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Umair Haque: MAGA and the Failure of America’s “Grand Social Experiment”

By dianeravitch
February 2, 2024 //
59

Umair Haque is an economist and a brilliant analyst of social and political trends. I read whatever he writes with a sense of amazement at his insight and his ability to synthesize events and their underlying causes. The following post from his blog called “The Issue” is especially alarming. It explains a lot about why we don’t have good health care, why the public sector is neglected, why privatization has run amok.

If you read one thing today, read this.

He writes:

He’s cruising towards clinching the nomination—as we all knew he would. The dreaded Trump-Biden rematch appears to be squarely in the sights.

And there are many, many theories being floated about Trump’s resurgence. Did he ever really go away, though? Still, it’s worth examining them for a moment. Trumpism’s a form of racial power, in a society divided. Trump’s power’s amplified by technology and society’s dependence on social media. Trump might win, but the coalition’s going to be so unstable he won’t accomplish much. It’s the last gasp of a nation facing demographic change. And so on.

I think that all these carry water. But I also think…there’s a truer truth at work here. Perhaps, in a sense, Trumpism’s America’s destiny. I know that’s a provocative thing to say, but I don’t mean it that way. I just can’t help thinking it lately, because…

What’s the most salient fact about America? Americans? Even—especially—Trumpists? The vast majority of Americans want a very, very different society. A more…can I say it? Liberal one. Even Trumpists don’t agree with most of Trump’s policies—they just support Trump, the Father Figure, come hell or high water. But when we ask Americans what kind of society they want, invariably, the vast, vast majority will plead for things like healthcare, childcare, retirement, stability, security. In short, Americans want eudaemonia—genuinely good lives.

But a kind of Stockholm Syndrome’s set in. They won’t…choose that form of sociopolitical economy. Even when it’s offered to them time and time again, whether in the way of a Bernie, or a Liz, and so forth.

Why is that? What explains that? This isn’t just “voting against your own interests”—it’s something stranger, deeper, weirder: remember, even Trumpists don’t agree with much of Trump’s agenda. So what can explain this pattern persisting over decades?

Let’s look at America objectively for a moment. What do you see? We’re going to speak factually, empirically—this isn’t about politics at all, really.

America’s a nation which failed to modernize, as I often say. It didn’t invest in itself. Europe and Canada’s investment rate is about 50%—while America’s is just 20% or so. Hence, Europeans and Canadians have cutting edge social contracts—made of the very things Americans desperately lack, like universal healthcare, childcare, high-speed rail, retirement, and so on. It’s true that in recent years, for example, in Europe, investment hasn’t kept pace—and hence, pessimism has grown there, too.

But America’s a special case. Its flatly refused to build a functioning social contract for…the entire modern era. Decade after decade, America’s rejected basic public goods. And so the result of course is that Americans pay eye-watering rates for everything that’s free in most other rich nations—education, healthcare, etc. My favorite example is universities. Harvard will set you back north of $60K a year—the Sorbonne in Paris is free. That’s the difference a functional social contract makes.

America’s social contract, sadly, is more pre-modern, Darwinian, Victorian: the strong survive, the weak fall and or perish, and that’s what’s not just right and just, but “efficient” and “productive.” Life is dog-eat-dog, and brutal competition defines every aspect of life. But how has that worked out?

Before we get there, another question needs to be asked. Why did—do—Americans fail to choose a modern social contract, time and again? There are many reasons, each one like the layer of an onion. It wasn’t offered to them. They were offered a lukewarm choice between Reaganomics, and then Clintonomics—etcetera. All of these, while they differed in the details, were variants of the same form of economy: nobody should have anything much as a basic right, everything should be financialized and capitalized, profit-maximization in “free” markets would unleash prosperity for all, and the wealth would trickle down.

But the very opposite happened. The wealth trickled up. We recently discussed how billionaires have gotten so much richer just during the pandemic that every American household would be $40,000 better off. That’s more than the median income—an astonishing statistic. And that comes after yet another wealth transfer upwards, during the last few decades—$50 trillion to the very richest. That’s half of the entire world’s GDP. Another startling statistic.

America, in other words, was the subject of Grand Social Experiment. Call it what you like—hypercapitalism, free markets, neoliberalism. We’re at the point where labels don’t matter much anymore—just the point does. The experiment failed. I’m not saying that American life is all bad, but I am saying that the results are self-evident: democracy’s on the brink, there’s a feeling of hopelessness on every side, among every social group, generation after generation’s experiencing rapid, sharp downward mobility, and young people say they “can’t function anymore”—just a smattering of statistics of social collapse.

So. America was a nation that failed to invest in itself—the Grand Social Experiment. We can put it in yet another way, a more philosophical one: all the old guff about “standing on your own two feet” and “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” and whatnot. The results have been catastrophic: now democracy itself faces an existential challenge from a figure who’s already tried to unseat it once.

How are those two things linked? I think they’re connected in many, many ways. You see, when people experience what Americans have, especially those in the former working and lower middle class—a profound sense of dread, hopelessness, even trauma, shaped by downward mobility, and the disappearance of a future, community, social bonds, security, stability—they seek just strength and succor in the arms of demagogues. Those wounds open the door for an omnipotent Father Figure—they practically invoke the need for one.

