Archives for the month of: October, 2023
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Ohio: Lawyer from State AG Office Advised Both Sides in Blatant Conflict of Interest

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2023 //
1

The governor of Ohio is trying to take control of the state school board. They are too independent for Governor Mike DeWine’s taste because they are elected, not appointed by him. As an official body, the school board sued the state to block the takeover and was represented by the state Attorney General’s office. Unfortunately, their lawyer—it was discovered—was also advising the defense counsel. Their lawyer was “Chief Counsel and Ethics Officer for the Ohio Attorney General.” He will no longer be representing the state school board.

The Ohio Capital Journal reported:

An Ohio Attorney General lawyer for state school board members in their ongoing lawsuit to stop a massive transfer of power over K-12 education from the board to the governor’s office was found by the court to be giving legal advice to the defense counsel, also a member of the Attorney General’s Office.

Chief Counsel and Ethics Officer for the Ohio Attorney General Bridget Coontz has been disqualified from participating in the lawsuit anymore after sending an email on Oct. 3 that included legal advice to the counsel for defendants, Julie Pfeiffer, the section chief at the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, according to new court documents in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas.

“In the email, Coontz offered legal advice to Counsel Pfeiffer clearly related to this case,” Franklin County Common Please Court Judge Karen Held Phipps wrote in an order disqualifying Coontz on Monday. “Coontz offered legal advice to Counsel Pfeiffer, which was directly adverse to Plaintiffs (Christina) Collins and (Michelle) Newman, who Coontz represented in this case. … Public confidence in the outcome of this case requires that Coontz be disqualified from any further participation.”

Seven members of the Ohio State Board of Education originally filed a lawsuit against Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Sept. 19 in an attempt to block an overhaul of K-12 education that was included by lawmakers in the state’s two-year budget this summer. Judge Phipps issued the temporary restraining order Sept. 21. Coontz filed a motion on Sept. 27 to substitute the Attorney General as counsel for the original seven plaintiffs.

“Coontz assured the Court that there was no danger of a conflict-of-interest in this situation because the Office of the Attorney General maintained a complex screening process in order to eliminate any such conflict of interest,” Phipps wrote.

When a conflict comes up between Ohio Attorney General clients, an ethics screen is set up between the AG lawyers and is distributed to all attorneys and supervisors involved in the case, Phipps said Coontz explained to the court during an expedited briefing process…

But Coontz mistakenly sent an email to a recipient on the other side.

According to Judge Phipps, Coontz told the court the ethics screen “did not become necessary because she determined that a conflict of interest did not exist.”

“Coontz’s argument in this regard is absurd on its face,” Judge Phipps wrote. “The Court strongly disagrees that Coontz personally gets to determine when a conflict of interest has arisen. The main concern here is the appearance of impropriety, which is precisely what Coontz’s email created. … Accordingly, Coontz is hereby disqualified from any further participation in this matter.”

The lawsuit is trying to stop the Ohio Department of Education from transitioning to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, which would create a cabinet-level director position and put the department under the governor’s office.

Categories Accountability, Fraud, Ohio

Jan Resseger: Teachers Should Be Paid as Professionals

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2023 //
5

Jan Resseger lives in Ohio. She has spent her career as an advocate for social justice and educational equity. Her blog is a must-read. This column probes the growing gap in pay between teachers and other college graduates. It is ironic and pathetic that self-styled “reformers” like Bill Gates, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg are silent on the issue of teacher pay, but expend their resources to promote teacher evaluation, merit pay, innovation, and other dead ends. They know they have to pay for talent in their own organizations. Why not in schools?

She writes:

In our society, teaching is not a high status position. It used to be considered women’s work, probably still is by many people. How wonderful it would be if we had fully transcended the cruelty of the old joke: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach, teach gym.” But we haven’t. I regularly hear legislators in my state explaining that if someone who knew what he was doing were put in charge, teachers would be forced to improve test scores immediately. The implication, of course, is that teaching is simply a matter of the production of test scores, and teachers don’t produce.

The tragedy of this kind of thinking is that the same teachers whom people attack and insult are the human beings to whom we trust the formation of our children. The opinion polls tell us that we handle this contradiction by learning to know, respect, and appreciate our own child’s teacher even as we fail to protest the barrage of attacks on teachers in general.

