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Sandy Hook Parents May Finally Get Justice in Legal Battle Against Alex Jones

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
22

The parents of children who were victims of a massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, moved a step closer to getting justice done in their legal battle with Alex Jones. Jones claimed on his broadcasts that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax intended to promote gun control. Many of the grieving parents were harassed by followers of Jones; some received death threats. They sued Jones and won. Jones, however, declared bankruptcy, and his case was moved to a bankruptcy court in Texas, where he lives.

What Jones did to the families of the Sandy Hook victims was unfathomable cruelty. How could anyone be so heartless?

A federal bankruptcy judge on Friday returned the Sandy Hook defamation cases to a state court in Austin, setting the stage for trials to determine how much money Austin-based conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay for labeling the 2012 school shooting a hoax.

Jones has been found liable for defamation and causing emotional distress to parents of several Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims when he and others in his InfoWars media system called the mass shooting a hoax intended to justify a government campaign to restrict gun rights.

The first of two Texas trials to determine how much money Jones owes to the parents was to begin last month in Austin.

However, shortly before jury selection was to begin, Jones sought bankruptcy protection for InfoWars, now known as InfoW LLC, and two related companies. That Chapter 11 petition was filed in Victoria and assigned to a judge in Houston.

Jones also removed the Sandy Hook cases to federal bankruptcy court in Austin, forcing the postponement of a two-week trial that was to begin April 25 before state District Judge Maya Guerra Gamble.

On Friday, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Mott returned to the cases to Guerra Gamble, noting that the Sandy Hook families had dropped all claims against InfoW LLC and the two other Jones companies in bankruptcy, Prison Planet TV and IWHealth.

“The Sandy Hook families look forward to being back in state court and bringing Alex Jones to justice,” lawyer Avi Moshenberg said.

The families had opposed the bankruptcy move, calling it an improper attempt to limit Jones’ financial exposure to court-imposed damage awards.

During a pretrial hearing last month, lawyers for Jones argued that Guerra Gamble could take no action on the Sandy Hook cases until a bankruptcy judge ruled on their motion to remove the cases to federal court.

Guerra Gamble reluctantly canceled the trial, saying that while she believed Jones’ lawyers had “improperly filed” the bankruptcy action, federal court rules left her no choice.

But the judge also predicted that the matter would be returned to her court, and she promised fast action once that happened.

“As soon as I do get a remand, I will be resetting this case at the earliest date I can get 100 jurors seated again. We are going to go to trial as soon as I can possibly do that,” Guerra Gamble said at the pretrial hearing.

The delayed trial involved Neil Heslin and Scarlett Lewis, parents of 6-year-old Jesse Lewis. They sued after Jones alleged that the school shooting was “a giant hoax” and disputed Heslin’s claim that he had held his dead son in his arms afterward.

A second Austin trial, set for June, involves Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, parents of 6-year-old Noah Pozner. They sued after Jones described the school shooting as a “false flag” deception meant to create a pretext to crack down on gun rights.

The two children were among 20 students and six adults who were killed in the attack at the Newtown, Conn., school.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Bankruptcy judge returns Sandy Hook-Alex Jones cases to Austin courthttps://d-19525011102339417401.ampproject.net/2205051832000/frame.html

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Guns

FAIR: Jonathan Chait Should Have Disclosed Conflict of Interest When Writing About Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
9

A progressive media-watch organization called FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) criticized New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait for failing to report his wife’s role in the charter industry when writing about (and defending) charter schools and attacking teachers’ unions.

On several occasions, Chait has written about education issues, usually to defend charter schools, although he is a political journalist with no particular expertise about education policy. He claims that he doesn’t have to disclose his wife’s role in the charter industry, because he is an opinion writer. FAIR does not consider that an appropriate justification for not disclosing his conflict.

It’s strange to see a journalist who calls himself “liberal” attack teachers’ unions. As a rule, liberals are not anti-union.

Chait’s article at the center of the controversy criticized President Biden and his Department of Education for proposing regulations that would prohibit for-profit charter management organizations from receiving federal funds. For-profit charters are typically low performing and should be an embarrassment to the entire sector, yet the charter industry lobbyists have rallied round the sleaziest of the charter chains. Since Joe Biden promised during his campaign to eliminate federal funding for for-profit charters, no one should be surprised that he is following through.

The proposed regulations also ask charter operators to submit an impact analysis, summarizing the likely effect of their charter on the existing public schools and the need for the new charter, as well as spell out their plans to collaborate with the district where they would locate. The charter lobbyists consider this idea of collaboration with district schools to be abhorrent.