These are shades of Weimar Germany, of course. The demagogue arrives, and scapegoats long-hated groups in society, blaming them for the woes of the pure and true. Isn’t that more or less what Trumpism’s appeal is based on? And doesn’t it begin to explain just why plenty of those who support Trump as demagogue even when they want a very, very different society from the one he’s going to deliver? They’re not thinking straight, as we all say. But there’s a reason why. The wounds go deep, right into existential territory itself. And then there’s an existential backlash, too. It’s me or you. I’m the master, you’re the slave. I deserve to live, you deserve to…

All Grand Social Experiments need…maybe not propaganda, but a certain ideological hardening to take place. They can’t happen otherwise. And this, too, is what happened in America. People were fed the myths of “free markets” and “trickle down economics” and so on for decades. So much so that even to this day to challenge them is to be labelled a “socialist.”

This was a process of ideological politicization. That is, these were all theories. Politics trucks in theories. But when those theories come true—or not—then we’re in the realm of empiricism, facts, reality. Americans were told that these theories had to come true. So much so that both parties offered slightly different versions of them. Sadly, that’s still true today—the Democrats are there for democracy’s sake, true, but they’re hardly offering much in the way of a modern social contract. Yes, on issues like abortion, the Democrats offer something better than theocracy. Still, their notion of progress falls well short of a truly modern social contract. Both parties agree, basically, that a modern social contract isn’t something Americans enjoy. That’s how deep this ideological hardening goes.

“Conditioning” might be too strong a word—but certainly, Americans were told to believe in the Grand Social Experiment for decades, to the point that any other alternative was considered “radical,” or even “communist” and so on—even while Europe and Canada proceeded to forge a different, socially democratic path. And of course it’s eminently true that there was a racial component to all this: Americans were told to reject “paying for those people’s schools” or educations or what have you, the clear implication being that “they” were different, lazy, foolish, liabilities. No clear aspiration to universalism was had, and in no sense were Americans bonded together as equals—the strong were to survive, and the weak perish, and that was what was moral, just, true, and theoretically sound, the key, somehow, to prosperity. Lead was to turn to gold. And to question it was taboo.

America still lives in the residue of this process of ideological hardening. This conditioning, though like I said, I think that’s too strong a word. I think that’s what explains this strange Stockholm Syndrome: Americans want a modern social contract, by and large, and yet here they are, unable to bring themselves to back one. In that vacuum, in that gap, what choice is left? The insecurity and instability, the fear and trauma—they turn people towards demagoguery. They reopen old wounds of hate and spite, instead of healing them with prosperity and trust and progress. They reduce people to their animal selves, seeking what stability and security they can find in older hierarchies of power and dominance, in which there appears to be some nostalgic certainty.

That’s a lot to chew on. I’m not saying I’m right. But I am saying that this may be where a society that fails to forge a modern social contract ends up. Haven’t we seen just this in plenty of “third world” countries? This oscillation between democracy and authoritarianism? I’m not saying America’s a “third world” country—don’t kid yourself, it’s not exactly Bangladesh. But I am saying that this place isn’t a stable equilibrium. The place the Grand Social Experiment—everyone’s a competitor, rival, adversary, in a brutal game called only the strong survive—ends? It might be right here. Destiny.

Destiny, of course, isn’t fate. It can be made and remade. But will America understand that before it’s too late?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Extremism, Poverty, Privatization, Trump

Mississippi Rejects Federal $$ for Summer Food for Kids

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2024 //
14

Congress extended a federal food program for hungry children in December 2022. Mississippi and several other Republican-controlled states chose not to accept the offer.

The Mississippi Free Press reported:

Nearly 21 million children in the U.S. and its territories are expected to receive food benefits this summer through a newly permanent federal program, but Mississippi will not be among them after the State rejected the funds. It is not clear whether the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians will participate.

The United States Department of Agriculture announced the program on Wednesday.

Thirty-five states, all five U.S. territories and four tribes opted into the Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer program, or Summer EBT, which the government says is meant to supplement existing programs during the summer that have had a more limited reach….

Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont and Wyoming chose not to participate this summer.

Nebraska, Iowa and Oklahoma cited existing programs that already feed children during the summer as reasons not to join Summer EBT.

Implementing a Summer EBT program this year was “not feasible” in Texas, state Health and Human Services Commission spokesperson Thomas Vazquez said in a statement to the AP. He said that was due to USDA guidance coming in late December, “the level of effort needed” to start a new program and the need for the state legislature to approve money for it.

Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt said in a statement that he doesn’t want “a single Oklahoma child to go hungry, and I’ll keep working to accomplish that, but large, duplicative federal programs don’t accomplish that goal.

“They cause more bureaucracy for families to wade through.”

I wonder if poor families are delighted that Governor Stitt saved them the trouble of doing paperwork to get free food for their children.

Categories Funding, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Poverty

Politico: House Republicans Want Deep Cuts to Education Funding

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
4

Political parties show their true colors when they offer a budget. Republicans, who control the House of Representatives just showed that they don’t care about funding education. They especially don’t care about funding schools attended by poor kids. They want to slash Title I—the most important federal funding for poor kids—by 80%. Remember that the next time that Republicans cry crocodile tears for poor kids.