We forget to consider that teaching is a relentlessly hard job. Teachers work with masses of children and adolescents all day without much of a break. The pressure is relentless. Regents’ Professor of Education, Emeritus, at Arizona State University and the past president of both the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association, David Berliner describes just some of the complexity of a teacher’s day:

“A physician usually works with one patient at a time, while a teacher serves 25, 30 or in places like Los Angeles and other large cities, they may be serving 35 or more youngsters simultaneously… (T)eachers have been found to make about .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching… (A) researcher estimated that teachers’ decisions numbered about 1,500 per day. Decision fatigue is among the many reasons teachers are tired after what some critics call a short work day, forgetting or ignoring the enormous amount of time needed for preparation, for grading papers and homework, and for filling out bureaucratic forms and attending school meetings.”

Teachers know how to build trusting relationships with their students and to help students respect each other while they all engage with their academic work. One of the best writers about teaching , the late Mike Rose published my favorite definition of excellent teaching based on years of observing teachers in their classrooms: “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

In the introduction to her annual report on the teacher pay penalty, published last week by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Sylvia Allegretto acknowledges the challenges teachers face: “Teachers have one of the most consequential jobs in the country—they have the future of the U.S. in front of them every day. But teaching is becoming a less appealing career choice for new college graduates. Not only are levels of compensation low, but teaching is becoming increasingly stressful as teachers are forced to navigate battles over curriculum and COVID-19 related mandates as well as rising incidence of violence in schools. Low pay makes recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers difficult.

Here are Allegretto’s conclusions about the trend in teachers’ wages and compensation through 2022:

  • “The pay penalty for teachers—the gap between the weekly wages of teachers and college graduates working in other professions—grew to a record 26.4% in 2022, a significant increase from 6.1% in 1996.
  • “Although teachers tend to receive better benefits packages than other professionals do, this advantage is not large enough to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers.
  • “On average, teachers earned 73.6 cents for every dollar that other professionals made in 2022. This is much less than the 93.9 cents on the dollar they made in 1996.”

Allegretto explains: “Because public school teachers must attain at least a bachelor’s degree to teach in the U.S., this research compares teachers with college graduates working in other professions… Over the past two decades, the weekly wages and total compensation of public school teachers have fallen further and further behind… Recent high inflation has significantly reduced the average weekly wages of teachers but has had less of an effect on other college graduates… The erosion of relative weekly wages for teachers continued apace in 2022.” “Teachers generally receive a higher share of their total compensation as benefits than other professionals do, partially offsetting the weekly wage penalty.” But, “the benefits advantage for teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty.”

Inflation has been a significant factor recently: “From 2021 to 2022, real wages for teachers fell by a bit more than inflation (8.8% vs 8.1%), meaning that the lion’s share of the decline was due to inflation, not a large drop in nominal wages. Regardless, the buying power of teachers took a big hit…. This dynamic is likely explained (at least in part) because teachers’ wages are often set by long-term union contracts and dependent on government budgets. In contrast, the private sector can often respond more quickly to improving or deteriorating economic conditions by adjusting wages. Other college graduates were able to garner an increase in nominal wages to keep pace with inflation….”

In 31 states, in 2022 the relative teacher wage penalty was greater than 20 percent. The five states with the greatest relative teacher wage penalty in 2022 were Colorado at 37.4 percent, Arizona at 33.2 percent, Virginia at 32.1 percent, Oklahoma at 31.8 percent, and Alabama at 30.9 percent. You can check your state’s relative teacher wage penalty on page 8 of Allegretto’s report.

Allegretto concludes: “One of our nation’s highest ideals is the promise to educate every child without regard to means. In many respects, we have always fallen short on that promise. And there are many issues to be addressed around public education and its funding… But one thing is for sure. A world-class public educational system cannot be accomplished without the best and the brightest heading our classrooms. And it cannot be done on the cheap.”

Categories Education Reform, Teacher Pay, Teacher Shortage, Teachers and Teaching

Massacre in Maine

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
55

What more can be said about the senseless murder of at least 18 people in Lewiston, Maine? We have said it all, heard it all.

Thoughts and prayers for those who lost loved ones.

Action on gun control? No way.

One Democratic Congressman from Maine, Jared Golden, switched his position and will now vote for restrictions on guns. Susan Collins, Republican Senator from Maine, will continue to oppose a ban on assault weapons. She favors a ban on “high-capacity magazines,” though it’s doubtful her colleagues would support that. She’s usually called a “moderate.” She’s probably serving her last term. Why is she resisting limits on deadly weapons?

The Republican Party will not budge. They didn’t budge after the murders of babies at Sandy Hook. They didn’t budge after the festival carnage in Las Vegas. They didn’t budge after the slaughter of children in Uvalde, Texas. They won’t budge now.

The United States banned assault weapons from 1994 to 2004. The ban lapsed and was never renewed. The skies didn’t fall. The Constitution remained in place.

