Archives for the month of: September, 2023
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Was Your Dinner Produced by Child Labor?

By dianeravitch
September 13, 2023 //
10

Mother Jones published an alarming report about the revival of child labor, based on the work of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. Promoted by Republican governors despite federal law, child labor has become increasingly dangerous. Children are hired to replace adult immigrants and to keep costs low.

If you’ve eaten a burger and fries recently, there’s a chance that the potatoes were picked by middle schoolers, working through the school day in a field in Idaho. The steer that became the beef patty may well have been killed at a slaughterhouse where teenagers work, and the bone saws used to process the meat could easily have been cleaned by a 13-year-old, wearing a bulky hard hat and oversized gloves. It’s also quite possible that the burger was grilled, flipped and assembled by a child working at McDonald’s on a school night, far later than federal law allows.

This sort of child labor—culled from thousands of examples in U.S. Department of Labor investigations—has been mostly illegal in the U.S. since the 1930s, but that hasn’t stopped a surprising number of companies from engaging in it. In February, the department announced that the nation is experiencing a sharp rise in child labor violations across all industries; since 2018, the agency has documented a 69-percent increase in children who were employed illegally.

A FERN analysis of investigation data released by the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD)—which is tasked with enforcing federal child labor laws—found that more than 75 percent of recent violations were committed by employers in the food industry. The agency uncovered more than 12,000 child labor violations in the nation’s food system—out of 16,000 total violations across all industries—between Jan. 1, 2018 and Nov. 23, 2022, the most recent date for which data were publicly available. Investigators found minors working illegally at vegetable farms in Texas and Florida, at dairy farms in Minnesota and New Hampshire and at poultry plants in Alabama and Mississippi. Children are involved in every step of the food supply chain, working illegally from farm to table…

Supermarkets and other food and beverage stores were well represented, too, responsible for 7.7 percent of the violations. In one particularly egregious example, from 2021, a 16-year-old supermarket worker in Clarksburg, Tennessee, was tasked with cleaning out a meat grinder, even though federal law prohibits employers from having minors clean or operate them. As the boy reached into the machine, the grinder switched on and ripped off half of his arm.

Who could have imagined that states and employers today would be rolling back protections for children enacted in the 1930s?

Categories Childhood, Cruelty

Lisa Haver: More Than Half the Charters in Philly Have Empty Seats

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
11

For many years, the charter lobbyists have claimed that there were long waiting lists of students hoping to get into a charter school. This claim should be taken with pounds of salt. No one ever audits these lists. A reporter in Boston once told me that he tried to audit the list and found many duplicate names, names of students who had already enrolled in a charter school, and some who had already graduated high school. Obviously, there is political benefit in never updating the wait lists, which helps charter advocates demand more charters.

Lisa Haver, a public school activist, reported that a review of public records reveals that more than half the city’s charter schools are underenrolled.

She writes:

In recent months, promoters of school choice lobbied Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to expand the state’s voucher program to include the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program (PASS) which would divert an additional $100 million from public school districts to private schools. Already established voucher programs in the state include the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and the Education Improvement Tax Credit.

Shapiro, after intense pressure from public school advocates, reversed his position and signed the state’s $45.5 billion budget without the voucher provision.

School choice proponents claim that public school students are “trapped” in failing schools, trying in vain to find an alternative. A recent Sunday Inquirer editorial, written by wealthy suburban backers of more privatization of the city’s schools, painted public schools as “cages” from which children could not escape. The only solution, they claim, is to take funding for public schools and give it to individuals to use as tuition to attend private schools. Their version of school choice does not acknowledge that the choice is not the families’ but the schools’–who can reject any applicant without explanation and can discriminate against students on the basis of sexual identity. Most voucher money would go to students already attending religious and exclusive private schools. Education policy expert Josh Cowen writes that a decade of research indicates that vouchers actually lower academic achievement.

What those lobbying for more voucher programs can’t explain is why more families don’t leave the district schools, which they paint with a broad brush as “failing”, and attend any of the district’s 83 charter schools. They refer to the elusive “charter waiting list” of 25, 000 students (inexplicably down from their previous list of 40,000) without producing the list or offering proof of any kind of its existence. The truth is that there is no charter waiting list for the simple reason that most of the city’s charter schools are under-enrolled.

