Jan Resseger points out the contrast between the two major parties’s treatment of public schools. Trump treats them as a babysitting service. Joe Biden’s wife Jill gave her Convention speech from a high school where she was a teacher. Trump and DeVos pledge to defund them. Biden and Harris pledge a massive infusion of funding. Trump pledges four more years of massive neglect. Biden and Harris pledge respect.
Archives for the month of: August, 2020
David Dayen writes a regular column for The American Prospect. In this post, he explains why Bannon was indicted. He and some of his friends created a website to “Build the Wall.” None of them had any engineering experience. They raised $25 million, and they paid personal expenses.
Dayen says this scam was part of a long history of grifting by con artists.
It was ironic that Bannon was taken into custody by agents from the USPS.
Dayen begins:
Author and historian Rick Perlstein (who’s doing a Prospect Zoom event with me about his new book Reaganland on Monday) wrote a famous story back in 2012 about “mail-order conservatism,” the tendency for the conservative movement to bilk their supporters through hysteria and lies and small-time grifting schemes. This tendency to rip off the rank and file dates back to the mail-order empire of Richard Viguerie. Con men were always critical to the conservative movement. Now, they comprise virtually the entire Republican Party.
Read the indictment of Steve Bannon and three associates, accused of defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to the “We Build the Wall” campaign, a preposterous effort on its face to crowdsource the private construction of the border wall with Mexico. We Build the Wall took in an astounding $25 million, only enough for one mile of the 576 Trump means to erect, but about $25 million more than should be handed over for a building project to people with no engineering or logistics background.
But Bannon and his pals were experts at thievery. He took hundreds of thousands of dollars from We Build the Wall for travel and hotels, while Air Force veteran Brian Kolfage nabbed $350,000 for “home renovations, payments on a boat (named “Warfighter”), a luxury SUV, a golf cart, jewelry, cosmetic surgery (!), personal tax payments, and credit card debt,” per the indictment. The money was routed through a third-party nonprofit and a shell company, using fake invoices and vendor receipts.
The We Build the Wall website, numerous donor solicitations, and written bylaws of the organization made repeated assurances that all the money would go to border wall construction. Hilariously, when they learned of the criminal investigation, they took the “no compensation” pledge off the website.
Glen Brown, retired teacher in Illinois, suggests that Trump’s ignorance has had real consequences. In fact, it is dangerous and has contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Brown has maintained a running roll of actions Trump has taken to avoid controlling the coronavirus, updated to mid-August 2020.
Check with Worldometer for the latest count of cases and deaths. Here are the world data. The U.S. has consistently accounted for about one-quarter of all the world’s infections. Maybe one day, as Trump claims, the disease will magically disappear, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Carol Burris writes in Valerie Strauss’s “Answer Sheet” blog about a for-profit charter corporation that about to take over the entire Chester-Upland school district in Pennsylvania. This district is one of the poorest in the state.
Burris writes:
Chester Community Charter School (CCCS) first opened its doors in 1998, just a few years after the school district found itself in financial distress. Vahan Gureghian, a Pennsylvania lawyer who runs a billboard company and is one of the state’s top Republican donors, owns CSMI, the for-profit management company that helped open Chester Community Charter School.
Although the charter school began small, it now educates about half of the district’s students. Despite its growth, its academic record is dismal. CCCS students perform worse on standardized tests than students at several of the Chester Upland public schools. “This is the charter whose test scores have been below those of several district-run schools, ever since it was cited for cheating on said test scores,” said Chester resident Will Richan, “[cheating] not by one or two rogue teachers but across three grade levels.”
Maura McInerney, legal director of the nonprofit Education Law Center (ELC) said she is concerned that students may be forced into attending lower-performing schools. “Publicly available data discloses that children served by Chester Community Charter School exhibit lower achievement scores compared with most [Chester Upland] District schools in all categories of PSSA [Pennsylvania System of School Assessment] testing in math, English language arts, and science. The 2019 profile score for CCCS (40.7 percent) is significantly lower than that of other district schools,” such as Stetser (66.5 percent); Main Street (55.5 percent), and Chester Upland School of the Arts (56.4 percent).”
