Archives for the month of: September, 2023
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North Carolina: Voucher Teachers Required to “Speak in Tongues” at This School

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
16

Justin Parmenter, an NBCT-certified teacher in North Carolina, has been posting interesting facts on Twitter (X) about religious schools in North Carolina that accept voucher students. That is, the public is paying most or all of their tuition.

Here is the latest:

NC requires public school teachers to hold a license.

Durham, NC’s Mt. Zion Christian Acad receives public $ for vouchers. They require their teachers to demonstrate their relationship w/the Holy Spirit by speaking in tongues.

A license is optional. #nced #ncpol #ncga

@justinparmenter

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Dana Milbank: Biden Faulted by GOP for Liking Dogs and Ice Cream

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
34

Republicans have spent the past four years portraying Joe Biden as a senile fool, a bumbling idiot, giving him no credit for his legislative achievements. They boast about the infrastructure projects in their districts, but never mention that they voted against the legislation that funded the projects.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote recently that Republicans have found new reasons to ridicule Biden: he pets dogs and he likes ice cream. Shocking!

Milbank writes:

White House spokesman Andrew Bates is a happy warrior. For years, he has spiritedly fended off whatever calumny Republicans alleged at the moment, whether about President Biden’s age or Hunter Biden’s laptop or some imaginary scheme to take away Americans’ hamburgers or, most recently, their beer.

But Bates has found that he cannot in good conscience defend the man he serves against a deeply troubling new charge that the Republican National Committee has leveled at him. “I’m just coming to grips with the fact that I work for a dog-petting monster,” he told me.

It’s true. A couple of weeks ago, when Biden was touring the devastation in Maui, Hawaii, he encountered a golden lab named Dexter who was assisting with the grim search. He noted that Dexter was wearing booties to protect his paws from the scorching earth, and — Outrageously! Unforgivably! — Biden leaned over and petted Dexter on the top of his head.

The RNC swung into action. “Biden gets distracted by a dog: ‘That’s some hot ground, man!’” the GOP tweeted (or whatever one does now that Elon Musk has wrecked the platform) from its @RNCResearch account. It appended video of the offense.

This was not the first time the RNC caught the president in a scandalous act of canine affection. “Biden gets distracted by his dog on the balcony as he returns from Japan,” the RNC tweeted in May. The month before, @RNCResearch mocked Biden for answering “a child’s question about his dog” and for attempting to greet the Irish leader’s Bernese mountain dog (the animal barked at the president). “This dog wants nothing to do with Joe Biden,” the RNC tweeted.

Offensive though it is that Biden likes dogs, the RNC has exposed him for worse: enjoying ice cream. @RNCResearch has gone after him no fewer than 12 times for this deplorable behavior, tweeting out indefensible things Biden has said on the topic, such as “I know some really great ice cream places around here” and (parental discretion advised) “I got a whole full freezer full of Jeni’s chocolate chip ice cream.”

Impeach!

The GOP’s goal, of course, is to portray Biden as doddering and feebleminded. “Was Biden dozing off in Maui?” @RNCResearch tweeted with video that did not, in fact, show Biden dozing. “Biden looks confused as he heads back to his vehicle,” it tweeted in late August. “BIDEN: *stares blankly*,” it tweeted a few days later, after he ignored questions from a Fox News reporter. “BIDEN (very confused): ‘Who am I yielding to?’ ” @RNCResearch tweeted after the president inquired about the speaking order at a news conference with foreign leaders….

The RNC, which has defended Donald Trump’s lies that led to a violent attempt to overturn the 2020 election, has repeatedly faulted “SERIAL LIAR” Biden for exaggerating the damage done by a fire in his home decades ago. The accuracy standard of @RNCResearch’s attacks is little higher than the former president’s. It spread false storiesabout an unseen White House official silencing Biden with a mute button, about a bird pooping on Biden, about Biden making an antisemitic remark and about Biden being disoriented.

“Did Joe Biden just announce he has cancer?” the RNC ridiculed one day, apparently unaware that Biden has had various non-melanoma skin cancers removed.

“Joe Biden says the length of Barack Obama’s signature is shorter than his. Obama’s is 3 letters longer,” the RNC mocked on another day, clearly unaware that Biden signs his name “Joseph R. Biden Jr.”

There is nothing Biden does that will escape the ridicule of the RNC.

But what could be worse than petting dogs and liking ice cream?