Politico reported:

HOUSE TAKES UP EDUCATION FUNDING AS SHUTDOWN LOOMS: As House leaders wrangle votes for a stopgap measure to head off a shutdown at the end of the week, House Republicans are also turning to longer-term appropriations for education programs. The House is set to consider on the floor this week Republicans’ education funding bill that would make deep cuts to federal education programs, including drastic reductions to aid for low-income schools.

— What’s in the bill: The GOP bill to fund the Education Department for the 2024 fiscal year would provide $67.4 billion of new discretionary funding, a reduction of about 15 percent compared with 2023. But the bill would also rescind more than $10 billion of funding for K-12 education that was already approved by Congress, bringing the overall cut to the Education Department to about 28 percent from fiscal 2023.

— Among the most drastic proposed GOP cuts would be the $14.7 billion reduction to federal spending on low-income school districts under Title I, an 80 percent reduction. Democrats say that funding level would translate into 220,000 fewer teachers in classrooms across the country.

— The bill also includes policy riders that would block a slew of Biden administration education policies, such as its overhaul of Title IX rules and new student loan repayment program known as SAVE. The bill would also end the administration’s safety net program that eliminates most penalties for borrowers who miss their monthly payment for the next year.

— The GOP’s top-line funding levels for education won’t survive negotiations with the Democrat-led Senate and White House. A bipartisan proposal by Senate appropriators calls for keeping overall spending on education at roughly the same level as 2023. Biden’s budget requested a 13.6 percent increase.

— But the vote on making deep cuts to funding for schools could put some moderate House Republicans in a tough spot and hand Democrats some election-year messaging fodder.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Poverty, U.S. Department of Education

Mississippi: Can a White Democrat Win the Governor’s Race?

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2023 //
2

Mississippi is as red a state as any in the country but a white Democrat has a real chance of winning. His name is Brandon Presley. He’s a second cousin of Elvis, and he grew up dirt poor. He’s a genuine progressive. He has gone out of his way to court Black voters. Presley has a chance of upending politics in the state and perhaps the region.

The Daily Yonder reports that Presley must overcome the rural-urban divide:

American politics are defined by the rural-urban divide. Democrats own the major cities; Republicans dominate smaller cities and the countryside. Brandon Presley aims to change that, at least in Mississippi. The 46-year-old Democrat is challenging the GOP incumbent, Tate Reeves, for the governorship. If he wins, he would be the Magnolia State’s first Democratic governor in a generation.

But a Presley victory is potentially something more. To win, the Democrat must score well with Mississippi’s rural voters. Such a turnabout would redound across the nation. William Browning, a Mississippi-based reporter, claims “If Brandon Presley beats Reeves, this changes the way people view elections.” In other words, a Presley victory could shake the nation out of its rural-urban divide. It would prove that Democrats can win rural America, and prompt Republicans to woo the cities.

Presley’s campaign is an uphill climb. Mississippi is the definition of a Republican stronghold. The GOP controls every statewide office and possesses supermajorities in both the state Senate and House. The race will be decided by rural voters, a Republican-leaning demographic. Sixty-five of Mississippi’s 82 counties are designated as rural (using the nonmetropolitan definition) and more than half of the state population, 54%, qualify as the same.

Despite these realities, Presley has more than a puncher’s chance at victory. Reeves is vulnerable. A January 2023 survey showed 57% of state voters wanted an option beyond Reeves. A June poll was even more ominous for the incumbent. One-fifth of Republicans supported Presley over the GOP incumbent. A Mississippi political observer explained these numbers bluntly, “Reeves is not likeable and is kind of arrogant.”

Presley’s prospects go beyond an unpopular incumbent. Every observer of any political stripe agrees that he is a one-of-a-kind political talent. Brannon Miller, a longtime state political hand, calls him Mississippi’s “best retail politician.” One reporter already termed him the “second best politician in state history.”

Tall, gregarious, and oozing Southern charm, he is, as one Democratic official described him, “a back-pattin’ doesn’t-know-a-stranger Democrat.” He is also equipped with a biography straight from a Hollywood script. Second cousins with Elvis, Presley was born dirt poor. Raised just down the road from Elvis’s Tupelo, he came of age in tiny Nettleton, Mississippi (population 1,995). At age 8, his alcoholic father was murdered. Thereafter, his single mom struggled to provide for him and his two siblings, Greta and Greg. The family regularly lived without electricity, running water, or a phone.

In 2001, the 23-year-old came home from college and was elected mayor of Nettleton. He has been running ever since. In 2007, voters elected him Public Service Commissioner for northern Mississippi, a post he has been reelected to three times by successively wider margins.

Presley is not a standard issue “national” Democrat. He steers clear of divisive social issues. Pro-life on abortion, he is an evangelical Christian who hews to Mississippi’s cultural mainstream. He is also a self-described “populist.” Born from his rough-and-tumble childhood, Presley also draws upon the rich tradition of Southern economic populism. Dana Burcham, the Nettleton city clerk, sums up Presley’s philosophy in saying, “He’s for the little people.”