And yet, despite its poor academic record, in 2017 Peter R. Barsz, the receiver appointed by Dozor who oversaw the financially distressed district, renewed Chester Community Charter School for an additional five years just one year into its new renewal term. In doing so, he gave the charter school a nine-year pass no matter how poorly its students might do.
The Philadelphia Inquirer referred to the move as “unprecedented,” noting that Barsz’s reappointment to a third-term by Dozor was made over the objections of the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Barsz was then replaced by the same Republican judge in the middle of his term (because, the Inquirer reported, Barsz wanted to expand his accounting firm). The latest in a string of receivers is the recently retired superintendent of the Chester Uplands District, Juan Baughn.
Profiting from charter schools
To understand why Chester Community Charter School and its for-profit parent company, CSMI, are so interested in taking over the beleaguered schools, one needs to understand how lucrative being a charter management organization (CMO) can be in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where there are no limits placed on what the CMO can charge.
In 2014-15, state data showed that CCCS had the highest administration expenses of any charter school in Pennsylvania. With total expenditures just shy of $56.6 million, over $26.1 million, or 46 percent, was spent on administration, while $18.8 million, or 33 percent of total expenditures went toward instruction.
This is not only true for CSMI’s Pennsylvania charter school, however. With the help of federal Charter School Program dollars, Vehan Gureghian extended his reach into neighboring New Jersey, again setting up shop in poor, financially stressed predominantly black districts — one in Camden New Jersey (since closed) and another in Atlantic City. The administrative costs of these CSMI charters were among the highest in that state.
The fiscal crisis of Chester Upland’s public schools
It would be difficult to find a more underfunded district with more challenges than the Chester Upland School District, which has been in financial trouble for years. In 2012, its teachers agreed to work without pay, although in the end, the state intervened, allowing them to be paid.
A few years later, however, a crisis returned when the state legislature could not agree on a state budget, thus delaying state school payments to public schools. The 2015-16 school year began with teachers coming to work without knowing when or if they would receive a salary.
It would also be hard to find a district that serves a more disadvantaged student population. According to the district’s recovery plan, every student in the district (100 percent) is eligible for free lunch, 89 percent of the students are black, and 4 percent are Hispanic. Twenty-two percent are students with disabilities.
Financial mismanagement is partly to blame for the district’s fiscal woes — with inadequate revenue, there were years when the district spent more than it took in. However, the drain of district funds to charter schools, especially CCCS, has put the district on a death spiral.
The Bethlehem School District analyzed the proportion of operating expense funds that flow to districts. Number 1 in the state was Chester Upland, with almost 47 percent of funds leaving the district for charter school tuition. You can find the results of that analysis here. This compares with about 30.5 percent of the budget of Philadelphia public schools, 11.5 percent of Bethlehem’s funds, and an average rate across the state of 3.7 percent.
At first glance, it might appear as though 47 percent is a savings given that 60 percent of the district’s elementary students attend Chester Community Charter School. However, it is important to keep in mind that the education of elementary students is far less expensive than that of high school students who need laboratory sciences, specialized courses, guidance counselors, and extracurricular activities such as sports. Chester Community Charter Schools is only interested in educating the district’s K-8 students.
There are, too, differences in which students the charter school educate.
According to McInerney, who is representing parents opposed to the charter takeover, CCCS has a track record of poorly serving students with the most significant disabilities. In an email correspondence. she noted that “during the 2017-18 school year, while 11 percent of students with disabilities at Chester Upland School District were students with autism, the percentage of students with autism at CCCS was only 4.3 percent.” “
In addition, CCCS was cited for noncompliance by the Bureau of Special Education in 2016,” she wrote. “These citations related to core requirements for educating students with disabilities, including (1) the failure of IEPs to be reasonably calculated to enable a child to advance appropriately towards annual goals and (2) failure to educate children in the least restrictive environment.”
The special education funding formula for charter schools in the state incentivizes charters to take the least disabled students
because the school receives the same amount for every special education student, regardless of the severity of the disability.
The pattern of charter schools having fewer students with more severe disabilities is found across the state according to a June 2020 report by Education Voters of Pennsylvania, which used Chester Upland as an example of how wide those disparities are.
At the same time, the law does not require that all special ed funds be spent on the student; therefore, extra dollars can be spent any way the charter schools decide to support its program.
Can this distressed, underfunded district survive? One would think the Chester Upland School Board, although it has little authority in receivership, would nevertheless advocate for the independence of the school.
That assumption would not be correct. School board president Anthony Johnson has stated that he wasn’t troubled by the for-profit status of the Chester Community Charter School’ management company and that he was open to charter expansion.
The recent appointment of Carol Birks as superintendent also signals the board’s interest in allowing charter expansion and governing control of the public schools. Birks made it clear that she believes parents have the right to choose between charter and public schools and that she has “no preference.” (Birks’ contract was bought out by the New Haven Board of Education for $175,000 after a year and a half in the position of superintendent. The small, cash-strapped Upland District negotiated a salary of $215,000 a year, placing her among highest paid superintendents in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.)
Despite all of the challenges, maintaining a public school system in the district has its advocates. Last December, the Education Law Center, along with the Public Interest Law Center, intervened in the case both on behalf of Parents of Chester Upland School District as well as the Delaware County Advocacy & Resource Organization to challenge the CCCS petition to include charter school conversions to become part of the district’s recovery plan. A proffer of witness testimony outlined by the law center at hearings included testimony from parents who want their children to attend the district schools which they describe as more accountable, as well as providing better services to their children, particularly those with disabilities.
The story of Chester Upland is a cautionary tale of what occurs when public schools are financially abandoned, and charters are allowed to swoop in, placing such an enormous financial strain on the schools that a disastrous downward spiral begins.
McInerney summed it up this way: “Chester Upland School District is a stark example of the high cost of inadequate and inequitable school funding and the disproportionate impact of underfunding on students of color. It needs significant investments and support from the state to effectively serve the significant number of students living in deep poverty who have been harmed by entrenched underfunding and horrific deprivation of basic school resources. Instead, conversion to charter control is being pursued as an ‘out’ when we should focus our attention on creating a sustainable path to local control.“
Joe Biden gave a wonderful speech last night. He was sharp, hopeful, eloquent, compassionate, determined, visionary.
If you missed it, watch it now. He was superb.
He laid out a vision of a renewed America, united to conquer the virus, rebuild our infrastructure, bring people together, and heal the deep wounds inflicted on us during the past four years.
After his speech, Republican consultant Rick Wilson—active in the Lincoln Project—said on Brian Williams’ MSNBC show that the choice in the election is stark. He said, “it’s a choice between a good man and a very bad man; between a decent man and an indecent man; between a moral man and a deeply immoral man.”
After listening to Biden lay out an inspiring call to rebuild and uplift our nation, I saw clips of Trump speaking spitefully in Scranton, Biden’s hometown. Trump was vicious, ridiculing Biden and accusing him of abandoning Scranton 70 years ago! Same old, same old: mean-spirited, nasty, divisive, sowing hatred and chaos. Again, he broke a norm of American politics in which each party goes silent while the other convenes. Not Trump. He was desperate to rain on Biden’s big night, but his me-me-me failed. It was Biden’s night.
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post said that Biden spoke from a place unknown to Trump: the heart.
He wrote:
President Trump has tried every dirty trick in the book — and a few new ones — to cast doubts about the workings of Joe Biden’s brain. But Trump has been focusing on entirely the wrong organ. Biden’s appeal is from the heart.
The Democratic presidential nominee, in the most crucial speech of his long career in public service, had no problem clearing the low bar Trump had set. The evening began with a clip of Biden quoting Kierkegaard and ended with him quoting the Irish poet Seamus Heaney.
But the power of Biden’s acceptance speech — and the power of his candidacy — was in its basic, honest simplicity. The rhetoric wasn’t soaring. The delivery was workmanlike (he botched an Ella Baker quote in his opening line). But it was warm and decent, a soothing, fireside chat for this pandemic era, as we battle twin crises of disease and economic collapse we only see each other disembodied in boxes on a screen. Biden spoke not to his political base but to those who have lost loved ones to the virus.
“On this summer night,” Biden said, his voice growing rough, “let me take a moment to speak to those of you who have lost the most. I have some idea how it feels to lose someone you love. I know that deep black hole that opens in the middle of your chest, and you feel like you are being sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes. But I have learned two things. First, your loved one may have left this earth, but they will never leave your heart. . . . And second, I found the best way through pain and loss and grief is defined purpose. As God’s children, each of us has a purpose in our lives.”
Biden’s speech, and indeed the whole closing night of the Democratic convention, was the polar opposite of the Trump’s “American carnage” vision. Biden’s rejoinder: American compassion. American competence. American community.
Words kept recurring: Dignity. Normalcy. Decency. Integrity. Stability. Sanity. Family. Big-hearted. Justice. Respect. Faith. Hope. Love. There was little about policy from Biden, and certainly no laundry list of proposals and promises. There was no attempt to throw red meat to the political left. This was about healing and recovery.
No choice here: Biden must beat this hateful, ignorant, illiterate, vicious man.
Barack Obama was president of the United States for eight years without a single scandal. None of his aides were arrested and jailed. I disagreed with his education policies but I respect him as a man of integrity and a patriot.
This is the speech he delivered to the virtual Democratic National Convention.
Please watch. It was riveting.
Grassroots Arkansas is a coalition of parents and civil rights activists. When reading anything about Arkansas, bear in mind that in the background is the Walton Family. They pull the strings.
Grassroots Arkansas sent the following letter to Mike Poore, the state-appointed superintendent of the Little Rock School District:
Mr. Poore,
We realize that you have been serving the LRSD community as Superintendent for four years now, at the behest of Governor Asa Hutchinson and AR Sec. of Education, Johnny Key, and not at the will of the people of our community.
We are yet seeking your humanity and your ability to appreciate that you have the power and the authority to right some wrongs during your administration.
Under your watch, LRSD students have NOT experienced safety and equity in their public school education.
African American and Latinx students have disproportionately been over criminalized with you as Superintendent. Though, Johnny Key has the authority to overturn your decisions or make decisions without your permission, you have not shown strong leadership in protecting the students and educators you have been entrusted to serve.
Again, I understand that you were not brought here to make things better for our LRSD community, but to further promote the agenda of the billionaires who have used their wealth and power to dismantle public schools all over this country.
My appeal to you is to get off the train of destruction and join the moral movement to overturn systems of racism, poverty, and the oppression that results from both.
You have seen and read the news reports: nothing good comes from forcing educators and students back into classrooms during this Covid-19/Corona crisis.
Surely, you don’t want the blood of students and their families, school bus drivers, school cafeteria workers, school nurses, school environmental service workers, school secretaries, school teachers, school librarians, school counselors, school social workers, school paraprofessionals, and other school personnel and administrators on your hands.
Surely, you don’t want to put yourself at further risk of testing positive and potentially dying for the sake of helping billionaires stay ridiculously wealthy, while the community you are serving gets sicker and experiences mass, untimely and avoidable deaths under your watch.
We know that you have children and grandchildren. We hope that you would protect our LRSD community with as much or more love and protection with which you provide them.
We are asking you to take the high road of moral justice by calling for temporary remote, safe and equitable schooling until reputable scientists say so. And, we hope that you will wait until the number of persons in our being infected and dying by Covid-19/the Corona Virus are what we experienced in mid March of this year when you called for LRSD school buildings to temporarily close.
This is a more than reasonable ask of you.
You owe it to us to engage in a school by school assessment to ensure that no students or educators are without necessary means and access to the effective resources they need to begin safe schooling remotely on August 24, 2020.
Upholding Justice and Human Love,
Rev. Dr. Anika T. Whitfield
LRSD community member
Grassroots Arkansas, co-chair
Arkansas Poor People’s Campaign, co-chair
Robert Mackey of The Intercept reports that the White House plants far-right journalists in Trump’s press conferences and he makes sure to call on them. In the past, these fringe media never had White Gouse press credentials.
He writes:
IN AN APPARENT effort to make his daily news conferences even more like campaign events than they already are, the White House press office has been packing the briefing room with supporters of President Donald Trump from far-right media outlets who can be relied on to toss him softball questions and initiate attacks on his political rivals.
Clearly in on the plot, Trump solicited a question each day this week from one of the guests invited by his press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, to stand at the back of the room — where representatives of One America News, The Epoch Times and Gateway Pundit compromised the health of reporters by violating social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
On Monday, Trump called on Chanel Rion, a far-right Republican operative and conspiracy theorist now working as a correspondent for One America News, a San Diego cable channel dedicated to spreading lies about Joe Biden and elderly protesters battered by the police.
Rion gave Trump the opportunity to unleash a familiar riff from his pre-pandemic rallies by suggesting to him that Biden might have been considering President Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, Susan Rice, as his running mate because, “she can best cover up a lot of the Obamagate surveillance crimes that have taken place during your campaign.” Trump responded by accusing Obama and Biden of “probably treason.”
The next day, Rion triggered another familiar Trump diatribe by asking for his take on the resignation of Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead Seattle’s police force, after the city council voted to cut her department’s budget. “What does this say about our country?” Rion asked Trump. “And what does this say about the Defund Police movement?” The president replied by repeating the lie that Seattle’s Democratic mayor had let “a radical left group, Antifa and others, take over a big portion of the city.”
Trump defended the QAnon conspiracy theorists at a news conference as “people who love our country.”
President Trump on Wednesday offered encouragement to proponents of QAnon, a viral conspiracy theory that has gained a widespread following among people who believe the president is secretly battling a criminal band of sex traffickers, and suggested that its proponents were patriots upset with unrest in Democratic cities.
“I’ve heard these are people that love our country,” Mr. Trump said during a White House news conference ostensibly about the coronavirus. “So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”
When told by a reporter about the central premise of the QAnon theory — a belief that Mr. Trump is saving the world from a satanic cult made up of pedophiles and cannibals connected to Democratic Party figures, so-called deep-state actors and Hollywood celebrities — Mr. Trump did not question the validity of the movement or the truth of those claims.
Instead, he offered his help.
“Is that supposed to be a bad thing or a good thing?” the president said lightly, responding to a reporter who asked if he could support that theory. “If I can help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”
A separate article explains “What Is QAnon??
QAnon is the umbrella term for a sprawling set of internet conspiracy theories that allege, falsely, that the world is run by a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles who are plotting against Mr. Trump while operating a global child sex-trafficking ring.
QAnon followers believe that this clique includes top Democrats including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and George Soros, as well as a number of entertainers and Hollywood celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Tom Hanks, Ellen DeGeneres and religious figures including Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama. Many of them also believe that, in addition to molesting children, members of this group kill and eat their victims in order to extract a life-extending chemical from their blood.
According to QAnon lore, Mr. Trump was recruited by top military generals to run for president in 2016 in order to break up this criminal conspiracy, end its control of politics and the media, and bring its members to justice.
An article in the Los Angeles Magazine explained QAnon:
It’s not behind a paywall.
Here is a portion:
Until recently, few knew much about QAnon. The right-wing conspiracy movement emerged in 2017 as a result of cryptic clues posted on the internet that portray a world in which Donald Trump works secretly to vanquish a coven of global elites, including top Democrats and Hollywood celebrities, who torture children, traffic them for sex, and even eat them. Flagged as a violent threat by the FBI, banned from Twitter and TikTok, and avidly courted by the Trump campaign, QAnon has become the most potent force in American politics that most Americans have never heard of. In a few short years, QAnon-associated accounts have metastasized on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok at an unprecedented rate. The pandemic has further fueled its growth, uniting anti-vaxxers and COVID deniers with the Sandy Hook skeptics already part of QAnon’s growing coalition. That coalition apparently also includes everyone from Roseanne to porn queen Jenna Jameson to former National Security Advisor Mike Flynn. (The general, a QAnon icon, recently released a video of himself and his family earnestly reciting the QAnon pledge.)