Categories Biden, Elections, Humor, Republicans, Stupid

Nancy Bailey: The Folly of Destroying Play in Kindergarten

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
16

Nancy Bailey criticizes the ongoing campaign to raise academic expectations and academic pressure on children in kindergarten. She traces the origins of this misguided effort on the Reagan-era publication “A Nation at Risk” in 1983.

Although the gloomy claims of that influential document have been repeatedly challenged, even debunked*, it continues to control educational discourse with its assertion that American schools are failing. “A Nation at Risk” led to increased testing, to the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind in 2002, to the creation of Barack Obama’s Race to the Top in 2009, to the release of the Common Core standards in 2010.

Despite nearly a quarter century of focus on standards and testing, policymakers refuse to admit that these policies have failed.

And nowhere have they been more destructive than in the early grades, where testing has replaced play. Kindergarten became the new first grade.

But says Bailey, the current Secretary of Education wants to ratchet up the pressure on little kids.

She writes:

In What Happened to Recess and Why are our Children Struggling in Kindergarten, Susan Ohanian writes about a kindergartner in a New York Times article who tells the reporter they would like to sit on the grass and look for ladybugs. Ohanian writes, the child’s school was built very deliberately without a playground. Lollygagging over ladybugs is not permitted for children being trained for the global economy (2002, p.2).   

America recently marked forty years since the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform which blamed schools as being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.

Berliner and Biddle dispute this in The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. They state that most of these claims were said to reflect “evidence,” although the “evidence” in question either was not presented or appeared in the form of simplistic, misleading generalizations (1995, p. 3). 

Still, the report’s premise, that public schools failed, leading us down the workforce path of doom, continues to be perpetuated. When students fail tests, teachers and public schools are blamed, yet few care to examine the obscene expectations placed on the backs of children since A Nation at Risk.

Education Secretary Cardona recently went on a bus tour with the message to Raise the Bar in schools. Raising the bar is defined as setting a high standard, to raise expectations, to set higher goals.

He announced a new U.S. Department of Education program, Kindergarten Sturdy Bridge Learning Community.

This is through New America, whose funders include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Waltons, and others who want to privatize public education. Here’s the video, Kindergarten as a “Sturdy Bridge”: Place-Based Investments, describing the plan focusing on PreK to 3rd grade. This involves Reading by 3rd and the Campaign for Grade Level Reading.

Cardona says in the announcement:

Getting kindergarten right has to be top of mind for all of us, because what happens there sets the stage for how a child learns and develops well into their elementary years and beyond. 

Ensuring that kindergarten is a sturdy bridge between the early years and early grades is central to our efforts both to Raise the Bar for academic excellence and to provide all students with a more equitable foundation for educational success. The kindergarten year presents an opportunity to meet the strengths and needs of young learners so they can continue to flourish in the years to come.

Raise the bar? Kindergarten is already the new first grade. What will it be now? Second? Third? Fourth? What’s the rush? How is this developmentally sound? One thing is for sure: there will still be no idle time for children to search for ladybugs.

Few bear the brunt of A Nation at Risk,as do early learners whose schools have been invaded by corporate schemes to force reading and advanced learning earlier than ever expected in the past.

If kindergartners aren’t doing well after all these years of toughness, higher expectations, and an excruciating number of assessments, wouldn’t it seem time to back off, instead of raising the bar higher?

Editor’s note:

*James Harvey and I will discuss the distortions contained in the “Nation at Risk” report at the Network for Public Education conference on Oct. 28-29 in Washington, D.C. James Harvey was a high-level member of the staff that wrote the report. He has written about how the Reagan-era Commissuon in Excellence in Education “cooked the books” to paint a bleak—but false—picture of American public schools. Please register and join us!

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Industry, Extremism, For-Profit, History, Play

Frank Breslin: Critical Thinking Is the Most Important Lesson in High School

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
48

Frank Breslin, a retired high school teacher in New Jersey, wrote recently at Medium that critical thinking is the missing ingredient in high school, even though it is the most important tool that students need.

Breslin writes:

The following warning should be affixed atop every computer in America’s schools: Proceed at your own risk. Don’t accept as true what you’re about to read. Some of it is fact; some of it is opinion masquerading as fact; and the rest is liberal, conservative, or mainstream propaganda. Make sure you know which is which before choosing to believe it.

