Archives for the month of: August, 2020
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George T. Conway III: Trump’s Name Will Live in Infamy

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2020 //
51

George T. Conway III is a lawyer and a Republican. He is a founder of The Lincoln Project. His Twitter feed is brilliant. He happens to be married to Trump’s senior advisor Kellyanne Conway. Imagine the dinner-table conversations at the Conway home.

He wrote this article for the Washington Post, where is is an occasional contributor. I did not insert the many links that verify each statement. It may be worth the cost of a subscription to see them.

Conway writes:

If there’s one thing we know about President Trump, it’s that he lies and he cheats. Endlessly. And shamelessly. But still, mostly, incompetently.

So it should have come as no surprise that Trump finally went where no U.S. president had ever gone before. In a tweet last week, he actually suggested that the country “Delay the Election.”

That trial balloon was a brazen effort to see if he can defraud his way into four more years in the White House. And why not try? After all, Trump has managed to swindle his way through life, on matters large and small, essential and trivial.

He paid someone to take the SAT for him, according to his niece Mary L. Trump. (He denies it.) A prominent sportswriter wrote an entire book, titled “Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump,” on how Trump cheats at golf — golf! — through such methods as throwing opponents’ balls into bunkers, miscounting strokes and even declaring himself the winner of tournaments he didn’t play in.

Trump posed as a nonexistent publicist, so he could lie about his wealth and plant stories about his supposed sexual exploits, including one with actress Carla Bruni, who denied a tryst and called Trump “obviously a lunatic.” And his life has been littered with myriad alleged financial cons, including Trump University, which resulted in a $25 million settlement, though no admission of wrongdoing, and his “charitable” foundation, which regulators ordered be shut down.

His presidency has been of a piece. By The Post’s count, more than 20,000 falsehoods in 3½ years, on subjects ranging from his inaugural crowd size to the coronavirus, from conversations with foreign leaders to forecasts of a hurricane track. The untruths have accelerated, from five a day in early 2017 to nearly two dozen daily this year and last. With the coronavirus, his untruths have finally brought him down: No, concern about the virus wasn’t a “hoax.” No, the disease won’t just “disappear,” “like a miracle.” No, we’re not in a crisis because we’ve done so much testing. No, Trump hasn’t done a “great job” fighting the virus, and no, we’re not on the verge of a “tremendous victory” over it.

So finally, Trump’s credibility, such as it ever was, is shot — and his poll numbers with it. He stands on the verge of electoral oblivion. He’s capable of no response other than his lifelong mainstays: shamelessly lying and trying to cheat. He tried once before, of course, to cheat in this election, by using presidential powers to try to extort Ukraine into propagating lies about his opponent — and was caught, although not punished.

Now he peddles a different lie: that somehow extensive “Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good)” would produce “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” Hence the supposed need to “Delay the Election.”

All untrue, of course. Voting by mail has a long, venerable tradition in this country, most notably the election of 1864, when 150,000 Union soldiers sent in ballots that helped ensure President Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, the preservation of the union and the abolition of slavery. Mailed votes leave a paper trail that renders them less, not more, susceptible to fraud. The fraud is Trump’s: He’s lying so he can buy more time — or so he can delegitimize the vote and blame someone other than himself for his defeat.

But Trump is apparently too inept, ignorant, desperate or deluded — probably all four — to realize or care: His suggestion is absurd. The electoral calendar is set in stone, by law. Title 3 of the U.S. Code makes clear that the election must be held on Nov. 3, that members of the electoral college must meet and vote on Dec. 14, and that their votes must be counted before a joint session of the new Congress on Jan. 6 at 1 p.m. sharp. And the 20th Amendment provides that, no matter what, Trump’s current term ends at precisely noon on Jan. 20, and that if no president has been elected, another provision of Title 3 would confer the presidency’s powers on … the speaker of the House.

Even the worst of Trump’s enablers in Congress dismissed out of hand the idea of delaying the election. But Trump’s suggestion was more than just imbecilic. Steven G. Calabresi, a law professor who was a founder of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group of which I’ve long been a member (and a member of its visiting board), nailed it: Trump’s suggestion was “fascistic.” It was the ploy of a would-be dictator, albeit an inept one.

Calabresi added that Trump should be impeached and removed for his tweet, and if Trump ever acted on it, and were there time, I’d agree. Trump should have been removed already twice over, for obstructing the Russia investigation and extorting Ukraine. His effort to sabotage a democratic system he swore to protect only confirms his unfitness for the job. But it’s too late for impeachment now.

