Archives for the month of: January, 2022
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“I Am a New York City Public High School Student. The Situation Is Beyond Control.”

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2022 //
140

This statement by a student was published anonymously at Reddit. He wanted to explain what is happening in his school in regards to COVID. The situation, as he puts it, is “beyond control.” There are many absences, students as well as teachers. There is very little learning going on. The writer makes clear that he hates remote learning, but given the conditions in the school, he thinks remote learning is preferable to no learning.

The article has created quite a buzz. It has thus far received more than 5,000 comments, mostly from other students, reporting on their schools, but also from teachers. Meanwhile, the new Mayor, Eric Adams, assures the public that all is well.

The statement begins like this:

I’d like to preface this by stating that remote learning was absolutely detrimental to the mental health of myself, my friends, and my peers at school. Despite this, the present conditions within schools necessitates a temporary return to remote learning; if not because of public health, then because of learning loss.

A story of my day:

– I arrived at school and promptly went to Study Hall. I knew that some of my teachers would be absent because they had announced it on Google Classroom earlier in the day. At our school there is a board in front of the auditorium with the list of teachers and seating sections for students within study hall: today there were 14 absent teachers 1st period. There are 11 seatable sections within the auditorium … THREE CLASSES sat on the stage. Study hall has become a super spreader event — I’ll get to this in a moment.

– Second period I had another absent teacher. More of the same from 1st period. It was around this time that 25% of kids, including myself, realized that there were no rules being enforced outside of attendance at the start of the period, and that cutting class was ridiculously easy. We left — there was functionally no learning occurring within study hall, and health conditions were safer outside of the auditorium. It was well beyond max capacity.

Open the link and read the rest.

Some schools are managing very well with in-person learning. Others are not. Schools cannot make up for “learning loss” if there is no instruction going on.

An important point to bear in mind. For everyone, this is an unprecedented time. We are in the midst of a global pandemic. None of us has lived through one before. No one knows what will happen a week or a month or six months from now. We follow the science, protect health and life as best we can, don’t take risks, and hope it ends soon. Odds are COVID will become less virulent, manageable with vaccines, and fade into the long list of diseases from which we must protect ourselves. Maybe next winter, the doctors will remind us to get a flu shot and a COVID shot. Meanwhile, we do the best we can.

Categories Health, New York City, Safety, Students, Teachers

Dark Money in the Holy City: A Short History of School Privatization in Charleston, South Carolina

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2022 //
29

Paul Bowers was the education reporter at the Charleston Post and Courier. He wrote this post at my request. A reader alerted me to the billionaire-driven attack on public schools in Charleston, and I had the good fortune to find the journalist who knew the story.

Paul Bowers writes:

Every few years, South Carolina becomes a battleground for school privatization. It looks like 2022 is going to be one of those years.

Back in the 2000s, the New York real estate investor Howard Rich backed a series of South Carolina candidates pushing school vouchers, which would funnel public education funds into private schools. More recently, we have seen efforts by Gov. Henry McMaster and the state legislature to create a Tennessee-style “turnaround district,” to deregulate for-profit online charter schools via authorizer shopping, and to divert federal COVID-19 relief funds from public schools to private schools. Teachers and parents have had to fight these advances tooth and nail and have so far kept most of the damage at bay.

Lately it seems like the tip of the spear for privatization efforts in South Carolina is the Charleston County School District, a starkly segregated and unequal district anchored by a world-renowned tourist destination. The Charleston County School Board is scheduled to vote Jan. 10 on a proposal called “Reimagine Schools” that would allow a private third party to make decisions at 23 predominantly Black schools. I thought now would be a good moment to revisit the history of school board power struggles and dark-money campaigns in Charleston County.

The pressure to privatize the governance of public schools often comes from two of South Carolina’s billionaires, the chemical manufacturer CEO Anita Zucker and the debt collection agency CEO Ben Navarro. Sometimes working in tandem, sometimes independently, Zucker and Navarro tend to promote more charter schools and private takeovers of public schools.

Zucker and her advocacy organization, the Tri-County Cradle to Career Collaborative, were involved in a 2015-2016 effort to create a “turnaround district” at the state level, modeled after failed efforts in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Michigan. The proposal involved lumping the state’s lowest-performing schools into a new district and bringing in third-party operators to manage them. Similar bills were introduced in Georgia and North Carolina around the same time, but the idea never received serious discussion in the South Carolina Statehouse.