Students are exposed to so many different viewpoints on- and offline and so prone to accepting whatever they read, that they run the very real risk of being brainwashed. If it’s on a computer screen, it becomes Holy Writ, sacrosanct, immutable, beyond question or doubt.

Teachers continually caution students against taking what they read at face value, since some of these sites may be propaganda mills or recruiting grounds for the naïve and unwary.

Not only egregious forms of indoctrination may target unsuspecting young minds, but also the more artfully contrived variety, whose insinuating soft-sell subtlety and silken appeals ingratiatingly weave their spell to lull the credulous into accepting their wares.

To prevent this from happening, every school in America should teach the twin arts of critical thinking and critical reading, so that a critical spirit becomes a permanent possession of every student and pervades the teaching of every course in America.

Teaching students how to be their own person by abandoning Groupthink and developing the courage to think for themselves should begin from the very first day of high school. More important than all the information they will be learning during these four crucial years will be how they critically process this information either to accept or reject it, or to keep an open mind.

It is a rare high-school graduate who can pinpoint 20 different kinds of fallacies while listening to a speaker or reading a book; who can distinguish between fact and opinion, objective account and specious polemic; who can tell the difference between facts, value judgments, explanatory theories, and metaphysical claims; who can argue both sides of a question, anticipate objections, rebut them, and undermine arguments in various ways.

The essence of an education — the ability to think critically and protect oneself against falsehood and lies — is a lost art in America’s high schools today. This is unfortunate for it is precisely this skill that is of transcendent importance for students in defending themselves.

Computers are wonderful things, but, like everything else in this world, they must be approached with great caution. Their potential for good can suddenly become an angel of darkness that takes over young minds.

A school should teach its students how to think, not what to think; to question whatever they read, and never to accept any claim blindly; to suspend judgment until they’ve heard all sides of a question; and interrogate whatever claims to be true, since truth can withstand any scrutiny.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Ethics, Students

The Onion: “Dads for America” Join to Harass Your Child’s Favorite Teacher

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
7

The Onion parodies the news of the day.

In this one, they describe a Looney Tunes group called Dads for America, which tried to run down a teacher for being “woke.”

TERRE HAUTE, IN—Screaming incoherently about transgender girls in sports and the need to teach children cursive so they can learn to read the Constitution, some group called Dads for America is currently trying to run over your kid’s teacher with a car, sources confirmed Thursday. The group of local fathers, who reportedly met on Reddit last week, were seen piling into a vehicle, steering it toward the front doors of an elementary school, and flooring it when they saw Ms. Landers, your child’s beloved fifth-grade teacher.

Open the link and read the rest.

Categories Humor

Thom Hartmann: The Cynical GOP Impeachment Claim

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
64

Thom Hartmann remembers when Republican operatives undermined John Kerry’s presidential campaign by “swift boating” him. Having no positive policies to advance to voters, they instead attack the character and ethics of the Democratic candidate.

He writes:

House Republicans have revived the infamous Swiftboat lie strategy that helped defeat John Kerry in 2004. In essence, it involves relentlessly lying about a candidate and smearing his or her name and reputation in the hopes it’ll shave a few points off their popularity with independent voters.

While virtually 100 percent of the men who served with Kerry in Vietnam spoke glowingly of his service, a group who did not serve with him made up lies and exaggerations. 

Kerry and those who served with him tried to get the truth out, but, as Mark Twain is often credited as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

While Democrats prefer to win elections based on facts and policy positions, Republicans — not having anything to offer average Americans — instead default to slander and lies. Like with Obama’s birth certificate. Or Hillary’s email and Benghazi.

Wouldn’t most people, after all, resort to lies if all they had to offer was: 

— Forcing 10-year-olds to carry their rapist’s babies to term,
— More guns to slaughter more American children,
— Tax cuts for billionaires,
— More fossil fuels to create out-of-control weather,
— A government shutdown to cause a recession,
— And a Russian victory in Ukraine?

In this case, the essence of the impeachment inquiry Kevin McCarthy announced yesterday is straightforward: he believes that Joe and Hunter Biden profited from Joe’s being in the White House during the Obama administration and he thinks that’s an impeachable offense.