Current data shows that 58 of the district’s 83 charter schools–67%–are under their authorized enrollment. Fifteen charter schools are between 20% and 40% under-enrolled. Two schools are below 50% of their authorized enrollment. Families living in any part of the city could choose from among the 65 charters with citywide admission. Renaissance schools are nominally neighborhood schools, but many have a large percentage from outside their official catchment areas.

Obviously, Philadelphia’s schoolchildren are not trapped in district schools. Parents have fought to stop the hostile takeover of their schools by charter companies, and many continue to choose district public schools over charters. In addition, the low percentage of in-catchment enrollment at Renaissance charters shows that parents will travel farther rather than attend a charter they find to be substandard.

Philadelphia’s schools need more funding, not less. Diverting money to private and religious schools means fewer educational opportunities for Philadelphia’s children.


Note: All data cited in this report can be found on the School District of Philadelphia website. Current enrollment figures are from the 2022-23 school year (except where noted). Schools with enrollment lower than authorized are designated “under”; percentages are given for those more than 5% under-enrolled.

In the balance of the article, Haver identifies the schools that are undeeenrolled.

Categories Education Reform

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
18

Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

September 11: A Day Seared into Our Memories

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
15

Some days live on in our memories forever. In my parents’ lives, Pearl Harbor was one of those days. The death of FDR was another.

In my lifetime, those days include the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.

Then came September 11. I live directly across the New York Harbor from lower Manhattan. I heard the first plane crash. I ran to the harbor and arrived just in time to see the second plane crash into the second World Trade Center building. I saw it. That sight is seared into my memory.

The events of the day were unforgettable. The sounds (sirens and jets), the smell of burning plastics, the scenes we saw on television—the bodies flying through the air.

For many weeks afterwards, there were signs posted in public places in NYC: photographs of men and women who were missing. “Have you seen…?”

There will be debates and books for years about why it happened. It was terrorism, for sure. That day led us into a war that lasted for 20 years and cost even more lives. It changed the act of taking a flight, imposing security measures.

For the thousands of innocent men and women who died that day, it was a tragedy. I mourn for the children who lost parents and grandparents, for those who lost husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. I mourn for the firefighters and police officers who ran to the burning buildings and lost their lives. It is a sad day of remembrance.

Categories Evil, International

Thom Hartmann: Never Again Let a President Lie Us into War

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
78

Thom Hartmann writes here about how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney cynically used the attacks of 9/11 to get us into America’s longest war. They wanted to go to war. I can’t help but think that if 537 votes in Florida had gone a different way, the world would be a different place today. It was those 537 votes that made Bush the President, not Al Gore. Remember that: Every vote counts.

Hartmann writes:

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost…

Today is 9/11, the event that first brought America together and then was cynically exploited by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to have a war against Iraq, followed by their illegal invasion of Afghanistan just a bit more than a year earlier.

Yet the media today (so far, anyway) is curiously silent about Bush and Cheney’s lies.

Given the costs of both these wars — and the current possibility of our being drawn deeper into conflict in both Ukraine and Taiwan — it’s an important moment to discuss our history of wars, both illegal and unnecessary, and those that are arguably essential to the survival of democracy in the world.

To be clear, I support US involvement — and even an expanded US involvement — in the defense of the Ukrainian democracy against Putin’s Hitler-grabs-Poland-like attack and mass slaughter of Ukrainian civilians. Had the world mobilized to stop Hitler when he invaded Poland in 1939 there almost certainly wouldn’t have been either the Holocaust or WWII, which is why Europe is so united in this effort.

If Putin succeeds in taking Ukraine, his administration has already suggested that both Poland and Moldova are next, with the Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia) also on the menu. That would almost certainly lead to war in Europe.

And China is watching: a Putin victory in Ukraine will encourage Xi to try to take Taiwan. Between the two — war in both Europe and the Pacific — we could find ourselves in the middle of World War III if Putin isn’t stopped now.

That said, essentially defensive military involvement like with Ukraine or in World War II have been the exception rather than the rule in American history. We’ve been far more likely to have presidents lie us into wars for their own personal and political gain than to defend ourselves or other democracies.

For example, after 9/11 in 2001 the Taliban that then ran Afghanistan offered to arrest Bin Laden, but Bush turned them down because he wanted to be a “wartime president” to have a “successful presidency.”

The Washington Post headline weeks after 9/11 put it succinctly: “Bush Rejects Taliban Offer On Bin Laden.” With that decision not to arrest and try Bin Laden for his crime but instead to go to war, George W. Bush set the US and Afghanistan on a direct path to disaster (but simultaneously set himself up for re-election in 2004 as a “wartime president”).

