There are some wonderful things happening in our public schools. HBO is featuring a film about the music created by students at the Hill-Freedman World Academy. HFWA is a public high school for high-performing students.
**TUNE-IN**TUNE-IN**TUNE-IN**
Presents
STAND UP & SHOUT: SONGS FROM A PHILLY HIGH SCHOOL
Debuts Tuesday, NOVEMBER 7 on HBO and Max
NOW AVAILABLE TO SCREEN UPON REQUEST
The HBO Original documentary STAND UP & SHOUT: SONGS FROM A PHILLY HIGH SCHOOL , directed by Emmy ® and Peabody winner Amy Schatz (HBO’s “We Are the Dream: The Kids of the Oakland MLK Oratorical Fest” and “In the Shadow of the Towers : Stuyvesant High on 9/11”) and executive produced by the award-winning team at Get Lifted Film Co., Emmy ® and Tony ® winning producer Mike Jackson, EGOT recipient John Legend, and Emmy ® -winner Ty Stiklorius, debuts TUESDAY , NOVEMBER 7 at 9:00 pm ET/PT on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.
Synopsis: The film follows 10th graders from Hill-Freedman World Academy (HFWA), a Philadelphia public school, who take part in a unique songwriting collaboration. Working in teams with local musicians, students come together to create an album of powerful original songs that capture both the challenging times they’re living in and the joy that music brings.
Back in the classroom after two years of pandemic isolation, the teenagers find a way to express their experiences and feelings in stirring songs that come straight from the heart. HFWA offers a unique music program teaching students to write, compose, produce, and perform, their own work. Although many are new to music, they learn to trust their voices and lift each other up. STAND UP & SHOUT: SONGS FROM A PHILLY HIGH SCHOOL explores the transformative power of music and how arts education can unlock creativity and be a source of hope and healing.
Featured Participants: Joining the courageous and talented students of Hill-Freedman World Academy High School are award-winning musical talents Kristal Oliver, Andrew Lipke, Bethlehem Roberson, and program director and music technology teacher Ezechial Thurman.
Credits: HBO Documentary Films in association with Get Lifted Film Co. presents STAND UP & SHOUT: SONGS FROM A PHILLY HIGH SCHOOL. Directed and produced by Amy Schatz; executive produced by Mike Jackson, John Legend, Ty Stiklorius, and Tommy Benjamin for Get Lifted; For HBO: executive producers, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, and Sara Rodriguez.
I’m sorry that this is not a comment on the current blog post, but I can’t find any other way to alert you to this WaPo article from today.
All I can say is that we’d better redouble (is that the same as quadruple?) our efforts to prevent this from happening!
Not mentioned, but heaven forbid that they bring back DeVos or try to get rid of the Educ Dept altogether.
Bobbi Eisenberg
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/05/trump-revenge-second-term/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most
Trump and allies plot revenge, Justice Department control in a second term
Advisers have also discussed deploying the military to quell potential unrest on Inauguration Day. Critics have called the ideas under consideration dangerous and unconstitutional.
Isaac Arnsdorf
Former president Donald Trump at the courthouse in Manhattan on Oct. 17. (John Taggart for The Washington Post)
Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.
In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations. Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.
In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.
To facilitate Trump’s ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.
“It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. “It’s hardly something we should aspire to.”
Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed “Project 2025,” the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by The Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.
The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump’s supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.
Supporters listen during the national anthem before Trump arrives to speak at a campaign event at the Kingswood Arts Center on Oct. 9 in Wolfeboro, NH. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion. “President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden,” Cheung said. “President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution.”
The discussions underway reflect Trump’s determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.
“This is third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. “And that means I can do that, too.”
Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith’s prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.
Trump, the clear polling leader in the GOP race, has made “retribution” a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells his supporters that he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies’ expense.
‘He is going to go after people that have turned on him’
It is unclear what alleged crimes or evidence Trump would claim to justify investigating his named targets.
Kelly said he would expect Trump to investigate him because since his term as chief of staff ended, he has publicly criticized Trump, including by alleging that he called dead service members “suckers.” Kelly added, “There is no question in my mind he is going to go after people that have turned on him.”
Barr, another Trump appointee turned critic, has contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s.” Asked about Trump’s interest in prosecuting him, Barr deadpanned, “I’m quivering in my boots.”
“Trump himself is more likely to rot in jail than anyone on his alleged list,” said Cobb, who accused Trump of “stifling truth, making threats and bullying weaklings into doing his bidding.”
Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.
Rod J. Rosenstein, the Trump-appointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges. That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.
“Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy,” Rosenstein said. “The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons.”
But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution. Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.
“You don’t need a statutory change at all, you need a mind-set change,” Vought said in an interview. “You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel’s Office that don’t view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president.”
A fixation on prosecuting enemies
As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel’s Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump’s aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.
“The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don’t put guys like me … in those jobs,” Kelly said. “The lesson he learned was to find sycophants.”
Although aides have worked on plans for some other agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department. In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.
