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Florida: New College Wants $400 Million to Expand

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
24

New College in Sarasota is the state college that used to be progressive. Then Governor DeSantis filled its board with rightwing cronies with the goal of turning it into the Hillsdale of the South. To change the culture, the politician who became its president has been recruiting athletes. They are not the type to want to major in gender studies.

Now, Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell reports, New College wants $400 million to grow. That’s a lot of money for a small college. The Florida press will have to keep watch on where the money goes.

Maxwell writes:

Today we’re catching up on controversy at New College, revisiting one of Central Florida’s stranger environmental debates and bidding adieu to one of Florida’s funniest novelists.

We start with what increasingly looks like the biggest public money-grab in Florida — the orgy of incestuous spending at New College of Florida.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ trustees at this school already generated national controversy when they hired former House Speaker Richard Corcoran, a guy with no higher ed experience, as the school’s president and hiked his compensation package to up to $1.3 million a year — all to run a school that says it has fewer students (698) than many elementary schools. (Seriously, Apopka Elementary has more than 800.)

But now New College wants more money — a lot more.

The Sarasota Herald Tribune recently reported that its tiny hometown college has requested a “minimum” of $400 million in additional public money to spend over the next five years and increase enrollment by a few hundred students.

Even if the school grew to 1,200 students, you’d be talking about $333,000 per student. For that price, we could practically buy every student their own school. Or at least a classroom.

If only Florida’s political policymakers were as eager to fund public education when their buddies aren’t involved.

Given the cronyism at play — New College also hired a former senate president as its general counsel and the wife of a former GOP party chair as a fundraiser — there will be a lot of people watching to see who gets the contracts dished out when the new largesse is spent.

Then there’s the lawyer

Speaking of New College’s general counsel, that’s former Senate President Bill Galvano, who generously offered to serve the school and President Corcoran “at a reduced rate of $500 per hour.”

Well, keen Orlando Sentinel readers noticed that Galvano’s name also popped up in other stories the Sentinel has written about a lawsuit filed by a GOP Senate candidate from Lake County who claims former party officials conspired to sabotage her campaign in favor of another Republican candidate.

Corcoran has been subpoenaed in that case. And Galvano is representing him — meaning the school’s president is now using the school’s attorney for personal legal needs. How convenient.

Galvano said in an email last week that Corcoran is paying his legal fees but wouldn’t say if Corcoran is getting a discounted rate or answer questions about whether the school’s trustees approved the overlapping representation, saying he considered those details “confidential attorney/client information that I do not disclose.”

Theoretically, it’s up to the trustees to ask probing questions about all that and share the details with taxpayers to instill public confidence. Also theoretically, I could enter and win a bikini pageant.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, Funding, Higher Education

National Education Policy Center: Are ESAs as Bad as Vouchers—Or Worse?

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2023 //
3

The National Education Policy Center published this valuable analysis of the difference between “education savings accounts” and vouchers.

Termed “education savings accounts” (ESAs) these vouchers on steroids were the subject of 79 percent of the 111 voucher-related bills introduced in state legislatures in 2023. Five states enacted new ESAs (AR, IA, MT, SC, and UT). In addition, four states expanded existing ESA programs (FL,IN, NH,TN).

In most ways, ESAs are similar to traditional vouchers that parents have used for decades to pay for private schools at public expense. It’s just that they go a step farther, permitting parents to use the funds not just for private school tuition but for other education-related expenses such as school uniforms, homeschool curricula, and gym memberships.

In a recent article in the Brown Center Chalkboard, a publication of The Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC-based think tank, NEPC fellow Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University writes that he already sees signs that ESAs are following in the footsteps of traditional vouchers, which studies suggest lead to a flood of new providers, many of which quickly close, as well as tuition hikes at existing voucher schools.

“Unfortunately, the voucher research literature suggests that even with new schools opening, there simply are not enough effective private schools to go around,” he writes. “This might explain the dismal academic results over the last decade—and suggests a very real risk in today’s ESA initiatives if they produce large increases in private school enrollment.”

Drawing upon past research on traditional vouchers, Cowen predicts that ESAs will lead to lower student achievement. Evidence on traditional vouchers’ impact on rates of high school graduation and college enrollment is more mixed—but when positive effects were found, they were associated with students spending all four years of high school in a private school. However, private high schools that accept vouchers often experience high rates of churn. In Milwaukee, which Cowen has studied, 20 percent of voucher students left private schools annually. Academic improvements occurred once students returned to public schools.

Voucher advocates disappointed with academic results have blamed over-regulation for the poor outcomes.

Yet Cowen writes that “the only empirical evidence of the effects of accountability on a voucher program found that once voucher schools were required to use the same testing and reporting requirements as their public counterparts, voucher performance improved substantially.”