After all, there is:

— That $2 billion that Hunter got in a sweetheart deal from the Saudis with an annual paycheck of $25 million to manage it. 
—Or the billion he got from Qatar after his buddies in Saudi Arabia blockaded the country and threatened to starve them until they coughed up to bailout his fancy overpriced building in New York City. 
— And the more-than $600 million Hunter made while working in his dad’s White House. 
— Don’t forget the tens of millions in trademarks his wife got from the Chinese when she visited them with Dad. 
— Or his multiple meetings with Russians working for Vladimir Putin who was then trying to get his dad elected. 
— Or the $30 million given him to invest and manage by one of Israel’s largest insurance companies. 
— And the top-secret info he gave a Saudi prince that helped him overthrow his own government.

Oh, wait. That was Jared and Ivanka Kushner, not Hunter Biden.

Hunter appears to have committed three crimes, two of which he’s being prosecuted for by a Trump-appointed special prosecutor with help from a Trump-appointed judge.

First, he failed to report or pay his income taxes for two years while he was in the throes of alcohol and drug intoxication.

He’s since paid them in full, plus fines, as do tens of thousands of delinquent filers in the US every year. Republicans want him to go to prison anyway.

Second, he checked a box on an application to purchase a gun — which he only kept for two weeks and never used — which said that he wasn’t then a drug addict.

Checking that box when you are a drug addict is technically a crime, but there’s no instance I can find with a pretty thorough web search of anybody, anywhere, any time ever having been prosecuted for it.

Until now. It looks like Hunter might actually go to prison for checking the box, which raises the question: where are the Second Amendment Republicans protesting this violation of his sacred right to own a gun no matter what? Crickets.

Third, Hunter took a position on the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian fossil fuel giant, for which he was paid millions. This was a transparent effort to trade off his father’s name and nobody is denying that: it was “poor judgement” (to quote Hunter himself).

To show his employers how tight he was with the Vice President, he’d call his dad and conduct the phone conversation on a speaker phone for the room to hear; his business partner in the Burisma deal, Devon Archer, testified about that before James Comer’s House Oversight Committee. 

Sadly for Comer, though, Archer testified under oath that the two never discussed business or Burisma: Joe Biden kept the conversations to family, rehab, and the weather.

Nonetheless, the Republicans are sure if they dig deep enough they’ll find something at least as scandalous as Jared’s cutting the deals with Saudi Arabia that led to the Crown Prince funneling millions of dollars into Donald Trump’s pockets via the LIV Golf scheme. 

Good luck with that: unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden actually has a moral compass. He used those phone calls to try to talk his son into rehab.

But Marjorie Taylor Greene had dinner with Donald Trump this past Sunday night, and he told her he wanted Joe Biden impeached according to people who were there, and then turned up the pressure on McCarthy. Trump, of course, doesn’t want to be the only guy running for the presidency who’s been impeached and whose family is known to be corrupt through-and-through.

Now Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz are in a pissing match over who was first with the very, very cool plan to impeach Biden.

Boebert’s proposal, Greene wants the world to know, is simply a rip-off of her own efforts. After calling Boebert a “little b*tch,” Green said:

“I had already introduced articles of impeachment on Joe Biden for the border, asked her to co-sponsor mine—she didn’t. She basically copied my articles and then introduced them and then changed them to a privileged resolution.”

Yesterday morning, after McCarthy’s coming announcement was public knowledge, Gaetz tweeted:

“When @SpeakerMcCarthy makes his announcement in moments, remember that as I pushed him for weeks, @kilmeade said I was: ‘Speaking into the wind’ on impeachment. Turns out, the wind may be listening!”

In response, Greene tweeted back at him:

“Correction my friend. I introduced articles of impeachment against Joe Biden for his corrupt business dealings in Ukraine & China while he was Vice President on his very first day in office. You wouldn’t cosponsor those and I had to drag you kicking and screaming to get you to cosponsor my articles on the border. Who’s really been making the push?”

The sad reality for this MAGA crowd is that there is no evidence, either direct or implicit, that Joe Biden ever had anything to do with his son’s business dealings or ever took any money from them. None. Even the two “IRS whistleblowers” who said Hunter had committed tax crimes that they claimed were overlooked during the Trump administration brought no evidence. The Department of Justice also denied their claims.  

Another much-heralded “whistleblower” that Comer and House Republicans had talked about for weeks turned out to be a professional con man, spy for China, and criminal who’s on the lam fleeing international arms trafficking charges. Understandably, he didn’t show up for the hearings.

But don’t let facts get in the way of a good swiftboating.

I remember when, during the 2004 election year, Jerome Corsi came on my programseveral times to hype his book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Corsi, it turned out, had never served in the US military, and his co-author, John O’Neill, served in Vietnam long after Kerry had returned to the US.

