You have probably read about the gymnasts who testified before Congress last week, complaining about the failure of the FBI, the US Olympic Committee, and others had ignored their reports of sexual abuse by the doctor for the gymnastics team.
Like me, you probably never read the FBI report describing its own failure to take their reports seriously.
This CNN story has a link to the report. It is horrifying.
Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote recently about Teach for America’s changing focus. Founded in 1990 to recruit college graduates to teach in urban and rural schools for a minimum of two years, TFA made bold claims about the success of its teachers in closing achievement gaps and raising test scores. For many years, they attracted hundreds of millions from corporate sponsors, foundations like Walton, Broad Gates, based on their certainty that their young teachers were better than experienced teachers.
Messenger wrote that teachers were leaving the profession because of demanding parents and school politics.
He thought that might explain why TFA was headed in a new direction.
He wrote:
It’s also a reason why a nonprofit organization that has been providing teachers to several area school districts is changing its focus with a bit of a twist that at first seems disconnected from the problem. Despite the teacher shortage, New York-based Teach for America is no longer providing teachers to the St. Louis Public Schools and other districts. Instead, it will work on training school leaders, like principals, administrators and school board members.
It’s a change that to some degree comes from a place of failure. Teach for America was founded in 1990 as an education reform organization, to try to boost academic achievement of students in urban settings and reduce the learning gap between white and Black students. But the numbers haven’t budged much after 20 years of training young teachers who make a two-year commitment to come to places like St. Louis and teach in public or charter schools.
“As a whole, student achievement is not growing the way we intended it to,” says Elizabeth Bleier, the interim executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis. Bleier came to St. Louis from Chicago. She taught in the St. Louis Public Schools for a few years, and then worked at charter school KIPP in the city for a few more, before going to work at TFA.
With 600 similar alumni in St. Louis, TFA plans to help mentor those teachers and former teachers. This week it announced its latest class of Aspiring School Leaders Fellowship, in which 15 existing public school or charter educators, many of them people of color, will be trained and mentored for a year while earning a principal certification through St. Louis University.
In turning the focus to training principals and other school leaders, Bleier says the goal is to improve school cultures so that teacher retention eventually improves. “There is a lot of teacher and principal turnover in St. Louis,” she says. “When there is a strong school leader, teachers are happier and stay longer. We want our people to be able to go into the schools and have an influence.”
It’s a demonstration of hubris on the part of TFA to believe that they can ”train” TFA teachers to be principals.
How will a staff of teachers, ranging in age from their early 20s to their early 60s react to the announcement that their new principal is 24-25 years old, with two years of teaching experience? It is hard to imagine that the insertion of a young, inexperienced TFA principal would raise morale and stop the exodus of teachers. It seems likely that they would prefer a veteran whom they can turn to for help with teaching problems.
Parent activist Trevor Nelson explains how parents organized to get accurate medical information to other parents and the public. Governor Doug Ducey took a strong stand against mask mandates, and anti-maskers turned school board meetings into screaming matches. Nelson organized parent opposition to policies that endangered their children. He tells his story here at ”Public Voices for Public Schools,” a new website created by the Network for Public Education.
He begins:
Arizona had a problem. The people showing up at our local board meetings were anti-mask and anti-vaccine. Meanwhile, other parents had stopped showing up to the meetings because they felt frustrated and fearful of speaking up at all. Getting yelled at, hooted out, called a liar, and threatened will do that to you. It was starting to feel like the 2020 election all over again. And yet for all of the rancor, I knew that most parents felt the way I did: desperate to get their kids back to school as safely as possible.
My friend and fellow parent advocate Jessica Wani and I hatched a plan, with the help of some great Arizona healthcare workers to provide grounding in science and data. We’d begin collecting signatures from our fellow Arizonans to put pressure on the state government, local government and school boards, including as many representatives from the medical community as we could get. Even as our governor doubled and tripled down on his extreme anti-mask position, we were determined to demonstrate that when it comes to common sense safety measures in schools, public opinion is on our side.
We started small, with a single google form that people could easily sign, then we began to work on elected officials: boards of supervisors, city councilors, mayors, legislators—we reached out to all of them. And we kept our efforts intentionally non-partisan, making a point of not asking signers about their political affiliation. Next our scrappy team reached out to representatives of the medical community, including pediatricians, family doctors and public health experts.The number of signers quickly grew. By the time we put out our first newsletter, filled with the latest info about health and safety protocols in schools, we were up to 4,000 people.