FAIR did not analyze the argument about the value or harm of the regulations. It did address Chait’s failure to disclose his wife’s connection to the federal Charter Schools Program.

FAIR wrote:

NPE executive director Carol Burris, in a post on fellow education expert Diane Ravitch’s blog (5/13/22), laid out a convincing case that Chait’s latest article oversteps even the limited disclosure he had put in the article’s footnote aside.

[Burris wrote]:

Now let’s talk about what Jonathan Chait failed to disclose as he opposed the CSP regulation reforms, using the same misinformation that has appeared in other op-eds.

His wife worked for Center City Charter Schools as a grant writerwhen that charter chain received two grants from the Charter School Program (CSP), the program whose loose rules he is now defending. Download the 2019 database that you can find here and match the years of dispersion to the resume of Robin Chait. But the undisclosed conflict continues to this day. Since 2018, Robin Chait has worked for WestEd, which evaluated the CSP during the Betsy De Vos era. And her employer, WestEd, once got its own $1.74 million grant from CSP.

FAIR’s research confirmed—and expanded upon—those claims.

WestEd, where Robin Chait has worked since October 2018, has received CSP funding from the Department of Education, most notably an open grant that’s already paid out $8.1 million to evaluate CSP and work with grantees. The contract, issued in September 2020, is one of a number of high-value DOE grants received by WestEd.

Also objectionable, although FAIR does not discuss it, was Chait’s characterization of the Network for Public Education as an organization funded by the teachers’ unions, which is false. That was his way of disparaging NPE, although for the life of me, I see nothing objectionable about taking funding from unions representing the nation’s teachers. It’s not like taking money from foundations of billionaires pushing privatization of the nation’s public goods, like the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and Betsy DeVos.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit

Andrea Gabor: How Biden’s New Regulations Will Help Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
12

Andrea Gabor is Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at Baruch College of the City of New York. She writes often for the Bloomberg website, where this article appears. Michael Bloomberg has written in opposition to Biden’s proposed regulations for the federal Charter School Program. Hopefully, he will read this article and change his views. The National Aliance for Public Charter Schools has been running a full-fledged panic attack in opposition to the sensible regulations, claiming falsely that they are a mortal threat to all charter schools; they are not. The lobbyists have even paid for ads on MSNBC, paid for by one of their billionaire funders, assailing the regulations.

Gabor is the author of “After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.” It contains one of the best—maybe the best—analyses of what happened to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Andrea Gabor explains why the regulations will improve the charter sector.

She writes:

Forget the battle over critical race theory. The latest salvos in the public-school culture wars are being fired over the federal charter schools program and the sensible guidelines that are being proposed by the administration of President Joe Biden.

Congress extended the program in March, approving $440 million for state agencies to help charters with startup expenses such as staffing and technology. Almost immediately, the White House is received a barrage of criticism for issuing guidelines intended, most importantly, to rein in charter-school funding abuses.

In particular, the proposed regulations would prevent for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charters from accessing federal funds. Even ardent charter supporters shun for-profit charters, which significantly underperform traditional public schools, and the new guidelines would close loopholes that have fostered fraud nationwide and especially in states including Arizonawhere loose regulations have emboldened legislators to enrich themselves on the taxpayer’s dime.

That kind of common-sense rule should serve as a first step toward a truce in the decades-long conflict over the role of charters in public education. Alas, it probably won’t.

The debate about charter-school regulations has become a proxy for a wider and even higher-stakes fight over the proper role of government. Since at least the era of President Ronald Reagan, conservatives have seen privatization as a way to undermine public schools and teachers unions, rejecting guardrails and often ignoring the original mission of charters to foster educational innovation.

Meanwhile, public-school advocates have been so busy defending the traditional public-school system, which they correctly argue is essential to democracy, that they rarely focus on finding ways to improve it.

Indeed, rancor between charter and public-school proponents is so toxic that a potentially mutually beneficial Biden proposal for granting funding to charter schools — that they demonstrate collaboration with a public school or district — seems almost impossible to achieve.

That’s a shame because the new guidelines offer quite a few possibilities to find common ground; ways to strengthen the charter sector while also protecting public schools.

Consider the proposed requirement that new charters reflect the movement’s original promise of promoting teacher innovation and “robust family and community engagement.” Such an approach could rebuild public trust in charter-friendly cities like New Orleans, which dismantled its public school system and replaced it with private operators over 15 years ago following Hurricane Katrina and, in the process, alienated much of its African-American community.