He added: “The lack of accountability is already raising problems in newer programs. In Arizona, for example, families had a number of questionable expenses approved, and in North Carolina, some private schools are claiming more vouchers than students actually enrolled.”

Unlike earlier traditional voucher programs, today’s vouchers are more likely to be universally available rather than to be offered to certain populations-such as students from low-income families.

“How these new, expanded programs will function is perhaps the key open question for research moving forward,” Cowen writes.

Data from traditional voucher programs has indicated that the larger the program, the worse the results tend to be. In the best case, that’s because there are too few effective private schools to serve expanded voucher programs; in the worst case, there are inherent limits to the choices parents can make when vouchers allow private schools to choose their students as well.

For example, private schools that accept vouchers may implement admissions criteria that screen out students with disabilities, students with low test scores, or emerging bilinguals.

Voucher-accepting schools are also permitted to refuse to accept LGBTQ+ students or families, and to fire or refuse to hire LGBTQ+ staff.

“[I]t remains to be seen how the new expansion of private school choice programs will ultimately affect educational opportunity,” Cowen writes. “But research on traditional vouchers suggests extreme caution when expecting new, favorable results simply because parents of children outside of public school can now spend public dollars on costs beyond tuition.”

Categories Bigotry, Disruption, Education Industry, Research, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Rosalynn Carter: A Son’s Eulogy

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2023 //
14

I voted for Jimmy Carter when he ran for office. Unlike most presidents, he is remembered now for what he did after he left the presidency. Instead of retiring to a life of leisure and celebrity, he devoted himself to serving others. I think of him building houses for Habitat for Humanity. He also remained involved in political life through the work of the Carter Center, which monitored elections around the world and reported on fairness and transparency. I had the pleasure of serving on a federal commission that studied electoral reform in 2001 after the debacle of the Bush v. Gore election; the co-chairs of the commission were President Carter and President Gerald Ford. Those were the days when Republicans and Democrats agreed that everyone should vote and every vote should be counted. How things change in only 20 years.

I read this beautiful tribute by James “Chip” Carter to his mother and wanted to share it with you. It appeared in The Daily Yonder.

Chip Carter said at his mother’s funeral:

I want to welcome all of you here and thank you for coming to help my family and to mourn with my family and, mostly, to celebrate a life well lived.

My mother was the glue that held our family together through the ups and the downs and thicks and thins of our family’s politics. As individuals, she believed in us and took care of us.

When I was 14, I supported President Johnson for president. And every day I wore a Johnson sticker on my shirt. And periodically I would get beat up, and my shirt torn, and the button pulled off and my sticker always destroyed. And I would walk the block during lunch from school down to Carter’s Warehouse and my mother would have a shirt in the drawer already mended, button sewn on and the LBJ sticker still applied.

Years later she was influential in getting me into rehab for my drug and alcohol addiction. She saved my life.

When I started making speeches for dad in his political career, I was so nervous I often vomited in the waiting room before we went on stage. And one day after debating seven other children or offspring of candidates for president, I called my mother and told her how nervous I got and she told me something that I have used a thousand times since: She said Chip, you can do anything for 20 minutes except hold your breath.

When I was in the second grade, at Plains High School they had a donkey basketball game in the school building there to raise money for the school, and my mother rode her donkey as fast as it would slowly go, right under the goal, spun around so she was facing its tail, caught the pass and made the winning two points.

She was my hero that night. And she’s been my hero ever since.

A couple years ago mom and I were talking when she said that when Dad asked her to marry her for the second time, she said yes. But she expected him to provide for her a life of adventure. He told her that it would happen. She told me that she had lived on both coasts and Hawaii in the Navy and began their family. Mom said when it was decided they would leave the Navy and return to Plains, she was upset. And the family story is they rode in a car from Connecticut to Plains, Georgia, and when Mom had something to say to Dad she would say, “Jack, would you tell your father …” [Jack is the Carters’ eldest son.]

When Dad ran for office the first time my mother ended up running Carter’s Warehouse. She loved it. Every time he would go on a campaign trip or during the legislative session, she was really pleased to be in the office and be the boss. She told me that when Dad started running for president that the thing that she enjoyed the most were the people that she met across the country. And from working in Carter’s Warehouse, she said I was able to speak the language [of] prices and yields and relate to everyday issues and farm families — especially in Iowa. She said because of that, she’s the one that helped win that election there.

Then as first lady of the United States, always trying to follow the teaching of Jesus and to do what he taught her to do as a guideline, she said, “You will always get criticized by somebody for everything you do, so you might as well do what’s right.” That she and Dad were able to make a positive difference in peoples’ lives and that of so many families too.