The puzzle pieces began to fall into place. As we reached out to medical experts, we also encouraged them to raise their voices. And they did. Doctors and other medical professionals started writing their own letters, reporting on what they were seeing on the ground in real time, as hospitals in Arizona began to fill with COVID patients. They also urged their own colleagues to get involved and help make the case for vaccines, masking and social distancing in schools.
Please read the rest of his account. He is well that the parents and medical community are up against a governor who wants to dismantle public education. But they keep fighting.
The school board of Sarasota County passed a mask mandate to protect student safety, despite Governor Ron DeSantis’ strident opposition to such mandates. When parents learned that they could get a medical exemption form signed by a local chiropractor, they stood in long lines outside his office to get him to sign the form. When the Sarasota board received 1700 requests for medical exemptions, they declined 650 of them. Most of the 650 were signed by chiropractor Dr. Dan Busch. Chiropractors are not medical doctors.
Long lines surrounded Twin Palms Chiropractic late into the evening the day the mandate went into effect. The doctor worked late hours to evaluate and sign medical exemption forms for families all across Sarasota County free of charge.
The next day, district officials announced in an effort to ‘prevent abuse’, the school board would only accept medical exemption forms signed by medical doctors, osteopathic physicians, or advanced registered nurse practitioners. They would no longer accept forms from all licensed healthcare providers, including chiropractors. The change went into effect on the first of September.
“Dr. Busch is disappointed to learn that the Sarasota County School Board has chosen to reject every single medical exemption to the mask mandate signed by Twin Palms Chiropractic, despite those exemptions previously being accepted, and despite the school board continuing to accept exemptions from other licensed chiropractic physicians, dentists, and psychologists who are no longer able to grant exemptions under the new form,” Busch’s attorney sent 8 On Your Side in a September 2 email.
Jan Resseger explains how the Ohio legislature, which is devoted to charters and vouchers, managed to cheat districts like hers while boasting about “fair student funding.”
In the new state budget, the Ohio Legislature supposedly fixed an inequitable scheme for funding the state’s extensive private school vouchers. But it was a bait-and-switch. Public schools were losers, especially in poor districts.
Megan Schmidt wrote in Discover magazine about the value of reading fiction. Although written a year ago, this article is timely because it decisively refutes one of the central tenets of the Common Core, which encourages teachers to spend increasing amounts of time on “informational text” while decreasing time for literature.
She began:
Would the world be a better place if people read more books?
Of course, asserting that reading can fix the world’s problems would be naive at best. But it could help make it a more empathetic place. And a growing body of research has found that people who read fiction tend to better understand and share in the feelings of others — even those who are different from themselves.
That’s because literary fiction is essentially an exploration of the human experience, says Keith Oatley, a novelist and professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.
“Reading novels enables us to become better at actually understanding other people and what they’re up to,” says Oatley. “[With] someone who you’re married to … or a close friend, you can actually get to know them. Reading fiction enables you to sample across a much wider range of possible people and come to understand something about the differences among them.”
Psychologists have found that empathy is innate, as even babies show it. And while some people are naturally more empathetic than others, most people become more-so with age. Beyond that, some research indicates that if you’re motivated to become more empathetic, you probably can. Although there are many ways to cultivate empathy, they largely involve practicing positive social behaviors, like getting to know others, putting yourself in their shoes and challenging one’s own biases. And stories — fictional ones in particular — offer another way to step outside of oneself.
Fiction has the capacity to transport you into another character’s mind, allowing you to see and feel what they do. This can expose us to life circumstances that are very different from our own. Through fiction, we can experience the world as another gender, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, profession or age. Words on a page can introduce us to what it’s like to lose a child, be swept up in a war, be born into poverty, or leave home and immigrate to a new country. And taken together, this can influence how we relate to others in the real world…
Sometimes, empathy is described as the glue that holds society together. Without it, humankind probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. Our ancestors depended on acts of caring for survival — such as sharing resources, help with healing the sick, and protection from predators. And we’ll probably continue needing empathy to move forward. Yet, at this particular moment in history,it can feel like empathy is on shaky ground.
From this perspective, it seems that our current test-driven regime and neglect of literature are promoting the wrong values. Selfishness, competitiveness, hyper-individualism, lack of empathy.”
The union movement built the middle class. For most of the past century, big business and plutocrats have waged war on unions and have largely succeeded. As the following analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows, the high point of the labor movement was in the in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the strength of unions waned, inequality grew.
The EPI study begins:
Unions improve wages and benefits for all workers, not just union members. They help reduce income inequality by making sure all Americans, and not just the wealthy elite, share in the benefits of their labor.