Instead of engaging local families, officials began by firing the city’s mostly African-American teachers — a sizeable swath of its middle class — and replacing them with inexperienced Teach-for-Americarecruits, most of whom only lasted a year or two. At the same time, charter authorizers recruited out-of-state charter-management organizations that established a harsh-discipline schooling model that often worked against the interests of New Orleans’s poorest and most vulnerable children. The authorizers explicitly excluded even well-regarded local groups from winning charters.

Given no say in the new education system, community groups rebelled — not just in New Orleans, but in Indianapolis, Kansas City and other cities where the same model was being imposed.

New Orleans belatedly and reluctantly recognized the need for community engagement and eventually made room for a handful of independent, community-led charters like Morris Jeff, which fought an uphill battle for authorization and funding and was launched with the express intention of allowing teachers to unionize and have a say in school policies. The well-regarded school offers an international baccalaureate program and is among a minority of integrated schools, but New Orleans is still dominated by large charter management organizations.

Increasing community engagement would mean supporting more schools like Morris Jeff and inviting more family input. It should also mean giving teachers a role in school decision-making, which has been shown to improve both public and charterschools. To that end, charter schools should reserve a percentage of governing-board seats for family members elected by parent-teacher organizations, as well as teachers elected by colleagues. (Unlike public schools, which have elected boards, charters have appointed boards and sometimes exclude family members from serving.)

The new guidelines also could be used to promote racial integration. Charters “can be a great vehicle” for doing so by drawing on students from multiple neighborhoods and appealing to students of diverse backgrounds, said Halley Potter an educational researcher at the Century Foundation.

There are also important elements of the White House guidelines that predictably inflame charter advocates. For example, they might keep some charters from opening when they threaten the stability of nearby public schools as they have in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. There, high concentrations of charters led regular public elementary and middle schools to enroll double and sometimes triple the proportion of special-needs kids of nearby charter schools, which often discourage special-needs applicants.

Traditional public schools still educate the vast majority of American children. The hostility to almost every aspect of the Biden guidelines is sad confirmation of the animosity toward this vital institution itself. It also shows the difficulty of finding common ground that could quell the education wars and foster improvements across sectors.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit

Massachusetts Poised to Do the Wrong Thing by Taking Over Boston Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2022 //
15

Reader Christine Langhoff sent a warning that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is poised to take control of the Boston Public Schools. This would be a mistake. No state takeover has ever led to better education. The state is not wiser than the city. If anything, the state education department is far removed from daily practice, as it is simply another bureaucracy. The current board is dominated by advocates of choice. Apparently they are unaware that the root cause of low test scores is poverty. The best the board could do would be to reduce class sizes and to promote the creation of community schools, which makes the school the hub of valuable services for children and families. Such proven strategies are unfamiliar to choice advocates. They prefer a failed approach.

Christine Langhoff wrote:

It seems that MA DESE is poised to place Boston’s public schools under receivership, perhaps by a vote as soon as May 24. Doing so would fulfill the Waltons’ wet dream which has been frustrated since the defeat of ballot Question 2 in 2016, which would have eliminated the charter cap.

The board is appointed by Governor Charlie Baker, whose donors are, of course, the Waltons and the Kochs. Four members of the board have day jobs tied to the Waltons: Amanda Fernández, Latinos for Education; Martin West, Education Next; Paymon Rouhanifard, Propel America; and Jim Peyser, New Schools Venture Fund and the Pioneer Institute. Baker is a lame duck, which may explain the haste to pull this off.

No state takeover has yet been successful, and once a system enters receivership, there is no exit. BESE has pointed to low MCAS scores to say our schools are failures, but Boston’s scores, invalid as they may be during the covid pandemic, are higher that in the three districts the state runs: Lawrence, Holyoke and Southbridge.

The Boston Teachers Union has an action letter if anyone is so inclined to support public education in the city where it originated:

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/our-city-our-schools-boston-public-schools-need-resources-not-receivership/?fbclid=IwAR3FA5vSKSZp5PEGedXad-hHlr58RzLy-yNqmmftQO9zS_UBiuMkxAzatHI
Categories Accountability, Boston, Class size, Closing schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, Massachusetts, Privatization, School Choice

Brown University: Hundreds of Thousands of Lives Could Have Been Saved…

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
42

Brown University released a study showing that hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved if everyone had gotten vaccinated.