According to the AP:

The shooting was the country’s 36th mass killing this year, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. At least 190 people have died in those killings, which are defined as incidents in which four or more people have died within a 24-hour period, not including the killer — the same definition used by the FBI.

But other news sources say there have been 565 mass shootings this year:

There have been more than 565 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which is defined by the Gun Violence Archive as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed. These mass shootings have led to 597 deaths and 2,380 injuries.

I’m not sure that it matters how many people died in mass shootings because the people with the power to ban civilian ownership of military weapons don’t care. They won’t act no matter how many people die.

If I were a foreigner, I might hesitate to be a tourist in the U.S. It’s dangerous here.

Categories Corruption, Courage, Cruelty, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Guns, Republicans

Thom Hartmann: The Real Mike Johnson Is a Dangerous Rightwing Zealot

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
21

Thom Hartmann has checked out the record and public statements of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He is even more of an extremist than his idol Donald Trump.

Hartmann writes:

The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate.

As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday:

“Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.”

Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

Their lawsuit had no merit and no facts — everybody, including the Republicans involved, knew that Biden had won fair-and-square — but Republican hate of Democrats is now so deep that the idea of Democrats legitimately governing after winning an election is repugnant to them. No matter how big the Democrats’ victory (7 million votes in this case) may be.

Johnson went public with his support of Trump’s hateful, poisonous Big Lie just a week after the 2020 election, saying:

 “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that…They know that in Georgia it really was rigged.”

As The Washington Post noted at the time:

“Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, spearheaded the effort to round up support on Capitol Hill. Johnson emailed all House Republicans on Wednesday to solicit signatures for the long-shot Texas case after Trump called. The congressman told his colleagues that the president ‘will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.’”

Johnson got 106 of the 196 Republicans then in the House to sign on to the effort to force four swing states to throw out Democratic votes and declare Trump emperor for life: he was the legal architect of the argument. It doesn’t get more hateful against our republican form of government than that effort to destroy confidence in the vote at the cornerstone of our democracy.

Johnson’s hate of women having agency over their own bodies and lives is so intense that he has repeatedly championed a nationwide ban on abortion. 

His wife Kelly, a “licensed pastoral counselor” with whom he’s in a “covenant marriage,” makes money from Louisiana Right To Life, and before being elected to the House in 2016 he was an attorney for the far-right-billionaire-supported Alliance Defending Freedom that pushed the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court.

While there, he helped sue New York and New Jersey to force them to allow official state license plates that displayed an anti-woman, anti-abortion message; sued New Orleans to try to block benefits for the partners of queer city employees; and promoted a “National Day of Truth” to encourage homophobic students to hate on their LGBTQ+ peers.

Johnson and the GOP explicitly hate queer people and their allies.

“Radical homosexual advocacy groups” are promoting “the culture’s assault on traditional values,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed for a Louisiana newspaper. That “assault,” of course, was gay marriage, something that horrifies Johnson and his wife. 

He wrote:

“Same-sex ‘marriage’ selfishly and deliberately deprives children of either a mother or a father. Children need both. Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.

“Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”

Johnson also supports a federal version of DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law that would outlaw any discussion of queer people in any public school classroom in America. In another anti-gay newspaper screed, Johnson wrote:

“Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices. Where would it end? This is one Pandora’s box we shouldn’t open.”

While Johnson hates queer people, he apparently loves Vladimir Putin, an affection that has earned him the loyalty and help of Donald Trump.

Last month he joined Matt Gaetz and 93 other Republicans in voting to cut off all US military aid to assist Ukraine’s survival in the face of Russia’s ongoing terror campaign.

He’s also a friend to mass shooters and the psychopaths at the NRA. 

Johnson repeatedly voted against gun safety and gun control legislation, and voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Hating on Medicare and Social Security is another specialty of Johnson and the GOP. As Social Security Works Executive Director Alex Lawson noted yesterday:

“Rep. Mike Johnson has a long history of hostility towards Social Security and Medicare. As Chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019-2021, Johnson released budgets that included $2 trillion in cuts to Medicare and $750 billion in cuts to Social Security, including:
— Raising the retirement age
— Decimating middle class benefits
— Making annual cost-of-living increases smaller
— Moving towards privatization of Social Security and Medicare.”

Johnson also pushed for $3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), saying slashing the entitlement programs should be Congress’ “top priority.” Johnson is also a huge advocate for a Catfood Commission to figure out ways to slash Social Security benefits to seniors (thus forcing them to eat catfood: the White House refers to it as a “death panel for Social Security”).

