Whereas once I expended anger upon you, now I am simply glad never to be forced to think of you again. Whereas many have contended over the years that you acted valiantly, if secretly, to mitigate and ameliorate the cruelty of your father, the evidence suggests that you instead acted corruptly, if secretly, to coat his viciousness in silky pink pearlescent influencer goo.…
Unfortunately, the Trump™ brand now includes family separations, environmental denialism, global degradation, needless pandemic deaths, LGBTQ affronts, and petulant, truth-free grievance, none of which can just be shipped out and sold like last year’s sagging merch. The shattered shiny detritus is littered everywhere, and the cleanup work will take years. And though it may be a designer fragrance, the smell of complicity lingers. Even at its glossiest, the Trump™ catalog was never all that interesting. Please, oh please, take me off your list.
Pasi Sahlberg is a noted Finnish educator whose book Finnish Lessons awakened Americans to the realization that good schools can flourish without standardized testing. He has focused in his work on the importance of creativity and play for children and the dangers of standardization and the free market.
In this essay, he compares the different experiences of students in Australia (where he currently lives) and in Finland (his native land) and tries to figure out what educators have learned because of the pandemic. One glaring fact is inequality. Will there be a will to address that basic and damaging fact of life after the pandemic?
He draws the following lessons:
Address inequalities early. Preventive health care and high-quality early childhood education can go a long way in avoiding gaps early.
Trust teachers as professionals. They know what their students need.
Build self-directedness among students, teachers, and schools. Too many comply with mandates and are lost when it is time to be thoughtful and make decisions on your own.
Sahlberg is resolute that an excellent and equitable education go hand-in-hand.
Most of those promises require a dramatic increase in funding to close the opportunity gap.
During the campaign, President Elect Biden proposed public schools policy designed to expand the opportunity to learn: “Invest in our schools to eliminate the funding gap between white and non-white districts, and rich and poor districts. There’s an estimated $23 billion annual funding gap between white and non-white school districts today, and gaps persist between high- and low-income districts as well.”
Educators and advocates will need to hold Joe Biden accountable for these promises even as we work to support his efforts to make them a reality. A significant challenge for Biden will be passing the tax increase on corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Mitch McConnell will continue to lead a Republican majority Senate, whose members will likely not be amenable to raising these taxes.
So, one obstacle to implementing Biden’s bold promises is Mitch McConnell. Another is whether he chooses a Secretary of Education and key personnel who are still attached to the failed policies of Race to the Top. Will his new Secretary bring a bold new vision to support students, teachers, and schools instead of threatening them?
WILMINGTON, Del. – In his first act as president-elect, Joe Biden announced Monday the 13 members of his transition team’s covid-19 advisory board.
Biden advisers say this speedy rollout is intended to signal that the incoming administration will elevate the voices of public health experts and scientists, who have found themselves marginalized and debased by President Trump as the coronavirus continues to course through the country.
The United States will surpass 10 million confirmed infections today. The seven-day average for new cases is more than 100,000 per day for the first time. In five of the past seven days, covid-19 has killed more than 1,000 Americans.
People wait in their vehicles on Sunday at a drive-through coronavirus testing site in Milwaukee. (Bing Guan/Reuters)
The new advisory group will brief Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris here later today, and Biden will deliver remarks on his plan to control the contagion. Vice President Pence will host a meeting at 3 p.m.of the White House coronavirus task force in the Situation Room. This is the first meeting Pence has convened since Oct. 20, despite the rapidly deteriorating situation.
Two members of the new panel worked inside the Trump administration: Luciana Borio was director for medical and biodefense preparedness on Trump’s National Security Council until she left last year before the pandemic. She is now vice president of the technical staff at In-Q-Tel, the Central Intelligence Agency’s investment arm, and a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously served as assistant commissioner for counterterrorism policy and the acting chief scientist at the Food and Drug Administration.
There’s also Rick Bright, an immunologist and vaccine researcher, who was ousted by Trump political appointees in April as the director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Bright, a civil servant who had led the agency since 2016, alleged in a whistleblower complaint and testified under oath before Congress that he was pushed aside after he strongly objected to Trump’s insistence that his agency support widespread access to chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, two potentially dangerous drugs that the president spent weeks peddling in the spring as a potential cure for covid-19.
Bright was demoted to a lesser role at the National Institutes of Health, from which he resigned on Oct. 6 because he said that he was being given no work to do. “Public health and safety have been jeopardized by the administration’s hostility to the truth and by its politicization of the pandemic response, undoubtedly leading to tens of thousands of preventable deaths,” Bright wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post the day after his resignation.