There are thousands of groups and pages devoted to QAnon on Facebook, with millions of members and followers, according to an internal Facebook report leaked to Ari Sen and Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News. A popular Reddit group called the Qult Headquarters now offers support to the estranged families and friends of QAnon converts. The group, dedicated to debunking the conspiracy theory and deprogramming its devotees, has more than 24,000 members. Once a strictly American phenomenon, QAnon has gone global. There is evidence of QAnon presence in 71 countries and on every continent save for Antarctica, says Concordia University researcher Marc-André Argentino.
The group’s followers also include some mentally unbalanced people who have latched onto the QAnon ideology with a fervor that has broken into real life in dangerous ways. Defense lawyers for the man charged in the murder of the underboss of the Gambino crime family in New York City, say their client is obsessed with conspiracy theories and believed the mobster was a member of the “deep state.” (The same man had previously attempted to make citizen’s arrests of Schiff and Congresswoman Maxine Waters.) The landscaper arrested for igniting the 2018 wildfire that burned nearly 20,000 acres of Orange County and destroyed a dozen homes had posted dozens of conspiracy videos on his Facebook page, including some about a satanic cult that ruled the world and a mysterious U.S. intelligence insider who is working with Donald Trump to thwart it. A QAnon believer and self-identified member of the alt-right Proud Boys in Seattle killed his brother in January by stabbing him in the head with a four-foot-long sword, later claiming he thought his brother was a lizard. In June of last year, an armed man inspired by a QAnon post barricaded himself in an armed vehicle and blocked traffic on the Hoover Dam bridge for hours. He was demanding the Justice Department release a (nonexistent) secret report on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server that a QAnon influencer had claimed was being stashed at the dam.
Despite its outlandish allegations, the group has also become an increasingly influential player in GOP politics. Fourteen QAnon supporters are running for Congress in 2020; two, including Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a GOP candidate and avid conspiracy theorist with a history of making racist comments, seem poised to win. Despite early objections from a few party members, she has encountered little opposition from party leaders or the president. In fact Trump, who frequently retweets out QAnon conspiracy accounts, warmly congratulated the candidate on her victory. At this stage in its growth, QAnon “is driving conversation on the online right,” says Kevin Roose, the tech columnist for the New York Times. “Many of the stories that end up trending on Twitter or Facebook are there because QAnon found them and pushed them. It is a lot bigger and more influential than people realize.”
The basic premise of QAnon is this: “Q” is a top government insider close to the president who has proof that global elites secretly enslave and torture children and extract from their blood what they believe is a life-extending chemical named Adrenochrome. Q’s targets range from Democratic politicians like the Clintons, Adam Schiff, and the Obamas to globalist moguls like Bill Clinton and George Soros to celebrities like Tom Hanks and Chrissy Teigen. Trump and his military allies are working secretly to unmask all these evildoers and make sure that they are carted off to Guantánamo and hanged for their crimes. The enemies of QAnon are, in nearly every case, enemies of Trump, which experts say is no coincidence. “At the end of the day, this conspiracy theory is targeting the Democratic establishment,” says Cristina López G., who studies QAnon for the liberal research group Media Matters for America. “To believe Q requires rejecting mainstream institutions, ignoring government officials, battling apostates, and despising the press,” wrote journalist Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic. “One of Q’s favorite rallying cries is ‘You are the news now.’ Another is ‘Enjoy the show,’ a phrase that his disciples regard as a reference to a coming apocalypse: When the world as we know it comes to an end, everyone’s a spectator.”
The QANon candidate for Congress in Georgia won the primary. She will be elected in November as it is a staunchly a Republican district. Trump congratulated her.
Governor Cuomo slashed school funding across the state of New York. Other governors have found ways to protect their schools and children. Please sign the petition of the Network for Public Education Action, calling on Governor Cuomo to restore school funding. Schools cannot safely reopen with less money.
Diane Ravitch's blog 