Like Red state Republican politicians beholden to the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries, Johnson also hates marijuana. He’s repeatedly argued and voted against legalization, as well as helping shoot down a bill that would let legal pot dispensaries use banks to conduct their business.  

Hating on science and our children’s future is a feature, not a bug, of Republican politics, and Mike Johnson fits right in. The largest single group of donors to his political career have been the oil and gas industries, and he happily takes their money and spreads their lies. For example, he argued:

“The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

The League of Conservation Voters gave his environmental record a 0 percent (yes, zero) score for 2022: this guy has burrowed so deeply in Big Oil’s pocket that he’s like a blood-filled tick on a shaggy dog. He’ll never let go.

On voting rights, Johnson hates voters in Blue cities in Red states as much as their own Republican legislatures do. A big fan of voter suppression laws, he argued that making it harder to vote and purging people from voter rolls would help the GOP in the 2022 election:

“They’re making sure that the election results can be counted upon, and that’s a critical thing for us to do.”

That was followed by his voting against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act, both of which would have guaranteed Americans’ right to vote regardless of race, religion, or geography. On the other hand, he voted for a Republican bill that would have enshrined GOP voter suppression efforts nationwide. 

Like Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville, Johnson apparently also hates our men and women serving in the armed forces.

He voted against the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Actthat President Biden was cheerleading because it would aid service members like Biden’s son Beau who became deathly sick because of exposure to open-air burn pits and other toxins.

He also voted against a year-end package of bills to aid service members, including requiring states to honor the professional licenses of military spouses who find themselves stationed in states other than where they were originally certified. And he joined Tuberville in his opposition to the Pentagon paying to fly raped servicewomen stationed in countries or states where abortion is illegal to places where it is available.

Johnson has supported a few Republican military spending bills, but only, as military.comnoted, when they are “packed with GOP policy riders such as provisions to bar abortion services, transgender health care, and LGBTQ+ Pride flags at the VA.”

Johnson, like most Republicans who hate the idea of Brown people entering our country legally, is also a “border hawk,” having visited our southern border with Donald Trump and introduced two pieces of legislation that would restrict immigration and refugee status. Speaking of his desire to “build a wall” and keep would-be refugees out of the US, he said:

“Now, I have no illusions about this. I’m sure that President Biden will veto anything we send him, but it will send a very strong message. If we can’t override a veto, we’ll be ready to run when the next Republican president is elected two years later.”

Republicans like Johnson love to plaster the word “freedom” all over everything they do. But they’re just fine with a for-profit prison industry lobbying for harsher sentences, and to keeping draconian drug laws in place.

When Republicans say “freedom,” it’s a safe bet they mean they want the freedom to hate on minorities, the freedom of rich people and giant corporations to screw average working people, and the freedom of billionaires to continue paying only around 3 percent of their income in income taxes.

In MAGA Mike Johnson (what Trump calls him), Republicans have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds. At this point, the only “loves” they have are rightwing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, Trump’s good buddy and fossil fuel oligarch Vladimir Putin.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Politics, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Nancy Flanagan: How School Choice Erodes Support for the Public Good

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
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Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher of music in Michigan, writes here about how “school choice” has damaged the perception of public schools, turning them from a valued public good to just another consumer choice. when she started teaching, public schools were the glue of the community. Now they are forced to compete with multiple private choices, which claim to be better although they are not.

She explains why we could have good public schools in every community, but we have lost the will to pursue that goal. instead we have pursued a series of demonstrably failed ideas, wasting money and lives, while disintegrating the will to improve our public schools.

She writes:

The only contentious thing I ever talk about, at holiday hang-outs or on Facebook (our new town square), is education policy. I will talk to just about anybody—persistently and passionately—about schools, and what it would take to make our public education system not merely workable, but beneficial for all kids in the United States.

This is, by the way, a goal that could largely be accomplished. We have the human capital, the resources and the technical knowledge to transform public education over a generation. What we lack is the public will to do so—for children other than our own, at least.

This represents a sea change in our 20th century national approach to public education, that post-war America where the GI Bill and the Baby Boom made tan, rectangular brick elementary schools spring up like mushrooms in the 1950s. Teachers were in high demand, and state universities were adding a new dormitory every year. Education was going to lift us up, make us (here it comes) the greatest nation on earth.

We don’t think that way anymore.

Somewhere in between our rush to put a man on the moon and the advent of computers in all our classrooms, we lost our “public good” mojo, the generous and very American impulse to stir the melting pot and offer all children, our future citizens, a level playing field, educationally. Lots of edu-thinkers trace this to 1983 and the Nation at Risk report, but I think that the origins of losing that spirit of unity are deeper and broader than that.

