Education with likeminded ideologues who hate public schools.
The authors write:
When Trump selected Betsy DeVos as secretary of education, many took it as a sign that he wasn’t serious. After all, DeVos seemed to know little about public schools. But that was a product of her extremism. Over the last four years, she has been crystal clear that her primary interest in the public education system lies in dismantling it. For evidence, look no further than her proposed Education Freedom Scholarships plan, which would redirect $5 billion in taxpayer dollars to private schools.
Unmaking public education is a long-standing goal of libertarians and the religious right. Conservative economist Milton Friedman conceived of private school vouchers in 1955, and four decades later was still making the case for “a transition from a government to a market system.” As they see it, public education is a tax burden on the wealthy, an obstacle to religious instruction, and a hotbed for unionism. Rather than a public system controlled by democratic values, they’d prefer a private one governed by the free market. If they had their way, schools would operate like a welfare program for the poor while the rich would get the best education money could buy. The result would be entrenched inequality and even more concentrated segregation than now exists.
This extreme view has never caught on, largely because public education is a bedrock American institution. Many states created public education systems before the nation even existed. Massachusetts, for instance, was educating children in public schools long before tea was dumped in Boston Harbor. In 1787, the federal government explicitly mandated that the center plot of land in every new town in the territories — land that would become states like Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois — be reserved for schools, and that other plots be used to support those schools. After the Civil War, Congress doubled down on that commitment, requiring readmitted Confederate states, and all new states, to guarantee access to public education in their constitutions. In each of these foundational periods, leaders positioned public education at the very center of our democratic project.
The founders and their successors recognized that public education is essential to citizens’ ability to govern themselves, not to mention protect themselves from charlatans and demagogues. Public education is the surest guarantee of individual liberty, the founders understood — no less essential than a well-trained army to the survival of the nation. That’s why they recognized that the education of American citizens couldn’t be left to chance...
We are here to sound an alarm to Republicans and Democrats. The future of our nation’s public schools is at stake. And insofar as that is the case, the democracy envisioned by our founders — one with universal, tax-supported schooling at its core — hangs in the balance.
Just my opinion, but I think the specific policy – on tests, on charters- matters less than the people Biden hires.
If they come out of the Bush-Obama-Trump ed reform pipeline we are going to get the same anti-public school federal policy we have gotten for the last 20 years.
You’ll know if Joe Biden is going to change the federal approach to public schools in a positive direction not by what he says, but by the people he hires.
Ed reform is an echo chamber. There’s no real debate. The adherents can have a D after their name or an R after their name- it’s all the same.
Essentially, Jeb Bush has been setting federal education policy for the last 20 years. It didn’t have his name on it but it’s all his approach.
If Biden hires yet another iteration of Jeb Bush we’ll get more Jeb Bush education policy. If he doesn’t, we won’t.
I think 20 years of Jeb Bush is enough. Time to look outside the echo chamber for some new people.
YES: we will know much after Biden is actually in office and starts appointing his cabinet
If it hadn’t been for President Ronald Ray-Gun falling in love with Milton Friedman’s trickle down economic philosophy, the United States wouldn’t have more than $27 trillion in national debt today.
https://www.usdebtclock.org/
When Obama left office, that national debt was $19.19 trillion. Under Obama the U.S. debt increased $9 trillion in eight years.
Under Trump, that debt has increased almost $8 trillion in less than four years. This is what Trump’s swamp has done to the United States.
If Trump beats the odds and is re-elected for four more years, he will take that as a mandate to triple the national debt as he loots the country.
Putin is Trump’s role model. Trump wants to be another Putin in every way.
“No one knows Putin’s exact net worth, but many speculate he’s the wealthiest person on the planet — his $1 billion palace and $500 million yacht explain why”
Former Russian government adviser Stanislav Belkovsky estimated his fortune is worth $70 billion. Hedge fund manager Bill Browder, a noted critic of Putin, claimed it was more like $200 billion. A fortune that enormous would propel him straight past Amazon founder and richest man in the world Jeff Bezos, who Forbes estimates has $150.2 billion to his name.
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-putin-spends-his-mysterious-fortune-2017-6
With Trump as president for four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen more years, how much public money would he steal?
I cannot measure how much I want COVID-19 to claim Trump sometimes in the first half of November.
“Using available preliminary data, the median time from onset to clinical recovery for mild cases is approximately 2 weeks and is 3-6 weeks for patients with severe or critical disease.”
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/who-china-joint-mission-on-covid-19-final-report.pdf#:~:text=Using%20available%20preliminary%20data%2C,severe%20or%20critical%20disease.
“When some people are currently sick and will die of the disease, but have not died yet, the CFR will underestimate the true risk of death. With COVID-19, there are many who are currently sick and will die, but have not yet died. Or, they may die from the disease but be listed as having died from something else.”
With the COVID-19 outbreak, it can take between two to eight weeks for people to go from first symptoms to death, according to data from early cases (we discuss this here).12
https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
Two to Eight weeks !!!!!
If September 26th was the date Trump was infected, we have about three weeks left to see if COVID will still claim his life. He is not immune like he has repeatedly claimed.
In ten days we have the election. If Trump is going to die from COVID 19, I want that incredible event worth celebrating to happen a week or two after he loses the election.