He has been warning that the Trump administration still has no coordinated national testing strategy and criticized the White House for expressing resistance to testing people who might have asymptomatic infections. “Federal agencies, staffed with some of the best scientists in the world, continue to be politicized, manipulated and ignored,” Bright wrote in the op-ed. “The country is flying blind into what could be the darkest winter in modern history.”
Bright also previously served as an adviser to the World Health Organization. In July, the Trump administration began the process of formally withdrawing the United States from the U.N. agency. One of the first actions Biden plans to take after being inaugurated on Jan. 20 is to reverse that.
Trump’s political people at the top of Health and Human Services have claimed they got rid of Bright because he was confrontational and ineffective, but his whistleblower complaint included emails and other documentation that supported his allegations.
The spotlight is also back on the Trump White House’s handling of the coronavirus within its own walls. News leaked out late Friday that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and five other Trump aides in the West Wing – plus a senior campaign official – tested positive for the virus around Election Day. Meadows, who tested positive Wednesday but told others not to disclose his condition, said on Oct. 25 that Trump was pushing to reopen schools and send people back to work because “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”
Biden has attacked the Trump team for waving the white flag of surrender, and he promised during his victory speech on Saturday nightthat trying to get the pandemic under control will be his top priority as president.
“We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality or relish life’s most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control,” Biden said. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science. It will be constructed out of compassion, empathy and concern. I will spare no effort — or commitment — to turn this pandemic around.”
Who else is on the Biden task force:
The effort will be co-chaired by David Kessler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who served as commissioner of the FDA from 1990 to 1997, under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Vivek Murthy, who as surgeon general during the final three years of Barack Obama’s administration commanded 6,600 public health officers during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks; and Marcella Nunez-Smith, the associate dean for Health Equity Research at Yale medical school. Murthy and Kessler have been regularly advising Biden for months.
Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist, chairs the medical ethics department and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he’s also vice provost. During the first two years of the Obama administration, he was served a special adviser for health policy at the Office of Management and Budget. (His brother Rahm was White House chief of staff.) Emanuel has also chaired the bioethics department at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health since 1997.
Atul Gawande, a surgeonatBrigham and Women’s Hospital, teaches at Harvard’s medical school. The prolific author founded Ariadne Labs, a health systems innovation center between the hospital where he practices and Harvard’s School of Public Health. He was a senior advisor in HHS during the Clinton administration.
Celine Gounder cares for patients at Bellevue Hospital Center and teaches at New York University’s medical school. While on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, she directed delivery efforts for the Gates Foundation-funded Consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS/TB Epidemic.
Julie Morita, who served as the city of Chicago’s health commissioner for two decades, is executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, sat on the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Community Based Solutions to Promote Health Equity in the United States.
Michael Osterholm directs the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, where he chairs the Department of Public Health. He was previously a science envoy for health security on behalf of the State Department and worked for 24 years in the Minnesota Department of Health, including 15 years as the state’s epidemiologist.
Loyce Pace is executive director and president of the Global Health Council. She has worked with Physicians for Human Rights and Catholic Relief Services, and she previously held leadership positions at the Livestrong Foundation and the American Cancer Society.
Robert Rodriguez is a professor of emergency medicine at UCSF medical school, where he practices in the emergency department and intensive care unit of two major trauma centers in the Bay Area. The Harvard medical school graduate has authored papers on the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the mental health of frontline providers. In July, he volunteered to help with a critical surge of coronavirus patients in the ICU in his hometown of Brownsville, Tex.
Eric Goosby, also a professor at UCSF medical school, was the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator during the Obama administration. Later, he was appointed by the United Nations Secretary General as a special envoy for TB.During the Clinton administration, he was founding director of the Ryan White CARE Act, the largest federally funded HIV-AIDS program, and the interim Director of the White House’s Office of National AIDS Policy.
Rebecca Katz, the director of the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center, and Beth Cameron, director for global health security and biodefense on the White House National Security Council during the Obama administration, are serving as advisers to the transition task force.
Joe Biden receives a virtual coronavirus briefing on Oct. 28 at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
This new advisory group offers a stark contrast with Trump, who suggested last week during one of his final rallies before Election Day that he plans to fire Anthony Fauci, the top expert on infectious diseases in the government since 1984, after the election. Fauci and others have clashed with Scott Atlas, a radiologist at a conservative think tank who does not have a background in public health but who has had Trump’s ear since advocating for a more relaxed approach to the virus during appearances on Fox News.