Categories Health, Science

Heather Cox Richardson: The Radicalization of the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
58

This post by Heather Cox Richardson aims to explain the bizarre transformation of the Republican Party. To those of us old enough to remember Republicans such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Earl Warren, Howard Baker, George Romney, Nelson Rockefeller, and Jacob Javits, today’s GOP is incomprehensible. Long ago, the GOP was the party of fiscal conservatism. Today it is the party of Trump and the religious right. An odd combination. Please open the link to see the notes at the end of the post.

She writes:

The modern Republican Party rose to power in 1980 promising to slash government intervention in the economy. But that was never a terribly popular stance, and in order to win elections, party leaders wedded themselves to the religious right. For decades, party leaders managed to deliver economic liberties to business leaders by tossing increasingly extreme rhetoric and occasional victories to the religious right. Now, though, that radicalized minority is driving the party. It has thrown overboard the idea of smaller government to drive economic growth and embraced the idea that a strong government must enforce the religious and social beliefs of their base on the rest of the country.

This religiously based government wants to control not just individuals, but also businesses. We are seeing not only the apparent overturning of the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, but also the criminalization of contraception, attacks on gay and trans rights, laws giving the state the power to design school curricula, fury at immigrants, book banning, and a reordering of the nation around evangelical Christianity.

Today, when the Senate voted on the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill protecting the constitutional right to abortion as originally recognized in Roe v. Wade, all of the Republicans voted against it, along with Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin said the bill was too broad, although he did not say in what way.

Modern Republicans are not limiting this strong state to the policing of individuals. They are using it to determine the actions of businesses. Even two years ago, it was unthinkable that Florida governor Ron DeSantis would try to strip its longstanding governing power from the Walt Disney Company to force the company to shut up about gay rights, and yet, just last month, that is precisely what happened.

Similarly, in his quest to weaponize the issue of immigration, Texas governor Greg Abbott drastically slowed the trade routes between Texas and Mexico between April 6 and April 15, costing the country $9 billion in gross national product and prompting Mexico to change the route of a railway connection worth billions of dollars from Texas to New Mexico. And now Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) is proposing to use the government to strip Disney of its copyrights, a plan Professor Paul Goldstein of Stanford Law School, who specializes in intellectual property, calls “blatantly unconstitutional.”

This is no longer your mother’s Republican Party, or your grandfather’s… or his grandfather’s.

Today’s Republican Party is not about equal rights and opportunity, as Lincoln’s party was. It is not about using the government to protect ordinary people, as Theodore Roosevelt’s party was. It is not even about advancing the ability of businesses to do as they deem best, as Ronald Reagan’s party was.

The modern Republican Party is about using the power of the government to enforce the beliefs of a radical minority on the majority of Americans.

After more than a year of emphasizing that he could work with Republicans, President Joe Biden yesterday went on the offensive against what he called “the Ultra-MAGA Agenda.”

He focused on Florida senator Rick Scott’s “11-Point Plan to Rescue America,” which offers a blueprint for creating the modern Republican vision, beginning with its statement that “[t]he nuclear family is crucial to civilization, it is God’s design for humanity, and it must be protected and celebrated.” To protect that family, Scott not only wants to end abortion rights, but also proposes requiring all Americans, no matter how little money they make, to pay income taxes, and to make all laws—including, presumably, Social Security, the Affordable Care Act, Medicare, and so on—expire every five years. Congress can then just repass the ones it likes, he says.

Yesterday, Biden laid out the difference between his economic plan and Scott’s. He pointed out that his policies of using the government to support ordinary Americans have produced 8.3 million jobs in 15 months, the strongest job creation in modern history. Unemployment is at 3.6%, and 5.4 million small businesses have applied to start up this year—20% more than in any other year recorded.

Now, he says, the global inflation that is hurting Americans so badly is his top priority. To combat that inflation by taking on the price of oil, he has released 240 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to boost supplies, and increased domestic oil production. To lower prices, he has untangled supply chains, and now he wants to reduce our dependence on oil by investing in renewables, to restore competition in key industries (like baby formula) now dominated by a few companies, and to take on price gouging. And he has asked the wealthiest Americans “to pay their fair share in taxes,” since “[i]n recent years, the average billionaire has paid about 8% in federal taxes.”

Biden wants to take on household finances quickly by letting Medicare negotiate prices for prescription drugs to lower prices—as other developed nations do—and cap the price of insulin.