Literally none of their claims held up, but, like with the Obama birth certificate and Benghazi, they blew enough smoke that millions of swing voters concluded there must be a fire somewhere.

So now McCarthy is having to twist himself into pretzels to try to justify this bizarre fishing expedition.

Instead of seating a select committee to look into impeaching Biden, McCarthy is essentially doing a marketing move rather than a legal one. There is no “impeachment committee” with subpoena power because having one would require a majority of the House to vote for it and he knows he doesn’t have enough Republican votes to make it happen.

As McCarthy himself said just two weeks ago:

“To open an impeachment inquiry is a serious matter and House Republicans would not take it lightly or use it for political purposes. The American people deserve to be heard on this matter through their elected representatives. That’s why, if we move forward with an impeachment inquiry, it would occur through a vote on the floor of the People’s House and not through a declaration by one person.”

Back in 2019 — when Nancy Pelosi was debating having a vote to put together an impeachment committee when it came out that Trump had tried to extort Zelenskyy to say that Biden was corrupt — McCarthy said:

“Speaker Pelosi can’t decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives.”

But instead of having that vote yesterday, McCarthy’s just attaching that “impeachment” label to the existing hustles being run by Comer at House Oversight and Jordan at Judiciary and Weaponization. It’s legally meaningless, but just the use of the word “impeachment” guarantees multiple news cycles, driving the “smoke” into the faces of American voters. 

This is the same McCarthy who said the entire Benghazi two-year circus was done purely to tarnish Hillary Clinton in the upcoming 2016 election. He told Sean Hannity it was his “strategy to fight and win” the election, adding:

“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping. Why? Because she’s untrustable. But no one would have known any of that had happened, had we not fought.”

The fact is that presidential elections, which are often decided by just a few points or less, can be won if a candidate can simply shave those few points off their opponents’ tally. And that can be done by discouraging base voters about a candidate and thus suppressing turnout, or simply souring swing voters on that candidate.

This strategy worked for Republicans in 2004 against John Kerry and again in 2016 against Hillary Clinton; we can fully expect them to play it out now. Particularly if Democrats once again respond by trying to ignore it and wrongly assume people will realize how absurd it is. 

Slander campaigns like this must instead be hit head-on with outrage and ferocity: Democrats need to take this seriously.

So, while Don Jr. and Eric Trump are facing prosecution in a $250 million fraud suit by New York State for corrupt acts that handed their family billions of dollars scammed from banks, insurance companies, and unpaid taxes, Republicans are going to try to impeach Joe Biden for his son’s poor but entirely legal decision to sit on the Burisma board.

Meanwhile, within hours of McCarthy’s announcement, Russian President Vladimir Putin came out and gushed about the “outstanding person” Elon Musk while taking Donald Trump’s side in his dispute with Jack Smith.

Irony is dead and hypocrisy has never been more alive.

Categories Biden, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans

The Deceptive Language of “Reform”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
9

While looking over my site, I came across this post written in 2014.

It is as timely now as it was then. Reformers worked with communications specialists to develop language that conceals its true meaning.

For example, reformers today don’t want to improve public schools. They want to defund them. Some want to destroy them. They think that public money should go to anyone, any organization that claims they are educating young people. They are fine with funding religious schools. No doubt, they would have no objection to funding Satanic schools, for fairness sake.

These reformers believe in tight accountability for public schools, their principal, their teachers, their students.

They believe in zero accountability for anyone taking public money for nonpublic schools. In most states with vouchers, voucher schools do not require students to take state tests. Students can’t be judged by test scores as public school students are; their teachers can’t be evaluated by test scores. Their schools can’t be closed because of test scores. There are no test scores.

Teachers in public schools must be college graduates who have studied education and who are certified. Teachers in voucher schools do not need to be college graduates or have certification.

Hundreds of millions, maybe billions, now fund homeschooling. With well-educated parents, home schooling may be okay, although the children do miss the positive aspects of meeting children from different backgrounds, working in teams, and learning how to get along with others. But let’s face it: not all home schoolers are well-educated. Poorly educated parents will teach their children misinformation and limit them to what they know, and no more.

Then there is the blessing that the US Supreme Court gave to public funding for religious schools. The purpose of most religious schools is to teach their religion. The long word for that is indoctrination. We have a long history of not funding religious schools. But now all of us are expected to foot the bill for children to learn the prayers and rituals of every religion. I don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s religion to be inculcated. I also don’t want to pay taxes to inculcate my own religion.

