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North Carolina: Why Tricia Cotham Betrayed Voters and Gave GOP a Supermajority

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
22

Last April, newly elected Democrat Tricia Cotham announced that she was switching from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. This was after she had campaigned as a supporter of abortion rights, an opponent of school vouchers, and a loyal Democrat. Her betrayal of voters in her blue district shook up the state’s politics, because it meant that the hard-right Republicans in the state legislature (the General Assembly) could override the vetoes of Democratic Governor Roy Cooper.

Everyone who saw the damage wrought by Cotham wondered why she did it. She claimed that Democrats didn’t appreciate her enough. That’s a strange reason to flip positions on big issues.

The New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt found out why she switched: she was wooed by powerful Republicans, encouraged to run, and flipped knowing full well that she lied to her voters.

When Tricia Cotham, a former Democratic lawmaker, was considering another run for the North Carolina House of Representatives, she turned to a powerful party leader for advice. Then, when she jumped into the Democratic primary, she was encouraged by still other formidable allies.

She won the primary in a redrawn district near Charlotte, and then triumphed in the November general election by 18 percentage points, a victory that helped Democrats lock in enough seats to prevent, by a single vote, a Republican supermajority in the state House.

Except what was unusual — and not publicly known at the time — was that the influential people who had privately encouraged Ms. Cotham to run were Republicans, not Democrats. One was Tim Moore, the redoubtable Republican speaker of the state House. Another was John Bell, the Republican majority leader…

Three months after Ms. Cotham took office in January, she delivered a mortal shock to Democrats and to abortion rights supporters: She switched parties, and then cast a decisive vote on May 3 to override a veto by the state’s Democratic governor and enact a 12-week limit on most abortions— North Carolina’s most restrictive abortion policy in 50 years…

More perplexing to many Democrats was why she did it. Ms. Cotham came from a family with strong ties to the Democratic Party, campaigned as a progressive on social issues and had even co-sponsored a bill to codify a version of Roe v. Wade into North Carolina law…

Late in March, just a few days before switching parties, she skipped a pivotal gun-control vote, helping Republicans loosen gun restrictions in the state. After she became a Republican, she sponsored a bill to expand student eligibility for private-school vouchers, voted to ban gender-affirming care for minors and voted to outlaw discussions of race or gender in state job interviews.

“This switch has been absolutely devastating,” said state Representative Pricey Harrison, a Democrat from Greensboro.

Ms. Cotham received a standing ovation at North Carolina’s state Republican convention in June. She was invited to meet privately there with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and former Vice President Mike Pence.

“She’s a rock star among the Republican Party activists and voter base,” said U.S. Representative Dan Bishop, a Republican who said he encouraged Ms. Cotham to join his party and who stood behind her when she announced the decision.

There were clues that should have raised suspicions. In an earlier stint in the legislature, Cotham was loud in demanding greater accountability for charter schools. After she left the legislature, she was a lobbyist for the charter school industry. When she returned this year and flipped parties, she led the Republican demand to transfer control of charters from the State Board of Education to the General Assembly.

The move would, at first, shift independent oversight of charter schools from a board largely appointed by the governor to a board largely appointed by the General Assembly….

Cotham, a former teacher, has been a supporter of school choice. She was the president of a corporation that ran charter schools. Cotham is one of three chairs of the House Education Committee, a role she’s held since the start of the session when she was a Democrat, a rare position for a Democrat in the GOP-controlled chamber.

Real Democrats support public schools, not corporate charter chains or vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Scandals, Vouchers

Dana Milbank: House GOP Discovers Aliens Among Us

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
71

Dana Milbank, a regular columnist for the Washington Post is always insightful and sees the humor in the antics of politicians. In this account of recent hearings about UFOs, he hits it out of the park. He explains why Trump supporters are avid believers in the presence of mysterious aliens: they believe the Deep State is hiding what it knows. Another conspiracy. The missing link in their conspiracy: why didn’t Trump release all this secret stuff during his four years in office? Milbank casts doubt on whether outer space aliens are real; I can answer him. They are; a few of them have been posting on this blog recently.

