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Michael Hiltzik: NBC’s “Meet the Press” Interview with Trump Was a Disaster

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
15

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, excoriates Kristen Welner, the new face of “Meet the Press” for her inability to pose tough questions to Trump or to counter his repeated lies. But, in fairness, Trump knows how to use television to his own advantage far better than the professional journalists who interview him. The bottom line is that no broadcast journalist has figured out how to counter a firehouse of lies.

He writes:

When Chuck Todd announced in June that he would be retiring as host of “Meet the Press,” not a few people who take politics seriously breathed a sigh of relief: No more of Todd’s insight-free, planed-down, both-sides-do-it horse race approach to news.

The NBC News publicity machine immediately built up Todd’s successor, Kristen Welker, as a tough, whip-smart journalist, “dogged” and a master of “sharp questioning of lawmakers.”

That whole PR edifice came crashing down Sunday, when Welker got steamrollered by Donald Trump on national television.

Despite ample evidence that dealing with Trump on his own level — through four years of the Trump presidency and as recently as May, when Trump chewed CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins to pieces at a misbegotten town hall — was a no-win situation, NBC News went ahead and subjected its hopelessly unprepared journalist to ritual humiliation. It was a milepost in the deterioration of network news’ ability and inclination to hold politicians to account.

What Trump received was a nearly hour-long, essentially unmoderated publicity platform, gratis, an opportunity to once again show that he is a feral exploiter of television’s tendency to take everyone at their own level of self-esteem.

Of Welker the sharp questioner of lawmakers, nothing remains. Here’s a fair sampling of her presence during the interview (drawn from the full official transcript of the encounter, of which only a portion was shown during the broadcast):

“But Mr. President—”

“Let’s stay on track, though, Mr. President.”

“Mr. President, we have so many topics to cover.”

“You had —”

“You — Mr. President —”

“But, let me, let me, but Mr. President —”

“Mr. President, let me just ask this question, please —”

Etc, etc….

The transcript fails to illustrate how often Welker, bollixed by Trump, ended up stepping on her own questions. Trump delivered the coup de grace late in the program, when he complained to Welker, “You keep interrupting me.”

Welker allowed Trump to emit lie after lie in what I’ve described as his “Gish gallop,” a technique named for a notorious creationist who would conduct debates with experts in evolution by “spewing forth torrents of errorthat the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.”

Welker tried, here and there, to counter Trump’s lies, but on the whole she failed miserably; they just keep coming at too great a pace. But she displayed abject ignorance about too many of the issues she herself raised. NBC News posted a “fact check” online after the broadcast, but at a mere 1,800 words it couldn’t possibly correct the record adequately.

Let’s take a look at some of Trump’s most egregious lies.

On abortion, Trump claimed that Democrats advocate allowing abortions “after five months, six months, seven months, eight months, nine months, and even after birth.”

Not only is after-birth abortion a contradiction in terms, but late-term abortions aren’t done out of a casual decision not to proceed with birth, but because the fetus is not viable or suffers from extreme deformities, or the pregnancy is a threat to the woman’s health.

Welker’s response to this was a wan, “Only 1% of late-term abortions happen.”

When Welker asked about the consequences of anti-abortion laws in red states — “How is it acceptable in America that women’s lives are at risk, doctors are being forced to turn away patients in need, or risk breaking the law?” — Trump simply failed to give an answer, and Welker failed to insist on one.

Trump claimed that abortion is “a 50/50 issue,” meaning that the U.S. public is evenly split. That’s not true.

According to Gallup, 67% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy — the first 90 days. The most stringent anti-abortion laws enacted in red states don’t allow abortion at all or restrict it to the first six weeks, a period in which many women don’t even know they’re pregnant.

Importantly, Gallup finds that 58% consistently oppose the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide. Trump has long bragged about having installed the court majority that overturned the 1973 ruling.

Trump defended his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including his notorious call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to find enough votes to flip the Georgia results from Joe Biden to himself. He said Raffensperger “again last week said I didn’t do anything wrong… Raffensperger said ‘it was a negotiation.’ ”

This is a lie. Raffensperger has not said Trump did not do anything wrong. At a federal court hearing last month on a motion by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to move the trial over his indictment over conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, Raffensperger was asked point-blank by the judge whether the call was a “negotiation.” He replied that it was not.

Trump has also been indicted in that case, brought by Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis.

Turning to economic affairs, Trump claimed that his 2017 tax cuts, which went mostly to corporations and wealthy people, “created tremendous jobs…. More importantly, we had more revenue with lower taxes than we did with higher taxes.” These assertions are false or highly misleading.

Job growth under Trump fell short of the mark set by former President Obama. In the first three years of Trump’s administration (leaving out 2020, when the pandemic provoked huge job losses), 6.36 million jobs were created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; in the last three years of the Obama administration, 8 million jobs were created.

In the two years following the tax cuts, job growth was meager — 2.3 million new jobs in 2019, and 2 million in 2019. Those were worse than the annual figures for 2013-16. Under Biden, incidentally, nearly 14 million jobs have been created, in part thanks to the post-pandemic recovery.

Higher revenues after enactment of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act? No, not really.