Presley’s populism is apparent in his rhetoric. He defines his politics as one in which, “you side with the people against a system that is set up against the people all day long.” But his populism is also obvious in his record. As mayor and public service commissioner, he focused upon bread-and-butter issues for his rural and small-town constituents. Nettleton’s current mayor, Phillip Baulch, and Burcham credit Presley as the source of the town’s turnaround. Mayor Presley turned abandoned property into parks, audited the city’s books, balanced the budget, and cut taxes. The results are tangible. Storefronts abound with commerce. Downtown is tidy. Nettleton, if not thriving, is surviving.

Read on to finish the story.

The New York Times says changes in the laws of Mississippi may have a large effect on the outcome of the Mississippi race.

Just three years ago, Mississippi had an election law on its books from an 1890 constitutional convention that was designed to uphold “white supremacy” in the state. The law created a system for electing statewide officials that was similar to the Electoral College — and that drastically reduced the political power of Black voters.

Now Mississippi is holding its first election for governor since those laws fell, the contest is improbably competitive in this deep-red state, and Black voters are poised to play a critical role.

Voters overturned the Jim Crow-era law in 2020. This summer, a federal court threw out another law, also from 1890, that had permanently stripped voting rights from people convicted of a range of felonies.

Black leaders and civil rights groups in Mississippi see the Nov. 7 election as a chance for a more level playing field and an opportunity for Black voters to exercise their sway: Roughly 40 percent of voters are Black, a greater share than in any other state.

Presley is going after Black voters.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

Black Mississippians lean heavily Democratic: Ninety-four percent voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, according to exit polls. Any path to victory for a Democrat relies on increasing Black turnout and winning over some crossover white voters.

Mr. Presley, a member of the Mississippi Public Service Commission and a second cousin of Elvis Presley, has made outreach to Black voters central to his campaign, seeking to win them over on Medicaid expansion, addressing a rural hospital shortage and providing funding for historically Black colleges.

On a recent October weekend, Mr. Presley navigated the tents and barbecue smokers at the homecoming tailgate for Alcorn State University, one of six historically Black colleges in the state. As he darted from tent to tent, wearing a purple-and-gold polo to support the home team, Mr. Presley introduced himself to unwitting voters and took selfies with his backers, many who flagged him down amid the din of music and aroma of smoking ribs.

Presley needs a strong turnout to win. I plan to send him a donation.

“This election is going to be one that is historical,” said Charles V. Taylor Jr., the executive director of the Mississippi state conference of the N.A.A.C.P. “It’d be the first time we don’t have to deal with this Jim Crow-era Electoral College when it comes to the gubernatorial race. And also, we’re at a point in our state where people are fed up and frustrated with what’s currently happening.”

Democrats are trying to harness that energy behind Brandon Presley, the party’s nominee for governor. Mr. Presley, who is white, is seeking to ride his brand of moderate politics and his pledges to expand Medicaid to an underdog victory over Gov. Tate Reeves, an unpopular Republican incumbent who has been trailed by a welfare scandal.

If Mississippi voters elect Presley, it would affect th southern

Categories Courage, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Hope, Mississippi, Poverty, Race, Racism

Nikhil Goyal’s Stunning New Book About How Poverty Damages Lives

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
25

Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.

The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”

Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.

A recent review by Julia Craven in The Washington Post raves about the book.

Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.

Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.

A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.

Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.

Categories Corporate Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Philadelphia, Poverty, Students

Yes, There Is a Free Lunch, for Kids

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
13

The Lever reports that Michigan is the sixth state to guarantee free lunch for all public school students. At the same time, House Republicans seek to ban free lunches because there might be “fraud.” For example, little Johnny might swipe a second sandwich. Iowa, as we read earlier, has limited the number of items that may be purchased with food stamps. What is it with these Republicans? Why do they children and poor adults to go hungry? Why do they want to weaken child labor laws so teens can work dangerous jobs?

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

This week, Michigan became the seventh state in the country to guarantee free lunch for every public school student in grades pre-K through 12. The $160 million program is included in the state’s School Aid Budget,which passed in June with bipartisan support. The program will serve 1.2 million students, an estimated 283,000 of whom are food insecure, and offer two free meals a day.

The national push for free lunches has been surprisingly controversial. Republicans intent on cutting the social safety net at every turn have even directed their ire at hungry kids. The Republican Study Committee, a policymaking group for conservative House lawmakers, went so far as to declare banning universal school meals a 2024 priority, suggesting that it would allow “widespread fraud.”

Michigan’s expansion of universal free school meals follows California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont — and represents a heartwarming investment in public education after years of defunding.

Categories Democrats, Fraud, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Michigan, Poverty

Houston: Most Schools Targeted for “Reform” Were Performing Well, with Overwhelmingly Poor Kids

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2023 //
5

The Houston Chronicle studied the demographics of the 29 schools that were the targets of the state takeover. Most had grades from the state of B. Even the school that precipitated the takeover—Wheatley High School—went from an F to a C. The takeover superintendent, Mike Miles, is a military man and a Broadie with no classroom experience. He was previously superintendent in Dallas, where he boasted of his lofty goals, but left after three years, having driven out a large number of teachers (he claims the only ones who left were those with low ratings). Once again, he has a plan, but his plan lacks any evidence behind it.