Trump’s sanction must come at the polls, and beyond. For the sake of our constitutional republic, he must lose, and lose badly. Yet that should be just a start: We should only honor former presidents who uphold and sustain our nation’s enduring democratic values. There should be no schools, bridges or statues devoted to Trump. His name should live in infamy, and he should be remembered, if at all, for precisely what he was — not a president, but a blundering cheat.

Categories Democracy, Fraud, Lies, Trump

John Thompson: With Coronavirus Surging in Oklahoma, School Reopening Is Unlikely

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2020 //
5

John Thompson asks how it is possible to open schools in Oklahoma with coronavirus on the rise.

Thompson writes:

The New York Times reports that on June 1, the Oklahoma City metropolitan area had a seven-day average of 17 new COVID-19 cases a day. I believe Mayor David Holt deserves great credit for the science-based policies that kept infection numbers down.

By Aug. 1, however, the seven-day average was 409! The reopening of schools is essential for the education and mental health of students, as well as the economy, but how is that possible when infections have increased by nearly 2,400%?

Thompson takes issue with the American Academy of Pediatrics and economist Emily Oster, whose assurances about a return to school, he believes, were premature.

The current “positive” results are a warning sign that Oklahoma should be cautious and follow the science.

Categories Accountability, Health, Oklahoma

Connecticut: Charters Struggled with Ethics of Double Dipping Federal PPP

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2020 //
5

This story in the Middletown (Connecticut) Press shows that charters in the state debated whether it was ethical to take federal money intended to help small businesses and nonprofits that might go bankrupt. Some took the money, others decided against it. The Connecticut Charter Schools Association encouraged the state’s charter schools to go for the money. Among those that did were members of large charter chains supported by billionaires.

Note the comments of Rep. Bobby Scott, chair of the House Education Committee (and a DFER favorite), who sees no dilemma, and of Connecticut’s Rep. Jahana Hayes, who acknowledges the ethical problem.

Journalist Emilie Munson writes:

As the coronavirus reshapes education, over half of Connecticut’s 22 charter schools received Paycheck Protection Program loans this spring and summer, collecting a total of at least $12.5 million to $16.5 million in federal support unavailable to traditional public schools, a review of Small Business Administration data and school board minutes shows.

The popular forgivable loans proved a source of division among charter school administrators, some of whom thought it was improper for the schools to apply for the money, while others said it was irresponsible not to….

Bruce Ravage, founder and executive director of Park City Prep in Bridgeport, applied for a PPP loan in July, after learning more about the program and realizing he would be “crazy” not to, he said. The school recently was approved for a loan of $441,000, he said.

“We’re a business that serves a very, very needy population of students and I want to be sure that I have the resources available to provide whatever it is going to take,” Ravage said. “There are corporations that have a lot more money than us that applied for this.”

Tim Dutton, director of Operations at the Bridge Academy in Bridgeport, said his school chose not to apply for a loan because it did not lose revenue or lay off employees during the pandemic, and they knew they would receive federal emergency funding.

“The decision on the Paycheck Protection Program was really just the ethical one. I didn’t think it was about bailing out schools,” Dutton said. “PPP would not be appropriate as it would look like ‘double dipping.’”

On May 13, the school board of Great Oaks Charter School in Bridgeport voted against applying for a PPP loan, believing the school was likely ineligible because it was still receiving a steady stream of state and federal funding, school board minutes show. Just over a month later, the school was approved for a PPP loan of $350,000 to $1 million, SBA data shows…

When asked about PPP loans for charter schools, House Education and Labor chairman Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., said his priority is simply securing funding for public schools, adding he does not want to “draw red lines all over the place.”
A member of the committee and former 2016 National Teacher of the Year, Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5, said however she wants to “push for effective guardrails that prevent charter school waste, fraud and mismanagement.”
“Far too often, malicious actors in the charter school industry siphon much needed funds away from public education and from students in need,” Hayes said in a statement. “Public charter schools accessing both pots of relief funds amounts to double dipping and feeds into the skepticism and criticism that so many have surrounding charter schools. Applying for funds both as a school and a nonprofit drains resources from the public schools and communities that need it most, undermines student’s ability to learn, and threatens the very promise of equal education.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Connecticut, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Privatization

University of Kentucky Joins with NAACP to Establish New Research Initiative

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2020 //
27

The University of Kentucky College of Education and the NAACP have agreed to establish a research center at the university to address issues of concern to African American communities. The driving force behind this project is the new Dean of the College, Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, who is a nationally recognized scholar on equity policies. Heilig has written extensively about civil rights, charter schools, and Teach for America. He is a founding board member of the Network for Public Education.