My parents’ 77-year partnership is often talked about. Mom was always well-informed on the issues of the day. In the White House, Mom asked Dad so many questions that he finally said that she should attend Cabinet meetings, so she did. And caught a lot of flak for that. But she was then able to speak with authority on issues across our country and the world.

She would often try, and often fail, to get Dad to do what was right politically, and when she couldn’t change Dad’s mind she would repeat to herself: A leader takes people where they want to go, a great leader takes people where they need to go.

Losing the election in 1980 was devastating to us all. My parents were still young, my mother only 53, and they knew they still had more to contribute. They decided they would become missionaries and spent months trying to decide how to accomplish their goal. Finally, they decided as partners to start the Carter Center, which would allow my mother to continue to fight the stigma of mental illness and allow them both to help the poorest of the poor on this earth, as Jesus had taught them.

Mom started the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers at Georgia Southwestern University to train and support those who help others. At the same time Mom and Dad continued to support Habitat for Humanity, and Mom continued to support the Friendship Force.

She told me that her adventures had led her to more than 120 countries. She had been fly-fishing all over the world. She had met kings and queens, presidents, others in authority, powerful corporate leaders, and celebrities. She said the people that she felt the most comfortable with and the people she enjoyed being with the most were those that lived in absolute, abject poverty, the ones without adequate housing, without a proper diet and without access.

She had probably more adventures than anybody else on earth. Mom was always fun to be with. The Halloween before the pandemic, Mom showed up at Amy’s house. Amy lives on a street which closes down on Halloween, and every house is decorated. Mom was beautifully dressed as a monarch butterfly. The Secret Service were dressed casually, but perfectly, as Secret Service agents.

She proceeded to go up and down the street with her great-grandchildren and grandchildren and go trick or treating up and down and talk to people all over the street. She got back to Amy’s, and she was so excited because she’d been out so much and nobody had recognized her.

After Dad was put in hospice, my mother was racked with dementia, my siblings, my wife and I would stay with them so that there would always be a family member around. One day my mother was sitting with my wife, Becky, and she was reminiscing on what it was like to go and live in Hawaii. And she was talking about learning all of the native dances. And she got up from the sofa, pushed her walker away — which she couldn’t take a step without — and proceeded to do the hula for two or three minutes. She grabbed her walker, turned around, sat back on the sofa, turned to my wife and said, “That’s how you do it.”

I will always love my mother, I will cherish how she and dad raised their children. They’ve given us such a great example of how a couple should relate.

Let me finish by saying that my mother, Rosalynn Carter, was the most beautiful woman I have ever met, and pretty to look at, too. Thank you.

Categories Love

Florida: DeSantis Hires Company to Train State Guard for Combat

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2023 //
14

Ron DeSantis clearly wants to have his own country, where he is el caudillo, the guy in charge of everything. Now that he has a supine supermajority in the Legislature and has named the majority on the Florida Supreme Court, what else does he need? His own army!

Never willing to say no to DeSantis, the Legislature appropriated millions for the governor to have a state guard (in addition to the National Guard, which is under federal control).

But that was not good enough for Ron. He wanted his Guard to be combat-ready. So he hired a private company to teach his Guard how to use weapons and explosives and to prepare for urban warfare.

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

The Florida company trains police and military members on tactical shooting, explosives and urban combat and is owned by a former Army green beret who supports the Republican governor’s presidential campaign. The governor, the State Guard and the Florida Department of Military Affairs, which oversees the agreement, didn’t respond to questions about the training services.

The state’s civilian force was initially sold as a unit that would help Florida’s overworked National Guard respond to emergencies within the state. Since then, its scope has been expanded to allow the state guard to respond to emergencies anywhere in the country, and some members have been granted the ability to make arrests and carry weapons….

In promotional videos, Stronghold SOF Solutions highlights training that teaches individuals how to use drones, explosives and precision shooting. The company, based in Destin with a training facility in Defuniak Springs, touts having trained various special forces units, including Army Rangers, and police officers. Its facilities include a shoot house, various firing ranges, an airfield and a targetry.

If DeSantis can’t be President, at least he will have his own combat-ready army.

Categories Democracy, DeSantis, Extremism, Florida

Elon Musk Sues Critic for Scaring Away Advertisers

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2023 //
11

An organization called Media Matters reviewed Twitter content and determined that the ads placed by major corporations were sometimes posted next to Nazi or other anti-Semitic tweets. Some of these corporations responded by suspending their ads, thus hurting Twitter’s revenues. Elon Musk has sued Media Matters.

My view: Musk owns Twitter (X); he can put up any content he wants. Media Matters is free to comment on the content of Twitter and warn reputable advertisers that their ads are being placed next to offensive content. Big advertisers are free to place their ads wherever they want and they are free to object to advertising alongside Nazi tweets. Everyone is free.

