Yesterday it was Eli Broad, the Los Angeles billionaire, who turned against Betsy DeVos.
Today, it is Arthur Rock, a Silicon Valley billionaire who is one of the biggest supporters of Teach for America.
They are troubled by DeVos, maybe because she is a religious zealot, maybe because vouchers might force them to compete, maybe because her brand of reform taints theirs.
Whatever it is, the reformers are embarrassed to find that they are in the same camp with Trump, whose name is anathema in California.
But, hey, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arthur Rock, and the Walton family paved the way for DeVos with their advocacy of school choice. She is just taking it to the next step.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The “rats leaving a sinking ship” cliche seems appropriate here. Only in this case, the fleeing rats are hoping the public won’t recognize that the rats left behind are one and the same as them.
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No Rats Left Behind (NRLB)
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Is that Trump’s new education policy
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I don’t know if this is “rats leaving a sinking ship” or simply more of the Susan Collins “I will pretend not to support DeVos now that she is guaranteed to be approved and my non-support won’t stop her.”
Why is Eli Broad coming out NOW? While a few reform organizations, to their credit, opposed DeVos early on, these Johnny Come Lately “now that she’s guaranteed a victory I will pretend to oppose her” comments sure sound like hypocrites.
Where was Eli Broad for the past month? Pretending he was too busy to pay attention to what Betsy DeVos stands for and just happened to tune in once she was approved by the committee?
Broad seems as cowardly as Susan Collins. Only he’s scared that public school parents are witnessing what the “reform” movement is all about with Eli Broad-funded charter operator Eva Moskowitz loudly proclaiming how great DeVos will be.
Suddenly, Broad realizes the wool is being pulled off the eyes of these parents. All his pretense that the “reform” movement has not always been about what Betsy DeVos wants is being revealed. His PR machine is good, but not good enough to convince Los Angeles voters that Donald Trump wants to help poor kids. But DeVos is still terrific for Broad in terms of handing over everything to privatizers while forbidding any oversight but the “free market”! So he remained quiet until she was guaranteed to be approved and now, like Collins, can pretend he doesn’t want her. He wants to have his cake and eat it too.
Maybe this will all do some good and DeVos is voted down. But if she is not, hearing these reformer billionaires’ sudden epiphany that DeVos isn’t good for schools now that she is guaranteed to be approved sure seems as phony as a three-dollar bill.
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^^By the way, maybe I have missed it but I haven’t seen any of the usual pro-reform suspects who usually post on this blog commenting about DeVos. Did they get their marching orders to support her or remain quiet? Are they just too embarrassed to acknowledge that the same education “reformers” they kept insisting always had the best interests of the poor children in mind — no matter how many incidents of unethical behavior and got-to-go lists were revealed – are heartily embracing Betsy DeVos and working so very hard to make sure she oversee all schools in the manner she believes is proper according to her very unique right wing philosophy?
Have they posted here? Will they show up again hoping we can all embrace the alternative fact that the people embracing Betsy DeVos did it for the “kids” and not for themselves?
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Thank you for tracking this.
Interesting silences from other billionaires who are heavily invested in charter chains, feeding Teach for America, online education, corporate education, and the international market for educational products and services.
I imagine some of the billionaires have permanent DC lobbyists and ready-to use play-books for the next Secretary of Education, deputies, and program managers.
Vouchers are eagerly awaited by Pearson, Bridge International and other low-cost for-profit outfits who, according to Wired Magazine, may bring back to the US the low-cost packaged programs, management schemes, and “efficiency” analytics being developed for Africa, India, Pakistan and other countries. Instructional delivery facilitated by availability of iPhones. variants of ipads, and mobile apps.
See https://www.wired.com/2016/04/apec-schools/
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Diane: How about sending these billionaires copies of your books, if you haven’t already?
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Disagree. Only if they pay for them. No freebies for the oppressors!
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Gregb: There is striking when the iron is hot?
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I fundamentally disagree with rich folks getting anything for free. When I lived in L.A., I was always annoyed at concerts when the best seats were reserved for industry types who didn’t have to pay (unless, of course, my friends got me in with them on one of those seats; forgive, I’m weak).