It’s now been two weeks since Superintendent Mike Miles announced his plans to overhaul 29 Houston Independent School District campuses under his “New Education System” plan. Now that HISD has released more details, the Houston Chronicle compiled and analyzed data on each of the campuses to get a clearer picture of the schools impacted by Miles’ plan.

Instead of focusing exclusively on struggling campuses, Miles’ New Education System plan mainly targets elementary and middle schools that “feed” into three struggling high schools in the district. Though the plan will reconstitute 29 total schools as a part of the system, a spokesperson for HISD clarified that only 28 traditional campuses will be impacted. The 29th school will be a temporary alternative education program which will be reformed and evaluated separately.

The schools chosen to participate in Miles’ “New Education System” are three high schools and their feeder schools.

The schools are largely low-income, Black and Latino schools

According to the Houston Chronicle’s analysis, each school included in Miles’ plan is either majority Black or majority Hispanic/Latino. The vast majority of students at each campus are also from low-income families.

At the schools impacted by Miles’ plan, the average percentage of economically disadvantaged students – which is measured by the amount of students who qualify for free and reduced price lunches – is higher than the average across HISD. In the 2021-2022 school year, the average percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the campuses in Miles’ plan was 98%, while the district average was 83%, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

New Education System schools demographics

Every school in Mike Miles’ New Education System plan has either a majority Black or majority Latino student population, and most students at the schools are from low-income families, according to data from the 2021-2022.

Most of the schools are 90-95% Black.

Most schools are already performing well

In terms of accountability ratings, many of the schools targeted in Miles’ overhaul have not underperformed in recent years. In 2022, the majority of schools included in the plan received “A” or “B” ratings, and only five of the schools were given a “Not Rated” label under SB 1365 – which exempted schools from ratings that would have received a “D” or “F” last year.

Though the three high schools at the heart of the Miles’ plan – Kashmere, North Forest and Wheatley – have had three of the five highest failure rates in the district, North Forest and Wheatley both received passing ratings in 2022.

Additionally, Miles’ plan includes four campuses that are unconnected to the three struggling high schools. These campuses include Highland Heights Elementary and Henry Middle, which also have some of the worst failure rates in the district, and Sugar Grove Academy and Marshall Elementary, which both received passing ratings in 2022 but have struggled in prior years.

So, at the point of takeover, the most troubled schools in HISD were on an upswing, making progress under the leadership of an experienced educator (who was quickly hired by Prince George’s County in Maryland). And now they are led by a Broadie who failed to make a difference in Dallas.

It would not be a stretch to believe that Governor Abbott, a mean and vindictive man—is punishing Houston for not voting for him.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Poverty, Race, Texas

Peter Greene: What Vouchers Will Do to West Virginia

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2023 //
4

Peter Greene looks into the Koch-funded voucher lobby in West Virginia and finds a fairly accurate portrayal of the dystopian future that lies ahead.

First, he details the background of the leaders of the voucher lobby. All have long-time connections to rightwing causes. Most were hired to push West Virginia’s expansive voucher plan, which passed in 2021.

If ever there was a state that needs a strong public school system, it’s West Virginia. But with big Koch money, the Koch puppets will make that impossible.

Instead of good public schools, West Virginians will have the “freedom” to find a good education on their own!

After identifying the staff and board, Greene writes:

So we’ve got the picture now– Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy (which belongs to the State Policy Network) is a Koch organization.

Cardinal Institute is all for the usual Koch version of liberty. They are pushing a West Virginia Miracle, and the four pillars are “Economic Freedom, Labor Freedom, Education Freedom, and Montani Semper Liberi – a culture of freedom.” They would like to promote “limited government, economic freedom, and personal responsibility.” They’ve got a podcast– “Forgotten America.” And they promise a “new paradigm”–

An “island” of poverty in the wealthiest country the world, West Virginia’s brighter future depends on a new paradigm – a new way of looking at the world with new ideas and a philosophy built on innovation, human flourishing, and a recognition that freedom is the greatest alleviator of poverty the world has ever seen. Ours is a philosophy built on the entrepreneur, the tinkerer in the garage, and the idea that small government means more room for people to create and build their own futures.

It’s a curious pitch in a state that is not exactly known for government overreach. West Virginia is a state with a history of labor struggles and a history of state government that exerts its power mostly to aid guys like Charles Koch. Regular people have always had plenty of room in this state that is renowned for its poverty— worst health, worst education levels, worst employment, and geography that makes it hard for basic infrastructure like roads and water and electricity and internet to reach some citizens. (And at least one community gutted by the departure of its WVU college campus–but hey, they’re free now.) It’s hard to imagine that any of these problems would be solved by less government, but libertarians gotta libertarian.

So what does Ballangee say about Mount Everest?

In his Education Next piece, Ballangee comes close to honesty about the larger goals of his particular arm of the school voucher movement. 

There is a common misconception among education reform advocates that passing universal choice legislation is akin to summiting Mount Everest. Upon universal choice’s enactment into law, it is done. Time to exhale and pop the champagne, for the mountain has been scaled.