To further complicate things for Bush and Cheney, the 9/11 attacks were not planned, hatched, developed, practiced, expanded, worked out, or otherwise devised in Afghanistan or by even one single citizen of Afghanistan.

That country and its leadership in 2001, in fact, had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, as I detailed in depth here on August 15th of last year. The actual planning and management of the operation was done out of Pakistan and Germany, mostly by Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

The Taliban were bad guys, trashing the rights of women and running a tinpot dictatorship, but they represented no threat whatsoever to America or our allies.

Almost two decades later, though, then-President Trump and Mike Pompeo gave the Taliban everything they wanted — power, legitimacy, shutting down 9 of the 10 US air bases in that country to screw incoming President Joe Biden, and the release of 5000 of Afghanistan’s worst Taliban war criminals — all over the strong objections of the democratically elected Afghan government in 2019.

Trump did this so could falsely claim, heading into the 2020 election, that he’d “negotiated peace” in Afghanistan, when in fact he’d set up the debacle that happened around President Biden’s withdrawal from that country.

”The relationship I have with the Mullah is very good,” Trump proclaimed — after ordering the mullah who then named himself President of Afghanistan — freed from prison over the furious objection of Afghan’s government, which Trump had cut out of the negotiations.

Following that betrayal of both Afghanistan and America, Trump and the GOP scrubbed the record of their embrace of the Taliban from their websites, as noted here and here.

And the conservative Boris Johnson administration in the UK came right out and said that Trump’s “rushed” deal with the Taliban — without involvement of the Afghan government or the international community — set up the difficulties Biden faced.

“The die was cast,” Defense Minister Ben Wallace told the BBC, “when the deal was done by Donald Trump, if you want my observation.”

So, Republican George W. Bush lied us into both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and then Donald Trump tried to lie us out of at least one of them.

But this was far from the first time a president has lied us into a war.

— Vietnam wasn’t the first time an American president and his buddies in the media lied us into a war when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara falsely claimed that an American warship had come under attack in the Gulf of Tonkin and LBJ went along with the lie.

— Neither was President William McKinley lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 by falsely claiming that the USS Maine had been blown up in Havana harbor (it caught fire all by itself).

— The first time we were lied into a major war by a president was probably the Mexican-American war of 1846 when President James Polk lied that we’d been invaded by Mexico. Even Abraham Lincoln, then a congressman from Illinois, called him out on that lie.

— You could also argue that when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 leading to the Trail of Tears slaughter and forced relocation of the Cherokee under President Buchanan (among other atrocities) it was all based on a series of lies.

Bush’s lies that took us into Afghanistan and, a bit over a year later into Iraq, are particularly egregious, however, given his and Cheney’s reasons for those lies.

In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3- day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected (if you did it right) and have a two-term presidency.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

The attack on 9/11 gave Bush his first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” when our guy Osama Bin Laden, who the Reagan/Bush administration had spent $3 billion building up in Afghanistan, engineered an attack on New York and DC.

The crime was planned in Germany and Florida and on 9/11 Bin Laden was, according to CBS News, not even in Afghanistan:

“CBS Evening News has been told that the night before the Sept. 11 terrorists attack, Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He was getting medical treatment with the support of the very military that days later pledged its backing for the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.”

When the Obama administration finally caught and killed Bin Laden, he was back in Pakistan, the home base for the Taliban.

But attacking our ally Pakistan in 2001 would have been impossible for Bush, and, besides, nearby Afghanistan was an easier target, being at that time the second-poorest country in the world with an average annual per-capita income of $700 a year. Bin Laden had run terrorist training camps there — unrelated to 9/11 — but they made a fine excuse for Bush’s first chance to “be seen as a commander-in-chief” and get some leadership cred.

Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. Dresser Industries was big into asbestos and about to fall into bankruptcy because of asbestos lawsuits that the company was fighting through the court system.

Cheney bet Dresser would ultimately win the suits and had Halliburton buy the company on the cheap, but a year later, in 1999, Dresser got turned down by the courts and Haliburton’s stock went into freefall, crashing 68 percent in a matter of months.

Bush had asked Cheney — who’d worked in his father’s White House as Secretary of Defense — to help him find a suitable candidate for VP.