Valerie Strauss writes in the Washington Post:

The NAACP, the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States, is launching a new education initiative with the University of Kentucky that will provide a home for Black faculty to conduct and disseminate research on the community in a new way.


The enterprise marks the first time that the NAACP has joined with university-based education scholars to help address racial inequities that for decades have plagued public schools around the country.


“It’s a brand new paradigm,” said Julian Vasquez Heilig, dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Education who has served on the NAACP executive committee and as the education chair for the NAACP’s California Hawaii State Conference. “There is no playbook.”


Vasquez Heilig, who is the initiative’s mastermind, said research will be done not by finding topics in the halls of academia, as is usually done, but rather in African American communities.


The idea here is to go to communities and understand what research they think needs to be done,” he said in an interview. “Instead of going to communities in the colonial way and taking research, we are asking what research they think is important to do.”


The focus of the initiative’s work will be to advance and protect education for students from preschool through higher education — with an emphasis on race-based discrimination. Special attention will be paid to students from underserved communities in Kentucky, which reflects many around the country.


The initiative will also seek to understand the challenges of students who are marginalized in the education sector based on factors including ability, gender, ethnicity, age and sexuality — and it will explore the intersectionality of these identities.


The agreement for the new initiative — for which a director and researchers have been hired — was signed by Vasquez Heilig, NAACP president and chief executive Derrick Johnson, NAACP Chairman Leon W. Russell and David Blackwell, the provost of the University of Kentucky. It will be based in the department of educational policy studies and evaluation at the College of Education at the university, which is largely funding the initiative.


These scholars will partner with students, educators, and communities to document the experiences of those facing educational disparities and use research to shape public policy,” Johnson said in a statement. “To see change, we must focus on discipline policies, school funding structures, college and career readiness initiatives, and our own great teachers in underserved communities.”


The director of the initiative is Gregory Vincent, a renowned civil rights attorney who just joined the faculty of the University of Kentucky. He is also the outgoing Grand Sire Archon of the Boule’, the nation’s first Greek-letter fraternity founded by African American men.


Researchers hired for the initiative include Sarah LaCour, arriving from the University of Colorado at Boulder, who will serve as an assistant director of the civil rights initiative, and Cheryl Matias, a scholar who studies culturally responsive education practices.

Categories Bias, Civil Rights, Race, Research

Private Schools Collected Billions from Federal Paycheck Protection Program

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2020 //
18

Baptistnews.com reported this important piece of information. Private schools have scored billions from the Paycheck Protection Program. This represents a massive transfer of public funding to private and religious schools. Of course, this fulfills a major policy goal of the Trump administration.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State reviewed federal records and calculated that private schools collected billions of dollars from the Paycheck Protection Program, which was enacted to save small businesses at risk of going bankrupt.

Americans United for Separation of Church and State has long considered public funding for religious schools, which comprise 67% of all American private schools, to be both bad policy and contrary to Constitutional intent. Americans United’s analysis of the data released by the Small Business Administration on PPP loans of $150,000 or greater reveals that Congress has already given private religious and secular schools funding totaling between $2.67 billion and $6.47 billion. PPP funding comes in the form of forgivable loans, which were intended to provide financial assistance to small businesses and nonprofits to recover from the pandemic. As long as the private schools meet certain criteria, like using the loan for payroll and operational expenses, the loans will be forgiven by the government in their entirety, essentially turning the loans into grants.

Categories Accountability, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

NPE Releases New Report on Astonishing Charter School Closure Rates

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2020 //
10

Today, the Network for Public Education released a new report on the astonishing rate at which charter schools close. The period covered in the report was 1999-2017, using data collected by the U.S. Department of Education. The findings were researched by Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D., and written by Carol Burris, executive director of NPE.

Contact: Carol Burris
Phone: 516 993 2141
Email: cburris@networkforpubliceducation.org

A new report shows that half of the nation’s charter schools fail during their first fifteen years. The report concludes that nearly one million students have been stranded by charters that closed.