Steve Ruis reminds us that Trump refused to participate in transition planning when he was elected and is now undermining the Biden transition. Chris Christie was in charge of Trump’s transition, prepared a voluminous briefing book, and Trump’s people threw it out. They were so convinced that the government was useless and inept that they didn’t want to know what was done or what was needed. They just knew it all.
Ruis writes:
People are noticing that the Trump official who is required by law to sign a document that releases the funds set aside for making the transition to a new president’s administration is refusing to sign that document. Oh my gosh, commenters ask, will Trump sabotage the transition?
If you weren’t paying attention, he already did.
When Mr. Trump was elected, the Obama administration spent millions of dollars preparing for the transition to Mr. Trump’s administration. Briefing books were prepared. Interviews were scheduled. Briefings were put on the calendar.
Whole books have been written on what actually happened. Trump officials didn’t show up for briefings. Others dumped the transition manuals. Other appointees were so incompetent, they didn’t bother to look up what the mandate of their department was. (Yes, I am talking about you Rick Perry.)
In some cases, when nobody from Trump showed up to be briefed and to take over, chaos ensued. Political appointees were not able to just stay on until their replacement showed up. They were required, by law, to pack their things and leave. Key employees who saw the writing on the wall used the “opportunity” to find other employment.
Emily W. Murphy is the Trumper at General Services Administration who refuses to allow transition planning for the Biden administration to move forward.
I was invited to write for The Hill, a D.C.-based website, about why I oppose the Trump administration’s executive order creating a “1776 Commission” to promote “patriotic education.” Here is my article.
Trump signed an executive order on November 2, the day before the election, establishing the Commission. The reason, the order said, was that “…in recent years, a series of polemics grounded in poor scholarship has vilified our Founders and our founding. Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
The Commission is a direct response to the 1619 Project, which was published by the New York Times and edited by Nicole-Hannah Jones. It sought to see American history through the African-American experience. I suspect that Trump never read the 1619 Project, but perhaps his speechwriter Stephen Miller did.
The Commission is a bad idea, which I explain in the article. It is also illegal. But when has that ever stopped Trump or Miller?
Linda Darling-Hammond declared that she does not want to be Biden’s Secretary of Education. She prefers to stay in California, where she is president of the State Board of Education and leads the Learning Policy Institute.
In 2008, she was Obama’s education spokesman during the campaign, and it was widely anticipated that she would be selected as Secretary of Education. But “reformers” (DFER) launched a campaign to torpedo her nomination and pushed for one-off their own: Arne Duncan. Editorials appeared miraculously in major newspapers denouncing her. And we got stuck with RTTT.
The Boston Globe wrote about what Trump might do next. He could graciously concede his loss, but that doesn’t look likely. He could try to undermine the legitimacy of the election, by tweeting that it was rife with fraud, as he has done on Twitter and his public statements.
“The simple fact is this election is far from over,” Trump said in a statement that was issued while the president was reportedly out playing golf. “Joe Biden has not been certified as the winner of any states, let alone any of the highly contested states headed for mandatory recounts, or states where our campaign has valid and legitimate legal challenges that could determine the ultimate victor.”
He could try to overturn the election results by another method:
Ian Bassin, who worked in the White House counsel’s office during the Obama administration and now serves as executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit group Protect Democracy, worries more about Trump’s legacy.
“While I think the president poses an immediate danger to the functioning of the federal government … I’m actually more concerned about the threats Trump, and especially Trumpism, will pose to our country in coming years,” he said.
Democracy can survive smaller anti-democratic movements, he said, but when they grow to represent large swaths of the population, there are grave risks.
“He has unleashed a toxic political virus on the nation — a mix of white supremacy and authoritarianism — that is not going to be so easy to contain, even if he leaves office,” Bassin said. “So while Congress, courts, and responsible executive branch officials will have to protect our institutions from any Trump-led assaults during a potential lame-duck period, the rest of us have our work cut out for us.”
But there may be more pressing concerns, especially if Trump leans on Republican legislatures in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia to dismiss the results and submit a slate of electors to Congress who favor him, as some right-wing commentators have been suggesting.
Such a move may be unlikely, but it’s allowed by the Constitution, which designates that states appoint electors “in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the 19th century, the popular vote in each state determined the slate of electors. But as recently as 2000, after the deadlocked election in Florida, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that states “can take back the power to appoint electors.