Navarro is best known nationally for his failed 2018 bid to buy the Carolina Panthers NFL team. In the financial world, he is known for his Sherman Financial Group, a privately owned firm that filed more lawsuits against defaulted credit-card debtors than others in the industry during COVID-19 lockdowns, according to a recent Wall Street Journal investigation.

In the arena of education, Navarro is known for his private Meeting Street Schools, which are sometimes lauded as a model for improving the test scores of low-income students from at-risk communities. Since 2014, Meeting Street Schools has entered unique public-private partnerships with South Carolina public school districts, starting with the takeover of two elementary schools in North Charleston.

With a boost of private funding, the schools invest in wraparound services for students and their families, offer additional psychological support, place two teachers in each classroom, and operate on an extended school day and academic calendar. Those practices have a proven track record of success, but most schools in South Carolina lack the funding to carry them out.

Meeting Street Schools also heavily recruit staff from Teach for America and KIPP, and they preach the trendy mid-2010s gospel of “grit” – in fact, the disciplinary model is so gritty that one Meeting Street-run elementary school suspended one-quarter of its students in a single school year. Before opening the schools under new management, Navarro sought and received a special exemption from the state’s employment protections for teachers. As a result, Meeting Street principals can hire and fire teachers at will.

Navarro is also closely associated with the Charleston Coalition for Kids, a dark-money group that emerged in 2018 and immediately outspent all other donors combined on advertising for a slate of school board candidates. Much of the Coalition’s funding and spending is hidden from public view thanks to state election law and the group’s nonprofit status, but FCC records reveal it spent at least $235,000 on TV commercials alone in the run-up to the 2018 school board election – four-and-a-half times what all of the candidates combined raised for their own campaigns. (Local activists estimated the Coalition’s spending on Facebook ads, billboards, and other media might have cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

The Coalition spent big on the school board election again in 2020, investing $306,000 on TV commercials, including attack ads against two Black incumbents. Today 6 of the 9 sitting Charleston County School Board members have received backing from the Coalition.

A number of national organizations have taken an interest in Charleston school politics as well, including 50CAN (formerly StudentsFirst) and the Broad Foundation.

After failing to create a statewide turnaround district in 2016, the 50CAN affiliate SouthCarolinaCAN shifted its focus to the local level – specifically to Charleston County. When I interviewed then-Executive Director Bradford Swann in December 2016, he said his organization would be focused on “grassroots organizing” via a 5-month fellowship program for parents.

The result was Charleston RISE, a parent advocacy group that also operates a parent help hotline. Billboards advertising its services have appeared all over the county, particularly in low-income neighborhoods. Charleston RISE trainees were among the founding members of the Charleston Coalition for Kids when it launched in 2018. Some RISE members said they helped vet school board candidates for the Coalition.

Currently the Charleston County School Board is deciding how to spend its share of the COVID-19 recovery funds provided under the American Recovery Act’s ESSER III program. Multiple local nonprofits submitted proposals on how to spend the money, but only one has gotten a public hearing.

On Monday January 10, the school board will vote on a proposal called Reimagine Schools that would target 23 low-performing schools in low-income and majority-Black parts of the county. Leaning on a “Schools of Innovation” law recently expanded by the state legislature, the proposal would authorize a takeover of individual schools by an unidentified “Innovation Management Organization.” The Schools of Innovation law also allows a school to hire up to 25% of its teachers in certain subject areas without a state teaching license.

The organization that proposed the Reimagine Schools plan is the Coastal Community Foundation, a relative newcomer to school board lobbying. The foundation and its CEO, Darrin Goss Sr., have promoted the Meeting Street Schools public-private partnership model as a way of getting around “bureaucratic” regulations. (Complicating matters further, the Coastal Community Foundation also administers an investigative fund and Education Lab for the local daily newspaper, The Post and Courier.)

The 9-member school board gave the Reimagine Schools proposal initial approval by a 6-3 vote in December without holding any community input sessions about it. All 6 members who voted to approve for the proposal had been endorsed by the Charleston Coalition for Kids.

Whatever the Charleston County School Board decides, the privatization push will continue in parallel at the state level. The state superintendent of education post is up for grabs this fall, and the first candidate to announce her run was Ellen Weaver, a charter school advocate with the conservative Palmetto Promise Institute. A central proposal in her platform is the creation of an Education Scholarship Account, a modified private school voucher program.

Sound familiar? If at first they don’t succeed, they give it a new name and try again.

