Sara Stevenson, librarian at the O. Henry Middle School in Texas, signed up to testify at 8 am in opposition to the Senate bill authorizing vouchers. She says she was the fifth person to sign up. She went to work and returned at 2 pm and waited until 8 pm to be called. She wrote an opinion piece in the Austin American-Statesman about the hearing. She maintained that people were called at random and it didn’t matter when she signed up.
Sara is already on the honor roll of the blog. She is a living example of the power of resistance, relentlessness, and readiness. The new Three Rs.
Politifact reviewed her claim and concluded that she was right.
The Texas State Senate loves vouchers, but the House of Representatives does not. The bill passed the Senate and went down to crushing defeat in the House.
From a reading of the Politifact report, it appears that the order was not very random. In fact, the order suggests that pro-voucher witnesses were called first, and that pro-voucher witnesses had a better chance to testify than those who opposed vouchers.
The lead witnesses, we found, included advocates such as a former Wisconsin gubernatorial aide and delegates from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Charles Koch and Goldwater institutes. Also, all but one of eight initial witnesses backed SB 3; Donna Corbin of Lubbock, president of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association, expressed opposition.
And how did Corbin land that spotlight? By phone, the association’s Lonnie Hollingsworth said Corbin wasn’t an invited expert. Rather, he said, the association had alerted a committee clerk that Corbin had to catch a flight.
Back to the video: In eight-plus hours of testimony after senators returned from a midday recess, people were called to testify mostly in groups of four.
And by our count, before Stevenson was called to speak, followed by 25-plus others, the people who testified included 45 individuals speaking in support of Taylor’s measure, 29 opposed and a few speaking “on” his proposal.
All told, according to the committee’s alphabetized list of individuals who testified, 67 witnesses ended up speaking in favor of SB 3, 40 expressed opposition and 12 testified without registering a position. In contrast, among 154 people who registered a position without testifying, 38 were in favor, 110 were against and six took no position, the list indicates.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Politics is a game of bribery to buy votes, lies, corruption, manipulation, misinformation, intimidation and rule by fear. I just finished reading Imperium by Robert Harris. This historical fiction is about Marcus Cicero and his quest for glory as the Roman Republic nears the end of its democratic era and the book showcases the political factions that will stop at nothing to win. While reading the book I kept thinking this is so similar to what is happening today in the United States.
The fall of Rome was caused by the wealthiest and most powerful 0.1 percent and anyone that tried to stop them would be crushed or killed. Cicero was one of the leading political figures of the era of Julius Caesar, Pompey, Marc Antony and Octavian. A string of misjudged alliances saw him exiled and eventually murdered.
The image of Julius Caesar and a few others in power at the time easily matches Besty DeVos and the Malignant Narcissist in the White House.
I finished the book yesterday and the similarities between the end of the Roman Republic and the United States Republic are frightening.
In the brief video, Harris says the (corrupt) rules of politics are universal.
Lloyd,
I love reaing your comments. You are so right on and you often take the words right out of my mouth, and say it so eloquently and succincly. THANK YOU.
Yes, “Politics is a game of bribery to buy votes, lies, corruption, manipulation, misinformation, intimidation and rule by fear.”
RE-Reading Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and is Zinn right. No wonder a “so-called” lawmaker form Arkansas wants this book banned. http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2017/03/08/howard-zinn-books-ban-arkansas
Thankfully, teachers fought this fascist move: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/03/13/hundreds-arkansas-teachers-request-howard-zinns-peoples-history
OOPS, READING is what I meant. Sorry for the typo.
Sara is already on the honor roll of the blog. She is a living example of the power of resistance, relentlessness, and readiness. The new Three Rs.. Add the fouth R, for Ravitch, the living example of the other Rs.
Hedge fund managers who are behind the push for school vouchers so that they can have more money available for them to skim from private charter schools are putting all private schools in danger of coming under tight government regulation. But, hedge fund managers don’t care about this danger because by the time government regulations hit private schools that accept vouchers, the hedge funds will have taken the money and run.
The lesson is clear from what happened to private schools after they began accepting Title IX money: At first everything was great…then, gradually at first, government began to issue rules, until today private schools that accept Title IX money — which is nearly all because they became addicted to it — are buried in rules, restrictions, and all manner of political correctness.
Private schools had originally reasoned that if, after they began taking public tax money, government tried to impose regulations that they didn’t like, they could simply stop taking the tax money — but: As soon as the schools began taking the money and getting more students, they began to expand their programs, buy more equipment, buy more property, build more buildings. They reached the point financially that if they stopped taking the public tax money, they would face bankruptcy.
They were hooked.
And what had been a light drizzle of government rules and regulations became a downpour on them.
And there was another consequence — one that should have been learned by observing what has happened to the cost of college tuition ever since GI education tuition benefits came into being: Because more students had more money to spend on tuition, tuition prices began to rise, and then to soar, That’s just basic Capitalism 101: You charge what the market can afford so that you maximize your profit. No surprise there to any capitalist.
Soaring tuition costs are the natural capitalistic result of government vouchers in the form of GI benefits, Pell grants, and dozens of other government programs that funnel money to private schools.
Conservatives of a generation ago knew all this and opposed vouchers. But today’s new generation of ideologues don’t know this history and have blinders on that block their ability to see the danger that vouchers are to private schools. Today’s inexperienced ideologues think that just because they wouldn’t impose more regulations on private schools that take public tax money, it will always be that way. But politics is always a see-saw, and already there are signs that inexorable demographics are causing it to swing back in the opposite direction from which it has been going. And as that swing back gathers speed, voucher-accepting private schools will find themselves facing a rising tide of government regulations that will make them more like public schools.
It’s the old adage: Beware of getting what you ask for.
Plus, vouchers roots are racist: The deceptive call for school vouchers to enable “choice” was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents a “choice.”
The 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that because of school attendance boundaries no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end the ongoing de facto segregation, the reform movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since then trying new tactics to restore racial segregation because it’s unlikely that the Court’s racial integration order can ever be reversed. When it became clear in the 1980’s that vouchers would become widespread, the segregationists tried many other routes to restore racial segregation, and the most successful has been charter schools because charter schools can be sold to blithely unaware do-gooder billionaires as well as to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
Charter schools are the profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda.