Steven Singer was an avid supporter of Bernie Sanders. Now, post election, he is feeling cautiously optimistic about the prospect of a Biden presidency. He explains why here. I’m posting his first reason. Open the link to read the other four.
Singer writes:
President-elect Joe Biden.
Go ahead and say that aloud once.
“President-elect Joe Biden.”
How does it feel?
If you’re like me, it feels pretty good.
And to be honest I never expected that it would.
Sure, I voted for Joe. I gave money to the campaign. I volunteered.
But Biden was far from my first choice. In fact, looking over the field of Democrats seeking the party’s nomination, he might have been my last pick.
I was a Bernie Sanders guy and probably will be until the day I die.
But damn if it doesn’t feel good to say “President-elect Joe Biden!”
Before today, I would have said the best thing about Joe was that he isn’t Trump. And, frankly, I think that is mainly the fact that won him the election.
It was a repudiation of Trump more than a celebration of Biden.
However, now that the dust has cleared and all the states but Georgia, Alaska and North Carolina have been called, I’m starting to have some thoughts about what a Biden administration might actually look like.
And it might not be too bad.
So here are what I see as the five main hurdles coming up for the Biden administration and why we might be cautiously optimistic about their outcomes:
1) TRUMP WILL FAIL TO SUCCESSFULLY CHALLENGE THE ELECTION RESULTS
As of this writing, Biden has 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 214.
Alaska will probably go to Trump and North Carolina is a bit of a toss up. Georgia will almost certainly go to Biden. [North Carolina went to Trump.]
It actually doesn’t really matter.
The world and the media have already accepted the results.
Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States.
In the absence of solid evidence of massive voter fraud in multiple states – many of which are controlled by Republican governments – it is unlikely that these results can be successfully changed.
Many Republican leaders like Pat Toomey, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have already accepted this fact. Far right leaders of other countries like Boris Johnson and Benjamin Netanyahu have already congratulated Biden.
It’s over.
And if there were any doubt about it, the Trump administration accidentally booking a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia instead of the Four Seasons hotel – and then pretending that’s what they intended all along – should put the final nail in the coffin.
You don’t know Four Seasons Total Landscaping? It’s a landscape gardeners located between a crematorium and a dildo shop.
That is not the work of people capable of running an effective challenge to a national election.
Yes, there are enough far right justices on the Supreme Court to pull off this Coup d’état. But I don’t think even they would have the guts to do it in light of the world’s acceptance of Biden, the acceptance of many in the GOP and the blatant incompetence of the Trump administration.
I admit that I could be wrong. And I certainly don’t think we should underestimate these neofacists.
Trump is a cornered rat, and that is when rats are at their most dangerous.
However, I think there is good reason to think he will not be able to steal this election no matter how many tantrums he throws on the floor of the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago.
Open the link and read the rest.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is not enough to just replace DeVos……we need to make sure the new commissioner of education is not Arne Duncan, or a Bill Gates puppet.
Me and Mara-la-go (to Me and My Arrow, by Harry Nilsson)
Me and Mara-la-go
Lost in the fog o
Wherever we go
Everyone knows
It’s me and Mara-la-go
Me and Mara-la-go
Taking the low road
Wherever we go
Everyone knows
It’s me and Mara-la-go
And in the morning when I wake up
I may be gone, I don’t know
And if I wake up just to break stuff
I’ll carry on, oh yes I wi-hill
Me and Mara-la-go
Lost in the fog o
Wherever we go
Everyone knows
It’s me and Mara-la-go
I’m not so sure that the tRump will lose the challenges. He has lost all of his court legal challenges, but the Rethugs have what they believe to be an ace up their sleeve, and it appears that is what they are going to do. The court challenges are a smoke screen for what they are planning-a Tilden vs Hayes job. Stall until the Dec deadline and then declare that the state legislatures in PA WI MI and AZ, which are Rethug controlled, have to pick their own electors who will override the popular vote and give those states to the Tangerine Wankmaggot. To understand all of the Rethuglican machinations read Greg Palast’s https://www.gregpalast.com/wp-content/uploads/HowTrumpStole2020_Palast.pdf It’s a free download and we know how much teachers/educators like free stuff, eh!
This from the huffingtonpost: WASHINGTON ― House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) continued to cast doubt on the U.S. election results on Thursday, refusing to acknowledge that President-elect Joe Biden had won and furthering a half-hearted GOP attempt to reverse the outcome.
When asked if Biden should be receiving intelligence briefings ― as is the custom for a president-elect ― McCarthy said that Biden was not the president right now and, “I don’t know if he’ll be president January 20th.” end quote
“half-hearted GOP attempt?” There’s nothing half hearted about nullifying an election. May the GOP party rot in Hades.
“It’s the best. We have the coups like you wouldn’t believe how great it is. Obama ever have coops like this? Just a couple weeks now big, beautiful coops like you never seen maybe Lincoln. You don’t have a coops you don’t have a country, am I right?”
The Fox guarding the coops
#2 is irrelevant. Even if Dems win both seats in Georgia, they still won’t have a filibuster-proof supermajority. They won’t even bother to bring any progressive legislation to the floor because “the Republicans will just filibuster it”. Even if they had a supermajority (as Obama did for five months), they still wouldn’t get anything done because of “Blue Dogs”. We saw this movie in 2009-2010.
BTW, has anyone been keeping tabs on Biden’s transition team and his likely appointees? Lobbyists, defense contractors, investment bankers, hedge funders, big corporation CEOs. Dig a bit into his Ron Klain, his new chief of staff, and you just might find yourself nostalgic for good ole Rahm Emanuel.
Biden himself told his donors that “nothing will fundamentally change”. Maya Angelou told us what to do when people tell us who they are.
Dienne,
Biden is not Trump!
He is not an insane narcissist.
Trump’s swamp is bigger and deeper than anything Biden might do.
In eight years of Obama, there was never a scandal.
Obama didn’t get anything done!!!???? Huh? Obama inherited the Bush caused recession of 2008 and guided us back to recovery. And he created the ACA which was an improvement over what we had and what the GOP was “proposing,”……………..NOTHING. And he appointed SOTOMAYOR AND KAGAN TO THE SCOTUS! That’s not just some chopped liver.
Right, Joe Jersey! And not a single scandal in eight years.
I think I will trust Elizabeth Warren and AOC – who both have been positive about Ron Klain — over those who rant about how the entire impeachment was a fraud because president trump did absolutely nothing wrong and those who still insist that the Mueller investigation was a plot to get Trump and totally exonerated Trump. Now this person is saying that Ron Klain is terrible and we should believe her over Elizabeth Warren and AOC.
When it comes to trust, we can trust those who have rabidly defended Trump’s presidency from what they characterized as the “evil democrats” or we can trust AOC and Elizabeth Warren.
^^^””Maya Angelou told us what to do when people tell us who they are.” Those who had no problems with Trump’s actions have definitely showed us who they are.
A Biden White House will be a welcome stable administration without unnecessary chaos and drama. Biden at least acknowledges that he must protect the American people. Biden will surround himself with competent advisers and scientists rather than right wing fringe groups and sycophants.
Democrats are smart to ignore Trump’s tantrums to the best of their ability. The best move for Democrats is to campaign aggressively in Georgia to try to neutralize McConnell’s power in the Senate. The Georgia Senate race is where Democrats should focus their attention.
Great article by Stephen Singer. I also am a Bernie supporter and voted for him in the primaries of 2016 and 2020. Bernie lost here in NJ by wide margins, a blue state. Joe Biden has won the election by a healthy number of votes, something to cheer about. I do admit that it is disturbing that 71 million Americans voted for the want-to-be authoritarian who has no respect for democracy or basic norms. This hints at some kind of sickness of the soul of the country that such a huge chunk of the electorate would even deign to vote for a demonstrated and certified sociopath, serial liar and Limbaugh/Hannity president.
We are lucky that Biden won and he still has a fight to get in the White House with his arms and legs intact. The GOP and Trump are working overtime to cripple the Biden presidency even before it is fully born.
From the article, quote:
And if he misses [on education], at least we can celebrate the end of the Muslim ban, reinstating the DREAM Act, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, rejoining the World Health Organization and the restoration of a functioning federal government to the USA.
end quote
Cautious optimism feels good, and it’s important to have some good feelings after four years of dread. Everything we see coming from the Biden education transition team, however, revolves around the continued use of high stakes data. The data are without validity, always have been, and always will be, but that doesn’t deter the architects of high stakes testing.
Yes, the transition team is filled with experts (from businesses and think tanks), and they are better than incompetents. But the team is not filled with educators. To be honest, as an educator who cares about ending the use of high stakes data and briefly considered applying to serve at the pleasure of the president in 2021, I do not want to be part of a team that refuses to relinquish federal mandates requiring the collection of high stakes data. I don’t want that job. I want to stand up for what’s right, not what’s better than DeVos.
Everyone forgot to thank Bernie Sanders after Joe Biden won the election. Biden won because, among other reasons, active Sanders supporters put all our differences with neoliberals aside for months to get Trump out of office. Well, now Trump is out of office. It’s time to go back to fighting the good fight. It doesn’t feel good, but it’s necessary. We cannot forever go along to get along.
Education is badly wounded. Apply pressure.
Well said
You know, Bob, a reason, of many, I tell everyone I know about this site is that I hope they’ll click on and read your site. — English teachers rule!
Thanks, LeftCoast!
Data Driven
Data are driven —
Along for the ride
Never are given
A chance to decide
Recycling?
Names are new
But poems are old
Hope they do
Not fit the mold
If I ever get tired of having the walls of Diane’s virtual living room beautifully covered with rhymes, old and new, I will let you know. Spoiler alert: That will never happen. Reuse, recycle, revise, rewrite, repost. Besides, all the corporations meddling in education for profit are just recycling old libertarian ideas, so older poems are appropriate.
I thought this was interesting from Newsweek this morning.
“Trump Counties Make Up Just 29 Percent of U.S. Economic Output, 2020 Election Study Shows. Counties won by Democratic President-elect Joe Biden make up 70 percent of all U.S. economic output—or gross domestic product (GDP)—a new post-election study finds.”
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-counties-make-just-29-percent-us-economic-output-2020-election-study-shows-1546951
What might we learn from that?
Well, for one, Trumpistan is welfare country showing us what poverty does to the ability to reason rationally.
Another great piece from Steve Singer.
Let’s be clear about comparisons of Linda Darling-Hammond (DH) to Betsy DeVos. This is like comparing the mathematical abilities of, say, John von Neumann to those of, say, Tom Cruz. DH is an actual education expert who has made profound contributions to the field. DeVos is simply another Trump maladministration incompetent.
Here comes the “buts.”
DH worked as a consultant for and approved of SBAC. How could any brilliant person look at the disaster that was SBAC in ELA (and that entire generation of standardized ELA tests) and approve? I would be happy to extend her the benefit of the doubt. From experience, I know that on these big educational materials and assessment projects, there’s a lot that’s baked in from the get-go because of the very concepts that the project is based on, and individual workers on these projects often can’t affect those much. I have myself, many times in the past, taken the position, “OK. I can’t undo this entire mess, but perhaps I can tinker with it and make it less awful.” Just a couple comments about SBAC and that whole generation of standardized ELA tests:
The test makers attempted to measure what in EdSpeak are called “higher-order thinking skills” using new multiple-choice question types, which, alas, DH defended. In practice, this meant, in part, that the answer choices were all to be plausible, but one of the choices was to be best. The idea was that kids would actually have to think about the answer rather than simply regurgitate a fact from a selection. Given vagaries of test preparation, however, this led to actual tests in which, more often than not, one (or more) of the supposedly wrong answers was (or were) actually better than the supposedly right answer was; in which none of the given answers was, arguably, a good answer to the question; or in which the question was actually unanswerable given the actual wording of the question stem. In other words, the tests were a confused and confusing mess, as any kid who has taken them can attest.
Unfortunately, the whole enterprise of constructing these new Common [sic] Core [sic] ELA tests was doomed from the start because they were trying to achieve an impossibility–to create a valid test of the Gates/Coleman bullet list of ELA “standards.” There are a number of reasons for this. Many of these “standards” are so vague and broad that one cannot legitimately operationalize them sufficiently to test them validly. So, for example, at every level in ELA, there is a “standard” on “making inferences from texts.” Well, there are three broad types of inferences–inductive, abductive, and deductive–and entire sciences devoted to methods of inference in each (including propositional and predicate logic scientific method and hypothesis testing, and probability, to name a few), and what constitutes a “text” is equally broad (and, in the “standards,” undefined). And, on one of these tests, there are one or two questions per “standard.” OBVIOUSLY, one or two multiple-choice questions cannot reliably or validly measure “inferencing from texts ability” IN GENERAL. Another example: among the ELA “standards” at Grades 11 and 12 is one saying that the student will be familiar with a wide range of fundamental texts in American literature and history. Again, one or two multiple-choice questions cannot determine whether that’s the case. We are talking, at a minimum, tens of texts there, and it could be hundreds. Another ENORMOUS issue with the testability of the “standards” is that the Gates/Coleman list is almost entirely CONTENT FREE. It’s a SKILLS LIST and contains very little in the way of concrete KNOWLEDGE of the subjects of ELA. Left out are both discursive, world knowledge (Who was Mary Shelley? What famous work did she write? What genre of literature did she thereby arguably create? What are the major themes of that work? How do these themes reflect Romantic Era preoccupations?) and procedural knowledge (How do you format an MLA Works Cited page? Particular entries for particular kinds of works? Parenthetical references to those works?) So, the “standards” are not validly and reliably testable, and even if they were, much that constitutes actual attainment in ELA would be left out and unmeasured by those tests.
So, why have the tests persisted even though they are A SCAM, even though they don’t actually reliably and validly measure what they are supposed to measure? Well, that’s because being written in English sentences, they DO require some level of reading ability, and thus they can serve a crude, very crude, sorter of test takers. But one could get the same results by giving every ELA student in the United States a test, written in English sentences, on ANY SUBJECT WHATSOEVER–on hydraulic mechanical industrial systems or dirigible driving, for example. Those who could read the sentences would do better than those who couldn’t. Such a test would be JUST AS GOOD A TYPE OF INSTRUMENT FOR THE PURPORTED PURPOSES OF THE ELA TESTS as the actual ELA tests are.
An aside: One of the problems with these discussions of “standardized testing” or “the standardized tests” is that they are NOT a single type of thing. The tests in ELA and the tests in Math, and the “standards” on which they are based, are entirely different types of thing, as different from one another as platypuses are from shoelaces, and one cannot speak accurately about them at a level of generalization that encompasses them both, though, alas, pundits do this all the time.
OK. That said, back to DH. I suspect that she has long known or at least now knows about these profound problems with the existing standardized ELA tests, and doubtless she will be (she already is) a proponent of more capacious measurement and accountability mechanisms, such as balanced scorecard dashboards. Educators have a habit of half understanding and then borrowing ideas from other fields, such as linguistics or business. In this case, the Balanced Scorecard comes from the brilliant seminal work of Harvard University Business professors Robert Kaplan and David Norton, and I agree that the notion of the Balanced Scorecard has potential uses in education generally.
HOWEVER, what I fear in the case of DH is that she will push or at least go along with yet another top-down assessment tool that will have profound unintended and disastrous effects of pedagogy and curricula, as the Common [sic] Core [sic] and its associated high-stakes tests did. In ELA today, because of these assessments, the tail is wagging the dog, and much of our curriculum has devolved into random, incoherent, “skills”-based test prep. The negative consequences of that are profound.
My verdict on the architects of the top-down “accountability” system:
“Lord forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
cx: “Here come the “buts,” Ofc.
Bob,
Thank you so much for this comment. As a parent, I found it one of the most insightful and helpful critiques of common core testing I have ever read. And everything you wrote rang so true to me from what I saw as a parent who experienced state testing before the days of common core and with common core. Pre-Common Core standardized testing always had its flaws, but there was something just off about the common core ELA exams and as I was reading your comment I finally understood why.
I can see how the original intent wasn’t nefarious — I suppose there is a credible argument to be made that testing kids on what facts they had memorized for a test wouldn’t reveal much about what they were learning. Asking kids to think, instead of memorizing lots of facts, seems like a pretty good idea from a parent’s perspective. But looking back, I see how shocking it is that educators like LDH would ever believe that a standardized test could be designed to measure that.
And your description of the problematic ELA testing — with one “best” answer – was so apt! I can recall my spouse and I trying to figure out the “best” answer on a 3rd grade ELA exam question and agreeing that any question where two college educated adults can’t both identify the same “best” answer was completely useless and the only purpose of such a test would be to guarantee that a certain percentage of 8 year old students would choose the wrong answer regardless of whether 100% of them read at an adult level.
The flaws with the common core tests must have been apparent within a year or two. So the question is why were those educators still so determined to keep testing instead of listening to what teachers and parents were saying about them. Were they just blinded by their own sense of superiority? Were they too insecure to admit to mistakes? Was it because keeping quiet and going along was more lucrative?
The idea of trying to teach students to think instead of memorizing and regurgitating facts is so appealing to me. Many private schools do this. It’s such a shame that what probably started out as a reasonable idea was ruined by people who refused to hear anything critical about the tests. If the people in charge had been confident, smart, and open-minded with a true desire to make education better, there might have been a more positive outcome.
Thanks. There’s a one-word answer to the question you raise: hubris.
hubris.
Yes, that is a perfect word.
One thing about Biden is that he doesn’t seem to have hubris. He even chose as his VP the woman who totally embarrassed him at the first debate. I don’t know if he will pick people for his cabinet who lack hubris the way he does, but I sure hope so.
hubris to me is a sign of deep insecurity. People with hubris know deep down that they aren’t very smart, so they cover it up by pretending they are always right.
Very smart and confident people want to know if they make mistakes! They change their mind because they listen and want to know more — their goal is not simply proving that their first idea was correct. That’s why I love this blog authored by a person with no hubris who did just that!
We all make mistakes. Those with hubris are terrible people to be in charge of anything because when they make mistakes, they would rather pretend they didn’t than just acknowledge it.
“Higher-order thinking skills”
Higher-order thinking skills
Help with your career
Fries, Big Macs and coke refills
Things you often hear
Seminal Work from Harvard
“Seminal work”
Pregnant with genius
Born of a jerk
On Harvardly genus
I wanted to use another word, but thought it a little inappropriate.
There’s a word, perhaps you know,
that describes what’s working when you forgo
the choice but somewhat indelicate term:
it’s action by the SUPEREGO.
Some, like Trump or a typical Redditor,
having the instincts of a predator,
will use it anyway, whatever the cost,
for such folk lack that internal editor.