In contrast, he said, Republicans are proposing to raise taxes on 75 million American families, more than 95% of whom make less than $100,000 a year. “Their plan would also raise taxes on 82% of small-business owners making less than $50,000 a year,” he said, but would do nothing to hold corporations accountable, even as they are recording record profits. The plan to sunset laws every five years would give Republicans leverage to get anything they want: “Give us another tax cut for billionaires, or Social Security gets it.”

Biden pointed out that while Republicans attack Biden’s plans as irresponsible spending, in fact the deficit rose every year under Trump, while Biden is on track to cut the deficit by $1.5 trillion this year. Reducing government borrowing will ease inflationary pressures.

Republicans responded to the president with fury, recognizing just how unpopular Scott’s plan would be if people were aware of it. They suggested that it is a fringe idea; host Dana Perino of the Fox News Channel tried to argue that Scott “is eating alone at the lunch table.” Scott promptly called Biden “unwell,” “unfit for office,” and “incoherent, incapacitated and confused,” and said he should resign.

While Republicans have not championed Scott’s program, they have let it stand alone to represent them. White House press secretary Jen Psaki pointed out that Scott’s plan is the only one the Republicans have produced, since Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has said he will not release any plans before the 2022 midterm elections, preferring simply to attack Democrats. Until he does, Scott is speaking for the party. And Scott is hardly a fringe character: as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he is in charge of electing Republicans to the Senate. Psaki went on to read a list of Republicans who supported Scott’s plan, including the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, who applauded Scott’s “real solutions to put us back on track.”.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) also called out Republican far-right extremism yesterday in her defense of abortion rights, hitting again and again on how their stripping away of a right established almost 50 years ago is dangerous and radical. Polls show that a majority of Americans want the court to uphold Roe v. Wade, while a Monmouth poll published today shows that only about 8% of Americans want abortion to be illegal in all cases, as new trigger laws are establishing.

The unpopularity of the probable overturning of Roe v. Wade also has Republicans backpedaling, trying to argue that losing the recognition of a constitutional right that has been protected for fifty years will not actually change abortion access. Ignoring both the move toward a national abortion ban and the voting restrictions newly in place in 19 states that cement Republican control, they say that voters in states can simply choose to protect abortion rights if they wish. Wisconsin Republican senator Ron Johnson said, “It might be a little messy for some people,” but Wisconsin women could obtain an abortion by driving to Illinois. “[I]t’s not going to be that big a change,” he told the Wall Street Journal.

If overturning Roe v. Wade is such a nothingburger, why has the radical right fought for it as a key issue since the 1980s? In any case, Republicans are no longer able to argue that their extremists are anything other than the center of the party. As Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third officer in Republican leadership in the House, said after Biden spoke: “I am ultra MAGA. And I’m proud of it.”

Categories Accountability, History, Republicans

Dana Milbank: Republicans Have Brought Extremism into the Mainstream

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
9

We used to have two rational, credible political parties in this country. Politics stopped at the water’s edge. People at the extremes were disappointed, but both parties respected civility, played by the rules, and respected the Constitution.

Dana Milbank warns us that the Republican Party has slipped off the edge into the muck of extremismism. Trump was the pied Piper, but he was preceded by other zealots like Newt Gingrich. And it has only gotten worse.

He writes:

This past weekend’s massacre in Buffalo has put a deserved spotlight on Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Newt Gingrich, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance and others trafficking in the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.

But the problem goes well beyond the rhetoric of a few Republican officials and opinion leaders. Elected Republicans haven’t merely inspired far-right extremists. They have become far-right extremists.

A new report shows just how extensively the two groups have intertwined.

The study, released on Friday by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a decades-old group that tracks right-wing extremism, found that more than 1 in 5 Republican state legislators in the United States were affiliated with far-right groups. The IREHR (which conducted a similar study with the NAACP in 2010 on racism within the tea party) cross-referenced the personal, campaign and official Facebook profiles of all 7,383 state legislators in the United States during the 2021-22 legislative period with thousands of far-right Facebook groups. The researchers found that 875 legislators — all but three of them Republicans — were members of one or more of 789 far-right Facebook groups. That works out to 22 percent of all Republican state legislators….

The far-right groups range from new iterations of the tea party and certain antiabortion and Second Amendment groups to white nationalists, neo-Confederates and sovereign citizen entities that claim to be exempt from U.S. law. The IREHR largely excluded from its list membership in historically mainstream conservative groups such as the National Rifle Association and in pro-Trump and MAGA groups, focusing instead on more radical groups defined by nationalism or antidemocratic purposes.