A newly released report by the Network for Public Education (NPE) tracked the longevity of charter schools that opened during the same year in order to determine the rate and progression of charter school failure. Analyzing a database that tracks charter schools over two decades, the report documents an astounding 50% failure rate by the close of year 15.

Commenting on the report’s analysis and findings, NPE Executive Director, Carol Burris, said, “We asked education researcher Ryan Pfleger, Ph.D. to analyze the U.S. Department of Education’s Common Core of Data to determine charter school failure rates at the 3, 5, 10 and 15-year marks. We were shocked to find that even by year 5, less time than it takes for a child to complete elementary education, 27% of charter schools are gone.”

Pfleger analyzed charter schools in the United States as far back as possible given the data available. Using enrollment numbers from the final year that the charter school was open, he documented that more than 867,000 students were enrolled in charters that closed between 1999 and 2017. “If we added closures prior to 1999 and subsequent to 2017, it is likely that one million students have been displaced,” he observed.

The study also found that charter closures were most likely to occur in the poorest neighborhoods of America’s poorest cities.

Dountonia Batts, an NPE Board member, and former Indiana charter school teacher concurred with the findings of the report, “I had students whose high school experience was completed at three different schools because of closing after closing. The marketing to the broader community is that charters are better for vulnerable students, which likely eases the collective conscience of those who benefit from the voluntary re-segregation of schools by choice. The students who often feel the hurt first are in black and brown communities where the charter product is peddled as a civil rights solution.”

Commenting on the report, historian of education Diane Ravitch concluded, “The public school should be a stable institution in every community, always there for children and families. Unfortunately, as this report shows, charter schools are inherently unstable. Charters fail for a variety of reasons, mainly because they are a market mechanism, like shoe stores or restaurants. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

The report, Broken Promises: An Analysis of Charter School Closures 1999-2017, and an animated map that shows the accumulation of failures across the United States can be found at https://networkforpubliceducation.org/brokenpromises.

Categories Education Reform

Tennessee: A District Opens in Midst of Surging Pandemic

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2020 //
33

The Washington Post reported this morning on a district in Tennessee that is opening for in-person instruction, even though the state is experiencing rising rates of coronavirus. Someone has to go first, and Blount County has decided to try it. The nation is watching.

The story was written by A.C. Shilton and Joe Heim, with the help of Valerie Strauss.

MARYVILLE, Tenn. — It was just before 7:30 a.m. when the line of Blount County Schools buses grumbled into the parking lot of Heritage High School and began dropping off students — some wearing masks, others barefaced — into the fraught new world of in-school education during a pandemic.

At the flagpole in front of the school, two unmasked teens hugged before sitting down in a small group to chat until the bell rang. The scene of students reuniting could have been from any other first day of school in any other year. But over their shoulders, an early August thunderstorm brewed above the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains — an almost-too-perfect metaphor for what many parents and teachers here, and across the country, worry is coming.

Last week, the district began a staggered reopening, making it one of the first in the country to attempt a full return. The goal was to have everyone who wanted to return back in school by Aug. 10. On Tuesday morning, the district changed its plan, opting to allow only half the students to return on alternating days through Aug. 21 with the goal of keeping class sizes smaller while the district eases into full attendance.

The success or failure of the Blount County school district’s reopening — as well as early attempts in Texas, Georgia, Mississippi and elsewhere — will be watched closely by many of the country’s 13,500 other school districts, which will at some point have to navigate these same ominous waters.

Already there have been significant setbacks in districts that have attempted to bring students back. A day after teachers returned to work in Georgia’s Gwinnett County last week, some 260 employees tested positive or had possibly been exposed to the novel coronavirus and were told to stay home. At Corinth High School in Mississippi, in-person classes started last week, and within days five students tested positive for the coronavirus and others went into quarantine as a result of contact tracing, according to a statement by the school district. A photo of a packed Paulding County, Ga., high school hallway with few students wearing masks went viral Tuesday as many people expressed concern about how schools could safely reopen.

With coronavirus cases reported at some reopened schools, protesters take to the streets with fake coffins
For months, administrators, teachers and staff members in this eastern Tennessee district have been preparing for the best way to safely return its 10,542 students to the classroom. The plans evolved as officials responded to information about how the coronavirus spreads as well as pressure from some parents and politicians to open the schools on time. As new cases of the coronavirus increased in the county in July, more parents began wondering whether reopening was a good idea.

Finding a path that works for everyone has not been easy. According to the school district, 75 percent of students are returning for in-school learning, while the remainder have opted to continue with virtual learning.