Cheney, as his company was collapsing, recommended himself for the job. In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as VP, Halliburton subsidiary KBR received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts.

Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001. Bush was seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; a war that gave him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.

Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today.

Even Trump had to get into the “let’s lie about Afghanistan” game, in his case to have bragging rights that he’d “ended the war in Afghanistan.”

In 2019, Trump went around the Afghan government (to their outrage: he even invited the Taliban to Camp David in a move that disgusted the world) to cut a so-called “peace deal” that sent thousands of newly-empowered Taliban fighters back into the field, and then drew down our troops to the point where today’s chaos in that country was absolutely predictable.

Trump’s deal was the signal to the 300,000+ Afghan army recruits we’d put together and paid that America no longer had their back and if the Taliban showed up they should just run away. Which, of course, is what happened on Trump’s watch. As Susannah George of The Washington Post noted:

“The Taliban capitalized on the uncertainty caused by the [Trump] February 2020 agreement reached in Doha, Qatar, between the militant group and the United States calling for a full American withdrawal from Afghanistan. Some Afghan forces realized they would soon no longer be able to count on American air power and other crucial battlefield support and grew receptive to the Taliban’s approaches.”

Jon Perr’s article at Daily Kos did a great summary, with the title: “Trump put 5,000 Taliban fighters back in battle and tied Biden’s hands in Afghanistan.”

Trump schemed and lied to help his own reelection efforts, and the people who worked with our military and the US-backed Afghan government paid a terrible price for it.

As President Biden told America:

“When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021 deadline on U.S. Forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. Forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500.

“Therefore, when I became President, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our Forces and our allies’ Forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth President to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war onto a fifth.”

America has been lied into too many wars. It’s cost us too much in money, credibility, and blood. We must remember the lies, and tell our children about them so that memory isn’t lost.

When President Ford withdrew US forces from Vietnam (I remember it well), there was barely a mention of McNamara’s and LBJ’s lies that got us into that war.

Similarly, today’s reporting on the chaos in Afghanistan and the war to seize the Iraqi oil fields almost never mention Bush’s and Cheney’s lies and ulterior motives in getting us into those wars in the first place.

George Santayana famously noted, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We can’t afford to let these lies go down the memory hole, like we have the other wars we were lied into that I mentioned earlier. Sadly, it’s clear now that neither Bush nor Cheney will be held accountable for their lies or for the American, Afghan, and Iraqi blood and treasure they cost.

But both should be subject to a clear and public airing of the crimes they committed in office and required — at the very least — to apologize to the thousands of American families destroyed by the loss of their soldier children, parents, and spouses, as well as to the people of both Afghanistan and Iraq.

If the media refuses to mention the Bush/Cheney lies on this anniversary of 9/11, it’s all the more important that the rest of us use this opportunity to do so. Pass it on.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Corruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Freedom, History, Trump

Peter Greene: Parents Are Happy with Their Public Schools, But the Public Falls for Rightwing Lies

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
13

Peter Greene wrote in Forbes about the results of the latest Gallup poll about schools. Bottom line: The extremist plot to dismantle public education has bamboozled the public, but not parents. The absurd conspiracy to portray teachers as groomers and pedophiles is undermining public trust in one of our most democratic institutions, the one that teaches us to live with others who are not just like us. As the extremist Chris Rufo said in his infamous speech at Hillsdale College, the road to universal school choice requires sowing distrust of the public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Parental satisfaction with their local school is at an all-time high, while Americans’ satisfaction with K-12 quality is at a record-tying low, according to newly-released poll results from Gallup.

Starting 1999, the pollsters have asked Americans every August about their views of K-12 quality. There has always been a gap in the results: parents think their own schools are better than the national system as a whole, and non-parents think the national system is even worse. But this year the gap is especially huge.

Of parents of K-12 students, 76% consider themselves completely or somewhat satisfied with their oldest child’s education quality. But when it comes to the U.S. system as a whole, those parents are only 41% completely or somewhat satisfied (14% for completely). Americans as a whole are only 36% satisfied with K-12 education (8% for completely).

Only 9% of K-12 parents are completely dissatisfied with their children’s education. For the system as a whole, both the parents and the full group report 25% completely dissatisfied.

Educators have long suggested that this disparity is the result of negative coverage. That theory makes sense; you know your own child’s school first hand, but beyond that, you only know what you’re told second hand.