Milbank writes:

The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!

That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:

  • That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.
  • That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.
  • That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.
  • That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.
  • That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.
  • That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
  • That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it a “total hack job.”
  • And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.

I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.

Alas, Grusch has no documents, photos or other evidence to corroborate any of his fantastic claims. It’s classified, you see.

Maybe everything he says is true, even the claim that “the Vatican was involved” in pursuing extraterrestrials, and Grusch has just exposed the best-kept secret and most sprawling conspiracy in the history of the universe. Or maybe Grusch himself is a conspiracy theorist, or he’s just having a lark at the subcommittee’s expense. Easier to discern was the motive of several Republicans on the panel: They greeted his out-of-this-world claims with total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.

“There has been activity by alien or nonhuman technology and/or beings that has caused harm to humans?” asked Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.).

Grusch said what he “personally witnessed” was “very disturbing.”

“You’ve said that the U.S. has intact spacecraft,” Burlison continued. “You’ve said that the government has alien bodies or alien species. Have you seen the spacecraft?”

Grusch said the nonclassified setting prevented him from divulging “what I’ve seen firsthand.”

“Do we have the bodies of the pilots?” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wanted to know.

“Biologics came with some of these recoveries, yeah,” Grusch told her, and the remains were “nonhuman.”

Mace asked whether, “based on your experience,”Grusch believes “our government has made contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.”

Classified, Grusch replied.

Just over a year ago, a House Intelligence subcommittee held a similar hearing on “unidentified aerial phenomena” but with dramatically different results. The panel’s bipartisan leadership said the matter should be taken seriously to protect pilots and to make sure enemies don’t develop breakthrough weapons. But they assured the public there was no evidence of “anything nonterrestrial in origin,” and they cautioned against conspiracy theories. In addition, Sean Kirkpatrick, the head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, where Grusch worked, testified to senators in April that his UAP-hunting office “has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics.” NASA has said likewise.

At the start of this week’s hearing, Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, reminded colleagues of Kirkpatrick’s testimony. One of the other witnesses, David Fravor, a retired Navy commander, told the subcommittee that the government is “not focused on little green men.” But this Republican majority has yet to meet a conspiracy theory it wouldn’t amplify, so it was only a matter of time before it landed on Roswell and Area 51.

There’s only one reason Trump failed to release the top-secret documents about extraterrestrials: he is part of the Deep State too! Shhhhhh.

Categories Ignorance, Politics, Republicans, Trump

Arizona: Expanded Voucher Program Blows a Hole in State Budget

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
10

Despite the public’s overwhelming rejection of vouchers in a state referendum in 2018 (by a margin of 65-35%), the Republican Legislature and then-Governor Doug Ducey ignored the vote and passed a program of universal vouchers. This meant that the state would pay for every student, regardless of family income, to attend a private or religious school or homeschool or whatever the family considered an educational expense.

The claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools” was exposed as phony, since most students who claimed vouchers never attended public schools. Quite simply, the voucher program was a transfer of public money from public schools to students in non-public schools.

The cost of the voucher program soared to nearly $1 billion. It’s two top administrators resigned. The new Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said that the voucher program was unsustainable.

Two of the top administrators in charge of a controversial school program in Arizona that has seen cost estimates swell to well beyond expectations have abruptly resigned, leading to more questions about the program and how it is being operated.

The program, known at the ESA Program, was expanded last year by the Republican-backed legislature and has seen its costs swell to enormous heights as students around the state quickly applied for the $7,000 vouchers made available by the program.

ESA Leaders Abruptly Resign

Two of the top administrators with the Empowerment Scholarship Accounts program in Arizona abruptly resigned on Monday, with the remaining members of the program giving few details as to why the two may have left.