***

Paul Bowers is a parent of 3 public school children in North Charleston, South Carolina. He was The Post and Courier’s education reporter from 2016-2019 and was part of a team that won the 2018 Eddie Prize from the Education Writers Association. Find him on Twitter at @Paul_Bowers and read his work at brutalsouth.substack.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Dark Money, Education Industry, Failure, Privatization, South Carolina

Melania Is Cashing in by Selling Her Stuff

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2022 //
56

At the Washington Post today, we learn that Melania is monetizing bits of her clothing.

Mark Lasswell writes:

Melania Trump apparently didn’t get the memo from that noted artist Hunter Biden: You’re supposed to cash in on your presidential family ties while the guy is still in office. She might be late to the party, but the former first lady is monetizing with a gusto worthy of, oh, brewmaster Billy Carter.

“On Tuesday,” Helaine Olen writes, “Melania Trump announced she would sell to the highest bidder the widely admired hat she wore when French President Emmanuel Macron” — he of the potty-bouche — “visited the White House in 2018.” Trump is also flogging both a watercolor of herself wearing the hat and a non-fungible token by the same artist. (If the watercolorist is one H. Biden, fetch my bidding paddle.)

Here’s the catch … it’s the Trumps, there’s always a catch: Transactions will be “conducted not in dollars but in cryptocurrency — specifically SOL, the currency of the blockchain platform Solana,” Olen writes.

Given that “the blockchain is where no small amount of the get-rich-quick of the past year is residing,” and given that “taking advantage of the rubes has long been a Trump family specialty,” Trump’s post-White House crypto avidity could be interpreted as a cynical SOL-grab. They thought of that. Trump’s announcement included the heartwarming aside that “a portion” of the proceeds — Olen notesthat bidding begins at the crypto equivalent of $250,000 — will go to computer science and technology scholarships for individuals who have been in foster care.

How much is that “portion”? Maybe this is the moment to wonder when Trump is going to put that “I REALLY DON’T CARE, DO U?” jacket up for auction.

Categories For-Profit, Trump

Stephen Dyer Destroys the Case for Vouchers in Ohio—or Anywhere Else

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2022 //
9

Stephen Dyer is a former state legislator in Ohio and an expert on school finance. In the latest post on his blog, 10th Period, he shows why the arguments for vouchers are a fraud. Vouchers are sold as a salvation for Black and Hispanic students, yet they mostly subsidize white children escaping desegregated schools. And while they are sold with the promise of improving student performance, the voucher schools are in fact inferior to public schools. They are not the schools that rich parents pay for; most voucher schools are low-quality religious schools with unqualified teachers.

Dyer begins:

Now that a group of 100 school districts have formally sued the state over the EdChoice Voucher program, it’s time for voucher proponents to trot out their favorite canard — vouchers give students of color opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have. And to oppose vouchers is to oppose opportunities for students of color.

Total crock.

The reason this canard is so pernicious is simple: It’s not true, and in fact, the opposite is true. Vouchers are disproportionately distributed to white students, leading to greater overall segregation in public school districts and communities of color with substantially fewer state resources to educate students in those communities.

This is the stat that voucher proponents love to quote, and it’s what Greg Lawson (a guy I actually like personally, despite our profound policy differences on this and nearly every issue) from the Buckeye Institute articulated in the Dispatch story yesterday:

“Greg Lawson of the Buckeye Institute said the data on who takes vouchers varies from school to school, but overall more minority students use EdChoice. 

Ohio is about 82% white, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. But 50% of the students who take an EdChoice scholarship identify as white or non-Hispanic, according to the Ohio Department of Education. 

‘The choice is there for everybody regardless of what demographic box they check,’ Lawson said.”

What Greg and others “forget” is that EdChoice doesn’t apply to every school district in the state. In fact, according to data from last school year, only 164 of Ohio’s 613 school districts lost any state funding to the EdChoice Voucher transfer last year — a $164 million deduction from districts’ state aid. However, 95% of that funding came from just 38 school districts. Want to take a gander at the demographic makeup of those 38 districts? You guessed it. Overwhelmingly non-white. How overwhelmingly?

Try 68% non-white.

Sounds a whole lot different from the 82% white stat Greg mentioned, doesn’t it? In fact, of those 38 districts, only Wilmington was close to the 82% white stat.

Why would he try to repeat the 82% stat when only 1 district in the entire state that loses substantial state aid to EdChoice fits that description?