Recently, I posted an article from American Prospect on my Facebook page—The Proselytizers and the Privatizers: How religious sectarian school voucher extremists made useful idiots of the charter movement (Katherine Stewart). You can read divergent articles on charter schools (the most obvious and deceptive signal of the loss of our sense of “public good” in education) everywhere, but this was a particularly good piece, honest without being accusatory, damning but cautious:

A wing of the charter movement that is ideologically or religiously opposed to “government schools” was present at the charter movement’s creation, and has grown to comprise a sizable segment of the charter universe. With the election of Donald Trump and the appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, it is presently empowered as never before. Public confusion about vouchers and charters continues to create opportunities. A lightly regulated charter school industry could achieve many of the same goals as voucher programs. They could drain funding from traditional public schools, deregulate the education sector, and promote ideological or religious curricula—all without provoking the kind of resistance that vouchers received.

I posted the article because it was true and thoughtful.

I live in Michigan, where charters took root over two decades ago. Like a handful of other states, we now know what happens to public education, including healthy districts, when charter schools damage the perceived desirability of one—thriving, publicly supported—school for all children. It’s happened all over our state, first in the urban and rural districts, struggling to maintain programming and viability, and now in Alpha districts, as their budgets are diminished and their student populations lured to schools that are “safer” (read: whiter).

After I posted the article, the online conversation was revealing. Teachers (and a lot of my Facebook friends are educators) contributed positive commentary. But there was also a fair amount what Stewart calls public confusion.

  • A sense that charter schools are, somehow, de facto, better than public schools—simply by the virtue of the fact that they’re not public, but selective and special.
  • Assertions that public schools (schools I know well, and have worked in) are attended by children who haven’t learned how to behave properly.
  • Blaming teacher unions for doing what unions do: advocating for fairness, serving as backstop for policy that prioritizes the community over individual needs or wants.

None of these things is demonstrably true. The conversation illustrated that many parents and citizens are no longer invested in public education, emotionally or intellectually. School “choice” is seen as parental right, not something that must be personally paid for. There is now agreement with an idea once unthinkable in America: corporations also have a “right” to advertise and sell a for-profit education, using our tax dollars.

Education is a major major public good where we tax the rich in order to provide a public benefit that you get just by right of being a citizen. When they talk about needing to do away with the entitlement mentality, the most problematic entitlement for them is not Medicare or Social Security. It’s education. Education is even more of a problem for them because teachers are trying to encourage kids to think they can do more. And that’s dangerous.

The core of the public confusion around schooling has been carefully cultivated for decades.

It’s worth talking about—the uniquely American principle of a free, high-quality education for every single child—even if the dialogue is heated. We’re in danger of losing the very thing that made us great. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Education Reform, Michigan

Houston: Principal of a High-Performing School Removed; Parents and Students Baffled

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
2

The chaos continues in the Houston school district, under the addled leadership of Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent. Another principal was pushed out, along with several staff members. No reason was given. Several hundred teens and parents demonstrated outside the school to protest the sudden dismissals of tested school leaders.

Sam Gonzalez Kelly wrote in The Houston Chronicle:

Families and staff at Eastwood Academy High School were informed Tuesday that their principal and several other staff members were pulled from the East End school after an investigation by the district into “incidents at the campus.”

Principal Ana Aguilar’s removal was announced in an automated phone call from HISD Central Division Superintendent Luz Martinez, who said that the change was being made to “ensure a high-quality education environment.” A district spokesman added in a statement that “HISD takes student safety in our schools very seriously,” and that Aguilar and other staffers were removed “after an investigation into incidents at the campus.”

Ana Aguilar

An assistant principal, a counselor and a librarian were also relieved of their duties, according to one teacher at Eastwood, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. An HISD spokesman declined to elaborate on the “incidents” in question or provide further comment.

The news immediately sent waves of outrage and confusion rippling through the tight-knit Eastwood community, whose members were unaware of any incidents that would spark their principal’s removal. Aguilar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It’s very frustrating, Eastwood is a wonderful school,” said Miranda Gonzales, a parent of an Eastwood student. “There’s no reason for the principal to be removed, Eastwood isn’t (in Miles’ New Education System). It’s ridiculous, it’s insanity and none of us know what’s going on.”

Eastwood, a school of fewer than 400 students in Houston’s East End, received an A rating from the Texas Education Agency on its latest evaluations. Aguilar joined the campus in 2022 after spending three years as principal at Robinson Elementary School, where she won a First Year Principal of the Year Award at what was an Achieve 180 campus in the east region of the district.