An Arizona Department of Education spokesman acknowledged Tuesday that Empowerment Scholarship Account Director Christine Accurso and operations director Linda Rizzo had resigned from the ESA program, according to KPNX-TV.

“Christine Accurso has explained to the department that she took the ESA position to clean up the program and having successfully done that she has chosen to move on,” according to the statement…

ESA Causing Huge Deficit to State Budget

The ESA program has now cost the State of Arizona approximately $943 million, prompting what Governor Katie Hobbs says will be a $319 million budget deficit for the state, largely caused by the bloated spending of the program.

Categories Arizona, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers

Matt Barnum: Pundits and Politicians Despair about Public Schools, But Parents Are Happy with Them

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2023 //
53

“This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters”.

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat summarized recent polls about public schools and noticed a sharp contrast between parents of public school students and non-parents.

Parents who have children in public schools are satisfied with them, based on their experience. But the general public swallows the negative narrative spewed by the mainstream media and rightwing politicians and thus has a sour view of public schools. This gap in perception has persisted for many years but seems to be increasing as Republican politicians like Texas’s Greg Abbott and Florida’s Ron DeSantis amp up their attacks on public schools.

Since it is not newsworthy to report that most parents are satisfied with their children’s public schools, the media loves to publish stories about crises and failure. Eventually, it becomes the conventional wisdom.

We have heard scare stories about the public schools with great intensity since the publication of the ominous “A Nation at Risk” report in 1983. That report, we now know, was purposely distorted to make public schools look bad. The commission that released that hand-wringing report had cooked the books to generate a sense of crisis. And they succeeded. The Reagan administration was alarmed, the nation’s governors were alarmed, the media stoked their fears. And for 40 years, the nation bought the lie.

But one group did not buy the lie: public school parents.

Barnum wrote:

The polling company Gallup has been asking American parents the same question since 1999: Are you satisfied with your oldest child’s education? Every year though January 2020, between two-thirds and 80% said yes.

The pandemic upended many things about American schooling, but not this long-standing trend. In Gallup’s most recent poll, conducted late last year, 80% of parents said they were somewhat or completely satisfied with their child’s school, which in most cases was a public school. This was actually a bit higher than in most years before the pandemic. A string of other polls, conducted throughout the pandemic, have shown similar results.

“Contrary to elite or policy wonk opinion, which often is critical of schools, there have been years and years worth of data saying that families in general like their local public schools,” said Andy Smarick, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

Categories Education Reform, Extremism, Fake News, Media, Opinion Polling, Parents, Politics, Privatization, Propaganda, Supporting public schools

South Dakota: A Catholic School Parent Explains Why He Opposes Vouchers

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
50

Kevin Woster, a veteran journalist in South Dakota, explains here why he opposes vouchers, even though he sent his own children to Catholic school and appreciated the education they got there.

He notes that the South Dakota legislature considered vouchers and did not pass them but he is sure that the issue will be back again for debate.

He and his wife made the right decision by sending their children to Catholic schools, but he nonetheless thinks it would be wrong to take public money for private schools.

He believes that public money should not be used to fund private schools.

It’s public money, for public schools. And the commitment and responsibility to provide a free public education isn’t a new idea. It’s a constitutional idea, as in the South Dakota Constitution, which reads in part:

“The stability of a republican form of government depending on the morality and intelligence of the people, it shall be the duty of the Legislature to establish and maintain a general and uniform system of public schools wherein tuition shall be without charge, and equally open to all; and to adopt all suitable means to secure to the people the advantages and opportunities of education.”

And as taxpaying citizens, it’s our duty to support that system of free public schools.

Making your choice with your checkbook, not public money

Just because my first wife, Jaciel, and I decided to send our kids to a Catholic-school system didn’t mean we were absolved of our responsibilities as citizens to support public schools. You don’t stop being a citizen because you decide to become a private-school parent. You are both. You must be both.