Greg Sergeant of The Washington Post reviewed the situation. If you are able to open his article, you will see the Nazi tweets.

He begins:

Elon Musk’s new lawsuit against Media Matters, which X Corp. filed late Monday, has been dismissed by legal experts as a frivolous effort to bully a prominent critic into silence. But some Republicans apparently see this as a feature, not a bug: They are allying themselves with Musk’s effort for precisely this purpose.

Musk’s suit charges that Media Matters deliberately and deceptively harmed X (formerly Twitter) with a widely-publicized investigation showing that posts containing pro-Nazi content appeared on X alongside advertisements from leading companies. That, along with a surge in antisemitic content, has advertisers fleeing the site, sparking a slide in ad revenue.

Republicans are eagerly rushing to Musk’s rescue — and not just rhetorically. Two GOP state attorneys general — Ken Paxton in Texas and Andrew Bailey in Missouri — have responded by announcing vaguely defined investigations into Media Matters.

Meanwhile, Trump adviser Stephen Miller is urging Republican law enforcement officials to probe Media Matters for “criminal” activity. And Mike Davis, who is touting himself as Donald Trump’s next attorney general, has declared that Media Matters staff members should be jailed.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Texas, doesn’t deny that the juxtapositions between ads and pro-Nazi postings are real. Rather, it accuses Media Matters of creating an account following only fringe content and endlessly refreshing it until it finally generated the juxtapositions. Those are “extraordinarily rare,” the suit says, but were deliberately engineered to disparage X, harm its revenue stream and interfere with its contracts with advertisers.

It’s a weak case, as experts point out. The Media Matters article said it had “found” the juxtapositions, which X calls “false,” insisting they were “manipulated” into existence. But even if you question Media Matters’s presentation of the facts, it still wouldn’t show that it did “all of this to harm X’s market value,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“If Media Matters doctored the images and couldn’t replicate those results, then maybe there would be a claim here,” Vladeck told me, stressing that it did prove “possible to see those ads” alongside Nazi-related content. He noted that Media Matters plausibly wrote about these juxtapositions not to hurt X, but because they’re “newsworthy.”

When I asked Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters for America, whether it’s misleading to say these images were “found,” he rejected the premise. He noted that Media Matters’s goal was to show that despite X’s assurances to the contrary, internal safeguards had failed to prevent those juxtapositions from actually happening.

“The point that we’ve been making is that the filters that they say exist are not working the way that they claim,” Carusone said of X. “Ads can and do run alongside extremist content.” That’s something those companies would surely want to know about — and avoid.

The lawsuit might get dismissed. But if not, Carusone said, Media Matters would probably pursue discovery, seeking to learn whether Musk and X executives “knew internally” that these juxtapositions were happening, what they communicated with advertisers about this, and how Musk internally discussed procedures for handling extremist content.

Discovery would also seek communications about Musk’s public antisemitism, Carusone said. Musk recently endorsed a posting that some Jewish communities are pushing “hatred against whites,” resulting in “hordes of minorities flooding” into Western countries — classic white genocide theory. Carusone noted that discovery could establish whether Musk’s “seeming endorsement of the white genocide worldview” was a major reason for “advertisers to reassess.”

Which brings us to a bigger point: Musk’s own antisemitic utterances — and his own website’s handling of antisemitic content — are plainly also key reasons companies are leaving. As First Amendment lawyer Ken White told me, it’s hard to imagine that the Media Matters report alone would have done this damage: “Much of the advertiser exodus resulted from Musk personally and eagerly endorsing explicitly antisemitic rhetoric.”

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Media

Politico: Most Vouchers Are Used by Students Who Never Attended Public Schools

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2023 //
8

How many times have we heard the claim that “vouchers will save poor kids from failing public schools”? That claim is plainly false. As we have seen voucher programs scale up, it’s clear that the overwhelming majority of students who take vouchers never attended public schools.

Now, even Politico has noticed that the main beneficiaries of vouchers are rich kids. Maybe that was the goal all along. The headline of a piece Politico ran recently was: “GOP States Are Embracing Vouchers. Wealthy Parents Are Benefitting.”

In Arkansas, where vouchers were just initiated, 95% were claimed by students never in public school. Florida, with its long-established voucher program, recently made vouchers available to all, regardless of income. Only 13% of vouchers were claimed by public school students.

Those of us who follow education politics closely have known these facts for a long time. Veteran voucher researcher Josh Cowen of Michigan State University has broadcast this finding in TIME, in The Hechinger Report, in daily newspaper columns.

But when POLITICO notices that vouchers are subsidizing those who never attended public schools, it means that the news is spreading beyond the choir of voucher critics.