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I would hand deliver the books but I feel sure they would not read them.
If anyone can provide an introduction to Broad or Rock, let me know.
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They’d sell the books to their mothers. Rephormers are, at every opportunity… exploiters. Nothing is sacrosanct.
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When I went to visit my daughter in Seattle a couple of years back I tried to hand deliver a copy of Comte-Sponville’s “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” and a few of my short writings to Billy the Gates but the private security force dude wouldn’t even let me in the building to give it to secretary to give to him. He said I could mail it. He wouldn’t take it. Screw em. So I got into the part of the building that is a paean to Billy and Melinda, kind of like a museum display area and proceeded to put my writings all over the education part.
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Diane: Maybe call for a meeting or something?
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I agree with the reformers that our public schools need to be shaken up. But not in the way they’re being shaken up now. The problem isn’t lazy teachers; it’s the embrace of ignorance-breeding educational philosophy –i.e. the idea that skills should take precedence over knowledge. Even as our country crashes due to an ignorant populace, the Education World’s war on knowledge transmission moves forward. The Next Generation Science Standards disparage lecture and reduce the importance of fact learning in lieu of “inquiry” (read: allow kids to struggle with texts and wallow in confusion). The same will soon happen with history classes. This breeding of ignorance might be worth it if these novel curricula did indeed produce sharp skills, but they don’t. Reading, writing and thinking ability depends on reserves of knowledge embedded in long-term memory. Our embrace of these foolish ideas about education may well lead the the demise of our democracy. When will the education schools wake up?
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Already happening in history classes. New AP history curricula are very skills driven.
Loved your post and couldn’t improve on it.
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I’m with Steve: “the idea that skills should take precedence over knowledge” and “Our embrace of these foolish ideas about education may well lead the the demise of our democracy” is sooooooooo on target! We need to put your name up for nomination when Dems can name Sec. of Ed., if it’s still in existence then.
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Ponderosa, Steve B, GregB While I appreciate your notes GREATLY, I have to say that the either/or applied to knowledge or skills or inquiry is both polemical and inadequate. It’s polemical and inadequate because these are not exclusive choices but rather all are needed to educate a child to be a learned adult. For instance, knowledge without a child’s interest and inquiry is “forced” and usually ends up in rote conceptualism; whereas child-motivated inquiry brings new insights into their developmental arena of thought- briefly they more easily make it their own. Further, knowledge without skills, as in a science or field knowledge, is usually devoid of anything close to excellence of application.
Of course (as you suggested) without students being led properly or having conditions set by curricula handled in turn by a wise teacher, the meaning of inquiry, satisfactory understanding, knowledge accumulation, and skills cannot develop in the student in a way that truly inspires them to keep on learning. And students’ muddling through in confusion is certainly not what any good teaching is about.
If educational philosophy is in need of a good cognitional theory, then let’s get one, but one that is comprehensive enough to take into consideration the whole gamut of human inquiry-to-knowledge, to the self-correction process, and on to deliberation and decisions about “what am I to do?” and then back to inquiry again. But I do appreciate your intentions here.
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Catherine, I’m wondering where you’re coming from. Are you an education school professor? Have you taught in K-12 schools?
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ponderosa. Both, and some adult education. My long term interest is philosophy–foundations:, cognitional theory, and epistemology.
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I am with you ponderosa.
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Catherine,
You write:
“knowledge without a child’s interest and inquiry is “forced” and usually ends up in rote conceptualism”
Theory. My experience teaching contradicts it. My experience as a learner contradicts it. When I start a history unit, most kids have no pre-existing interest in it. But a few choice facts pique their interest and then I build their knowledge base on that subject, and by the end they’ve DEVELOPED an interest. This is what teaching should do: develop interests, not cultivate the paltry handful of pre-existing interests that a student brings to the classroom. The backbone of my teaching is lecture –not inquiry –which many students tell me is what distinguishes me from other teachers and why they enjoy my class. I tell them stories. I use lots of visuals (many hand-drawn and projected on the white board). I hand-make graphics that are designed to teach the core ideas with ultra-lucidity. I make it possible for even the lowest students to understand which is why special ed students are often ardent fans. Imagine these kids in an “inquiry” classroom: marooned with an opaque text or long set of directions at a table. Nothing ever becomes intelligible to them. Their brains go starving, though allegedly this struggle is building brainpower. Quickly they start hating the class, they misbehave or just suffer, sunk in confusion. They finish the year with only the foggiest notions of history. The only illuminated spots in the year were those moments the teacher took to the whiteboard and explained things.