It would be wrong, he believes, to weaken the public schools for the benefit of those who have made private choices.

Categories Catholic Schools, Citizenship, Democracy, Funding, Religion, School Choice, South Dakota, Special Education, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

The Big Lie About America’s Public Schools and the Scheme to Privatize Them

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
49

America’s public schools were one of the glories of the nation until recently. Politicians hailed them as a symbol of democracy, a public institution open to all, supported by taxpayers, and controlled by elected local boards.

Local business leaders frequently served on local school boards. Americans broadly understood that the schools prepared the rising generation to be good citizens and to sustain our democracy. Certain principles were taken for granted: public funds were never used to fund religious schools; teachers and principals were career professionals, often the most educated members of their community, and were respected.

This is not to say that everything was rosy. I have written several books about the controversies that rocked the schools, especially over desegregation, which encountered vehement resistance in both the South and the North.

But despite the battles over race, curriculum, and other matters, the public schools garnered high praise from the public and elected officials.

However, this iconic symbol began to take a drubbing in 1983, when the Reagan-era National Commission on Excellence in Education released its harshly negative report called “A Nation at Risk.” The commission claimed that the nation’s schools were mired in a sea of mediocrity, that test scores were on a downward spiral, and that the nation’s public schools were responsible for the loss of major industries to other nations.

The reaction to the report was immediate: states set up task forces and commissions to find solutions to the schools’ crisis. Higher standards for students and teachers, more time in school, tougher curricula, etc.

The one refrain that became the legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was: Our schools are failing.

But we now know that the report was a hoax. James Harvey, who worked on the commission’s staff, explained that the books were cooked to produce a negative result. The data were cherry-picked to paint the schools in the worst possible light. The conclusions were a lie. The report ignored positive findings and chose to ignore the students living in poverty, the students with disabilities, and the other socioeconomic challenges facing the nation’s schools.

So today, relying on the Big Lie of 1983 (“our schools are failing”), ideologues, grifters, tax-cutters, religious interests, and others have joined forces to grab the money now devoted to public schools.

To the original Big Lie have been added new Big Lies to advance the cause of privatization and profits:

Big Lie number one: Test scores are reliable indicators of school and teacher quality. This simple but wrong idea was the basis for No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.

Big Lie number two: Teachers need not be professional to get good results. Inexperienced teachers with high expectations and a few weeks of training will get better results than career professionals. This lie undercut the profession, undermined respect for teachers, and was the founding myth of Teach for America.

Big Lie number three: the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government, therefore we need more charter schools. BUT: The charter sector has spawned scandals, with private entrepreneurs embezzling millions of dollars for themselves. Some charters get high test scores by excluding weak students, some get high scores by attrition of weak students. Many charter schools close every year due to academic or financial problems. On average, charter schools do not get better results than public schools.

Big Lie number four: vouchers will produce higher test scores. BUT: Voucher schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, are usually exempt from state testing and are not accountable as public schools are. Where voucher students do take state tests, they fall farther and farther behind their peers in public schools. Now that it’s well-known that voucher schools are academically behind public schools, their proponents have moved the goalposts to say: Parents should choose, no matter what the studies show about test scores.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has swallowed the Big Lies and is intent on giving every student—regardless of income—a voucher to attend a religious school, private school, or home school.

For the first time in two centuries, the very concept of public schools is in jeopardy.

Ninety percent of Americans were educated in public schools. That ninety percent made America a successful nation by most measures. Public schools built bridges among diverse communities.

What will the new paradigm contribute to our nation?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fake, Fraud, History, Hoax

Thom Hartmann: Trump’s Big-Lie Ad Threatens Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
23

Journalist Thom Hartmann shows that Trump’s latest ad is an exercise in the Big Lie Technique. It contains vile smears that simple-minded people are likely to believe. It resounds with echoes of fascism.