Nor have opponents of public education been shy about explaining their intent. In an April, 2022 speech at Hillsdale College entitled Laying Siege to the Institutions, school choice advocate Chris Rufolaid out the strategy succinctly:

To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal school distrust.

This caps forty years of pressing home the message that U.S. public schools are failing. There was a time when supporting public schools was as politically innocuous as babies and apple pie. Now criticism of public education is the political norm, with accusations that teachers are pedophiles and groomers and porn peddlers are not unusual. And groups like Moms For liberty push the narrative that the majority of parents are themselves up in arms about the many failings of their districts.

As the poll shows, that’s not true.

If your child is in school, you see first hand the efforts of the district and the results for your child. But if you have no children at all, or your children’s school days were long ago, all you know about school is what you hear second hand, and that second hand space is dominated by voices declaring that U.S. education is failing.

The poll findings reflect that long repetitive negative messaging, and little else. After all, what would be a better way to gauge the quality of a particular restaurant: talk to people who just ate there, or the people who do PR for a rival eatery?

Categories Corporate Reformers, Curriculum, Dark Money, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake News, Lies, Opinion Polling, Parents, Privatization, Propaganda

Rightwing Zealots Plan for Trump’s Second Term, Politicizing Civil Service, Establishing Authoritarianism

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
20

Hundreds of radical rightwingers are working on something called Project 2025, a detailed plan to dismantle the federal government and establish an Imperial Presidency if Trump wins the 2024 election. If Republicans win, they will fire tens of thousands of federal employees, turn thousands more into political appointments instead of apolitical civil servants, and centralize authoritarian power in the White House.

The planning is led by the Heritage Foundation. Its plan echoes what Trump advisor Steve Bannon called “destroying the administrative state.” What they really want is to diminish all checks and balances, destroy norms, and place all power in the President’s hands. Their plan sounds like what has happened in several red states, where Republicans have gerrymandered districts to exercise complete control, and if Democrats win a statewide election, the legislature reduces the Democrat’s powers before he or she takes office.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

WASHINGTON — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.


Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Biden in 2024.


With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.


“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking….

The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.

“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.


Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.


Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.

Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.


As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.

“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide,” Guy said. “Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun.”


The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee-table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of long-standing conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.


There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Raymond F. Tirana: The Libertarian Goal for K-12 Schooling

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
27

Reader Raymond F. Tirana posted a comment in which he described the end goal of the libertarian overhaul of school funding. In Kansas, Florida, and other red states, he says, they are trying to shift responsibility for funding and providing schools from the state to parents. This will not only exacerbate segregate but increase inequity. Of course, they will do this under false pretenses, claiming to “widen opportunities” and to “save poor children from failing schools.” Don’t believe them.

He wrote in a comment:

What will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children: Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

America Has Too Many Guns, Too Many Gun Deaths

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
83

The other day I was listening to the news on the radio, and there was a string of reports about gun violence across the country. It wasn’t a “special” on gun violence, it was just the morning news. Gun deaths have become normalized, like weather reports. And yet, because Trump stacked the Supreme Court with gun-rights justices, any effort to limit access to guns seems doomed.

The Los Angeles Times recently published an editorial that captured the gun insanity in which we are all now trapped. Why doesn’t this Court of Originalists limit gun ownership to the kind of weapons available when the Second Amendment was written? Muskets, primarily.

It was perfectly legal for the racist killer of three Black people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla., on Saturday to buy and possess the Glock handgun and AR-15-style rifle he used in the shootings, officials said.

A laptop belonging to Ryan Christopher Palmeter, the white 21-year-old killer, was filled with racist screeds. Officials said he had been briefly held for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation in 2017.

Two days before the Jacksonville massacre, Jason and Melissa Dunham and their three children aged 15, 12 and 9 were found shot to death in their Lake Township, Ohio, home in an apparent murder-suicide. The handgun used in the shooting belonged to Jason Dunham, police said, but it wasn’t yet clear whether he was the shooter. He and his wife both had permits to carry concealed weapons.

A day before that, retired Ventura police sergeant John Snowling shot his estranged wife and eight other people at Cook’s Corner, a roadhouse in Trabuco Canyon in Orange County. His wife, Marie Snowling, survived but three others died. Police shot the gunman to death. The killer lawfully acquired and possessed the .380 pistol, .38 revolver, .25 pistol and shotgun that were recovered at the scene.