With enrollment surging in these programs — which Republicans say shows how desperate families are for more education choices — early data shows that students in some of these states aren’t leaving their public schools for private options. Instead, most scholarships are going to incoming kindergarteners and students already enrolled in private schools…

School choice expansions are fueled, in part, by groups like the American Federation for Children — founded by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — sending millions of dollars to candidates who support them. For the 2022 election cycle, the organization boasted donating $9 million to candidates backing school choice with reportedly solid success — winning 277 out of 368 races.

DeVos and the GOP are not known for their devotion to poor kids, unless you believe voucher propaganda.

More than half of the voucher funding in Arizona is going to students previously enrolled in private school, homeschooling or other non-public options, according to a memo circulated by the Hobbs administration. In 2022 in Arizona, 45 percent of scholarship applicants came from the wealthiest quarter of students in the state, according to an analysisfrom one think tank.

Vouchers divert funding from the public schools to pay the partial tuition of rich kids. We now know?

Was that the plan all along?

Categories Education Reform

Florida: School Officials Removed for Allowing Trans Girl to Play Girls’ Volleyball

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
36

The Florida State Education Department applauded the superintendent of schools in Broward County for taking swift and stern action when he learned that a transgender girl was allowed to play on the girls’ volleyball team at Monarch High School. The superintendent received an anonymous tip about the student and reacted by removing the principal, the assistant principal, and members of the athletic staff.

When the word got out, students staged a protest by walking out.

Following the removal of a Broward County high school principal and four employees in response to “allegations of improper student participation in sports,” Florida education officials on Tuesday said they expect “serious consequences for those responsible” and accused them of violating state law.

The comments came hours after Broward County Public School officials confirmed the reassignments of the Monarch High School employees occurred because a transgender female athlete played volleyball at the high school during the fall season and after hundreds of students staged a peaceful walkout during school hours to protest the decision. The students, who gathered on the football field and walked to the parking lot on the north end of the school, shouted, “Let her play,” “Trans rights are human rights” and “Free Cecil now,” referring to Monarch principal James Cecil, who was among the employees reassigned. Kenneth May, the assistant principal; Dione Hester, the athletic director; Jessica Norton, the girls’ volleyball coach; and Alex Burgess, a temporary athletic coach, were also reassigned.

The reassignment of the five staff members is “ridiculous,” said Alexandra Almeida, a senior at Monarch, who participated in the walkout to support her friends. She hoped the walkout, which she heard about through social media Monday, would “bring more awareness to the situation so that people see what’s happening in our Florida schools.”

Safe Schools South Florida in a statement said it is “appalled” by the district’s decision. The organization works with LGBTQ students to promote inclusivity and diversity within the education system “The reassignment of faculty is a measure typically reserved for the gravest of infractions. In this case, it is not only an overreaction but also a glaring misjudgment,” the statement read. “Furthermore, the potential inadvertent outing of a minor, who may not have publicly disclosed their transgender status, is deeply troubling.”

But state officials, in response to a Miami Herald inquiry, said department officials “instructed the district to take immediate action” upon being notified of the issue “since this is a direct violation of Florida law.” During a brief news conference Tuesday, Broward County schools Superintendent Peter Licata said officials spoke to the Florida Department of Education on Monday.

“Under Governor DeSantis, boys will never be allowed to play girls’ sports. It’s that simple,” said Cailey Myers, communications director for the state Department of Education.

There was no mention of the win-loss record of the girls’ volleyball team.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article282411498.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Florida, Gender, Students

Thom Hartmann: The GOP Plan to Kill Social Security

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
14

This may be the most important article you read today. The Republicans have made it a practice to promote culture-war issues in order to obscure their real goals: cutting or eliminating entitlement programs, including Social Security, Medicare and Obamacare. Because the entitlement programs are wildly popular, the GOP can’t admit publicly that they oppose them. So the GOP elevates issues that they oppose like “woke,” critical race theory, diversity-equity-inclusion, drag queens, and gay marriage. Forget the smokescreen and see what their real agenda is.

Thom Hartmann writes.

Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed Social Security through Congress, signing it into law on August 14th 1935, and Republicans opposed it then and have hated it ever since.

Next week, they’re planning to do something about it with a House hearing designed to set up a closed-door commission to “reform” the program. They figure when government funding runs out in January they’ll be able use the fiscal crisis they intend to create to force Democrats to go along with what the Biden administration calls a “Death Panel for Medicare and Social Security.”

There is an incredibly long history here.

Back in 1935 during the debate on Social Security, New York Republican Congressman James Wadsworth rose to warn America that the program to end poverty among the elderly was an effort by Roosevelt to establish a dictatorship in America. It would be, he said:

“[A] power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.”