He writes:

Trump’s people are promoting a new lie-filled fascist advertisement, which even the normally unflappable Frank Luntz called “disturbing.” It follows a fairly ancient pattern of destructive Big Lies that goes back to Renaissance Italy and even the Roman republic and ancient Greece.

German filmmaker Fritz Hippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists (he produced the infamous movie The Eternal Jew), said that two steps are necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it.

The first is to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” 

The second is to “repeat the oversimplification over and over.” 

If these two steps are followed, Hippler and Goebbels both knew, enough people will come to believe a Big Lie that it can change the politics of a nation.

In Hippler’s day, the best example of his application of the principle was his 1940 movie “Campaign in Poland,” which argued that the Polish people were suffering under tyranny — a tyranny that would someday threaten Germany — and that the German people could either allow this cancer to fester, or preemptively “liberate” Poland.

Hitler took the “strong and decisive” path, the movie suggested, to liberate Poland, even though after the invasion little evidence was found that Poland represented any threat whatsoever to the powerful German Reich. The movie was Hitler’s way of saying that invading Poland was the right thing to do, and that, in retrospect, he would have done it again.

The Big Lie is alive and well today in the United States of America, and what’s most troubling about it is the basic premise that underlies its use. For somebody to undertake a Big Lie, they must first believe Niccolo Machiavelli’s premise (in “The Prince,” 1532) that “the ends justify the means.”

Hitler, after all, claimed to have based everything he did on the virtuous goal of uniting Europe — and then the world — in a thousand-year era of peace, which he claimed was foreshadowed in the Bible. If you believe that a thousand years of peace is such a noble end that any means is justified to reach it, it’s a short leap to eugenics, preemptive wars, torture of dissidents and prisoners, and mass murder.

Believing that the end justifies the means is the ultimate slippery slope. It will kill any noble goal, because even if the goal is achieved, it will have been corrupted along the way by the means used to accomplish it…

In real life, it’s the story of the many tinpot dictators around the world who quote America’s Founders while enforcing a brutal rule, of fossil fuel executives pushing for lax CO2 rules to “help the American economy,” of the legion of lobbyists who work daily to corrupt democracy in the name of GMOs, pharmaceuticals, and the insurance industry (among others).

Here in the US it was used by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to lie us into murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and when there was little consequence to them personally or the GOP, Republicans decided to continue the Big Lie strategy and are using it to this day.

Gandhi, Jesus, and Buddha all warned us about this, as did Tolstoy, Tolkien, Hemingway, and Kafka.

Be it “small sins” like the Green Party and No Labels getting into bed with Republicans to get on state ballots, or “big sins” like rightwing think-tanks working to turn America into a strongman oligarchy with their Project 2025, trying to accomplish a “good” by using the means of an “evil” like a Big Lie inherently corrupts the good.

Now the Trump campaign and its allies are encouraging a new series of Big Lies to assail President Biden and the very idea of democracy itself.

With the smug assurance of damage done to the enemy, Republican governors are rewriting American history (the Big Lie that white children are injured by learning about Black history), criminalizing the LGBTQ+ community (the Big Lie that queer people are “groomers”), and throwing millions of people in Blue cities off the voting rolls (the Big Lie of voter fraud).

They are pushing and celebrating nakedly fascist policies, tropes, and memes.

Most recently, a Trump-aligned group rolled out an ad that strings a whole series of Big Lies together. It says:

If I was the deep state and I wanted to destroy America, I would rig the election with a puppet candidate, one that was so compromised that they would never say a word about it. I would create a false flag that allows for mail-in ballots. I would be in charge of the ballot-counting machines. I would create a false flag to blame all who question the results of the election.

If I was the deep state, I would prosecute anyone that went against me. I would sue and prosecute anyone that spoke up about the fraudulent election. I would use my powers to shut down all your internet businesses and bankrupt you.

If I was the deep state, I would make everyone an example why you should never question a Democrat ever winning an election. I would imprison my foes. I would use my corrupt DAs and blackmail judges to destroy you. I would make sure all crimes I ever committed never happened. I would prosecute my biggest competition. I would make sure they could never run for office ever again.