Aguilar’s removal is the latest in a string of shakeups at HISD schools, where at least nine other principals have been replaced without much in the way of explanation given to families or staff. The principal at Middle College High School at Houston Community College’s Felix Fraga campus, also in HISD’s Central Division, was removed less than a week ago. The principal at Cage Elementary and Project Chrysalis Middle School, many of whose students go on to attend Eastwood Academy, was replaced during the first week of school this year.

Yesterday the new Miles leadership removed the principal of Wisdom High School and most of its top administrators. Wisdom’s students are mostly non-English-speakers.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Ethics, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: House GOP Remains Loyal to the Big Lie

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
28

How to explain the radicalization of the Republican Party? It just chose a defender of the Big Lie as Speaker of the House. Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner explain:

The drama around a speakerless House of Representatives has come to an end, at least for the moment. It has been a sad spectacle, to be sure, but the means by which it was resolved, and what it augurs for the future, offer no reason to celebrate.

Quite the contrary.

If the elevation of Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson to the speaker’s gavel with unanimous Republican support counts as compromise within the party’s caucus, it reinforces what we already knew — this nation faces grave threats to its constitutional order, because one of our two major political parties has embraced autocratic extremism.

This is not hyperbole. The person who rallied his party to make him second in line to the presidency was a cheerleader for the end of American democracy. There should be no normalization of this fact.

In the wake of President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, the vast majority of the Republican Party fell in line behind Donald Trump’s attempts to destroy one of the most sacrosanct features of American democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. We all know what came next, including a violent attempted coup that swarmed the Capitol on January 6. On that day, 139 Republican members of the House of Representatives (including Johnson) voted not to certify the election. It marked arguably the greatest threat to the continuation of the republic since the Civil War.

The new speaker of the House might not be well known by the American public. But he was an influential leader of the movement to deny the will of the people and their selection of president. In late 2020, Johnson pushed House members to sign on to a lawsuit, filed by Texas, that would have thrown out the votes in key battleground states — in essence disenfranchising millions of Americans. To call this ridiculous legal maneuver “fringe” is insufficient. This wasn’t just “out there.” This was the legal equivalent of orbiting Pluto. Even the reactionary right-wing Supreme Court refused to hear the case.

But the purpose of the lawsuit wasn’t just to deny Biden the presidency. It was to delegitimize a legitimate election. And all you have to do to understand how successful this movement has been is to see Mike Johnson now sitting in the speaker’s chair.

It should be noted that Johnson holds the speakership despite espousing extremely radical views on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage. He also seems to be following Trump’s lead in wanting to stymie U.S. support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. That these views were not disqualifying for a single Republican member — including those purported “moderates” who come from districts Biden won — shows how the party marches in lockstep with radicalism and in the opposite direction of where a majority of Americans want the nation to go.

In the days before Republican elected officials crowned an architect of authoritarianism to lead the House, several of the Trump lawyers who helped orchestrate the specious legal rationale for the coup were busy pleading guilty in the conspiracy case of election interference in Georgia. Georgia, it turns out, was one of the states where Speaker Johnson wanted votes to be thrown out.

In their plea deals, the Trump lawyers had to admit what was obvious from the beginning: All the attempts to steal the election were built on lies. The rule of law seems to be closing in on Trump. And it is being fueled by the truth.

Yet the Big Lie continues to fuel Republicans outside of the courtroom, and especially in the halls of Congress. This puts our nation in peril. We are at a point where the very thing that should most disqualify someone from political leadership in America — the desire to destroy our democracy — has become the litmus test for the speaker of the House.

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

Politico: The New Speaker of the House is Deeply Conservative

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
15

The Republicans in the House of Representatives finally united to elect Rep. Mike Johnson as the new Speaker of the House. Johnson was elected to Congress in 2016. He was a leading figure in the effort to overturn the election in 2020. He gathered signatures among his colleagues to support an appeal by the Texas Attorney General to the U.S. Supreme Court to disqualify the votes cast in contested states. The Court didn’t hear the case, ruling that Texas did not have standing to reverse the results in other states.

So, yes, Johnson is an election denier. Less well known are his deeply conservative views on social issues. He opposes abortion and gay marriage. As a representative of oil country, he dismisses claims that fossil fuels contribute to climate change.

Politico wrote about Johnson:

BROADCAST NEWS — It’s finally over. After more than three weeks without a leader, House Republicans came together to unanimously select Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the 56th Speaker of the House of Representatives. Johnson served as a consensus pick among the numerous factions, appeasing both the right flank of the party that tossed out former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and moderates. While he’s served as vice chair of the Republican Conference, he has served just four terms in Congress and remains little-known within Washington.