Because if only 50% of the voucher recipients are non-white, yet the communities from which the students come are almost 70% non-white, it kinda kills the whole “giving people of color an opportunity” argument.

Yeah….

Seems that for more than 20 years now, legislators have known that vouchers are disproportionately going to white students, yet they have done nothing to address this. 

Someone might want to ask them about that.

Oh yeah. One more thing. It was interesting to read that not even the outrageously histrionic Aaron Baer mentioned in the Dispatch the whole original argument for the voucher program to begin with: it provides better options for kids in “failing” public schools. 

That’s because we now know, thanks to more than a decade of comparative testing, that vouchers actually harm student achievement.

Even the Fordham Institute — an avowed voucher proponent — agreed in 2016 when it found that vouchers actually reduced student achievement. This was affirmed in 2020 when the Cincinnati Enquirer looked at test scores of voucher recipients and compared those scores with scores of students in the communities in which the private school resided. The paper found that 88% of the time, the public school students outperformed the private school students.

To voucher proponents now what matters now is the choice, not the outcomes from that choice apparently.

So let me bottom line this program: it leads to more racial segregation, deprives communities of color much needed state educational aid and provides less successful student outcomes. 

But hey, let’s throw hundreds of millions more of our tax dollars at this thing. 

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Race, Segregation, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: 100 School Districts in Ohio File Lawsuit Against Vouchers

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2022 //
7

Jan Resseger writes here about a lawsuit against vouchers filed by 100 school districts and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy.

She begins:

On Tuesday, 100 Ohio public school districts and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of Ohio’s EdChoice Scholarship Program under the provisions of the Ohio Constitution. EdChoice is Ohio’s rapidly growing, publicly funded school voucher program.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer’s Laura Hancock reported: “A coalition of 100 school districts sued Ohio over private school vouchers Tuesday, saying that the hundreds of millions of public dollars funneled away from public schools have created an educational system that’s unconstitutional.”

The lead plaintiffs are Columbus City Schools, Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools, Richmond Heights Local School District, Lima City Schools, Barberton City Schools, Cleveland Heights parents on behalf of their minor sons—Malcolm McPherson and Fergus Donnelly, and the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding. The Cleveland law firm of Walter Haverfield is representing the plaintiffs.

In their lawsuit, plaintiffs declare: “The EdChoice Scholarship Program poses an existential threat to Ohio’s public school system. Not only does this voucher program unconstitutionally usurp Ohio’s public tax dollars to subsidize private school tuitions, it does so by depleting Ohio’s foundation funding—the pool of money out of which the state funds Ohio’s public schools… The discrepancy in per pupil foundation funding is so great that some districts’ private school pupils receive, as a group, more in funding via EdChoice Vouchers than Ohio allocates in foundation funding for the entire public school districts where those students reside. This voucher program effectively cripples the public school districts’ resources, creates an ‘uncommon’, or private system of schools unconstitutionally funded by taxpayers, siphons hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer funds into private (and mostly religious) institutions, and discriminates against minority students by increasing segregation in Ohio’s public schools. Because private schools receiving EdChoice funding are not subject to Ohio’s Sunshine Laws or most other regulations applicable to public schools, these private facilities operate with impunity, exempt from public scrutiny despite the public funding that sustains them.”

Please open the link and read the rest of the post, which explains the grounds for the lawsuit.

Categories Education Industry, Equity, Funding, Ohio

Dana Milbank: Republicans Allow Their Crazies to Represent the Party

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
41

Dana Milbank, Washington Post columnist, wrote about the no longer surprising abdication of the Republicans on the anniversary of January 6, leaving Congresspeople Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz as the party’s representative.

He writes:

Exactly a year earlier, in and around the House chamber, Republicans and Democrats hid together, on the floor, behind chairs and under desks, as outnumbered police, guns drawn, kept President Donald Trump’s mob at bay.

Yet out of that shared trauma came one of the most divisive acts in American political history.

Republican lawmakers spent most of the next 364 days trying to erase any trace of the insurrection and Trump’s role in it. They opposed impeachment, they opposed an independent commission, they opposed (then sabotaged and boycotted) an investigative committee, and they embraced as gospel Trump’s “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.

Even after that record of ruin, Republicans somehow managed to plumb new depths on Thursday’s first anniversary of the insurrection. The House convened to hold a moment of silencefor the police officers who one year ago saved democracy — and lawmakers’ lives — and who died in the attack’s aftermath. Republicans boycotted this, too.