William John Antholis, director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, which specializes in presidential scholarship, said the size of Biden’s lead would make that approach more difficult, given that it would require multiple states to take the unprecedented step of overturning the will of voters.
“Every state that Biden wins will reduce the possibility of something crazy happening,” he said.
While Trump has lost the popular vote decisively — by more than 4 million votes, so far— some 70 million Americans voted for him, or nearly 48 percent of the electorate. His ultimate fate in the Electoral College, however, won’t be clear until the tight races in several swing states are certified.
Antholis hoped the margin would be great enough for other elected Republicans to recognize that the election was lost and persuade Trump to do so as well.
“Trump’s decision-making sometimes appears mercurial, but he does talk to a lot of people, and the messages those people provide to him, I think, will determine the fate of the country,” he said.
No matter what he hears, Trump is facing legal peril if he leaves office and loses his immunity from prosecution as a sitting president.
Carol Burris and I wrote about our hopes for President-Elect Joe Biden’s Secretary of Education. She or he will have to do a lot of work to clear away the mess that Betsy DeVos made in her mad rush to direct public money to private, religious, and charter schools. It’s comparable to cleaning out the Augean stables, where the mythical king Elis kept 3,000 oxen for thirty years without ever cleaning them. It’s a Herculean task!
We began:
Betsy DeVos just got her pink slip. Throughout her four-year tenure, she did everything she could to undermine public education. Instead, she promoted the idea that schooling should be a competitive free-for-all in which parents shop for schools with tax dollars and then hope it all works out. Now it is time to end that war against public schools as she walks out the door. It is time to chart a course away from the failed reforms that began with George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB), accelerated with Barack Obama’s Race to the Top and brought us to the place we are today.
Although education has not been a major focus of this campaign, President-elect Joe Biden, unlike Obama, talked less about “reform” and more about increased support and funding for public schools — an acknowledgment of the critical role that money plays in achieving successful school outcomes. This is a turn from the Race to the Top era during which it was believed, without evidence, that “three great teachers in a row” and the forces of the marketplace could solve all of the problems that American students face.
We are optimistic about the Biden administration. At the same time, we know there is often a slip between the cup and the lip, and while a candidate can say all the right things during a campaign, personnel is policy. It is too soon to know in which direction policy will go.
For example, Biden has promised that his new secretary of education would have teaching experience. That is good news. But who that teacher is can make a world of difference. In our view, whoever Biden picks for the top spot at the department should have a clear record that indicates a pro-public education agenda, as well as an understanding that we cannot test our way to excellence or fix schools by threatening to close them.
Here is what we hope to see in our new president’s choice.
First and foremost, the new secretary must support the rebuilding of our nation’s public schools, which have been battered by the pandemic, two decades of failed federal policy and years of financial neglect. Even as the president heals the nation, the new secretary must heal our nation’s schools.
There is no doubt that our public schools face extraordinary challenges in re-engaging students and families both now and when the virus subsides. The pandemic has expanded opportunity gaps and learning gaps. Even under the best of circumstances, remote learning has been a poor substitute for in-person teaching. In communities where schools opened, the need to quarantine students and teachers exposed to covid-19 or to temporarily shut the school has resulted in interrupted educational experiences. Many districts have been slow to reopen because they lack the resources needed to make the physical space safe. With states’ revenue declining, the federal government will have to provide the needed funds needed to protect the health and safety of students and staff.
Educators will not only have to catch students up academically, they will also be challenged to meet the social and emotional needs of students, many of whom will be traumatized by their experiences during the pandemic. Many will have difficulty adjusting to a return to school. The new secretary, therefore, must acknowledge the impact of adverse childhood experiences and trauma on students’ ability to learn. The financial support dedicated to these efforts must provide flexibility for schools to decide how that money is best spent.
Second, our new secretary of education must recognize that neighborhood public schools governed by their communities are essential to the health of our democracy and the well-being of children. We need a champion of public education in the Department of Education who rejects efforts to privatize public schools, whether those efforts be via vouchers or charter schools.
Choice programs, whether charters or vouchers, result in increased stratification by race, socioeconomics and political points of view. Now more than ever, in a nation divided, we need to increase opportunities for students to attend public schools that build tolerance and understanding of different experiences and opinions.