If I was the deep state, I would convince everyone that Ukraine Nazis were good, and women are men.

If I was the deep state, I would own every politician that mattered.

If I was the deep state, I would push my pedophilia ambitions on you.

If I was the deep state, you’d question your sexual identity, but not the medical establishment.

If I was the deep state, you would fear to ever resist me.

If I was the deep state, you would wish I was really the devil.

If I was the deep state, I would say mission accomplished.

Frank Luntz wrote of it, “This is the most disturbing political ad I’ve seen this year.”

Defenders of the Trump campaign are overrunning social media, defending the lies and threats in this new ad and Trump’s previous, “If you fuck around with us…” statements. They claim that Joe Biden is reviving our economy with “socialism and communism,” and Jack Smith and the DOJ prosecuting Trump and the January 6th traitors is some sort of “deep state tyranny.”

There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the work the administration is doing to punish seditionists and rebuild our economy from the wreckage of the Trump years and these sorts of naked appeals to fascism.

Truths and issues — however unpleasant — cannot be weighed on the same scale as lies, threats, and character assassination, explicit or implicit.

Lee Atwater, on his deathbed, realized that the “ends justify the means” technique of campaigning he had unleashed on behalf of Reagan and Bush was both immoral and harmful to American democracy.

“In 1988, fighting Dukakis, I said that I ‘would strip the bark off the little bastard’ and ‘make Willie Horton his [Dukakis’] running mate,’” Atwater said. “I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not. Mostly I am sorry for the way I thought of other people. Like a good general, I had treated everyone who wasn’t with me as against me.”

But Atwater’s spiritual and political protégés in the Trump campaign soldier on. He and his GOP allies in Congress are using Big Lies with startling regularity, and old Big Lies are being resurrected almost daily, most on social media, right-wing talk radio, podcasts, and TV.

The most alarming contrast in the coming election of 2024 is between those who will use any means to get and hold power, and those who are unwilling to engage in a Big Lie.

History tells us that, over the short term, the Big Lie usually works. Over the long term, though, the damage it does — both to those who use it, and to the society on which it is inflicted — is often incalculable.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, Ignorance, Lies, Propaganda, Trump

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: An Important Anniversary Today

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
21

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner publish a blog called “Steady,” which has a consistently steady tone while reflecting on our times. Only minutes ago, they called attention to an important event that occurred 75 years ago, when President Harry S Truman made history.

They write:

At Steady, we sometimes pause from the news of the day to look back and reflect on the journey our nation has taken. With this in mind, we want to acknowledge an anniversary that took place this past week that didn’t get enough notice, even if its importance is as relevant as ever.
On July 26, 1948 — 75 years ago — President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981. Its statement was simple but profound:

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. …”

Black people had fought in every war in the country’s history, with great courage and sacrifice. They fought for a nation that violently denied their human rights. During World War II, more than a million Black men and women served in the armed forces, fighting fascism around the world only to return to a country infused with systemic and often bloody racism.

This stark dichotomy became appallingly apparent with the tragic story of Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. He had enlisted in the Army in 1942 and served in the Pacific. After being honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, on February 12, 1946, Woodard boarded a Greyhound bus to see his family in North Carolina. He was wearing his uniform. En route in South Carolina, he was pulled off the bus and beaten by local police, then arrested, then beaten some more. The assault was so violent it left Woodard blind for life.

Woodard’s story soon became a defining moment in post-war race relations. Orson Welles called for justice on his ABC radio program. There was a benefit concert in Harlem headlined by Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, and boxer Joe Louis. President Truman ordered a federal investigation, and in 1947 he became the first president to address the NAACP. He said in his speech:

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in the long history of our country’s efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. And when I say all Americans — I mean all Americans.