But the Supreme Court has step by step moved us to a point where the government’s refusal to pay for Catholic schools, Muslim schools, Jewish schools, and evangelical schools—with no regulation, no accountability, and no oversight—violates freedom of religion. That’s where we are going.

Ninety percent of the people in this country graduated from public schols. Those who sent their children to private or religious school paid their own tuition. That arrangement worked. Over time, we became the leading nation on earth in many fields of endeavor. Our education system surely had something to do with our national success.

I believe that people should have choices. Most public schools offer more curricular choices than charter schools, private schools, or religious schools. Anyone may choose to leave the public school to attend a nonpublic school, but they should not ask the taxpayers to underwrite their private choice.

The public pays for a police force, but it does not pay for private security guards. The public pays for firefighters, highways, beaches, parks, and many other public services. Why should the public pay for your decision to choose a private service?

Saddest of all, the current trend toward school choice will lower the overall quality of education. The children of the affluent who attend elite private schools will get a great education, although they will not get exposed to real life on their $60,000 a year campus. None of those campuses will get poor voucher kids because all they bring is a pittance.

We are now learning that most public schools are superior to most of the voucher schools. Many charter schools are low-performing.

On average, school choice will dumb down our rising generation. It will deepen social and religious divisions. It will not produce better education or a better-educated society. It will widen pre-existing inequalities.

Books have been and will be written about this fateful time, when we abandoned one of our most important, most democratic institutions. Libertarians and religious zealots have worked for years, decades, on this project. By convincing leaders of both parties to follow them, they have betrayed the rest of us. They have lost sight of the common good.

Those two words are key. The “common good.” With them, we as a society can conquer any goal, realize any ideal. Without them, we are reduced to squabbling tribes, cliques, factions. We are becoming what the Founding Fathers warned about.

If it’s not too late, that is the banner behind which we should rally: the common good. An understanding that we are all in the same boat, and we must take care of others.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk Blames “the Jews” for X’s Problems

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
24

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble referring to Twitter as X. A single letter is not a name. And I have decided to stay on Twitter, because that’s how I reach nearly 150,000 people. When they retweet (re-X?) my posts, I reach even more. So I’m sticking with Twitter, despite Elon Musk and the proliferation of racists and anti-Semites on Twitter.

Michael Hiltzik, my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times, recently blasted Musk for blaming the misfortunes of Twitter on the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights racial and religious hatred, and especially anti-Semitism. Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for defamation. That’s ironic, almost funny.

Hiltzik writes:

Elon Musk has long been known for blaming everyone else but himself for the various fiascos visited upon his companies — meddlesome bureaucrats for COVID-related production slowdowns at Tesla, the Pentagon and conniving rivals for the loss of a government contract by SpaceX, nasty woke advertisers for the decline of X (ex-Twitter).

So what were the chances that he would get around to blaming the Jews? Based on the evidence at hand, 100%.

Over the weekend, Musk launched a ferocious, spittle-flecked attack on the Anti-Defamation League, which describes itself (accurately enough) as “a global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens.”

Musk decided that the ADL is responsible for (in his words) “most of our revenue loss [at X]….Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”

My goodness! When does he blame George Soros?

He asserted that the U.S. advertising revenue at X is “down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” And he tweeted that he has “no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.”

Not to put a fine point on things, but all this shows Musk to have gone utterly off the rails and over the edge of conspiracy-mongering paranoia. It’s the most extreme outburst of antisemitism by a purportedly mainstream public figure in more than 100 years.

Musk’s hate-spasm easily outflanks the previous champion of public antisemitism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was caught on tape in July arguing that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while leaving Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese relatively immune. It’s as if Musk challenged Kennedy’s effort to seize the antisemitism crown by saying, “Oh, yeah? Watch this.”

Musk’s outburst makes the position of Linda Yaccarino, the formerly respected entertainment executive who accepted the job of X’s CEO to restore the platform to the good graces of corporate advertisers, hopelessly untenable. Why she doesn’t resign is a mystery. His words also should prompt the federal government to question his suitability, and that of his company SpaceX, to hold government contracts of any kind.

Musk has bought into the notion — advanced by openly antisemitic X accounts — that the ADL fosters antisemitism by calling it out wherever it appears.