“Although we rejoice in seeing many of our students back in school, we recognize that reopening comes with levels of concern and anxiety,” the district’s director of schools, Rob Britt, wrote in a letter to parents in late July. “Please be assured that protecting the health and safety of our students and our staff is our top priority, and we will do our best to reduce and slow the infection rate through our daily health practices.”
One of the more contentious issues in Blount County has been whether masks need to be worn all day by students. Some parents have insisted they won’t send their kids back if masks are required all day. Other parents won’t send their kids back unless they are.

While masks are not mandatory in the school’s reopening plan (the district notes that masks are not an enforceable part of the dress code), they are expected in any situation in which social distancing is not possible, such as class changes. The district plan also encourages parents to drive their children to school in private vehicles. Students who ride buses will have to sit one per seat unless they are in the same family.

As for what happens when there’s a case of the coronavirus in a child’s classroom, the district states it will notify parents only when their child has been within six feet for more than 10 minutes with a positive case. In the classroom, the district promises “thoughtful group sizes,” though there’s no clear definition of how many students that is. School district officials declined to be interviewed for this article or to say whether any student or teacher in the district had tested positive for the virus.

Depending on who you talk to here, the Blount County school district’s decision to fully reopen schools this week with in-classroom learning is either a careful and necessary return to traditional teaching or an unwise choice that could endanger many in the wider community.

For Joshua Chambers, a single father of three whose wife passed away two years ago, the return of in-school learning is a huge relief.

“I’m perfectly okay with them going back. Doing virtual was impossible for me,” said Chambers, 46, a machinist who works 50-hour weeks and has children in ninth grade, eighth grade and kindergarten.

Chambers said he thinks the district has put a good plan in place and is taking the necessary precautions to keep children and teachers safe. Like many parents interviewed for this story, he said it has been difficult to find reliable information on the risks involved. His biggest worry is that an outbreak of cases will cause the schools to be shut down again.

“A lot of families in this area, both parents work and they need to be at work,” he said. “If the schools close, it’ll be a logistical nightmare for me, and I don’t know how I could get it done short of hiring a tutor. And that’s sort of out of my price range.”

Jennie Summers has boys in eighth and sixth grade and a daughter in second. She and her husband said that even though it wouldn’t look like a normal school year, it was important for their children to be back in class with other students.

Summers studied the district’s plan and did her own research. Her main objection was to the possibility of masks being required all day in all circumstances. She was a little nervous when the kids left for their first day of school last week, but she said she was reassured after talking with them when they came home.

“We all realize it’s different than what it should be for our kids, but there’s no way to have what we want right now,” Summers said. “Most of the people I talked to had pretty good days and were pleased with what went on. It was nice to even hear the normal first-day-of-school whining from the kids.”

Her son, Joshua Summers, 13, began his first day of eighth grade at a county middle school on Friday. Everyone wore masks, there were signs in the halls reminding students to wash their hands between classes, and the class sizes were smaller, he said. Because everyone had become accustomed to wearing masks, it didn’t seem odd to him to see students wearing them in school.

“It was basically the same as last year. I was a bit nervous, but that’s what usually happens on the first day of school,” Joshua said. “Everyone was just happy to see their friends again.”

All summer long, Cindy Faller has agonized over whether to send her daughter, Ellie, to first grade in Blount County this fall. At first, as stay-at-home orders seemed to be tamping out Tennessee’s spread, she had felt hopeful about Ellie going back. In July, as coronavirus cases throughout Tennessee kept climbing, Faller couldn’t help but feel as though the odds were shifting, and not in the right direction.

Faller used to be a special-education teacher in Knox County, which borders Blount. Having experienced firsthand all the sticky fingers and hugs and body fluids that seem to be part and parcel when dealing with first-graders, Faller just couldn’t imagine how social distancing would work. “I refuse to expose my daughter to this disease at this extent, and I also don’t think it’s possible to keep them safe,” she said.

According to the state of Tennessee, since March, Blount County has had 1,186 confirmed cases of the coronavirus. Of those cases, 509 are active. Right now, the county is averaging 42.07 new cases a day, a level deemed “above threshold” by the state.

Elsewhere in the state, cities and counties are all approaching school reopening slightly differently. Knox County has a similar case rate, with 843.78 cases per 100,000. Knox County, however, has decided to push back reopening until Aug. 24. Nashville, which has been hit hard by the coronavirus, will begin the 2020 school year with online learning only.