Think about your own learning experience: if you were starting to learn about, say, the history of Manchuria, would you prefer a series of excellent, visually-intensive lectures by a live human, or “inquiry” exercises? I think “inquiry” is great for graduate students; not for K-12. Talk about developmentally inappropriate.
I urge you to read E.D. Hirsch’s latest great book, “Why Knowledge Matters”. He synthesizes a lot of recent cognitive science and debunks a lot of the orthodox child development theory –e.g. much of Piaget. I also recommend Michael Oakeschott’s “The Voice of Liberal Learning” –he also thinks school is an initiation into a realm of ideas that are, by definition, alien to a child’s ordinary experience and interests. That’s a good thing: we must bring them outside their narrow little sphere.
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ponderosa: Again, it’s not one or the other. One without the other is empty. If I read you rightly, you are doing exactly what I was talking about (most teachers I have experienced do). I have copied a paragraph of your note below and made bold where “student inquiry” comes in, though you express it differently in your note.
“But a few choice facts pique their interest and then I build their knowledge base on that subject, and by the end they’ve DEVELOPED an interest. This is what teaching should do: develop interests, not cultivate the paltry handful of pre-existing interests that a student brings to the classroom. The backbone of my teaching is lecture –not inquiry –which many students tell me is what distinguishes me from other teachers and why they enjoy my class.**I tell them stories. I use lots of visuals **”
I would say that the backbone of your teaching is method–the right one–doing a dance, so to speak, between specific information and student inquiry.. Inquiry is a more articulate “wondering,” and wondering is equivalent to “interest.” And information without student wonder/interest/inquiry is a dead thing. Also, memory and rote learning itself has a place in long-term learning, but can only come alive in a person when and if they reconsider it (make inquiry about it in self-reflection) when they are ready to really understand its meaning.
Also, I’ve read Hirsch and my view is that he leans towards this: he sets up a straw man that is the total extreme off-the-rails of where “inquiry” theory is coming from and then broad-brushes everyone who understands “inspiring students to inquire” by “piquing their interest” with the extreme (and wrong) version of that theoretical movement. (I read his earlier book a long time ago, but will go back and see if I can find him in my stacks).
My point is that lecture alone–as if the children weren’t even there or in need of being “piqued”–can similarly be made into an extreme version, and where rote memorizing is key, and then everyone on Hirsch’s side can be broad-brushed (again, wrongly).
Human consciousness, its learning, and its spontaneous ability to self-correct, is dynamic. But most teachers know when they are (and aren’t) getting the across the knowledge. If the class sits there bored out of their skull and you keep on lecturing, then you lack method, and have the extreme; and then we can wrongly broad-brush what Hirsch is about (as example).
And of course there are many other things going on in students’ minds and hearts while you are teaching specific content that go to their character, their self-other evaluation, their relating to their home-life (especially with stories), their psychological outlook, their well-being in the world. Those are not on the test but, as you well-know as a teacher, they go forward anyway, to one degree or another, at their own rate, and differently for different children. But that’s another story. I don’t remember if Hirsch addresses these. But it’s THAT aspect of education that goes missing or becomes distorted when someone is “really smart,” who can get a good job and make lots of money–and still be a moral degenerate.