What’s clear, however, is that Johnson is a social conservative’s social conservative — the most culturally conservative lawmaker to ascend to the speakership in decades, if not longer.

He has longstanding ties to the evangelical activist group Family Research Council — which could one day prove discomfiting to members from swing districts or of a more secular orientation.

His first brush with national prominence came in April 2015, when Johnson, then a Louisiana state legislator, proposed a bill called the Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act that would have prevented “adverse treatment by the State of any person or entity on the basis of the views they may hold with regard to marriage.” Critics called it legalized discrimination against married gay couples, and the bill failed, but the media attention got him on the radar of the influential FRC and its president, fellow Louisiana native Tony Perkins.

Perkins, who hosts a national radio show called Washington Watch, began tapping Johnson to guest host. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, appeared to be a natural — by December 2015, local Shreveport, La. ABC affiliate KTBS said he “may have a budding second career on the airwaves.”

The FRC and Perkins are political lightning rods among non-evangelicals — some of Perkins’ stances, like his argument that natural disasters are divine punishments for homosexuality, don’t sit well with broad swaths of the electorate. But Johnson’s political and religious beliefs dovetail with Perkins’ views. In a 2004 op-ed, Johnson argued that “homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural… society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle.”

When he ran for Congress in 2016, Johnson placed his faith at the center of his campaign, telling the Louisiana Baptist Message, “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order.”

His connection with Perkins — and his interest in evangelical radio as a political tool — continued after he was elected to the House in 2016. As a freshman lawmaker, Johnson announced his bid to lead the Republican Study Committee, a conservative caucus that currently counts 156, on Washington Watch with Perkins. He won the election.

Johnson used the skills he sharpened on talk radio and in televised FRC interviews to start a weekly podcast in 2022 with his wife, called “Truth be Told with Mike and Kelly Johnson.”

During the first episode in March 2022, entitled “Can America be Saved?” Johnson says that “we’ll review current events through the lens of eternal truth,” and noted that in each podcast they intended to incorporate a themed scripture because “the word of God is, of course, the ultimate source of all truth.” Guests have included Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Charlie Kirk and Jordan Peterson.

On occasion, Kelly Johnson will tee up her husband for an answer. “Why are we the freest, most powerful, most successful, most benevolent nation in the history of the world, and why does every other nation on the planet look to us for leadership and even expect it of us?” she asks in one episode. Her husband responds explaining that America is the only country in the world founded upon a creed, or a “religious statement of faith.”

As a matter of fact, Kelly Johnson is wrong. The Constitution of the United States does not include a creed or a “religious statement of faith.” It specifically mandates freedom of religion and prohibits the establishment of any religion. It also bars any religious test for officeholders.

Mike Johnson is an evangelical Christian whose strong personal views are bound to affect his political views and actions.

Categories Bigotry, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Religion, Republicans, Trump

A Hero for Public Schools in Texas: James Talarico

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2023 //
6

James Talarico is a state legislator in Texas who stands up for public schools. He is a Democrat who supports gun control and expanded health care (he calls it “health care for y’all)”). He graduated from public schools in Round Rock, Texas, then earned his BA at the University of Texas and his MA in education policy at Harvard. He joined Teach for America and taught at a middle school in San Antonio, where his class had 45 students.

I’m usually skeptical about TFA teachers, but knowing Gary Rubinstein—an early TFA corps member—has taught me not to be so judgmental.

Talarico is a phenomenon. He’s an effective, outspoken opponent of vouchers. If you are still on Twitter (aka X), watch his powerful debunking of voucher myths. Vouchers are not “school choice,” because schools choose, and they can discriminate against anyone they want, for any reason.

Talarico recently co-sponsored a bill called “Fully Fund Our Schools,” which increases funding for the state’s public schools and provides a $15,000 raise for every teacher. Texas can afford it; the state has a $33 billion budget surplus.

Politico wrote about Talarico a few months ago and suggested that he might be the Democrat who is able to win a statewide office. He might run against Greg Abbott for governor in 2026. Talarico Represents a better future for Texas.

Talarico is a devout Christian. As the Politico story explains, he is taking classes at a seminary and hopes to be ordained as a pastor. He is steeped in Biblical knowledge, and he can respond to bigoted evangelicals and fundamentalists with the sense of love, hope, kindness, and charity that represents progressive Christian thought.

For his leadership, for his determined support for the public schools attended by 5 million students, for his enlightened support for progressive values, I am pleased to add James Talarico to the honor roll of this blog.