“The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform,” he tweeted on Sunday. He was responding to a tweet quoting the far-right conspiracy-monger Alex Jones calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve ever seen.” He further implied that the ADL is “somehow complicit in creating the very thing they complain about!”

So in this bizarro world, fighting antisemitism promotes antisemitism!

Musk implicitly endorsed the hashtag #BantheADL,” advocating banning the organization from X, by replying, “Perhaps we should run a poll on this.” Surely he knows that his right-wing followers would swamp any such poll on the “yes” side.

It’s crystal clear that X’s revenue problem is Elon Musk and his policies. He has welcomed dispensers of antisemitism, racism and other varieties of hate speech back onto the platform, while amplifying misinformation about purported COVID treatments and homophobic slurs retailed by conspiracy movements such as QAnon.

Corporate advertisers in the consumer market don’t need the ADL to tell them that it’s bad for their brands to be associated with a social media platform bristling with neo-Nazis and other denizens of the cultural underworld.

It’s true that the ADL has had its eyes on Musk and X for some time. That’s because the platform’s content moderation policies have fostered a documented surge of hate speech since Musk acquired it last October.

In March, the ADL reported that Twitter had refused to remove tweets or accounts that incited violence against Jews. Two months later, it followed up with a report that Musk’s decision to reinstate 65 Twitter accounts that had previously been banned for hate speech had contributed to the antisemitism surge.

The tweet-and-reply threads of many of these accounts, the ADL found, had become “magnets for vile antisemitic content.” They were rife with such “familiar antisemitic tropes” as “conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Rothschild banking family controlling global politics, finance, and media” and accusations that Jews are aiming to “destroy ‘the West’ by promoting transgender identities and lifestyles and ‘replacing’ white people via immigration (e.g., the Great Replacement).”

Tellingly, beyond stating his determination to “clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism,” and declaring, “I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind,” Musk in his weekend outburst made no effort to address the specific points raised by the ADL — he merely asserted that the organization’s accusations were “unfounded.”

Obviously, that won’t do. According to ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, Yaccarino reached out to him last month, leading to a “frank + productive conversation…about @X, what works and what doesn’t, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform,” he tweeted.

ADL will “give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better… and reserve the right to call them out until it does,” Greenblatt added.

It’s a safe bet that as long as Musk reigns over X, the platform will have a long, long way to go to warrant any credit for eradicating hate speech at all.

There are few precedents in American history for someone with the public renown of Elon Musk voicing or hosting opinions of such unalloyed virulence. The closest analogue is probably Henry Ford, who in 1920 began publishing screeds in the Dearborn Independent, a local weekly he had acquired, alleging the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.

“Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford,” Josh Marshall observed Tuesday on his website, Talking Points Memo. “The comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.”

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Media

Alana Semuels: Why You Should Not Shop at Walmart

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
40

Alana Semuels writes for TIME magazine, where this article appeared. She rightly notes that dollars spent at Walmart hurt locally-owned businesses. In many parts of the country, you can drive through small towns and see empty stores that used to be owned by local folk. They couldn’t compete with Walmart’s low prices. Maybe mom-and-pop got a job as greeters at the Walmart twenty miles away. Walmart keeps its prices low not only by its buying power but by prohibiting its workers from forming unions.

Walmart destroys small towns and communities by killing their local economy. if Walmart finds that its super store is not profitable, it will close it and move on, leaving behind devastated towns and communities.

But that’s not the only reason to avoid Walmart. Its owners, the Walton family, are avid supports of school choice. They are the biggest supporters of charter schools, other than the federal government, which dutifully spends $440 million every year to expand new charters, mostly corporate chains like Walmart. Did you ever imagine that your local public school would be replaced by a chain school? Of course, members of the Walton family top the list of America’s billionaires. With a combined wealth of more than $240 billion, they are America’s richest family. Don’t make them richer.

Ironically, Sam Walton, the founding father, graduated from public schools. He graduated from the David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri. Unlike his descendants, he did not hate public schools; he did not want to privatize and destroy them.

Alana Semuels wrote:

Every week, I go onto Walmart’s website and order a bunch of groceries to be delivered to my house and then feel a little bit guilty.

Walmart is a multi-billion dollar corporation with headquarters more than 1,000 miles from my home; the money I spend there goes to shareholders and executives who live far away, instead of to my local grocery store, Key Food, an 86-year-old co-op of independently owned stores based near my home in New York. By shopping at Walmart, I am likely contributing to the demise of the independently-owned grocery store, which is disappearing across the country.