Closing schools around the world could cause a ‘generational catastrophe,’ U.N. secretary general warns
Across the globe, countries such as Finland and South Korea have successfully navigated school reopenings without case spikes, especially in primary schools. Up until late June, South Korea boasted that it didn’t have a single coronavirus case spreading in a classroom.

Not every country has had that same success, though. Israel opened schools in May, but by early June officials had closed 100 of those schools as cases surged all over the country. Officials in Israel said it’s unclear how much spread happened at school vs. in the community, but at one middle and high school more than 100 students and 25 staff members tested positive for the virus.

In a paper published July 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine, the authors argue that reopening primary schools is important and that many countries have successfully opened them without dire repercussions. They note one important difference, however, between what’s happening abroad and here: In every case except Israel, countries had contained the spread to less than one new daily case per 100,000 residents. The United States has 18 new daily cases per 100,000 residents, according to a Washington Post analysis of the data.

Tiffani Russell also researched the plans to return to school, and she and her husband decided they weren’t comfortable sending their seventh- and second-grade children back for in-school learning. The couple both work but have altered their schedules and made arrangements with a neighbor so they can stick with the school’s virtual plan until they feel in-school learning is safer.

“Not everyone can do virtual, but they shouldn’t be opening [schools] anyway, because it’s not safe for our children,” Russell said. “And you can’t just think about the kids, you have to think about the bus drivers, the workers, the teachers.”

Rebecca Dickenson, a librarian at Eagleton Elementary School and the president of the Blount County Education Association, which represents the district’s teachers, wears a mask and a face shield whenever she’s around students. While that combo gets hot, she says, by far the hardest part of the first few days has been the strict no-hugs policy. “That’s my favorite part of being an elementary school teacher,” she says.

Dickenson is 40 and considers herself low-risk, but she lives with her sister, who has an autoimmune disorder. Every evening, when Dickenson returns home from school, she de-scrubs the way a nurse might, shedding her clothes at the door and beelining for the shower.

“If I really think about it, it’s very worrying. I’m not so much worried about myself getting sick, but if I get sick and I don’t know it, if I spread it, that’s so many people I am in contact with,” she said.

How to stop magical thinking in school reopening plans

The division in the county reflects the national debate about whether schools should reopen with students back in classrooms. President Trump has repeatedly urged districts to fully reopen, and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has threatened to withdraw federal funds from districts that don’t. At the same time, top health officials in the administration, including the White House’s top coronavirus coordinator, Deborah Birx, and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have cautioned about reopening in areas where the virus continues to thrive.

Last week, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) announced the state’s plan to reopen schools, saying that “in-person learning is the medically sound, preferred option” and urging districts to make in-classroom learning available to students.

But on Monday, the Tennessee Education Association responded on behalf of the state’s teachers to call for a pause on reopening across the state because of increasing rates of new coronavirus infections.

“Educators want to get back to in-person instruction,” said TEA President Beth Brown in a statement. “However, it is prudent and not contrary to Tennessee law to delay reopening school buildings for the next several weeks, when hopefully the data shows new infections have slowed.”

For now, though, the Blount County school district is moving forward with its plan to get students back in classrooms.

Categories Education Reform, Health, Tennessee

Anthony Cody: Who Is Allowed to Be Selfish?

By dianeravitch
August 6, 2020 //
18

Anthony Cody taught for many years in the Oakland public schools. We co-founded the Network for Public Education in 2012. His blog is called “Living in Dialogue.”

He writes:

Who is Allowed to be Selfish?

Isn’t it a bit strange – our capitalist economy is built on the glorious profit motive. The wealthy are expected to be selfish – they are rewarded for their ability to make more and more, and expected to avoid taxes, military service, and anything else that is unpleasant or risky. But only some people are allowed to be selfish.

Trump can insist that anyone who meets with him be tested. But he demands schools reopen, which means teachers will meet in closed rooms with as many as 160 students a day. Teachers must not put their own health above the needs of their students and the economy that requires they be in school six or seven hours a day.

It is unfortunate that we do not have funds to pay for nurses, counselors or librarians in our schools. But most wealthy people don’t send their children to public schools anyway. They get to make a different choice. But some of us have fewer choices. It pretty much falls along economic lines. Meat workers are essential workers — they have been required to show up and make sure we all have hamburgers. Waiters, restaurant workers, likewise, they can mask up and get back to work. Teachers find themselves in this same boat; they have no permission to worry about their health or that of their families.