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Catherine,
I respect your smarts, but I have lost my patience with this kind of high-falutin’ sounding, obfuscating education school theory. The simple truth is that kids are born with brains that are hungry for knowledge and are built for transferring knowledge into memory banks for future use, but they are not born with the knowledge itself. That’s where schools come in. Most of intelligence is memory (interacting with the hardware of the brain). Imagination is memory (a quote from James Joyce). To make a computer smarter, you give it more memory. Let’s stop pretending that memorized knowledge is not the heart of education. Linguistic competence is memory. All true “skill” is know-how –i.e. memorized procedures. Thus ed school bias against “rote learning” is ridiculous. It’s not complicated: teachers need to fill memory banks with good stuff. Now, of course this can be done badly or well. There are good lectures and bad lectures. Good books and bad books. There is trivial knowledge and generative knowledge. But the goal remains to give kids what they lack: knowledge.
We’re inflicting pseudo-education on kids. We’re giving them dismal chores to do with their brains in the erroneous assumption that the brain is like a muscle that grows through exercise. In fact the brain is a skinny kid that grows through eating. We’re starving their brains, while demanding hard labor from them. It’s awful.
I really hope you’ll read E.D. Hirsch’s latest book, “Why Knowledge Matters”. His thinking has changed and deepened over the decades. He expresses what I’ve said here much more convincingly than I can.
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ponderosa:
What all of us do from the beginning, including children, is wonder which then becomes more fully formed into “questioning.” That’s what I mean by “inquiry.” It’s a spontaneous act that underpins “interest.” Further, no one has to tell a baby to wonder–it just comes with being human. Unless that’s not a fact, we can start there. So to leave inquiry out of our understanding of education is to ignore an essential part of the evidence for learning theory–I hope you see the irony there–to leave out the fact that learning theory is a proposed answer to the prior question: What is human learning? or How do human beings learn?
In that sense, the theory is self-relating. We can find the evidence for it in ourselves and in the ongoing functions of our minds as we are all “interested” in whatever x we are interested in. From there, we do all our learning and storing of memory (as you regard in your note). Memory, then, is content processe as a response to our prior questioning and the insights that flow from it from first our desiring to understand.
From what you say, however, (“I have lost my patience with this kind of high-falutin’ sounding, obfuscating education school theory”), when you get over your present aggravation, pay close attention, not to a theory that includes inquiry, but to your own mind’s concrete functioning as you go about the thinking that you obviously do, and particularly about having an “aha” experience–that’s the evidence–and then watch your students’ faces when they are “in the zone” of their openness and paying attention to what you are saying in your lecture (that’s being open to understanding/inquiring). Their knowing comes as and after they are processing. Questions don’t happen in an intellectual vacuum and those aha-experiences don’t happen out of thin air. That is, behind every “aha” insight is a prior state of openness/wonder/questioning/ inquiry.
Finally, an awful lot of educational theory that I have seen, including Hirsch’s work, is rooted in an OVERSIGHT of the concrete functioning of the human mind described briefly above–the rather obvious evidence–human wonder, aka inquiry followed by insights and the satisfaction of having understood. Without first wondering, and regardless of its relationship to the brain, there is no memory to be had. (I haven’t seen Hirsch’s more recent work.)
I’m sorry if I annoyed you–I AM an unapologetic theoretician. I would hope that you would afford me and my chosen work as a profession the respect I offer you as a teacher–and I do.
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Catherine, I’m sorry for the testy tone of my last response.
I think I grasp what you’re saying here about being open to new learning. I’m not sure I agree that this prior questioning or desiring to understand is always a precondition for fruitful learning. I never wondered about how a cell functioned before Mrs. Sullivan, my 7th grade science teacher, told me all about it. There was no wondering. But there was enjoyment of her lucid exposition, and the knowledge stuck, and I’m grateful for it, even though it’s never been especially useful to me. Except that it’s part of my fund of general knowledge that helps me make sense of certain texts and utterances.
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ponderosa: “I never wondered about how a cell functioned before Mrs. Sullivan, my 7th grade science teacher, told me all about it.” Nicely put.
I think the process is so natural and common, so familiar, and so dynamic and overlapping, we hardly recognize it as its occurring. If we are really inspired to learn, then more questions will emerge on their own.