Echoing Wadsworth, fellow New Yorker Republican Daniel Reed, imagining himself a modern-day Paul Revere, declared, “The lash of the dictator will [soon] be felt!”

The next year was a presidential election, and the 1936 Republican presidential candidate, Alf Landon, campaigned on ending Social Security’s “cruel hoax” and “fraud on the working man”; four years later, the GOP’s 1940 presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, promised Americans that “you will never collect a dollar of your Social Security.”

It hasn’t quite worked out that way: Social Security has never missed a payment, never bounced a check, and pretty much ended the widespread deaths by poverty-associated hunger and freezing to death in the winter that were widespread among the elderly before its adoption.

Nonetheless, Republicans still hate the program. As do the fat-cat bankers who fund them and think those trillions in the Social Security Trust Fund should be in their money bins where they can skim a few billion a month off in administrative fees for themselves and the politicians they own.

Over the past two decades, Republicans in Congress have done everything they can to sour Americans on Social Security, mostly by repeatedly gutting funding for its administration every time they have control of the budget process.

The GOP’s plan has been to so overburden workers at the Social Security Administration that it takes absurd amounts of time and effort for people turning 65 to sign up, or for seniors on Social Security to find anybody to talk with about problems with or confusion about their claims.

In this, they’ve been spectacularly successful, forcing cut after cut into must-pass budget bills under the threat of government shutdowns.

As the economists at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) note:

“Congress has cut SSA’s core operating budget by 17 percent since 2010, after adjusting for inflation. These cuts hurt SSA’s service to the public in every state. The agency has been forced to shutter field offices and shrink its staff, leading to longer waits for service and growing backlogs. While the overall effect is a decline in service nationwide, the effects of the cuts vary considerably by state.

“SSA’s staff shrank by 15 percent nationwide between 2010 and 2021, so there are fewer people to take appointments, answer phones, and process applications for Social Security’s vital retirement, survivors, and disability benefits.

“As a result, workers and beneficiaries must wait longer to be served. Four states — Alaska, Iowa, Virginia, and West Virginia — and Puerto Rico have each lost more than 25 percent of their staff since 2010. …

“DDS (disability) staff shrank by 16 percent nationwide between 2010 and 2021. Eight states — Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia — each lost over 30 percent of their DDS staff.”

Congressional Republicans’ hope, of course, is to make the administration of Social Security so clunky that frustrated Americans will go along with turning the program over to the giant banks who own the Republican Party (and more than a few Democrats).

And now House Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson is keeping his promise to his banking industry donors, making one of his first orders of business to push forward the further immiseration — and ultimate privatization — of Social Security.

He’s not the first.

When Ronald Reagan had a chance, he jumped at the opportunity to avoid political heat by passing the buck to a 1981 commission headed up by Libertarian/Republican Alan Greenspan (a former member of Ayn Rand’s cult, who brought a dollar-shaped floral wreath to her funeral).

To “save” Social Security and avoid lifting the cap on Social Security taxes (today set at $160,200: if you make more than that, you and every millionaire and billionaire in America don’t pay an additional penny to support Social Security), Reagan’s commission made benefits taxable for the first time, nearly doubled the Social Security part of the FICA tax rate working-class people paid, and raised the retirement/eligibility age from 65 to 67.

That, though, wasn’t nearly enough for Republicans who still consider Social Security “tyranny,” “socialism,” “fraud,” a “Ponzi scheme,” and a “hoax.”

— Senator Rick Scott, before being called out by President Biden, pushed a plan to require the very existence of the entire Social Security program to be reauthorized by Congress every 5 years or it would automatically expire.

— Senator Ron Johnson demanded it become part of annual budget negotiations that could be held hostage to the debt ceiling.

— Lindsey Graham called “entitlement reform” a “must” and the largest caucus in the GOP, the Republican Study Committee, published a proposal that would turn Social Security into a welfare program as an initial step toward full privatization.

— Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio has called for raising the retirement age even higher than Reagan’s 67, and Senator Mike Lee called for a total “phase out” of Social Security.

— Florida Republican Congressman Mike Waltz told Fox Business, “If we really want to talk about the debt and spending, it’s the entitlements programs.”

— Senators John Thune and Mitt Romney have floated similar proposals. The list could go on for pages, particularly if we go back through previous decades.

And it’s not just Republicans in Congress who have worked for years to destroy Social Security: so have GOP presidents.

In 2005, after winning reelection based on his 2003 “wartime president” scheme to lie America into attacking Iraq and Afghanistan, George W. Bush (who campaigned for Congress in 1978 on turning Social Security over to the big banks like the one his grandfather ran) began a tour of America touting full privatization of Social Security.

“I earned capital in this campaign,” he said, “political capital, and now I intend to spend it [on privatizing Social Security].”