At the stroke of noon on the House floor, Chaplain Margaret Kibben prayed: “On this anniversary of national discord and despair, send your healing spirit among us and tend to the dispiritedness and disagreement here within and around the people’s house.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rose to hail the “defenders of our democracy” on Jan. 6. “Because of them Congress was able to defeat the insurrection, to return to the Capitol that same night, to ensure that the peaceful transfer of power took place.” She called for a moment of silence in memory of four officers who died in the aftermath of the attack and a subsequent attack at the Capitol.

On the left side of the chamber, about 50 Democrats rose. Across the aisle, only one Republican lawmaker stood: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, a pariah in her party because she dared to condemn Trump’s election lies. Next to her rose her father, former vice president Dick Cheney.

Democrats spontaneously lined up to greet father and daughter — a poignant reminder that there was a time, not long ago, when Republicans and Democrats could fight bitterly but be confident that their shared commitment to democracy would preserve the Republic.

No more. By shunning Thursday’s commemoration of the Jan. 6 attack, Republican leaders, as usual, left a vacuum that let the wing nuts speak for the party. Trumpian Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced that they would give “a Republican response,” on the Jan. 6 anniversary, and in the absence of any other Republican response, theirs became the Republican response.

“We did not want the Republican voice to go unheard, and we did not want today’s historical narrative to be hijacked by those who were the true insurrectionists,” Gaetz said. And so, in a meeting room in the Cannon House Office Building, two flights up from where Democratic lawmakers were at the same time recalling their personal horrors from Jan. 6, the duo spent 37 minutes telling reporters that Jan. 6 was a “fed-surrection,” a plot perpetrated by the FBI.

“What if those Capitol Police officers are victims?” Gaetz asked. “What if they’re victims of an orchestrated effort by the FBI or other federal law enforcement to increase the criminal acuity of that day?” Such “Department of Justice and FBI assets and informants,” Gaetz alleged, were also responsible for the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D).

Greene, chiming in, also blamed the FBI for the 2014 Bundy land dispute in Nevada. “Another example would be in 1968, the Democratic National Convention, when there were 10,000 protesters and one out of six were federal undercover agents,” she continued.

It was the sort of rant that would cause a C-SPAN host to disconnect a caller. But on Thursday’s anniversary, Gaetz and Greene were the unchallenged voice of the Republican Party — and Fox News’s Laura Ingraham gave Greene a platform to make the same bonkers allegations the night before.

Is it any wonder the Republican Party’s moral integrity has fallen so far, so fast?

As The Post reported this week, at least 163 Republicans who have embraced Trump’s election lies are running to become senators, governors or other statewide officials with sway over elections. At least five candidates for the House were at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and at least 12 of the top Republican House recruits have accepted the “big lie.” Six in 10 Republicans say the 2020 election was fraudulent, and 40 percent thought political violence could be acceptable, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found.

In his address Thursday from the Capitol, President Biden asked: “Are we going to be a nation that lives not by the light of the truth, but in the shadow of lies? We cannot allow ourselves to be that kind of nation.”

But the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to disappear Jan. 6 shows that we already are.

Categories Elections, Republicans

New Hampshire: Legislature Tables Unpopular Voucher Bill!

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
5

This is good news that few expected.

The New Hampshire legislature, with Republican majorities in both houses and a Republican Governor, tabled a sweeping voucher bill. In hearings, public sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to vouchers for private schools, religious schools, and home schooling, but Republicans seemed determined to push through their proposal.

The voucher bill was tabled (not passed, put on hold). It could come back for a vote. When I learn more, I will share with you.

This article by a school board member, Janine Lesser, appeared in the Monadnock (NH) Ledger Transcript this morning.

In March 2019, the ConVal School District sued the State of New Hampshire over its ever-decreasing funding. This is the sixth time the state has been sued for avoiding its constitutional mandate to fund an adequate education.

The first lawsuit was in 1993. The New Hampshire Supreme Court struck down state efforts to limit or decrease public school funding in Claremont I, II and III, the 2006 Londonderry, and 2016 Dover cases.

“With recent tweaks to the education funding formula and reductions in funding, many say that towns are at a breaking point. Teacher layoffs, cuts in programming, and even the threat of school closures have pushed the issue…” (Reaching Higher NH, Jan. 7, 2019 “The Big Question for 2019: How Will We Pay for Our Schools?”). And that was three years ago, before COVID. Meanwhile, Gov. Chris Sununu has taken the most-radical approach yet to this decades-long funding deficit. Rather than increase state education funding, as the court instructed, the governor gave large businesses four tax cuts. Meanwhile, he appointed a person with no educational credentials to lead the state’s Department of Education.