In other words, voucher laws are not the end game. Simply making a voucher program available is not enough.

Next, the program has to be pushed and promoted. There will be a urge, then a steady growth “as families become aware of the program and hear from neighbors, fellow church attendees, and other connections about their new options” (just in case you had doubts about voucher ties to religion). Nut awareness must be built and PR must be provided to popularize the program.

Failure for an education choice program does not often come in the form of mistakes, fraud, or incompetence. More frequently, the problems are apathy and ignorance.

I don’t know. There’s an awful lot of fraud and incompetence in the school choice world. Nor am I sure how the lack of interest in a choice program is not the same thing as a lack of market demand. But of course modern marketing means creating a demand for your product. So, Ballangee asserts, somebody will need to work on that.

Someone will also need to build/attract a supply of educational “providers.” “Help private schools sign up,” he says, skipping over the question of why a successful private school would want to sign up. Somebody has to reach out to edupreneurs and get them signed up, too. Basically, be an education broker.

Now that choicers need to spend less time lobbying legislators, “the nexus of a successful program [he means a privatizing program, not an educational program] will shift somewhat from legislative considerations, lobbying, and bill design towards family outreach and relationship cultivation, specific government agency relationships, and broad marketing campaigns.”

Also, you’ll have to prepare for those “legions of entities” looking to “besmirch” the program (public education establishment, unions, union-friendly media). 

And this–

You have to figure out how – not if – to help the families about to embark on this journey for the first time…

You must figure out how to manage each “case” not only for the sake of the family and child but also for the overall health of the program.

There will be grandparents who have never used a computer now asked to upload a birth certificate on their grandchild’s behalf. There will be parents with limited education who know only one thing when it comes to navigating this fresh bureaucratic concoction: “my child needs something different.” Be sympathetic, but, more importantly, develop competence.

Learn the law and accompanying statutes backwards and forwards or find someone who does. You must have a path or contact for families to use. “I don’t know the answer, but I know someone who might” will become one of the most useful phrases in your reform handbook.

In short, Ballengee is outlining all the new business opportunities available on the mountaintop voucher peak. The only one he left out was the booming business in K-12 education loans for all those parents for whom state’s voucher won’t cover the cost of their education provider. Not only will government stop providing public education, but there are many opportunities to make a buck or ten in the newly free and unregulated marketplace of education stuff.

The Koch mountaintop

Because here’s what “freedom” means on Koch mountain– you are free to try to get to the top if you can, and I am free to ignore any of your problems (unless you pay me to help you), because the dream remains a world in which I have no responsibility to my fellow travelers on the earth (and certainly don’t have to pay taxes to provide services for Those People). 

Ballangee isn’t going to have any discussion of how well vouchers work as far as education goes (hint: not very well). But that’s okay, because, as he says, “education choice is good and a moral necessity.” I’m of the opinion that guaranteeing each child a decent education is the moral necessity, and, as always, I question the assumption that “education choice” must somehow involve the free market, one of the great unexamined assumptions of the modern choicer movement. Are choice and freedom important values in life? Damn right they are–which is why we as a society bear a responsibility for getting every child an education that will help them freely access more choices.

In the end, Ballengee’s mountain is one that Ayn Rand would probably approve of.

Though the last few steps up the mountain are the steepest and most difficult, they are also closest to what we are looking for when we embark on our journey: helping children find their own path to their own personal summit.

In other words, I’ve got my summit, Jack. Go find your own. 

“Helping” I suppose could mean choice advocates just helping out of the goodness of their hearts (though their hearts, bless them, don’t know much about actual education). But I suspect that help will be provided, for a price (or a cut of your voucher), to those who can find it and access it while navigating a sprawling unregulated complicated marketplace. It’s funny, because another thing we could do is collect all the experts in delivering education under one roof, where they’d be easy to find. And we could pay them with public tax dollars, and recruit and hire them with the understanding that they are there to help students climb their own personal mountain. But then some of us would have to pay taxes to fund it, and they might not be willing to make it all about christianist ideas. 

So instead, Koch-trained folks imagine a mountain, an Everest. By the way, do you know what Everest looks like these days? It’s a crowded mess of wealthy, resource-rich tourists who are hiring someone else to guide them. Well, that’s Everest.

The peak of the school voucher mountain looks a lot like wealthy, well-resourced folks looking down at the folks struggling on the slopes of other mountains and saying, “Well, don’t they look free. I wonder if they’ll make it.”

Categories Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Koch Brothers, Poverty, Privatization, Propaganda, West Virginia

Sam Chaltain: A Fresh Look at the Finnish Miracle

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2023 //
58

This may be the best article about education that you will read all year. It is as good an explanation as you will find of “the Finnish miracle.”

As Chaltain explains, the success of the schools is only one part of the picture. For the sixth year in a row, Finland has been named “the happiest country in the world,” based on these metrics: “healthy life expectancy, GDP per capita, social support, low corruption, generosity in a community where people look after each other and freedom to make key life decisions.”

The secret to happiness: “Taking a holistic view of the well-being of all the components of a society and its members makes for better life evaluations and happier countries.”