In that, he was simply trying to fulfill his campaign promise that banks, instead of the government, should administer “private” Social Security accounts for seniors. As he said in his 2004 State of the Union address:

“Younger workers should have the opportunity to build a nest egg by saving part of their Social Security taxes in a personal retirement account. We should make the Social Security system a source of ownership for the American people.”

Back in 2010, President Obama established a bipartisan commission by executive order to look at ways to reduce the national debt, but Republicans on the commission demanded it focus instead on cutting Social Security (which has nothing to do with the nation’s debt, as SS is self-funding).

Because of the GOP’s obsession with using the commission as an opportunity to try to cut the program, Democrats began calling it the “Catfood Commission”: the GOPs’ proposed cuts in benefits would force seniors to eat cheap cat food to survive. The commission died an ignominious death.

Now Speaker MAGA Mike Johnson wants to revive the Catfood Commission, only this time behind closed doors where the capitol police can keep out those pesky members of the press and the public.

Its first meeting will be tomorrow, headed up by Republican Budget Committee Chair Jodey Arrington. (The announcement is here.)

Social Security Works Executive Director Alex Lawson asked Representative Arrington if Republicans were planning to cut benefits to seniors with their proposed commission and, as Lawson noted in a viral Twitter video, Arrington:

“REFUSES to tax the ultra-wealthy to protect Social Security. Instead, he plans to create a death panel to cut Social Security behind closed doors.”

Republicans now think they have the wind at their backs in this effort, which banks have poured hundreds of millions of lobbying and campaign contribution dollars into over the years.

Fully 10,000 people become eligible for Social Security every day, and these new retirees are increasingly frustrated with the time delays at the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the difficulty even reaching a real person to speak with.

This, of course, is the intended outcome of more than a decade of GOP cuts to the program’s administrative staff.

As CPBB notes:

“SSA lost roughly 11,000 employees between 2010 and 2021 and expects to lose another 4,500 front-line employees this year. State DDSs lost roughly 2,500 employees between 2010 and 2021 and attrition over the past year is over 25 percent. Inevitably, understaffing means that beneficiaries must wait longer to be served.

“The average processing time for an initial disability claim had held fairly steady in recent years at three to four months, but has been rising and reached over six months in April 2022. One million applicants awaited a decision on their disability benefit applications as of April 1, 2022.”

Tomorrow’s hearing will be behind closed doors, and, if mainstream media’s historic reluctance to highlight the GOP’s hatred of Social Security is any indication, it’s unlikely it’ll even be covered by the press in any significant way.

But keep an eye on this and tell everyone you know about it. Social Security Works is leading the charge to notify the public, noting that over 100 national organizations have already spoken out against this latest Republican attack on the program.

Both the MAGA faction and the old-line “conservative” corporate shill members of the GOP are dead serious about killing off this vital and important part of FDR’s legacy: it’s going to take grassroots outrage to stop them.

Forget the culture wars: They are a distraction. A vote for a Republican is a vote to eliminate Social Security.

Categories Education Reform

The Network for Public Education Needs YOU!

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
7

The Network for Public Education is the largest organization of volunteers and a tiny staff working every day to stop privatization of our public schools. The following is a message from our executive director, Carol Burris. Unlike the billionaire-funded advocacy groups for charters and vouchers, we need you! Contributions of any size are welcome!

What keeps NPE going are donors like you–friends of public education who are willing to make a one-time or monthly donation to invest in the continuance of our public schools.

We operate on a shoestring. But our reports, action alerts, advocacy, conferences, and webinars with Diane put us at the forefront of saving public education. Behind the scenes in fighting vouchers in Texas or making the case for Charter School Programs reform, NPE is the organization with a tiny budget but a mighty voice.

So please give to NPE this holiday season. You can make an online donation here, or, if you prefer to send a check, our address is:

The Network for Public Education, PO BOX 227, New York City, NY 10156.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Network for Public Education, Privatization, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

John Thompson: What Do School Report Cards Mean?

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2023 //
7

John Thompson, historian and retired history teacher, analyzes the use and misuse of Oklahoma’s school report cards.

He writes:

As usual, the 2023 Oklahoma school Report Card prompted headlines about “struggling” students. But counter-intuitively, State Superintendent Ryan Walters stressed the declines during his time in office!?!?

Two tales of the Report Card are being told. As the Tulsa World reports, Walters “claimed that the data was from ‘previous years,’ even though all of the academic achievement indicators are from state tests administered just seven months ago.” Yes, taking office as State Superintendent in January 2023, Walters hasn’t had time to achieve many gains in learning, even if he’d really tried to. But the chaos during 2023, combined with the disruption he’d spread since 2020 as head of the Education Department, provided plenty of time for disruption.