So Disney will have their workers open their parks again. School boards and legislators meeting on Zoom will decide to send teachers back to reopen their schools when social distancing is impossible.
If you are a worker, your reluctance to work, your desire to protect your family and community from illness or death is SELFISH. And you, as a worker, must be selfless and willing to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the economy. And don’t even mention that if you are Black, Indigenous or Latino, your chances for getting the virus is greater, and your outcomes likely to be worse.

And the billionaires get tax breaks and government bailouts, and their stock holdings gain value, and that is “the economy getting back on track.” Because the wealthy have the ultimate privilege – the right to be selfish. And working people get a sort of upside down socialism, where they are required to serve the common interests of society, and not allowed to protect even their own health.

Categories Accountability, Health, Science, Teachers

Peter Wehner: Trump Is a Broken, Bitter Man

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2020 //
35

Peter Wehner worked in the Reagan administration as a young man, as well as in the administrations of both Bush presidents. He remembers Reagan as a man who exuded hope and optimism. Whether or not you liked his policies, he was relentlessly cheerful and friendly.

Trump, on the other hand, is filled with self-pity and rage. Look at almost any photograph of him, and he is a portrait of an angry man. It is as though life has cheated him, people betray him, he is never “treated fairly.” Everyone is against him. He wallows in self-pity.

Wehner doesn’t understand why the man who is in the White House is so angry. He is “a psychologically broken, embittered, and deeply unhappy man.”

He lives to exact revenge, to watch his opponents suffer, to inflict pain on those who don’t bend before him. Even former war heroes who have died can’t escape his wrath.

So Donald Trump is a vindictive man who also happens to be commander in chief and head of the executive branch, which includes the Justice Department, and there is no one around the president who will stand up to him. He has surrounded himself with lapdogs.

He has utterly reshaped the Republican Party, bending it to his will.

There were certainly ugly elements on the American right during the Reagan presidency, and Reagan himself was not without flaws. But as president, he set the tone, and the tone was optimism, courtliness and elegance, joie de vivre.

He has since been replaced by the crudest and cruelest man ever to be president. But not just that. One senses in Donald Trump no joy, no delight, no laughter. All the emotions that drive him are negative. There is something repugnant about Trump, yes, but there is also something quite sad about the man. He is a damaged soul.

In another time, in a different circumstance, there would perhaps be room to pity such a person. But for now, it is best for the pity to wait. There are other things to which to attend. The American public faces one great and morally urgent task above all others between now and November: to do everything in its power to remove from the presidency a self-pitying man who is shattering the nation and doesn’t even care.

Categories Trump

Paul Horton: The Pathetic Story of Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2020 //
34

Paul Horton teaches history at the University of Chicago Lab school. He has studied the history of the South, among other topics.

The Eighteenth Brumaire of High Cotton

In the South, everything is about geography and history.

Arkansas’s current junior senator, Tom Cotton, routinely ignores both subjects in his embrace of Tea Party agitprop, Grover Norquist-like tantrums about strangling the public sector, and in his willingness to be the most fawning and most ambitious toady of the Waltons, the Kochs, and the Trumps.

Cotton hails from Dardenelles, Arkansas, a town built on the loam and alluvial silt deposited by creeks flowing from the Ozarks to the immediate north and from the Ouachitas to the immediate south into the Arkansas river west of Little Rock.

Although most of the cotton grown in Arkansas was and is grown in the Mississippi River basin in the east, the soils around Dardenelles supported three planters (slave owners who owned 20 or more slaves) before the Civil War. Mr. Cotton’s ancestors owned at least five slaves and several Cotton Gins in and around Dardenelles. It is a puzzlement to many in Arkansas that Cotton portrays his father as a cattleman, whitewashing his family’s history with two broad strokes: cattle and cotton do not go together that well outside of Texas, not in the nineteenth century anyway, and Cotton’s parents were both public servants of the state of Arkansas. His mother was a middle school teacher and principal and his father worked as a district supervisor of the Arkansas Health Department.

The Cotton family did own a local hunting lodge which allowed them to mingle with several generations of wealthy patrons from all over the South. So, although the Cottons were relatively modest in the last generation, they walked in “high cotton” because they accumulated a great deal of social capital as they rubbed elbows with the rich and famous.