Commissioner Frank Edelblut has a master’s degree in divinity and has diverted public funding to non-public schools, mostly religious. When New Hampshire schools faced the pandemic crisis, the commissioner appointed people without experience in school administration to write “guidelines” that came out too late to be of any use to any boards or administrators. The message from the state was clear – you are on your own.

If it weren’t for the financial help from federal relief funds, no district could have survived. But the Department of Education delayed those funds to public schools as long as possible by placing bureaucratic hurdles for district business managers. Meanwhile, Edelblut swiftly sent federal support to non-public schools, barely trying to conceal his disdain for the public school system established by our state’s founders, which has been the great equalizer for Americans since our nation began.  

When thousands of residents signed in against the 2021 Republican EFA voucher bill, the Republican-led legislature hid it in the budget. That let them and the governor establish the most-aggressive voucher program in the United States without further public scrutiny. These “Education Freedom Accounts” have loose limits on eligibility, no government oversight on how taxpayer-funded vouchers are spent and no spending cap. In other states, voucher programs have been rife with fraud. Public school districts, on the other hand, are audited every year and spending is controlled by local taxpayers.

Lack of voucher spending controls became apparent quickly. Edelblut estimated $130,000 for budgeting purposes; the actual cost is now projected at over $7 million, with 10% going to a tiny, unsupervised New Hampshire agency and its Florida financial firm. Why did the budget increase? A Koch-supported lobbying group, Americans for Prosperity, mailed postcards and even canvassed door-to-door to encourage parents to sign up.

Contrary to statements from EFA proponents, such as state Sen. Denise Ricciardi, taxpayers will bear the burden of vouchers. Wealthy communities may expand funding to support all types of schools, but poor towns will have to close schools. New Hampshire now has one of the best public school systems in the nation, but this cannot continue if the state tries to fund ever more schools. Because vouchers are too low to pay most private school tuition, only wealthy families get to choose which school their child attends. If public schools close in poor and rural towns, many children will need to learn remotely, an option that has proven deficient during the forced experiment of the pandemic. 

Meanwhile, thousands of educators and school employees will lose jobs. New Hampshire taxpayers will foot the bill for students’ out-of-state boarding schools and for-profit online schools. In the current session, 175 proposed bills plus 30 retained bills pertain to education, most further eroding communities’ public schools. I differ from Free Staters and the Liberty Caucus promoting these bills. I believe that community is important, and we are stronger when we invest our time and treasure in our community, together.

Our country and communities are at a crossroads. As citizens, we must scrutinize what our governing bodies are deciding in our names. When I questioned Ricciardi about her position on a few of the worst pending bills, I did not receive an answer. 

Through its lawsuit, ConVal has stood up and required the state to pay its constitutional duty to public schools, because local property taxpayers cannot continue to shoulder this unfair system. Sununu’s administration supports vouchers, even though they will cost more, and will fail to provide many children a competitive education for a global economy.

Janine Lesser is a Peterborough representative to the ConVal School Board. She is not writing on behalf of the board.

Categories Education Industry, Fraud, New Hampshire, Vouchers

Trump Advisor: How Steve Bannon and I Planned to Overturn the 2020 Election

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
85

Peter Navarro was Trump’s Trade Advisor. He recently published a book about his time in the Trump administration. The most fascinating part of his book, according to those who have read advance copies, is his story about the plan to overturn the 2020 election and keep Trump as president. He has done several media interviews. This account in Rolling Stone relies on this one that appeared in The Daily Beast.

Navarro says that he and Steve Bannon orchestrated a plan called the Green Bay Sweep.

Rolling Stone writer Tim Dickinson writes:

The plot sought to keep Trump in office by exerting maximum pressure on Vice President Mike Pence to block the certification of the Electoral College votes from pivotal swing states, by drawing out the proceedings on national television for as long as 24 hours. “It was a perfect plan,” Navarro told the Daily Beast. “We had over 100 congressmen committed to it…

Navarro is a Harvard-educated economist whom Trump tapped, originally, to escalate his trade war with China. But as coronavirus struck, Navarro’s role at the White House expanded to include pandemic response, in which he pushed the quack treatment of hydroxychloroquine. By the bitter end, Navarro was compiling cockeyed dossiers of (now-exhaustively-debunked) allegations of election fraud — “receipts” Navarro believed justified tin-pot measures to keep Trump in the White House.