Unions also reduce racial disparities in wages and raise women’s wages, helping to counteract disparate labor market outcomes by race and gender that result from occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market inequities related to structural racism and sexism.
Finally, unions help win progressive policies at the federal, state, and local levels that benefit all workers. And conversely, where unions are weak, wealthy corporations and their allies are more successful at pushing through policies and legislation that hurt working people. A strong labor movement protects workers, reduces disparities, and strengthens our democracy.
A friend who works in a government health agency sent me the following thoughts about the Texas abortion ban. The bill does not permit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which amounts to a ban since very few women know they are pregnant at that time. Citizens are offered a bounty of $10,000 for identifying any woman who obtained an abortion or who helped her get an abortion. The author requested anonymity.
She writes:
You have probably already read a great deal about the SCOTUS decision upholding (for now) the Texas ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Below are a few notable excerpts (articles by Lithwick, Tribe, and some others are worth reading in their entirety) and, as usual, some comments.
Note that “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v Wade SCOTUS decision, was a Texas resident who protested the unconstitutional abortion laws in her state.
Note also Michelle Goldberg’s useful framing of the crowdsourcing of anti-abortion enforcement as yet another illustration of the Republican embrace of vigilantism. (e.g.: Jan 6 insurrection, the call for military insubordination in defiance of civilian control, celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse in WI, praise for the Texas mob that attempted to force Biden’s campaign bus off the road, violence at anti-vaccine protests, Trump’s frequent promotion of assault.)
One of my questions today has still not been answered:
Are suits possible against individuals in other states who in any way help Texas women obtain an abortion out of state, i.e., if someone outside of Texas contributes money to an organization that helps Texas women leave the state to have an abortion, can the donor be sued? By anyone?
Dahlia LIthwick asserted on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight that the answer is not clear, and that that lack of clarity and the consequent chilling, self-censoring effect it has are deliberate. I’m sure clarity will be quickly forthcoming.
Another huge question is whether there will be sufficient political agitation (mostly among women) to make reproductive rights an issue with impact in the 2022 and 2024 elections. In theory, every legislator will now have to publicly take a position, and some are already lining up on either side. Dems see it as a winning issue – finally some serious motivation for our base and greater peril for Repubs.
A few points of clarification re misleading media reports:
– The Texas law is called a “heartbeat” bill. But there is no real “heartbeat” at 6 weeks because there is no real heart. At that point, the embryo is less than ½” long and has a slight pulse of electrical activity and a tiny tube that will eventually become a heart. After all, every living cell uses electric energy, including plants. So do cell phones. The term “heartbeat” bill is another form of emotionally manipulative, right wing branding which all journalists seem to be buying into.
– SCOTUS did not “give” women the right to abortion. The Roe v Wade decision agreed, as Jane Roe’s lawyers argued, that women have a Constitutional right to abortion based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides a “right to privacy.”
Here is what the Roe v Wade decision actually held. Note the differing terms and stipulations for each trimester:
State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother’s behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a ‘compelling’ point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term. Pp. 147-164.
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician. Pp. 163-164.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. Pp. 163-164.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164—165.
– An embryo is not an “unborn child.” An embryo is not even a fetus until week nine, and not viable outside the womb until 24-28 weeks. The Texas, Mississippi, and other laws outlawing abortion before “viability” are clearly unconstitutional.
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” introduced in 2017, 2019, and again in Jan 2021 with the co-sponsorship of 42 Republican Senators, duplicitously claims viability (and capacity for pain) at 20 weeks, counting from the date of conception/fertilization, rather than the standard obstetric calculation, which is from the first day of the woman’s last period – that is, two weeks prior to conception and easier to determine. (Muddying the water about the time of “viability” is another deceitful tactic designed to push a ban back at least to 20 weeks.) In either case, according to the Executive VP of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
“…in no way, shape or form is a 20-week fetus viable. There is no evidence anywhere of a 20-week fetus surviving, even with intensive medical care.”
Further, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
“the neural circuitry necessary to distinguish touch from painful touch does not, in fact, develop until late in the third trimester.”
– Why are we only discussing the responsibility of women and penalizing those who help them? If a fetus is a child, isn’t the father a parent, guilty of child neglect if he walks away from a pregnant partner and guilty of aiding an abortion if he knows she will seek one? And why are women expected to fight for their human rights on their own? Where is the outrage of regular men, other than the liberal TV pundits and civil rights lawyers?
As Dahlia Lithwick, points out,
“…It’s almost impossible ..not (to)..declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women…..