A year later, Truman ordered the desegregation of the military and the federal workforce. There was, of course, tremendous pushback, and racism persisted in the recruitment and deployment of service members generally, and in the promotion of officers specifically.

(The act very nearly cost Truman his presidency. He almost lost his reelection bid in 1948 because some southern states — previously known as the Democratic Party’s “Solid South” — voted for a third-party “Dixiecrat” ticket. The ramifications of this series of events reverberate today.)

While the Air Force integrated quickly after 1948, the Army didn’t fully integrate until 1954, spurred on by a need to fill its ranks during the carnage of the Korean War. The Marines and Navy took much longer. It is shocking to consider, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s, under the leadership of Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., then chief of naval operations, that the Navy was finally forced to fully confront its systemic racism.

In the ensuing decades, the U.S. military, while not entirely free from racism, has become a potent example for the nation of how our diversity is our strength. The military arguably has become the best meritocracy of any American institution. Seeing young men and women from different races, nationalities, cultures, religions, sexual identities, and geographic regions serve alongside each other sparks pride in what our country can and should be. They are beacons of hope.

Yet today, we are once again at a crossroads in the nation’s reckoning with its history. Right-wing extremists seek to downplay our legacies of injustice. We see this effort in distorted school curricula and banned books. We see it in politicians who use divisiveness as a tool to rally votes. The truth is, we still have a long way to go to make sure that the corridors of American power reflect the country as a whole. It should be noted that when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action recently, they exempted military academies. What is one to make of that?

It is vital that we confront what our nation truly was, and is. Surely it is just that we recognize the tremendous service of those who were denied full rights. White supremacy is on the rise, including among elements of the armed forces. Surely we should agree that this is a great danger needing to be rooted out.

Truman’s executive order was an important step toward our country’s making good on its founding ideals. Much hard work preceded that moment 75 years ago, and much has taken place after it. The journey continues, with new challenges in our present time. We can’t hope for continued progress if we don’t acknowledge the past, honor moments of justice, and vow to do the hard work to build upon them.

We can also find hope in President Truman’s own life story. He was a descendant of slave owners and Confederate sympathizers, and he grew up in a segregated town in Missouri. As a younger man, he himself identified as a segregationist and racist, but he was able to grow to become a champion for civil rights, at least by the standards of his time.

In Truman’s journey, we can find a mirror for the country at large. We have come a long way but still remain very much a work in progress. And the gains we have made are fragile without continued care and effort.

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Courage, Cruelty, Democracy, Freedom, Race, Racism, Segregation

Houston: Takeover Superintendent Will Turn 28 Libraries into Discipline Centers

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
25

The Texas Department of Education decided to take over Houston, one of the largest school districts in the nation, because one high school was not improving fast enough for state commissioner Mike Morath. The state ousted the elected school board and replaced a strong superintendent with military man Mike Miles, who had a rocky tenure when he led Dallas schools a decade ago.

Miles has launched a campaign of disruption—the signature move of “reformers,” especially Broadies, and he is offering what he calls a New Education System (NES). The details are not yet fully developed, but here is one aspect: 28 of the schools that are part of Miles’s NES will close their libraries and use them for other purposes. One such purpose is to serve as a “discipline center” for students who act out.

Houston Independent School District will be eliminating librarian positions at 28 schools this upcoming year and converting the libraries into ‘Team Centers” where kids with behavioral issues will be sent, the district announced.

This comes as part of the new superintendent Mike Miles reform program, New Education System (NES). Currently, there are a total of 85 schools that have joined Miles’ program, and of those, 28 campuses will lose their librarians. The district said they will have the opportunity to transition to other roles within the district.

The remaining 57 NES schools’ librarians will be assessed on a case-by-case basis, according to the district.

Retired HISD Teacher in Charge of Library, Lisa Robinson, believes the library is full of some of the greatest stories ever told.

“It was such a joy to help them find the perfect book,” said Robinson.

She said those stories are now ripped to shreds.