Sam Chaltain writes:

I spent last week in Finland, the small Scandinavian country that, for educators, has become a Mecca of sorts. And while I was there, a surprising thing happened:

I came for the schools.

I stayed for the library.

It’s hard not to be aware of the schools, which have experienced a dramatic metamorphosis over the past half-century.

For much of the early 20th century, Finland was agrarian and underdeveloped, with a GDP per capita trailing other Nordic countries by 30 to 40 percent in 1900. But in 1917, Finland declared its independence from Russia, and insisted that women be heavily represented in its first parliament.

As a result, the new nation prioritized a whole slate of policies that have helped support the development over time of a society that values and protects children. Free preschool programs enroll 98 percent of children in the country. Compulsory education begins at the age of seven, and after nine years of comprehensive schooling, during which there is no tracking by ability, students choose whether to enroll in an academic or a vocational high school. The graduation rate is nearly 95 percent.

Finland’s deep investments in the welfare of all people impact every aspect of public life. “It seems to me that people in Finland are more secure and less anxious than Americans because there is a threshold below which they won’t fall,” said Linda Cook, a political scientist at Brown University who has studied European welfare states. “Even if they face unemployment or illness, Finns will have some payments from the state, public health care and education.”

On our tour of schools in Helsinki and Turku (the current and former capitals), we saw evidence of both the “Finnish Miracle,” and features far less miraculous.

In every location, the atmosphere in the rooms and hallways were marked by an orderly, active hum, the kind that emerges only when everyone knows one’s role, responsibility and contribution. Classes are just four or five hours a day, and as many as one-third of the courses Finnish students take are non-academic.

Lest a visitor decide that any one of these solutions would solve their country’s own problems, our host for the week — Ari Koski of Turku University — warned us that “a Finnish system doesn’t work in any school outside Finland. Everything influences everything else — and if you take one piece out, it doesn’t work anymore.”

Of those influences, Koski believes Finland’s teacher preparation program is the most important. Only eight universities are permitted to prepare teachers, and admission to these programs is highly competitive: less than one of every ten applicants is accepted.

You can imagine my surprise, then, when almost every classroom lesson I observed was . . . OK. As one of my traveling colleagues said, “I feel like I’ve seen this movie before.” And that’s because we have seen it before — teacher-driven, content-heavy, “sit and get” instruction.

Where’s the miracle in that?

Then I remembered that the goal of the Finnish system is equity — as in, choose any school, anywhere, and it will be of a certain quality — and that they have actually achieved it.

In other words, Finland’s goal is not to spark the creation of spectacular schools — it’s to ensure an entire country of good ones.

Its miracle, therefore, flows from its integration, not its innovation.

Whereas its schools may not be hotbeds of innovative teaching, the newest public library in its capital city may be the most spectacular model for the future of learning that I have ever seen.

It’s known simply as Oodi. It opened in 2018 — a gift to the Finnish people to honor a century of independence. And it is a beautiful, vibrant, multigenerational civic hub for creativity and connection.

“Oodi is what you want it to be,” explains its website. “Meet friends, search for information, immerse yourself in a book or work. Create something new in a studio or an Urban Workshop — seven days a week, from early in the morning till late in the evening.

“Oodi is a meeting place, a house of reading and a diverse urban experience. Oodi provides its visitors with knowledge, new skills and stories, and is an easy place to access for learning, relaxation and work.”

It is, in other words, the ideal “school” of the future — a living meeting place of discovery that is open to all….

Please open the link and read the rest of this wonderful post. The secret of Finland’s success is not its schools; nor even its wonderful new library. It’s the nation’s determination to ensure that everyone does well.

Compare the Finnish approach to what is happening here:

In education: competition, standardization, winners and losers, privatization, state-funded religious schools, charters and vouchers; schools without nurses. The search for silver bullets, innovation, miracles.

In society: high income inequality, high wealth inequality, many people in poverty, many people without healthcare, many homeless people.

What are our politicians talking about: critical race theory, drag queens, trans kids, book banning, censorship, making people work for any government assistance.

Do you see a pattern here?

Categories Creativity, Education Reform, Equity, Freedom, Funding, International, Joy, Poverty

Michael Hiltzik: The Debt Ceiling Deal: GOP Protects the Rich, Punishes the Poor

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2023 //
3

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times explains how Republicans agreed to the increase in the debt ceiling: by cutting aid to the neediest. He wrote: The cruelty is the point.

No one should be surprised that the resolution of our most moronic fiscal policy, the federal debt ceiling, involved our stupidest social policy, work requirements for assistance programs.

But that appears to be the case. In negotiations between the Biden White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s Republican caucus, one of the last sticking points was whether, and by how much, to tighten work requirements for food stamps and welfare.

In coming days, as Congress moves toward votes on the deal, political commentators will thoroughly masticate the question of whether Biden or McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) prevailed in this dealmaking and which of them will be hurt or harmed politically by the outcome.

Democrats right now are willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work.

— Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) tells a giant lie about the debt ceiling negotiations

That’s not a very interesting parlor game. (Personally, I’d go with the judgment of Timothy Noah of the New Republic, who thinks Biden emerges as the political victor and McCarthy’s days as speaker are numbered, thanks to the choler of his far right wing.)