Categories Courage, Education Industry, Honor Roll, Texas, Vouchers

The Atlantic: IDF Shows Video from the Terrorists’ Cell Phones

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2023 //
33

Hatred is corrosive. It dehumanizes its perpetrators, as well as its victims. The Israel Defense Forces collected the contents of body cameras worn by terrorists on October 7. It showed these videos to journalists. One who saw the display was Graeme Wood of The Atlantic. I hope and pray that Israel does not invade Gaza. The bloodshed on all sides would be horrendous. I pray for Netanyahu’s ouster. I pray for peace. The Biden administration has been pursuing negotiations in order to free the hostages and avert a wider war. I pray for the President’s success and am glad that he is in charge of our foreign policy at this woeful moment.

Wood describes what he saw:

This afternoon, at a military base north of Tel Aviv, the Israel Defense Forces held a grisly matinee screening of 43 minutes of raw footage from Hamas’s October 7 attack. Members of the press were invited, but cameras were not allowed. Hamas had the opposite policy on cameras during the attack, which it documented gleefully with its fighters’ body cams and mobile phones. Some of the clips had been circulating already on social media in truncated or expurgated form, with the footage decorously stopped just before beheadings and moments of death. After having seen them both in raw and trimmed forms, I can endorse the decision to trim those clips. I certainly hope I never see any of the extra footage again.

It was, as IDF Major General Mickey Edelstein told the press afterward, “a very sad movie.” Men, women, and children are shot, blown up, hunted, tortured, burned, and generally murdered in any horrible manner you could predict, and some that you might not. The terrorists surround a Thai man they have shot in the gut, then bicker about what to do next. (About 30,000 Thais live in Israel, many of them farmworkers.) “Give me a knife!” one Hamas terrorist shouts. Instead he finds a garden hoe, and he swings at the man’s throat, taking thwack after thwack.

The audience gasped. I heard someone heave a little at another scene, this one showing a father and his young sons, surprised in their pajamas. A terrorist throws a grenade into their hiding place, and the father is killed. The boys are covered in blood, and one appears to have lost an eye. They go to their kitchen and cry for their mother. One of the boys howls, “Why am I alive?” and “Daddy, Daddy.” One says, “I think we are going to die.” The terrorist who killed their father comes in, and while they weep, he raids their fridge. “Water, water,” he says. The spokesman was unable to say whether the children survived.

The videos show pure, predatory sadism; no effort to spare those who pose no threat; and an eagerness to kill nearly matched by eagerness to disfigure the bodies of the victims. In several clips, the Hamas killers fire shots into the heads of people who are already dead. They count corpses, taking their time, and then shoot them again. Some of the clips I had not previously seen simply show the victims in a state of terror as they wait to be murdered, or covered with bits of their friends and loved ones as they are loaded into trucks and brought to Gaza as hostages. There was no footage of rape, although there was footage of young women huddling in fear and then being executed in a leisurely manner.

Edelstein said that the IDF chose to show the footage out of necessity. It is not every day that snuff films of Jews are shown at an IDF screening hall. (The original site of the screening was a commercial theater, which would have been even worse.) “What we shared with you,” Edelstein said, searching for words, “you should know it.” And he said he struggled to understand how some journalists could present the IDF and Hamas as comparable. This footage would refute that false equivalence.

“We are not looking for kids to kill them,” he said. “We have to share it with you so no one will have an idea that someone is equal to another.”

To me the most disturbing section was not visual at all. Like the clip of the father and his boys hunted in their pajamas, it was upsetting in part because it showed a relationship between parent and child. The clip is just a phone call—placed by a terrorist to his family back in Gaza. He tells his father that he is calling from a Jewish woman’s phone. (The phone recorded the call.) He tells his father that his son is now a “hero” and that “I killed 10 Jews with my own hands.” And he tells his family, about a dozen times, that they should open up WhatsApp on his phone, because he has sent photographs to prove what he has done. “Put on Mom!” he says. “Your son is a hero!”

His parents, I noticed, are not nearly as enthusiastic as he is. I believe that the mom says “praise be to God” at one point, which could be gratitude for her son’s crimes or pure reflex, indicating her loss for words to match her son’s unspeakable acts. They do not question what their son has done; they do not scold him. They tell him to come back to Gaza. They fear for his safety. He says, amid rounds of “Allahu akbar,” that he intends “victory or martyrdom”—which the parents must understand means that he will never come home. From their muted replies I wonder whether they also understand that even if he did come home, he would do so as a disgusting and degraded creature, and that it might be better for him not to.

Graeme Wood is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Way of the Strangers: Encounters With the Islamic State.

Categories Education Reform
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