I also think your statement about Mrs. Sullivan speaks to the intimacy of the teacher-student learning experience–when we have come to trust a teacher, we are easily prepared to believe and then to understand for ourselves–where we become most OPEN to that understanding experience and the new questions that follow. On the other hand, mere believing and trusting, that isn’t followed by our own understanding, can turn to naivete and can be an entrance to the distortion of that relationship. Their belief and trust in the teacher is not FOR that belief and trust, but rather for the experience of understanding–as you did about the cell.
]If I might speculate, that personal intimacy of the teacher-student experience, the entire trust/belief/ learning-mentoring experience, is what is overlooked in the movement of ideas that come with an over-dependence on technology, and the potential elimination of the teacher, in the early years of education. What will “knowledge” be without that experience and what comes from it in the more comprehensive version of human learning and development? Would you care about the cell if you were pointed to a book to read about it if you weren’t already inspired by a living teacher? It’s okay for adults who can learn from the more remote experience of reading. But what did it take to get to that point? What of human children as children involved in the learning experience?
So I think a misunderstanding of the need to understand how inquiry AND its relationship to knowledge accumulation actually work, especially in the early years, is of critical import, to say the least.
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I may be ignorant but how do you separate skills and knowledge? To me they are intertwined.
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Skills=knowing how
Knowledge=knowing what
E.g., you can know how to read without knowing anything about the world
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“The problem isn’t lazy teachers; it’s the embrace of ignorance-breeding educational philosophy –i.e. the idea that skills should take precedence over knowledge.”
PSYCHOLOGY TODAY just said the same thing.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/everybody-is-stupid-except-you/201702/what-does-betsy-devos-think-about-evidence-based
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Nate Kornell, Ph.D. , PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
“There is another principle, though, that virtually all educators
agree on: Whenever possible, educational reform should be
done based on evidence. DeVos does not seem to agree. I make
this claim based on three pieces of evidence.
” … ”
“In short, Neurocore makes incredible claims with no evidence
behind them. It is hard to see how someone could believe in
evidence and believe in Neurocore at the same time.”
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You’re saying we should simply feed kids facts and not have students explore and experiment? You sound like a representative for a textbook company. Your logic is what is so often used by politicians and “administrators” – applying adult logic to children’s learning. We knnow better.
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Yes, feed them facts about how head injuries can cause permanent brain damage, about how authoritarian governments rise and fall, how Muslims are a whole lot more than terrorists, how wonderful salmon are, how greenhouse gas traps heat, how evolution works, how to tell the volume of a cylinder, how Congress works, what the federal agencies do and why they’re useful and not demonic, how the eight hour day was achieved, how unions made the middle class, how economics works, etc. etc. etc. We cannot leave the transmission of these and many other facts to chance, which is what we’re doing now with Common Core and the new NGSS and history standards. We’re trying to make kids act like experts prematurely. Inquiry and experimentation is only fruitful when it builds on a deep foundation of factual knowledge. Cognitive science shows this to be true. At the elementary level, our job is to provide the elements, not have kids ape PhDs.
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WCT: I think a lot of skills are built-in to our brains and therefore don’t need to be (and cannot) be taught. Take analysis. If you tell someone about the history of several autocrats, that person will then be able to analyze common factors in the rise of those autocrats. You don’t need to teach analysis per se. It’s just something our brains can do given the relevant knowledge. Teachers err in thinking they can provide the skill. All they can to is provide the knowledge and then elicit the skill. The skills are built-in; knowledge expands the scope of these congenital skills.
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Enough already! 98% of us here agree with you and fully support your diatribe.
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If DeVos shifts money to vouchers for private schools, they get less for charters and sales of ed tech to public schools?
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Those are the blessings of a free market.
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Ponderosa,
I could not agree more after teaching science for mor than a quarter century. It is as though kids crave actual substance after years of wallowing about in skills learning.
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My cousin’s son was so glad to transfer from a high-scoring public school to a Catholic school because he was now “actually learning things”. I gathered that Catholic school was more old school: i.e. it was actually about teaching, not having kids “do work”.