I worry for the future of our democracy. I don’t think—as some do—that we are on the verge of a civil war. Only one side would be armed. But January 6 might be a harbinger of worse to come.

Categories Education Reform

Texas: Voters Oppose Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2022 //
3

Governor Gregg Abbott has endorsed vouchers, which have repeated failed to pass the legislature. Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is a voucher fanatic, and Senator Ted Cruz says that school choice is the most important issue in the nation. Pastors for Texas children has worked with a bipartisan coalition of legislators to stop vouchers.

Despite the enthusiasm of the state’s top elected officials, a new independent poll shows that the people of Texas don’t want vouchers.

Prepping for a war over private school vouchers in Texas, public school advocates are out with a new poll that shows the majority of likely voters oppose voucher programs that would hurt funding for public schools, and the opposition is deep in rural Texas.

The poll released Tuesday showed that 53 percent of likely Texas voters are against taxpayer-funded private school vouchers when hearing vouchers mean less money for their local public schools. And 71 percent of voters in rural areas said vouchers wouldn’t do anything to help them…

“These poll results show that Texas parents support their public schools, have confidence in their teachers, and are demanding investment in all of our students’ education,” said Julie Cowan, co-chair of Texas Parent PAC, which opposes private school voucher programs. “They do not support a blank check for private school voucher giveaways and charter school CEOs.”

The results come just over a week after Abbott declared in San Antonio that he was ready to make another run at passing a private school voucher plan that he insists won’t take money from public schools — a claim critics have questioned….

The poll released on Tuesday is from Change Research, a San Francisco-based firm. The poll surveyed 1,083 likely Texas voters. It had a margin of error of +/- 3.3 percentage points.

“Texas parents want to be absolutely clear to Governor Greg Abbott and every politician in office — don’t mess with our public schools,” said Dinah Miller, another co-chair of Texas Parent PAC.

Pro-voucher groups counter with a poll of Republican voters after the March 1 primary:

In the March 1 primary, Republican voters were presented a non-binding question previewing the school voucher fight. About 88 percent of GOP voters said yes to: “Texas parents and guardians should have the right to select schools, whether public or private, for their children, and the funding should follow the student.”

The wording of the question matters. Voters should be asked how they feel about taking money away from their local public school to pay for private and religious schools.

Here’s a copy of the poll results that should cause Governor Abbott to cut back on his support for vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Education Industry, Religion, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Texas

Texas: Trump Brings His Profitable Tour to Austin

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2022 //
66

Christopher Hooks of the Texas Monthly attended Trump’s latest tour date in Texas and reviewed the show. It seems to be a political revival show, with expensive tickets and opportunities to spend more money, with no explanation of what the money’s for. You really should subscribe to the Texas Monthly. It’s informative and delightful about a politically key state.

On Saturday, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee came to Austin to speak at a day-long conference attended by some six or seven thousand of his most passionate fans and supporters. In Ye Olden Days, that first sentence would be followed by a description of the future candidate’s remarks on politics and policy. But this has never been the way to cover a Donald Trump speech, and yesterday there wasn’t any new material. The only mystery was why his fans would wait for so long to see him, lining up before dawn to secure good seats.

Saturday’s riffs included an extended description of the contracting process for the replacement of Air Force One, and the story of how Trump crushed ISIS with the help of a general he identified only as “Raisin’ Cain.” I have been to a dozen or so Trump rallies, and these are stories I’ve heard several times. As had members of the audience, apparently: when Trump described how nervous he was flying into Iraq to visit troops, a man called out the punch line—“perhaps I should have been given a medal”—before Trump got there. When the former president caught up, the man laughed twice as hard as his neighbors.

Far more interesting were Trump’s supporters and allies. The conference, featuring speakers such as rock musician Ted Nugent and attended by allies such as Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, showed a movement falling deeper into a suffocating circle of televangelist-adjacent scammery—while its adherents grow ever more comfortable with the idea of the need for violence to triumph over their political opponents. Things are going great, in other words.

In late January, Trump held a rally in Conroe at the high point of the Texas’s GOP primary season. That rally, like most of the former president’s, was held by the joint fund-raising committee of Save America, an extension of Trump’s former (and possible future) campaign. Huge billboards hawked Trump’s new book, but the event was relatively civic-minded. He read, from the teleprompter, a careful speech endorsing all the requisite Texas GOP candidates.