As the Oklahoman reports, Walters cited the greatest decline under his watch, 8th grade reading proficiency which saw “a 5.7 percent decrease,” although “No other grade had more than a 0.4 percent decrease in reading scores, and some others “saw a very small uptick in reading scores.” Walters then promised “we are taking a Back to Basics approach,” which is the opposite of what it takes to increase proficiency.

The wisest narrative, illustrated by the Education Watch’s Jennifer Palmer, places the 2023 Report Card within the context of the massive decline of scores due to Covid, and the 2022 report. The 2023 report saw “no big swings in proficiency rates in any of the three tested subjects content,” while noting the overlooked fact that “a score of basic means a student demonstrated foundational knowledge and skills.”

Then Palmer tweeted background information on the differences between what basic means, as opposed to the widely misunderstood grade of proficiency which, I must add, has been misrepresented since the Reagan administration in order to denigrate public education. Oklahoma’s 8th grade reading proficiency grade requires that “students demonstrate mastery over even the most challenging grade-level content and are ready for the next grade, course or level of education.” It requires mastery of grade level skills that include interpretation, evaluation, analysis across multiple texts, and critical thinking. Mastery in requires use of evidence, argumentative response and synthesis of to create “written works for multiple purposes.”

As Palmer tweeted, we need a more nuanced” understanding of “reading.” And “the 8th graders who didn’t score proficient, but are in the ‘basic’ category, can still do all this” and then she linked to the challenging goals that are required for that grade, which include: partial mastery of interpretation, evaluation, analysis across multiple texts, critical thinking, use of evidence, argumentative response and synthesis.

Granted, these definitions are not necessarily the same as the more reliable NAEP scores. But as Jan Resseger explains, the nation’s NAEP proficiency grade “represents A level work, at worst an A-” and, basically, the same applies to Oklahoma’s tests. She asks, “Would you be upset to learn that “only” 40% of 8th graders are at an A level in math and “only” 1/3rd scored an A in reading?”

Ressenger also cites the huge body of research explaining why School Report Cards aren’t a reliable tool for measuring school effectiveness. We need a better understanding why the proficiency has been weaponized against schools, but we also need to master the huge body of research which explains why Report Cards aren’t a fair, reliable, and valid measure of how well schools are performing.

I’ll just cite one of the scholars that Ressenger draws upon. Stanford’s Sean Reardon’s 2022 research explained why “test score gaps may result from unequal opportunities either in or out of school; [but] they are not necessarily the result of differences in school quality, resources, or experience.” Reardon documented:

The socioeconomic profile of a district is a powerful predictor of the average test score performance of students in that district. The most and least socioeconomically advantaged districts have average performance levels more than four grade levels apart. … Achievement gaps are larger in districts where black and Hispanic students attend higher poverty schools than their white peers… and where large racial/ethnic gaps exist in parents’ educational attainment. The size of the gaps has little or no association with average class size, a district’s per capita student spending or charter school enrollment.

And that brings us to chronic absenteeism. As the New York Times reports, across the nation, “nearly 70 percent of the highest poverty schools experienced widespread, chronic absenteeism in the 2021-22 school year,” and “in these schools, about a third or more of the student body was considered chronically absent.” Of course, the Times notes, “Students cannot learn if they are not in school, and they cannot benefit from interventions, such as tutoring, that are supposed to help them make up pandemic losses.”

And Palmer reports:

Across the state, 20% of students were chronically absent last year, a half a percent increase over 2022. Some student groups were even higher: 24% of Hispanic students, 25% of economically disadvantaged and 31% of Black students were chronically absent …” Moreover, excessive absences are more prevalent now than before the pandemic. In 2019, 14% of Oklahoma students were chronically absent.

Tulsa World had previously reported that “About half of the Tulsa high school students are chronically absent” and explained why this complex and serious problem is “showing no signs of improvement.” The World cited the work of Georgetown’s Phyllis Jordan who explained the need to reconnect “what’s going on in the school and what’s going on outside the school.”

On one hand, that is why Patrick Forsyth, a University of Oklahoma professor who had analyzed the state’s A-F report card system, said “using attendance to measure school effectiveness is like using rates of tobacco use to measure hospital effectiveness.” On the other hand, as the Oklahoman reported, the Attendance Works’ Hedy Chang said, chronic absenteeism is an “all-hands-on-deck moment.” She also called on schools to “learn the specific barriers to attendance that their students experience before crafting a response to those unique challenges.”

That gets us back to the tragedy of two tales about what the Report Card means. Sadly, Ryan Walters uses it as one more weapon for disrupting public education. The other side must use these flawed metrics not to punish but for diagnostic purposes.

Categories Education Reform, NAEP, Oklahoma, Standardized Testing
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