Tom Cotton rode this “high cotton” at the crest of the Tea Party wave right into congress in 2012 and into a senate seat in 2015. He has made a name for himself in the last two years by standing up to those who support the Black Lives Matter protests and cancel culture that seeks to, in his view, silence patriotism and reason with a mindless adherence to “neo-Marxism.”

In a famous recent editorial in the New York Times, he declared that Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrating against police brutality and the murder of George Floyd should be given “no quarter.” The editorial cost the editorial page editor his job, but firmly established Cotton as Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s most loyal ally.

More recently Cotton has written legislation that would defund the “1619 Project,” a series of popular podcasts and teaching materials that tell the history of slavery in the United States. Although the “1619 Project” has been criticized for mistakes and misrepresentations by some prominent American Historians, almost all of the content of the Project is fundamentally accurate. What apparently angers conservatives is how it places slavery at the center of the American story and at the foundation of American capitalism. The Project makes use of a new wave of scholarship on American slavery that emphasizes the increasing economic efficiencies achieved by the slave regime in the South in sharp contrast to the work of an earlier generation of historians who followed the scholarship of Eugene Genovese, a Marxist, who argued that slavery was a pre-capitalist or feudal mode of production.

Apparently echoing the sentiments of many great libertarian thinkers (Von Mises, Hayek, and Friedman) who looked the other way when free enterprise thrived on coerced labor regimes and torture to build great efficiencies of scale that produce wealth, Cotton claimed that slavery was a “necessary evil.” The message from Cotton is that building American wealth was a necessary engine of American prosperity, a pronouncement that comes close to the slaveholder’s defense that the peculiar institution was a part of God’s divine plan.

In short, Cotton’s engagement in the culture wars of 2020 fit right into Stephen Miller’s and Steve Bannon’s playbook. Like the Bourbon restoration of France following the French Revolution, planters in the American South replaced Southern populist troublemakers with one party rule and white supremacy.

Cotton is the leader of the contemporary Bourbon counterrevolutionaries. The key to understanding the postbellum Southern Bourbons is that they played dirty and made little pretense of identifying with the “small fry.” Under the rule of the Bourbons in the South, convict labor camps exploded in size and were virtually unregulated. Elections were governed by racial intimidation and electoral fraud. Those who protested too loudly and persistently were permanently silenced by “white caps” or the Klan. Voting irregularities always supported white power, even in counties with black majorities. And finally, blacks and whites who voted together as populists were disfranchised.

Most importantly, the Bourbons whitewashed Southern History to legitimate their rule. Scott’s Waverly novels found their way onto the bookshelves in upstanding white middle class households. Lost Cause history glorifying the Antebellum South was written and Confederate monuments were built as thousands of black Americans were lynched or worked to death at such infamous places as Parchman Farm, Mississippi, or Alabama’s Kilby prison.

For all of his attention to the “1619 Project,” one would think that Cotton might know something about history as a Southerner. But counterrevolutionaries whitewash the past to serve the forces of reaction. The land that the Cottons claimed in Dardenelles became available only after the Native Americans who lived there were forced west following Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. During the Civil War Northwest Arkansas was a hotbed for Unionism. The 1880s and 1890s produced the most progressive and vibrant biracial Populist feeder organization The Agricultural Wheel was founded and spread throughout the upper South before merging with the Knight of Labor into the Populist party. Rather than embracing what might be the most inspirational democratic legacy of nineteenth century that historically thrived in what is now his state, Cotton made a point of emphasizing the founder’s suspicions of democracy in his senior thesis at Harvard.
When Cotton called for “no quarter” for Black Lives Matter protests he expressed the same set of attitudes that the planter class and the later the Klan expressed during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. “No quarter” was given by Confederate troops was the official policy of the Confederacy. In Arkansas, dozens of surrendered Black Union soldiers were given “no quarter” at Poison Spring, a site in senator Cotton’s former congressional district. In Arkansas after WWI black farmers were hung summarily in Elaine for standing up for their economic rights. Things were so bad in the Arkansas Delta during the Jim Crow era that Penn. State historian Nan Woodruff has written a book about the area that is called American Congo.

Cotton apparently knows so little about Arkansas history that one is left to wonder how he got into Harvard. For all of his belly aching about the evils of affirmative action, we are left to wonder whether Harvard admitted him because he is from Arkansas and it needed to make a state by state quota.

But this cannot be true: affirmative action was never white and no one is admitted to competitive educational institutions because they are recommended by very wealthy and powerful white people.

Categories History, Racism
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