By contrast, the event Saturday in Austin, at the city’s convention center, was a project of the American Freedom Tour, a for-profit traveling show that brings speakers to MAGA-heads around the country. The purpose is not to back candidates or even to get out the vote but to sell tickets. Trump was the headliner, while the undercard was filled out with relative heavyweights like former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and lighter weights, such as Kevin Sorbo, the actor who once starred in the nineties shlock show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. While the turnout of seven thousand might not be impressive in another context, it was large given that each attendee had paid quite a bit to be there. The cheapest tickets, for the seats at the very, very back of the warehouse space, sold for between $45 and $95.

Attendees could purchase a seat halfway to the stage with a ticket at the “VIP” or “Delegate” level, at some $800 to $1,000, respectively. Both came with access to a breakfast with Dinesh D’Souza—the conservative filmmaker whose new work, 2000 Mules, makes the case that the 2020 election was stolen—and an invitation to an afterparty with Donald Trump Jr. Only the Delegate level, though, came with a “Full Color American Freedom Tour Program,” which turned out to be a mostly blank booklet in which attendees were encouraged to write notes about speakers’ remarks. The best seats, however, were reserved for the “Presidential” ticket holders, who paid some $4,000. As it turned out, attendees could actually pretty much sit anywhere. I walked in without a wristband and sat in an empty seat that was supposed to cost $3,000.

With this kind of cash exchanging hands, you might think that the American Freedom Tour was a fundraiser for conservative causes. Many folks who shelled out for a ticket doubtless expected this to be the case. But there is no information anywhere on the tour website about how the proceeds will be distributed. It is not a PAC, of course. The money goes to the speakers—including Trump and Trump Jr., presumably—and the folks who put the rally together.

The only stated goal of the American Freedom Tour is to hold more incarnations of the American Freedom Tour. Its website’s FAQ doesn’t explain exactly what the money is used for, but it does helpfully emphasize that no recording of any kind is allowed inside. There is a cursory “our values” page that explains that the four pillars of American Freedom are “faith, family, finance, and freedom,” which each are given a short paragraph. “Men, in particular our fathers and husbands,” it says, “are under attack, being maligned and parodied in popular culture.”

In the past, I’ve written that the marketplace for well-compensated speakers and evangelists for the right—sometimes derided by the left as an ecosystem of “grift”—is an enormous asset for conservatives. If oleaginous liberal would-be demagogues could make a healthy living touring the country, all the while firing up Democrats in tent rallies, the party might be in a better place. But there are limits, man. My jaw dropped a little when Brian Forte, CEO of the American Freedom Tour, got on stage for a fund-raising appeal for his own company. A giant QR code appeared on screen directing attendees to a donation page, and the older folks around me struggled to make it work. Forte, a thirty-year veteran of the motivational speaking industry, was asking for money from attendees who had already paid to be there.

He did it in unbelievable terms. “Freedom is not free! Think about that,” he told the audience, appropriating a phrase typically used to refer to the sacrifice made by dead American soldiers. He urged the audience to donate at least $20 for Trump’s sake, but the donation page offered options of up to $5,000. “You can’t afford to not do this,” he reasoned, “because America is at stake!”

He went on. “If you see someone next to you who does not have their phone out,” he said, give them the hard sell. “Tap them on the shoulder and say, ‘Come on, let’s do this together.’ Go ahead and do that now. Everyone should have their phone out.”

He wasn’t done. “This is your chance. We need you now. The president needs you now! America needs you now! It’s now or never! We’re warriors on the front lines to save America,” he said. “This is a battle between good and evil!”

The spiel went on for several more minutes, without Forte ever saying what the donations were for. Anyone who has ever been exposed to an evangelist of the Righteous Gemstones variety recognizes this kind of preaching. “Give me money and you’ll get into heaven” becomes “give me money and the country will be saved,” and it’s a more effective approach when you don’t explain the how.

Categories For-Profit, Lies, Texas, Trump

Sweden: The Failure of Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2022 //
6

Lisa Pelling wrote this article, which appeared in the Swedish publication Social Europe. She directs Arena Ide, a progressive think tank in Stockholm, Sweden.

Lisa Pelling explains how ‘freedom of choice’ has wrought a vicious circle of inequality and underperformance.

Think of a caricature of a capitalist couple and you can picture the front page of the leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, earlier this year. A man with a tailormade suit and an 80s style attaché portfolio. Next to him, a woman in high heels, silk skirt and large, silver fur coat. Big confident smiles.