…..a court that comes to you in the dark of night, without logic or reason, whispering soothing words about how “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” as it upends the constitutionality of Texas law? That is the stuff of ancient gaslighting, reserved for those moments in which Power is explaining to Women that they are just being hysterical, and to kindly lie back and enjoy it…..”
Re suggested next steps and remedies:
– Presidential “whole government” study commissions are clearly not going to meet the urgent, desperate need for action.
– Likewise, voting rights reinstatement (in order to elect new judges and leaders who will appoint different judges) and court reform (expanding the Supreme Court and other changes) are supremely (pun intended) worthy goals, but will take years or decades to achieve. Further, Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court is not chargedwith actually making recommendations, and Biden has not expressed support for court expansion.
– Codifying national abortion rights through Congresswoman Judy Chu’s “Women’s Health Protection Act” would face highly likely defeat in the Senate (Dem Senators Manchin and Casey are anti-choice) and, if it survived that, a challenge and likely defeat by SCOTUS, which, after all, couldn’t even wait to hear normal public arguments in the Mississippi anti-abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), which comes before the court this fall and specifically requests the overturn of Roe.
I know there are many pro choice orgs desperate for funds at this moment, but the Center for Reproductive Rights (4-star rating) will argue the Dobbs case at SCOTUS and is a very focused and potentially impactful place to put some money:
https://reproductiverights.org/
https://reproductiverights.org/texas-abortion-ban-supreme-court-ruling-sb8/ (background and highlights from dissents.)
– 19 states have already banned abortion via telehealth using pills (despite Covid), and many are rushing to ban sending abortion pills by mail. Keep in mind that anti-abortion people, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, consider some types of birth control to be “abortion-inducing.” As Laurence Tribe, discussing this “grotesque” Texas law, statedtoday in The Guardian, there will be many other downstream consequences:
“The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas…….. if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel….”
– Neighboring states are not going to offer safe haven. As of June 2021, 12 states already have anti-abortion bans ready to be “triggered” with the fall of Roe, and 15 have early gestational age abortion bans ready to go. Per the Guttmacher Institute, abortion would almost immediately be illegal or severely restricted in 22 states. At least half a dozen states (e.g., FL, AR, MS) are now considering draconian laws modeled on that of Texas. (The idea is not new: In 2014, a Pennsylvania woman was imprisoned for buying her daughter abortion drugs.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/01/texas-abortion-law-faq/ (Note the few purple states.)
In any case, as Michelle Goldberg and others have pointed out, the goal was never just overturning Roe. Despite the professed commitment to state determination of abortion laws, the right will never be satisfied with a patchwork of state laws. Their goal has always been a total, national abortion ban.
“Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan. Each wrote their own dissents calling for the law to be blocked.”
Four Justices dissented from the SCOTUS ruling re the Texas law:
In case you missed the strong dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the SCOTUS ruling:
“The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
More from Sotomayor:
Governor Ron DeSantis has decided to drop standardized testing and replace it with “progress monitoring.”
The devil is in the details. How will the state monitor “progress” without standardized testing? Is he trying to hide the poor performance of charter schools?
Florida blogger Billy Townsend explains what’s happening here. He says Ron is ditching Jeb.
The Washington Post editorial board published a statement condemning Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ fierce opposition to mandates for masks and vaccinations. He wants to run for President as the candidate most like Trump.
It wrote:
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, has descended to a jaw-dropping level of cynicism. At a news conference on Monday, he announced that if local governments in Florida impose vaccine mandates on their employees, he would fine them $5,000 for every worker. Then he stood silently by as Gainesville city employees made false claims about the mRNA vaccines that have saved countless lives during the pandemic.
Although the wave of illness from the delta variant appears to be receding in Florida, the state has suffered a terrible summer toll of hospitalizations and deaths. A governor facing such a cataclysm might naturally be expected to use all methods to keep people safe. Instead, Mr. DeSantis, an ally of former president Donald Trump, has for months been campaigning against mask and vaccine mandates and actively sought to prevent business, government and schools from imposing them. These are vital tools to save lives in the face of a highly transmissible disease, but the governor insists that everyone should have the right to make their own decision. He casts himself as a defender of personal freedom.
This is a favorite argument of Republican governors and others, including Mr. Trump, who last year amid lockdowns was tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and other states. But personal freedom does not give an individual the right to hurt others. Those not wearing masks and refusing to get vaccinated are spreading the virus and overcrowding the nation’s hospitals. They are the majority of those who are dying. This is not freedom; it is recklessness.
Diane Ravitch's blog 