More important is what the deal says about the principles of both camps. The granular details of the agreement were still murky Sunday, and it could still collapse because of objections from congressional Republicans or Democrats.

The deal, as reported, freezes discretionary federal spending — that is, most of the programs for which Americans depend on the federal government — at current levels for the next two years, with increases lower than inflation. That means an effective budget cut, relative to inflation. In return, the debt ceiling is suspended for two years.

But Biden managed to preserve the accomplishments of his presidency thus far from the GOP’s knives. He fended off their efforts to torpedo the support for renewable energy in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, their harshest proposed budget cuts, the rollback of student debt relief, and repeal of his budget increase for the Internal Revenue Service.

(Reports say that $10 billion will be shaved off the $80-billion 10-year IRS budget increase, but the money can be redirected to other programs.)

Biden rejected Republican demands to impose work requirements on Medicaid, but allowed some tightening of the rules for food stamps — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, which is what’s left of traditional welfare.

Make no mistake: No rich American will be harmed even a bit by this deal. Some may even be advantaged, if the carve-out from the IRS budget comes from the agency’s enforcement efforts; that would help the rich, who are the nation’s worst tax cheats.

The most vulnerable Americans, however, will bear the brunt of the deal points. Let’s take a look.

Start with work requirements. As I’ve reported ad infinitum over the years, work requirements on safety net programs accomplish nothing in terms of pushing their beneficiaries into the job market.

They are, however, very effective at throwing people off those programs; that’s what happened in Arkansas , where 17,000 people lost Medicaid benefits in 2019 after only six months of a limited rollout of work rules. A federal judge then blocked the changes.

The debt ceiling deal will tighten work requirements for SNAP by requiring able-bodied, childless low-income adults younger than 55 to work 20 hours a week or be engaged in job training or job searches. If they don’t meet that standard, their SNAP benefits end after three months. Current law applies to those adults only up to the age of 49. The change will expire in 2030.

This rule will do virtually nothing to reduce federal spending, which Republicans say has been the whole point of holding the debt ceiling hostage. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in April that the change would reduce federal spending by $11 billion over 10 years, or $1.1 billion a year.

By my calculation, that comes to 17 thousandths of a percent of the federal budget, which this year is $6.4 trillion.

If it’s scarcely a rounding error in federal accounts, however, it’s critically important to the recipients of food aid. The CBO estimated that about 275,000 people would lose benefits each month because they failed to meet the requirement.

Biden’s negotiators did get the Republicans to waive SNAP rules for veterans and the homeless, which will probably lower that figure and limit the reduction of federal spending.

Work requirements for safety net programs have been a Republican hobby horse for decades. It’s based on the Republican image of low-income Americans as layabouts and grifters — the “undeserving poor.”

Sure enough, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), one of McCarthy’s debt-ceiling negotiators, couldn’t resist slandering this vulnerable population during the talks. “Democrats right now are willing to default on the debt so they can continue making welfare payments for people that are refusing to work,” he said during a break.

Of course, it was Republicans who showed willingness to default on the federal debt. Nor is there a smidgen of evidence that any sizable percentage of this target population is “refusing to work.”

The vast majority of SNAP recipients already work, but they’re in low-paying jobs that are so unstable that they often drift in and out of employment. According to the Census Bureau, 79% of all SNAP families include at least one worker, as do nearly 84% of married couples on SNAP.

In other words, the GOP insistence on work requirements is nothing but the party’s typical performative malevolence toward the poor. If they really cared about getting SNAP recipients into the job market, they’d fund job training programs and infrastructure projects. They never do.

In any case, the only cohort of beneficiaries that tends to move into the job market at all are younger recipients — not those in their 50s. All that work requirements accomplish is to erect bureaucratic barriers to enrollment in the safety net. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The work rules for TANF are managed somewhat differently — they’re directed at the states administering the program, which have been required to ensure that a certain percentage of beneficiaries are working or looking for work. How the debt ceiling deal applies to that program is unclear.

In the next week or so, before June 5 — the putative date at which the Treasury Department says the government runs out of money to pay its bills without a debt ceiling increase and thus flirts with an unprecedented default — Biden and McCarthy will hit the hustings to claim victory.

But there’s really only one way to think about the exercise we’ve just gone through. It was a supreme waste of time.

Republicans showed they were willing to crash the U.S. economy to make some bog-standard complaints about the federal deficit, most of which they created themselves through the 2017 tax cuts they enacted for the wealthy. Their initial negotiating stance was so extreme that they must have known it could never gain Democratic votes in the House or pass the Democratic Senate.

The Democrats held reasonably firm. They agreed to some modest budget constraints for two years, moved the next debt ceiling cabaret off to beyond the next election, and saved millions of Americans from serious economic pain.

As I’ve written before, if Republicans were really serious about restraining federal spending, they wouldn’t have voted for the tax cuts and budget increases that that contribute to the deficit.

Instead, they said the only way to control spending is to refuse to pay the bills they ran up, by refusing to increase the debt ceiling. They lied, and every thinking American knows they lied. So tell me, why did we go through this again?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Lies, Poverty, Republicans
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