A few days earlier, Orange County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Ferguson pleaded not guilty to murdering his wife, Sheryl Ferguson. He is charged with shooting her to death in their Anaheim Hills home during an argument. His lawyer said it was an accident. Law enforcement officers recovered 47 other weapons and about 26,000 rounds of ammunition from the judge’s home, all of which were apparently acquired and owned lawfully, although one rifle is unaccounted for.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Americans’ right to possess, carry and conceal weapons cannot be curtailed by laws that are not rooted in practices that existed in the late 18th century, when the 2nd Amendment was drafted and ratified. Gun advocates argue that the right to carry weapons makes Americans safer, and that any bad guy with a gun is now more likely to be stopped by a good guy with a gun — someone presumably like an armed parent, retired police officer or judge.

The targeted racist slayings understandably loomed larger in the news than the family violence. President Biden said, “We must say clearly and forcefully that white supremacy has no place in America.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said, “Targeting people because of their race has no place in the state of Florida.” Former Vice President Mike Pence, also running for president, said, “There is no place in America for racially inspired violence.”

They are wrong and they know it. The American people, their politicians, their courts and their culture have made this nation the planet’s preeminent place to target people for death because of their race — or for any other reason, such as their familial relationship, differing beliefs or reasons indiscernible to the rest of us. This country is exactly the place for hateful, murderous, suicidal gun violence, because this is the place for millions upon millions of guns, and the bizarre American delusion that the more of them we have, the safer and freer we are.

Pence added that his solutions include an “expedited federal death penalty for anyone engaged in a mass shooting.” It’s difficult to grasp how quick executions would alter the behavior of the Jacksonville killer, who shot himself to death. Or whichever member of the Dunham family pulled the trigger, the deranged Ventura cop who died at the scene or the judge who claims to have shot his wife by accident.

Firearms are the leading cause of death of juveniles in the U.S. Biden recently unveiled a plan to increase access to mental health care, including in schools, in part to address the causes of gun violence.

The far-right organization called Moms for Liberty said, in effect, don’t you dare. Mental health care “has NO place in public schools,” the group said in a social media post earlier this month.

At a special session of the Tennessee Legislature called in response to the slaying of three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school in March, lawmakers last week rejected gun control proposals and instead introduced measures to allow more guns in schools.

Speaking of schools, a 16-year-old boy was shot to death at a high school football game Friday night in Choctaw, Okla. Several others were shot as well. Don’t confuse that incident with the one at the high school game the same night in Tulsa, in which a 16-year-old waved a pistol, causing a stampede and ending the game before it was finished. Or the game on the same night in Locust Grove, also in Oklahoma, where a deputy took a gun from a teenager.

Or high school football games the same night in Abington, Pa., Waterloo, Iowa, or Goodyear, Ariz., where other teenagers were disarmed before they could harm anyone with the guns they brought with them.

A week earlier, four teenagers were charged for carrying three loaded Glock 9 millimeter pistols at a high school football game in Canal Winchester, Ohio.

“Why bring those to a football stadium?” Madison Township Police Chief Gary York asked. “Why do these kids have them to begin with?”

Such a mystery. Where on Earth do kids get these violent ideas? And where do they get all those guns?

Categories Accountability, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Guns, Safety

Ruth Conniff: Rightwing Ideologues Target Public Schools and Public Funds

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
16

During the last gubernatorial campaign, the Network for Public Education decided not to endorse Tony Evers. A friend in Wisconsin warned us that he would not be an ally. We endorsed a different candidate, our Wisconsin allies were disappointed in us, and Evers won. Now we know: Evers is not a reliable friend of public schools. He just agreed to a stunning hike in voucher spending.

Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief of The Wisconsin Examiner, reviews the money and politics behind the campaign to fund private schools and defund public schools in Wisconsin. Despite the failure of school choice, the rightwing money keeps flowing to destroy public schools as the center of community life.

She writes:

Now that the new school year has started, I’ve been volunteering on the Madison East High School cross-country team, trying to keep up with 80 or so kids as they run through Madison’s east side neighborhoods and around the fields behind the school.

A former East runner myself, I’ve always been a Purgolder partisan. All three of my kids have been shaped by the down-to-earth culture of East High School, with its hallmark quirkiness, warmth and inclusive ethic that, to me, captures the social value of public school.

To be sure, there are glaring inequities among public schools in Wisconsin. These are on display to East kids whenever they travel for meets away from their school, with its aging facilities and World War II-era cinder track, to the groomed fields and gleaming stadiums of some of their competitors.

Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues.

For decades, Wisconsin has been at the epicenter of the movement to privatize education, pushed by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, a mega-wealthy conservative foundation and early backer of Milwaukee’s first-in-the-nation school voucher program. That program has expanded from fewer than 350 students when it launched in 1990 to 52,000 Wisconsin students using school vouchers today.

This year school privatization advocates scored a huge victory when Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a longtime ally of public schools, agreed to a budget bargain that includes a historic bump in the amount of tax money per pupil Wisconsinites spend on private school vouchers. The rate went up from $8,399 to $9,874 for K-8 students and from $9,405 to $12,368 for high schoolers.

Not only is the amount of money taxpayers spend on private education increasing, in just a couple of years all enrollment caps come off the school choice program. We are on our way to becoming an all-voucher system.

This makes no sense, especially since, over the last 33 years, the school voucher experiment has failed to produce better outcomes in reading and math than regular public schools.

So why are we undermining our public school system to continue the voucher expansion?

School Choice Wisconsin would have you believe that vouchers for private school are an improvement on public schools. In a recent report the group claims that publicly funded private schools are more “cost effective” when you compare their academic results to the cost of educating each student. (Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the same group is pushing to prevent the state from publicly disclosing how much taxpayer money we’re spending on publicly funded private schools.)

There’s something fishy going on with the scientific-sounding document School Choice Wisconsin is promoting.

Using the word “report” to describe the document is “the kind of thing that drives school finance experts nuts,” Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University who has studied school vouchers for nearly two decades. told me on the phone after he read it.

“A serious version of this would give a range and talk about what would happen if you changed your assumptions,” Cowen said. For example, there are big differences in per-pupil spending across Wisconsin school districts, but the school choice lobby group came up with a “back of the envelope” ratio that doesn’t separate different areas with different costs. Nor does it make an apples-to-apples comparison between particular voucher schools and nearby public schools in the same district.

There’s a much bigger problem, though, says Cowen.

“If you took the report at its word,” he says, “it’s possible to achieve exactly what they’re describing simply by exiting the children who are the most expensive to educate.”

That’s significant, because Wisconsin voucher schools have a long record of expelling and counseling out expensive-to-educate students. The ACLU of Wisconsin called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Wisconsin’s school voucher program for discriminating against children with disabilities in 2011, pointing to the very low number of special needs students in Milwaukee voucher schools.

Last May, Wisconsin Watch reported on how voucher schools continue to discriminate against LGBTQ students and kids with disabilities by expelling them or counseling them to drop out.

“Forget cost-effective,” says Cowen. “they’re just able to reject kids that are more costly to them.”

Meanwhile, touting their dubious record of success in Wisconsin, pro-voucher groups are using Wisconsin kids to push forward vouchers nationally, Cowen says.

“The foot in the door created by the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program in 1990 with 350 kids — that’s what created vouchers everywhere,” says Cowen. He notes a that the School Choice Wisconsin report credits a study by Corey DeAngelis, Ph.D. — a researcher to whom the report attributes a long list of obscure academic journal publications. What the report doesn’t note is that DeAngelis is a fellow at right-wing billionaire Betsy DeVos’ American Federation for Children, a Michigan-based pro-voucher group that has dumped money into Wisconsin elections. His American Federation for Children bio adds his ties to a bunch of other right-wing foundations: executive director at Educational Freedom Institute, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, a senior fellow at Reason Foundation, and a board member at Liberty Justice Center — as well as a contributor to National Review and Fox News.

The idea that public schools have failed and the free market is the solution has been the drum beat from these groups for decades.

The results have not been good.

“The roughly zero difference between voucher students and non voucher students in Wisconsin — that is about as good as it gets nationally,” Cowen says. As unimpressive as the school voucher experiment has been in Wisconsin, things are better here than in other states that followed Wisconsin’s lead, where Cowen describes the outcomes as “catastrophic.”

“We don’t often see programs that reduce student achievement the way vouchers have in Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and DC,” he says.

The learning loss caused by what Cowen calls “subprime” voucher schools in church basements and strip malls, where “academics is not their priority,” has had “roughly twice the effect of COVID,” in reducing academic performance, he says.

Please open the link to finish reading this excellent article. As Conniff points out, it’s absurd for a rightwing advocacy group to describe its advertising as a “report.”

Categories Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, School Choice, Shame, Vouchers
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