“Given his recent trials and tribulations, one would think he’s going to pick up the plan for the Department of Justice before doing some light reading of a 500-page white paper on reforming the EPA,” said Matt Mowers, a former Trump White House adviser.
Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought’s think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump’s indictment in the federal election interference case.
Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney’s case accusing Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.
In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump’s refusing to leave office would lead to “riots in every major city.” Clark responded, according to the indictment, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J, golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D’Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Stephen K. Bannon, Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.
“I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion,” Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.
Clark’s involvement with Project 2025 has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as an unqualified choice to take a senior leadership role at the department, according to a conservative lawyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private talks.
Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement. “We are grateful for Jeff Clark’s willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times,” he said.
How a second Trump term would differ from the first
There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee. Many in Trump’s circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.
Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel’s Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In repeated comments to advisers and lawyers around him, Trump has said his biggest regrets were naming Jeff Sessions and Barr as his attorneys general and listening to others — he often cites the “Federalist Society” — who wanted him to name lawyers with impressive pedigrees and Ivy League credentials to senior Justice Department positions. He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.
The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president’s agenda in his first term, and they are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump’s demands.
Trump speaks with staff members backstage following a campaign event at the Kingswood Arts Center on Oct. 9 in Wolfeboro, NH. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Those groups are in discussions with Trump’s campaign advisers and occasionally the candidate himself, sometimes circulating policy papers or draft executive orders, according to people familiar with the situation.
“No one is opposed to them putting together ideas, but it’s not us,” a campaign adviser said. “These groups say they’ll have the whole transition planned. Some of those people I’m sure are good and Trump will appoint, but it’s not what is on his mind right now. I’m sure he’d be fine with some of their orders.”
Trump’s core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.
Alumni have also saved lists of previous appointees who would not be welcome in a second Trump administration, as well as career officers they viewed as uncooperative and would seek to fire based on an executive order to weaken civil service protections.
For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025. Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff, likened the database to a “conservative LinkedIn,” allowing applicants to present their resumes on public profiles, while also providing a shared workspace for Heritage and partner organizations to vet the candidates and make recommendations.
“We don’t want careerists, we don’t want people here who are opportunists,” he said. “We want conservative warriors.”
Marianne LeVine and Karen DeYoung contributed to this report.
A Trump second term would be a nightmare for anyone who is not a member of his cult.
There were “wonderful” things going on in the high school where I taught for the last 16 years of 30 that I was a public school teacher in that school district of about 19,000 students, and that high school was not a high school for high performing students.
The child poverty rate when I retired from teaching in 2005 was 70% and last time I looked at that high school’s website, had climbed to 80%. The local community around that high school was dominated by dangerous multi generational street gangs. And they are probably still there.
That public high school had a theater with a stage for plays and dedicated teachers (I don’t know about now) worked many hours after teaching five classes with students that wanted to act.
There was a marching band.
There were sports teams with coaches working long hours during after and on weekends with the teams.
Me and another teacher were sponsors for the high school chess club that met in my classroom at lunch. Even gangbangers showed up to learn and play chess. I had a few from the gangs there were always a challenge in class but at lunch in the chess club, they were polite and friendly.
The last class ended around 1500 in the afternoon, but the library stayed open late for teens that had no safe place to go. Latchkey kids with parents at work. In the library they were safe. Walking home in that community was not safe. We lost students on those streets every year, every month.
In the library those teens could read, do homework, use the computer lab, et al. There were volunteer tutors in the library after school, teachers and high performing students. I don’t remember how late the library stayed open. Late maybe since the night custodians and sports teams with their coaches were on campus often up to 2200 or even 2300, an hour before midnight.
That high school partnered with the local community college (some sort of link with monitors and cameras) and they offered classes in the library with the college teachers at the college, that counted toward high school graduation and college credit if they went on to college.
There was a high school newspaper produced by students. For seven of my 30 years as a public school teacher, I was the advisor for that newspaper and the journalism teacher with an hour class where i taught the students that took that class all about being a journalist, that included the ethics. For the high school editors and reporters, I’d arrive sometimes as early as 1600 AM and leave as late as 2300 PM — the same day.
This is only a sample of what dedicated, profession public school teachers are willing to do to help their students succeed and learn.
correction: I just caught it. I didn’t arrive at 1600, I arrived at 0600 AM.
1600 PM was an hour after my last class let out but I was almost always still there.
Awesome! Bravo to the students and the film producers and directors for sharing these Philly public school student’s stories! Looking forward to watching it!
The public needs to see public education that meets students’ needs, interests and unleashes their creative energy instead of all the gloom and doom from the press.
John Legend is one of the producers. Also a big booster of charters. I hope that participating in this production awakened him to the promise of public schools.
Typical of “High performing” schools the band is all white. That’s what high performing schools do.
I was an administrator in a middle school in Milwaukee. There are many names for classes for advanced students but they have one thing in common, mostly, if not all l white.
Principal Don Krueger took action. He made those classes based on Gardners Multiple Intelligences. Then next morning the local alderman was at the school complaining.
Classes for advanced students are safe havens for white people. That is there purpose. Pure racism.
Their purpose. 😳