Sadly, the portrait of Hans and Barbara Bergström was not a cartoon but an illustration of the current Swedish school system. The photo accompanied an article on what was once a cherished social institution and a source of national pride, which has become a profitable playing field for corporate interests and the creation of immense private wealth.

Barbara Bergström, founder of one of Sweden’s largest school corporations, with 48 schools across Sweden, and her husband, former editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter—and a long-time lobbyist for the privatisation of schools—are two of the people who have made a fortune running publicly funded schools in Sweden. When Barbara sold shares in her school empire to American investors a few years ago, she earned 918 million krona (almost €90 million). Her remaining shares are now worth another €30 million.

Voucher system

This is money made entirely from public funds. Private schools in Sweden are funded not by tuition fees, but by a ‘free choice’ voucher system introduced by a conservative government in 1992.

This year, that radical reform of Sweden’s school system turns 30. Ideologically conceivedby Milton Friedman, the system is under increasing criticism. Not only because no other country in the world has chosen to copy it, but also because the downsides have become so evident. In particular, school boards across the country are increasingly aware that the owners of private schools treat them as profitable businesses—at the expense of the public schools.

A controversial social-democrat governance reform in 1991 abolished the state-run schooling system. Since then, municipalities have been in charge of public schools in Sweden and all municipalities are by law obliged to hand out school vouchers (equivalent to the cost of municipal schools) to private schools for each pupil they accept.

Picking the most profitable

It sounds fair: all pupils get a voucher (‘a backpack full of cash’) and all get to choose. Yet individual pupils’ needs are different and, while the municipal school has to cater for all children’s needs, private schools can pick the most profitable pupils—and still receive the same funding.

Municipalities have a legal responsibility to provide children with access to education close to where they live, be that in a small town or remote village. For-profit schools do not have such an obligation and can establish themselves in the city centre.

Nor can municipalities turn pupils down. For-profit schools do this all the time: they put pupils on a waiting list and accept only a profitable quota. Since the largest costs in schools—teachers and classrooms—are more or less fixed, maximum profits stem from maximising the number of pupils per teacher and per classroom. Waiting lists allow pupils to be queued (while attending the default municipal school) until a full (in other words, profitable) classroom can be opened.

Vicious circle

This creates a vicious circle. While private for-profit schools operate classrooms with 32 pupils (with the funding from 32 vouchers), municipalities have to run schools where classrooms have one, two or maybe five pupils fewer. Less money per teacher and per classroom mathematically increases the average cost per pupil.

If the cost per pupil for the municipality rises in its schools, the private schools are legally entitled to matching support—even if their costs have not risen. Public schools lose pupils, and so funding, to for-profit schools, while their consequently rising cost per pupil delivers a further funding boon to the private schools—which, with the help of this additional support, become even more attractive. All the while public schools are drained of much-needed resources and so the downward spiral continues.

Inevitably, it is mostly privileged kids who are able to exercise their right to attend private schools, so socially-disadvantaged pupils are left in the public schools. This not only favours inequality of performance between schools but also lowers the overall average—high-performing Finland, by contrast, has very low performance gaps between its schools.

Andreas Schleicher, head of the directorate for education and skills at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, used to ‘look to Sweden as the gold standard for education’. Now, he writes, ‘the Swedish school system seems to have lost its soul’. No other country has experienced such a rapid fall in performance in the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment (PISA) league table as Sweden, paired with increasing knowledge gaps between schools. And all the while school segregation is increasing, not only in big cities, but in mid-sized towns as well.

In her seminal The Death and Life of the great American School System, Diane Ravitch describes how making ‘freedom of choice’ the ‘overarching religion’ benefits few and harms many, destroying the public school system. What should be a public service is abused by parents who seek a (white, non-working class) segregated refuge for their children.

Huge funds to spend

It might seem unlikely that the Swedish school system would be an inspiration to anyone anywhere. But Swedish private schools are highly profitable, their owners have huge funds to spend and they are eager to meet upper- and middle-class demands for social segregation by expanding their corporations abroad.

Academedia, the largest private education provider in Sweden, is established in Norway and has 65 preschools in Germany. It recently reported to investors that it was preparing to launch an apprenticeship programme in the United Kingdom and expand its preschools into the Netherlands. Barbara Bergström’s Internationella Engelska Skolan already owns seven schools in Spain.

The Bergströms’ foundation, meanwhile, has donated SEK60 million to establish a ‘professorship in educational organization and leadership’ at the Stockholm School of Economics. Friedman would have been impressed.

Categories Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, International, Vouchers
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