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“But, hey, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Arthur Rock, and the Walton family paved the way for DeVos with their advocacy of school choice. She is just taking it to the next step.”
So did Bill Clinton with his tax credits for anyone contributing $500,000 or more to a charter school (at a time JUST when Gulen was starting up his enterprises in the USA. WHAT a coincidence !!!!) and so did odious Obama, who is a prime enemy of public schools and public school educators. Let’s PLEASE add them to the list. How rotten this motley crew is! If you put enough holes in the dam with charters, then it will eventually break and give way to a deluge of strong ocean-like tidal waves of privatization with DeVos as the head Siren luring politicians towards the fatal rocks that will sink American democracy . . . .
How can the writer POSSIBLY omit Obama’s hateful name, when it comes to, of all things, public education????
Someone – anyone – please explain.
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You got it right, Norwegian Filmmaker! Thank you for naming the DFERS, too. I remember the Billaries’ and Obama’s part in this nightmare. They are on my list.
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Arne Duncan was a terrible puppet. It was no better under Obama. I guess the Democrats were more sneaky about the destruction of the public schools. The Republicans are just being out in the open. Nevertheless, the closing (and controlling) of the southern border with Mexico and the elimination of refugees is much more important for the country. I still prefer Trump to whatever Clinton was planning on doing. She would have brought in refugees by the thousands. I am also hoping, as I am sure most of you are too, that NPR will be defunded and dismantled. I also hope (as I am sure you do too) that UC Berkley loses all its federal funding for refusing to allow speakers freedom of speech. I think we all say no to the liberal, fascist violence. I think we all know now where the violence and intolerance is. It is firmly with the extreme left. We have to say no to these uneducated thugs on the Left!
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John Smith: You don’t agree with Reich, then, that the violence at Berkeley was instigated by outsiders? And “liberal fascist violence”? You are kidding, . . . right? And lastly, “de-fund NPR”? That lying group of moral degenerates who take oaths to the Constitution while shitting on it.
One thing you say is true: “I think we all know now where the violence and intolerance is.”
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Addendum to my note to John Smith: I am much more fearful of the destruction of democracy that comes from within-JS, is there a mirror handy?–than I have EVER been afraid of any immigrant.
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Maybe they can buy some votes against her.
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Ed reform was always headed straight to vouchers. These people are kidding themselves if they believe otherwise.
Eli Broad with his handwringing over “losing public education” makes me laugh. He set us on this path and now Trump is running with it, as anyone could have predicted.
How did they think this would turn out? They thought they could carefully control the exact parameters of privatization- the charters they approve of would flourish while the others would die? How was that supposed to happen? Magic market mechanisms?
The Masters of the Universe unleashed markets on public schools and now they’re upset because they can’t control the outcome. The rest of us will be stuck with the results of their reckless experiment.
He should be happy. Trump will pour money into opening charter schools. It’s public schools that will be harmed by ed reform. We’ll take the downside of their experiment.
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If DeVos expands for-profit charter networks with federal funding and then promotes those schools is the US Department of Education promoting one product over another?
Aren’t there rules about federal agencies promoting product?
I’m just trying to figure out how our new “school services provider” contract system will work.
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DeVos & Trump will not only promote more for-profit higher education scams & the inflated student loans but will personally profit from them while in office. Does anyone believe that DeVos will regulate the likes of Relay Graduate School of Education, https://dianeravitch.net/2012/07/08/a-very-bizarre-graduate-school-of-education/
or Western Governor’s http://www.wgu.edu/
And who can forget the Corinthian College scam that keeps on scamming? http://college.usatoday.com/2016/03/25/former-corinthian-colleges-to-pay-over-1b-for-defrauding-students/
I expect for-profit online teacher prep “schools” to pop up like Check Cashing sites all over the US.
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I read quite a bit on the ed reform side- their websites, etc. Should be interesting to watch the US Dep of Ed site. I bet it becomes another ed reform site- horror stories about public schools along with gushing endorsements of private schools and charters.
They’ll no longer be credible as an objective source, for anything.
Utter and complete capture. The US Dept of Ed may as well privatize.