At a time when so much must be done to rebuild our public schools when covid-19 subsides, our country cannot afford to provide tuition assistance to families that choose private and religious schools. We, therefore, expect that the new secretary will work with Congress to phase out the Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Act, the only federal voucher program, and oppose any congressional attempts to institute tax credit programs that are designed to subsidize private and religious school tuition.
We hope that the new secretary will insist that charter schools be subject to the same transparency, accountability and equity policies as public schools.
We expect the new secretary will encourage states to pass legislation putting districts in charge of authorizing charter schools and holding them to high financial transparency and accountability standards.
We also expect that the secretary will fulfill Biden’s campaign promise of no federal assistance to charters that operate for profit or are managed by for-profit entities.
The new secretary, we hope, will institute a moratorium on new grants from the federal Charter Schools Program at least until those reforms contained in the Democratic Party platform are enacted.
Third, the new secretary must end the era of high-stakes standardized testing — in both the immediate future and beyond. All federal tax dollars must be directed to helping our nation’s public schools recover — not wasted on the creation of new assessments as some have imprudently suggested.
After two decades of school accountability measures based on high-stakes testing, it is clear that these policies have proved to be ineffective levers for improving schools. The use of test results to evaluate teachers and put sanctions on schools has correlated with a decline in student performance on National Assessment of Education Progress tests, which are independent audits of student performance. The rapid and ill-advised implementation of the Common Core and its tests furthered that decline. This administration must focus on opportunity gaps, not test score gaps.
Fourth, the department’s new leader should promote diversity and desegregation (both among and within schools), and commit to eliminating institutional racism in school policy and practices. If we have learned anything in the past election, it is that our country is deeply divided along the lines of class and race. Diverse public schools where students learn together and play together — whether it be in the classroom or on the sports field — can break down social barriers, improve academic performance and increase tolerance. The benefits of attending socioeconomically and racially integrated schools remain throughout life.
Finally, our new secretary must believe in a philosophy of education that is child-centered, inquiry-based, intellectually challenging, culturally responsive and respectful of all students’ innate capacities and potential to thrive…
This is a historic moment for federal education policy. Now is the time to reverse two decades of failed federal mandates. Now is the time for a new vision of what education can be. And most important, now is the time to restore the original role of the federal government as a guarantor of equity, a source of funding for the neediest students and a source of accurate and timely research about the progress and condition of American education.
As I reported last night, the Trump campaign announced that the president’s personal attorney would meet with the media in Philadelphia to discuss legal challenges to the vote count. The announcement said the event would be held at the Four Seasons; the press assumed that meant the plush Four Seasons Hotel. Wrong. It was quickly rescheduled in front of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping in north Philadelphia, in a gritty neighborhood. No one could explain why.
PHILADELPHIA — The end came in all the places you’d expect, in all the ways you’d expect, with all the people you’d expect. When news broke Saturday that Donald Trump’s reign was ending, the president was on a golf course that he owns in Virginia, playing his last round as a non-loser. In Washington, about 125 of his worshipful supporters gathered on the stoop of the Supreme Court to “stop the steal,” then circumnavigated the U.S. Capitol seven times, because that’s how the Israelites conquered Jericho, according to the Book of Joshua.
And a pair of Trump’s most loyal surrogates made a defiant stand on the gravelly backside of a landscaping business in an industrial stretch of Northeast Philadelphia, near a crematorium and an adult-video store called Fantasy Island, along State Road, which leads — as being associated with Trump sometimes does — to a prison.
Rudolph Giuliani, America’s mayor turned Trump’s sloppy fixer, squinted into the autumnal sun at journalists who had assembled outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping — a choice of location that multiple Trump staffers could not account for, saying that it was the work of the campaign’s Pennsylvania advance team. Literally anywhere else would have conveyed more legitimacy on the enterprise, but legitimacy did not seem a high priority for one of the last battles of a lost war.
“Joe Frazier is still voting here — kind of hard, since he died five years ago,” Giuliani said in a meandering monologue, referring to the champion boxer who died in 2011 as an example of Philadelphia’s unproven election malfeasance. “But Joe continues to vote. If I recall correctly, Joe was a Republican. So maybe I shouldn’t complain. But we should go see if Joe is voting Republican or Democrat now, from the grave. Also Will Smith’s father has voted here twice since he died. I don’t know how he votes, because his vote is secret. In Philadelphia, they keep the votes of dead people secret.”
Joe Biden receives a virtual coronavirus briefing on Oct. 28 at the Queen in Wilmington, Del. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
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