So what was the Green Bay Sweep? The plot, Navarro writes, was named after a famous football play designed by storied 1960’s NFL coach Vince Lombardi, in which a Packers running back would pound into the end zone behind a “phalanx of blockers.”

For the 2021 Green Bay Sweep, Navarro writes, Bannon played the role of Lombardi. The plan was to have members of the House and Senate raise challenges to the counts of Electoral College votes from six pivotal battleground states.

“The political and legal beauty of the strategy,” Navarro writes, is that the challenges would force up to two hours of debate per state, in each chamber of Congress. “That would add up to as much as 24 hours of nationally televised hearings,” Navarro writes. The hearings would enable Republicans to “short-circuit the crushing censorship of the anti-Trump media,” Navarro hoped, and broadcast their Big Lie that Democrats had stolen the election “directly to the American people.”

The goal was not to get the election overturned on Jan. 6. Instead, they aimed to create such a spectacle that Pence would be forced to exercise his authority as president of the Senate to “put the certification of the election on ice for at least another several weeks” while Congress and the state legislatures pursued the “fraud” allegations. The dark particulars for how Trump would remain in office after that are not spelled out, and Navarro did not immediately answer an email seeking clarification. But he writes that the Green Bay Sweep was the “last, best chance to snatch a stolen election from the Democrats’ jaws of deceit.”

The problem with the plot was that its success hinged on “Quarterback Mike” — and Pence wasn’t solidly on board. Navarro writes that he tried, with Trump’s backing, to brief Pence on his claims of election irregularities, but that Pence was kept off-limits by his chief of staff, Marc Short. (Navarro seethes that Short was part of the Koch brothers wing of the GOP, having previously worked for a nonprofit backed by the Kochs. When Short came to work for the vice president, Navarro writes, “it was like the Soviet Union taking over Eastern Europe. As an Iron Koch Curtain fell over the vice president, the only way you could speak to VPOTUS was to go through Short.”)

Regardless, Jan. 6 began auspiciously — to Navarro’s view of things. He told the Daily Beast that Trump was “on board with the strategy,” which he writes also had the backing of “more than 100” members of Congress. Navarro elaborated that the plan started off “perfectly” as Congress opened the proceedings to count Electoral College votes. Rep. Paul Gosar objected to results from his home state of Arizona, seconded by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — an action that received standing applause from GOP colleagues in the chamber.

Navarro insist that the violence at the Capitol disrupted the Green Bay Sweep by putting pressure on Congress to conclude the certification. Apparently he forgot to tell Trump to keep his mob away from the U.S. Capitol, because Trump urged them to march to the Capitol, told them that they had ”to fight” or they would lose their country, and egged them on to do what they did: Storm and ransack the Capitol. some were chanting ”Hang Mike Pence,” which may have stiffened his spine.

Two things are clear: Mike Pence didn’t deliver for Trump, Bannon, and Navarro, and Trump was too dumb to remember that he was not supposed to send his mob to disrupt the Congressional proceedings.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Fascism, Fraud, Trump

This Is What Happened on January 6, 2021

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
17

Since there is now a deep partisan divide over what happened on January 6, it’s helpful to remember that there is extensive video footage of the events. Some footage was taken by the media, some by video cameras installed in the Capitol, some by police body cameras, and some by the participants who wanted to have a record of what they did. Hundreds of arrests have been made of participants in the riot; many recorded their actions. Others were identified by friends, acquaintances, and family members who recognized faces in the video and reported them to the FBI.

Anyone who believes that nothing unusual happened in January 6 should watch these videos, as should anyone who believes the intruders were peaceful. They were not peaceful. They brutally beat officers of the law that day.

On January 6, our democracy was in peril. If the intruders had managed to capture Vice President Pence or Nancy Pelosi or any other members of Congress, there might have been political assassinations. I give Vice President Pence credit for refusing to turn the election over to Trump, as Trump wanted.

How close we came to a disaster. Imagine this mob beating, abusing, even murdering the leaders of Congress in public view. Thanks to the Capitol Police and other law officers, our nation was spared from such an atrocity.

This is the video that was shown at the first meeting—July 27, 2021– of the House Committee investigating the events of January 6. It lasts 5 minutes.