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No one in the Trump Administration or among DeVos’ Congressional supporters have identified a single benefit or positive improvement they plan for public schools.
Incredibly, the US Department of Education now excludes public schools. Public school parents are not even considered important enough to appeal to- we’re simply omitted from discussion.
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Competition will force them to step up their game –that’s the positive improvement (in reformers’ unwise brains).
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Chiara, De Vos has finally triggered a wide-spread “immune response” to privatization. Auspicious. Also I think the far-from-miraculous track record of thousands of charters now enables us to stick up for public schools more credibly (for a long time public schools looked like ugly ducklings next to the shiny rising phoenix of charters). And scandal and corruption stories as starting to spread. So I do see signs for hope.
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That’s the good news about DeVos.
She clarifies the picture
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Anyone who thinks that Trump and DeVos can snap their fingers and transform USDE (or other administrative units) needs to remember that Congress has budget authority and the wheels of the budgetary process grind slowly and can alter wish-lists.
I thought it would be easy to look at the Obama budget and appropriations history, then guesstimate which programs were easy to cut (line items identified as discretionary) and programs less easy to eliminate (line items identified as mandatory). Not. Seems that the budget proposals for each fiscal year can include “new mandatory programs” conjured by the officials in charge of USDE, with some parts of each program also designated as discretionary.
I gave up trying to see how the budget as described with “justifications” matched up with the budget spreadsheets.
Here is the link if you want to know more. It begins with a discussion of the three year process of making a budget request including a justification for each line item (important for Congress), getting the budget request through appropriation committees, a final appropriation process, getting the funding in place, getting the funds out of the door, auditing and so forth.
You can download spreadsheets to see the history of funding for specific programs with the difference between “wish-lists” and actual appropriations.
According to this website, executive orders do not apply to budgets; only Congress has authority to act (or not) on the budget…or hold key operations together through “continuing resolutions” until the budget is approved.
https://ed.gov/about/overview/budget/process.html?src=rt
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How the Center for American Progress (CAP) brought American democracy to its knees.
CAP elected a government that colluded with Wall Street, the tech industry and discount retailing. Jaime Dimon, the Gates Foundation and Walmart were CAP donors.
Feeling rejected by both parties, some Americans joined Foster Freiss, in the evangelical movement, which was/is a source of Trump support. (Pages 96-99 of Hillbilly Elegy, describes how religion, misused, can mold desperate people.)
Russia planned and plans to exploit American polarization, which will be full-blown in the midterm elections, with the Republicans winning again.
CAP’s intransigent position in support of privatization of public schools drives a wedge in a party that is broken between two factions, one that serves the richest 0.1% and, the other, a party, working for the people.
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You’re saying the the pro-corporate CAP made the Democratic Party unlikable to working class voters, thus setting up Trump’s victory? Seems plausible. I’m waiting to hear a truly powerful, simple, penetrating message from the progressive wing. No wonk-ish laundry lists. Someone tell them that much of the electorate has the comprehension ability of a bright 4th grader.
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Pro-big pharma and hedge fund, Senator Corey Booker, was keynote speaker at last year’s CAP “Progressive Party”. He is being touted, by state Democratic parties as the future of the Democratic party. More Republicans are going to win.
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After the presidential election, on Jan. 13, CAP added its first V.P. of Faith and Progressive Policy. My take, CAP belatedly is trying to add to its margins of support while, at its core, it remains beholden to the richest 0.1%. If CAP won’t stop privatization of America’s most important common good-public education- it doesn’t belong in the Democratic party.
Is it a coincidence that Z-berg sent out Christmas greetings, for the first time this year and, Sandberg suggested he get info. for his burgeoning interest in politics, from CAP?
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“Secretary of Billionaires”(SOB)
(Department ‘a Free-market Theology (DAFT))
Gates wanted Arne
Race To The Top
Broad wanted Deasy
Rock wanted Kopp
Waltons want Evas
Creaming the crop
Billionaire divas’
Free-market flop
Betsy wants Betsy
Choice of the gop
Billionaire bets, see,
Never will stop
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