“My heart is just broken for these children that are in the NES schools that are losing their librarians,” said Robinson.

Librarian positions have been an ongoing debate in HISD. Robinson said the former superintendent, Millard House II, made efforts to keep library staff.

“The mandate for librarians had been put back in place. With one swipe of a pen that has been destroyed,” said Robinson.

Superintendent Mike Miles said students are behind on reading levels, especially in 4th grade.

Former HISD Librarian and Manager of Library Services, Janice Newsum believes eliminating librarian positions could hurt reading performance even more.

“When students engage in reading as an activity of choice, they are not only building that reading muscle, but they are also developing their vocabulary they are understanding a bit about the world that exists outside their block radius,” said Newsum.

Mayor Sylvester Turner believes the move is unacceptable.

“You don’t close libraries in some of the schools in your most underserved communities, and you’re keeping libraries open in other schools,” said Turner.

What’s the logic here? Many students are not reading well, therefore eliminate the librarians who might find books that interest them?

Categories Broad Foundation, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston, Librarians, Libraries, Texas

Trump Claims That He Is Prosecuted to Silence His Base

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2023 //
30

I heard it on the radio while driving and couldn’t believe it. Trump claimed that the prosecutors pursuing him for a variety of crimes are actually targeting his supporters. He portrayed himself in near-Biblical terms, as a savior who is being persecuted and crucified on behalf of his devout followers. He said, and I paraphrase, “When they come for me, they are really coming for you.” I couldn’t but think of the phrase “Jesus died for our sins.”

Then I read Philip Bump in The Washington Post, who explained how Trump has made this tack a central part of his campaign. He has done nothing wrong. He wrote a perfect letter. He made a perfect phone call. He is blameless. It is not he but his followers who are targets of wicked prosecutors.

Bump wrote:

Visitors to Donald Trump’s campaign website are immediately implicated in his current legal travails.

“They’re not after me,” text in the primary image on the site reads. “They’re after you … I’m just standing in their way!”

As though attribution were needed, the quote is sourced to Donald J. Trump, 45th president of the United States.

This idea that Trump faces a legal threat as a proxy for his base of support was offered explicitly during Trump’s speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition over the weekend.

“Every time the radical-left Democrats, Marxist, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a great badge of courage,” Trump said. “I’m being indicted for you, and I believe the you is more than 200 million people that love our country.”

That phrasing is dripping with hyperbole. Trump’s federal indictment came at the hands of an experienced federal prosecutor who is in no realistic way a “radical-left Democrat,” much less any of the other (contradictory) categories offered. Trump’s implication that his base of support numbers 200 million is heavily inflated.

Those exaggerations have a purpose. Two-hundred-million Americans are more than three-quarters of the adult population, but they’re also obviously more than half of the country, bolstering Trump’s long-standing claim that he is leading a “silent majority” (despite earning less than a majority of the vote in the 2016 presidential primaries, 2016 election and 2020 election). His framing of his opponents as politically opposed to that base — using vaguely defined pejoratives very familiar to supporters who remember the Cold War — is also familiar in a terrain littered with “Republicans in name only.”

Everyone agrees with him and anyone who doesn’t is a traitor. Simple enough.

I have lived through many Presidential elections but I can’t remember any candidate saying that everyone who votes against him is “radical left Democrats, Marxist, communists, and fascists.”

I recall that John McCain defended Obama when one of his supporters called him a Muslim. McCain did not traffic in the politics of personal destruction.

Trump’s inflammatory language and his disrespect for democratic norms undermines our democracy, just as do his attacks on the Justice Department and the rule of law and on the press. He attacks the integrity of our electoral system, our judicial system, and every part of our government. He is a Samson who would dearly love to tear down the pillars of his society unless he controls it. He inspires violence and relishes his ability to mobilize an armed mob.

If you don’t support him, you are a traitor. You don’t love your country. You are radical left. Or a Marxist or a communist or a fascist.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Lies, Trump
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