This is the Washington Post video, published on January 16, 2021. It was the first effort to provide an overall picture of what happened.

This is the New York Times’ video, probably the fullest account available. It was released June 30, 2021. It lasts 40 minutes.

This video was released by CNN on December 24, 2021. It is new video footage taken by security cameras inside the Capitol. CNN wrote:

CNN)—The Justice Department this week released a three-hour video of a battle between rioters and the police at the US Capitol Building on January 6 where rioters brandished weapons, officers were viciously beaten, and a member of the mob died on Capitol steps. The assault on the Lower West Terrace was one of the most violent confrontations between Capitol Police and the crowd. Officers held the line until the building was cleared without letting rioters inside. Some officers have since said they did not know the Capitol had already been breached in other areas. The video, taken from a Capitol security camera, does not have sound. It starts as officers retreat, helping each other as they stumble inside and washing their eyes out with water from chemical spray. Rioters crowd in behind them, coordinate efforts to attack and push through in infamous moments that have haunted the public, and officers, ever since.

The Justice Department released the videos after CNN and other outlets sued for access. It is the longest video from the riot released by the government thus far.

January 6, 2021, was the day we almost lost our democracy. Those who say that nothing happened or that the crowd was peaceful should watch the videos.

January 6 was an insurrection, planned by scoundrels to overturn the election of Joe Biden and maintain a sore loser in power, a man who knows no history and never read the Constitution that he wanted to shred. Having failed, he has spent the past year doing his best to persuade the public that our system of elections is corrupt. Having failed to destroy democracy by mob violence, he now hopes to weaken Americans’ belief in democracy itself. Trump has succeeded this far in destroying and corrupting the Republican Party, which repeats his lies and dutifully accepts his leadership. We cannot allow him or his lackeys to return to power.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Republicans, Trump

A Day That Will Live in Infamy: January 6, 2021

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2022 //
25

Never in the history of the United States has the U.S. Capitol been invaded and ransacked by its own citizens. Never in the history of this nation was there a violent attempt to prevent the Constitutional process of certifying the election of a new President. It happened on January 6, 2021.

The fact that this unprecedented insurrection was encouraged and abetted by the sitting President is also remarkable.

So much about this day was and is unprecedented. Republican leaders called the White House and pleaded with the President to call off the mob. He waited for hours to do so, telling his violent friends, “Go home. I love you. You are special.”

Republican leaders were briefly outraged but soon realized that they dare not offend Trump, whose mob it was. Their outrage soon dissipated, and they agreed that January 6 was nothing out of the ordinary. They blocked a bipartisan investigation of the day’s events. They fell in line with Trump’s Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. They joined Trump’s campaign to rewrite history and purge any Republican who dissented.

A year after the insurrection, the Washington Post reported the results of a poll conducted by the University of Maryland. The Post wrote:

The percentage of Americans who say violent action against the government is justified at times stands at 34 percent, which is considerably higher than in past polls by The Post or other major news organizations dating back more than two decades. Again, the view is partisan: The new survey finds 40 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 23 percent of Democrats saying violence is sometimes justified.…

Overall, 60 percent of Americans say Trump bears either a “great deal” or a “good amount” of responsibility for the insurrection, but 72 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Trump voters say he bears “just some” responsibility or “none at all.”

Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the election have spawned ongoing efforts in some states to revisit the results. No such inquiry has turned up anything to suggest that the certified results were inaccurate. That has not blunted a persistent belief by most of his supporters that the election was somehow rigged.

Overall, the Post-UMD survey finds that 68 percent of Americans say there is no solid evidence of widespread fraud but 30 percent say there is.
Big majorities of Democrats (88 percent) and independents (74 percent) say there is no evidence of such irregularities, but 62 percent of Republicans say there is such evidence. That is almost identical to the percentage of Republicans who agreed with Trump’s claims of voter fraud a week after that Capitol attack, based on a Washington Post-ABC News poll at the time.

About 7 in 10 Americans say Biden’s election as president was legitimate, but that leaves almost 3 in 10 who say it was not, including 58 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents. The 58 percent of Republicans who say Biden was not legitimately elected as president is down somewhat from 70 percent in a Post-ABC poll conducted in January shortly after the Capitol attack.

Among those who say they voted for Trump in 2020, 69 percent now say Biden was not legitimately elected, while 97 percent of Biden voters say the current president was legitimately elected.

The poll is here.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Republicans, Trump
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