But the prices make the choice easy. On a recent day, the 42-oz tub of Quaker Oats I get each week was $9.99 at Key Foods and $5.68 at Walmart; a 500 ml bottle of California Olive Ranch olive oil was $14.49 at Key Foods and $8.37 at Walmart; Rao’s homemade tomato sauce was $9.99, while I could have gotten the exact same item on Walmart for $6.88. On these three items alone, I saved $14 by shopping at Walmart.

These prices are one reason that Walmart captures one in four grocery dollars in America, but there’s an argument to be made that Walmart and other big chains including Dollar General, which is expanding at a rapid clip across the country, come by those prices unfairly because of their market power.

There’s a law on the books—1936’s Robinson-Patman Act—that essentially says suppliers in any industry can’t give lower prices and special deals to big chain stores if it costs the same to serve them as other stores. The law also says retailers can’t try and bully suppliers into giving those discounts.

But because Walmart and dollar stores are so huge, representing a big part of a supplier’s business, they’re able to extract deals and low prices from suppliers, according to Small Business Rising and the Main Street Competition Coalition, two groups of independent business owners making their case in Congressional hearings and television ads. The pandemic highlighted just how unfairly Walmart can wield its power, the small businesses are telling regulators, because it was able to demand that suppliers stock its shelves when competitors weren’t able to get the same products for weeks or months. It’s not just groceries; independent pharmacies, book stores, auto parts stores, and other types of retailers are also struggling on an uneven playing field, they say.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Charter Schools, Competition, Disruption, School Choice, Vouchers

Nikhil Goyal’s Stunning New Book About How Poverty Damages Lives

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
25

Nikhil Goyal has written an alarming book about the effects of poverty on young people. His book Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty documents the lives of three teenagers in Philadelphia, all of whom live in poverty.

The book is an implicit rebuke of the “reformers” who insisted that schools were the root cause of inequality, not poverty. They liked to say, “fix schools, and that will fix poverty.”

Goyal describes the obstacles in these young people’s lives, and it’s clear that the “reformers” had it backwards.

A recent review by Julia Craven in The Washington Post raves about the book.

Each of the three protagonists in sociologist Nikhil Goyal’s new book, “Live to See the Day: Coming of Age in American Poverty,” is navigating a pivotal juncture: adolescence, that unique and universally exhausting stage of human development when one moment can sometimes change the trajectory of life. For Ryan Rivera, that moment is being among a group of preteen boys who set fire to a trash can near their middle school’s atrium, a childish mistake that cast him into the school-to-prison pipeline. Corem Coreano, who came out as queer, and then changed their name and pronouns, ultimately made the difficult choice to leave home because of their mother’s refusal to leave an abusive relationship. And Giancarlos Rodriguez was — puzzlingly — thrown out of Philadelphia’s education system after fighting to protect his and his peers’ future by leading student walkouts to protest school closures and educational budget cuts.

Rooted in almost a decade of reporting, “Live to See the Day” is a sweeping indictment of poverty, America’s educational system, and how comfortably they both interact with the criminal justice system to upend the lives of young people and underprivileged families of color. All three protagonists hail from Kensington, an impoverished neighborhood in North Philadelphia.

According to Goyal, babies born with an address in Kensington aren’t expected to live beyond their 71st birthday — a staggering 17 years less than children born to families in Society Hill, less than four miles away.

A chunk of the book is spent world-building so readers can grasp the muddy terrain these children navigate, and Goyal does so by layering social systems atop one another so readers can draw connections. As Goyal explains it, underfunded public schools are at the heart of the issue. Schools are governed by racist educational policies that push students into the criminal system through the use of metal detectors, zero-tolerance rules and temperamental resource officers. Children leave the schoolyard and return home to families drowning because of crippling poverty, food insecurity, chronic joblessness, inequitable access to physical and mental health care, domestic violence, evictions, and addiction. In their social interactions, anything perceived as “soft” — whether it be snitching or queerness — doesn’t align with survival.

Goyal, who is on the staff of Senator Bernie Sanders, makes clear why programs like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were destined to fail. They ignored the conditions in which young people live. Evaluating their teachers by test scores, firing them, closing their schools, turning their schools over to entrepreneurs and corporate chains do nothing to change their lives.

Categories Corporate Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Philadelphia, Poverty, Students
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