Corporate income tax receipts fell to $224.9 billion in 2018 from $230.34 billion the year before and fell again to $210.45 billion in 2019. Personal income tax receipts held their own in 2018, coming in at $1.615 trillion, up modestly from $1.613 trillion in 2017, then rose to $1.7 trillion in 2020.

But those figures fell significantly below what had been projected by the Congressional Budget Office in 2017 — a shortfall of $275 billion, or 7.6% of pre-tax cut projected revenues, the Brookings Institution calculated.

Put it all together, and Brookings found that despite conservatives’ promises, “The TCJA did not pay for itself, nor is it likely to do so in the future.”

Welker, of course, was utterly ill-equipped to push back on Trump’s job and revenue claims. He simply blamed the pandemic, though the consequences of the tax cuts were felt long before then.

What’s most shocking is that almost none of Trump’s lies was new — he’s been spouting most of them nonstop. So how could Welker be so unprepared to address them head-on?

Given that the quality of Welker’s interrogation scraped the bottom of the barrel clean, it’s hard to pinpoint the lowest of low notes.

My vote for the single stupidest question she put to Trump is this one, which wasn’t heard during Sunday’s broadcast but appears in the full transcript: “Is there any scenario by which you would seek a third term in office?”

Leaving aside that Trump has served only a single term, lost his bid for a second term, and is not yet the official GOP candidate for the 2024 campaign, there’s this little thing out there known as the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That amendment states forthrightly, in black and white, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Perhaps Welker hasn’t had a chance to learn about it yet, it’s been around only since 1951.

Trump was perhaps too canny to answer her question; he turned it into an attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is challenging him for the nomination.

But one can only ask: What the hell was Welker thinking? Was this her way of asking Trump if he would stage an anti-constitutional coup d’etat? If so, why not ask that outright?

And where the hell was the NBC News staff, who surely were in the room at Trump’s New Jersey golf club where the interview took place? Did no one say, “Er, Kristen….”

So that was that. At the end of the interview Welker docilely asked Trump, “If you have time, I think we want to get one little shot of us walking together.” Because, of course, what’s important to NBC News and its fellow TV enterprises is the optics.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Media, Trump

Josh Cowen: The Truth About Vouchers in Milwaukee

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
9

Joshua Cowen, Professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University, has been researching and writing about vouchers for yearly 20 years. As you will read, school choice advocates were very angry about his criticisms of vouchers. They told him he was wrong. George Mitchell, a founder of School Choice Wisconsin wrote a comment on this blog, highly critical of negative judgments about vouchers. Here is Josh Cowen’s response.

Author: Josh Cowen

Affiliation: Professor of Education Policy, Michigan State University

Topic: Wisconsin Voucher Results

Recently, I made comments to the Wisconsin Examiner that were highly critical of Wisconsin’s system of school vouchers. The columnist for that piece had asked me as a researcher with 18 years of experience on the topic for my professional opinion about a new School Choice Wisconsin report purporting to show that Wisconsin vouchers are more cost-effective than the state’s public schools.

In response to my comments, the director of School Choice Wisconsin issued his second op-ed in one week, slamming both me and the Examiner columnist; a researcher from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which like School Choice Wisconsin is heavily subsidized by the voucher-advocating Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, issued a similar social media thread; and George Mitchell himself, the co-founder of SCW, sent me not one but two angry and unsolicited emails trying to rebut me.

Among other things, I said to the Examiner: “If you took the report at its word, it’s possible to achieve exactly what they’re describing simply by exiting the children who are the most expensive to educate.”

I make similar assessments in other states, based on the large volume of data showing that voucher programs like Wisconsin’s have huge exit rates among the lowest scoring and lowest income students. I’m used to objections from conservative activists who are for ideological reasons supportive of vouchers, but the sheer volume in this case is frankly odd and warrants extra attention.

Wisconsin is also a bit different because that’s where I got much of my start on voucher research—and that’s where some of the more troubling patterns of student exits from voucher schools first emerged. As an early career analyst on the last official evaluation of vouchers—at the time, limited to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program between 2005 and 2010—I helped study those data.

Here’s the thing: the Bradley Foundation financially supported that larger evaluation, and School Choice Wisconsin played an integral role in participant recruitment for the study.

What we found in not one but two papers published in the top education research journals in the country was that students left Milwaukee vouchers at high rates, roughly 15% of kids per year (in other states it’s above 20%), and did so in very systematic ways: the lowest scoring kids, lowest income children (even in a program targeted to lower income families to begin with) and students of color were far more likely to experience turnover out of the voucher program.

And crucially, those students did better once turning or returning to Milwaukee Public Schools. That last finding was important because kids who gave up their voucher did not enroll at the highest rated MPS schools, but they still appeared to have been better served there than when they had used a voucher.

That pattern alone can inflate the numerator in the fraction SCW used to claim voucher cost-effectiveness. By dividing the state’s accountability score by a simplistic calculation of the revenue schools receive per kid, SCW was able to claim more voucher bang for the buck. It’s simple algebra: “cost effective” can mean either a high score for a given dollar spent, or a smaller dollar spent for a given accountability score.

And if, as in our MPCP evaluation, students who leave voucher programs are especially low scoring on state exams, that would artificially push SCW’s voucher numerator high. Again, simple algebra.

That is not a particularly controversial statement among serious program evaluators who specialize in such data without an agenda. And while I’m not surprised that as the state’s chief voucher advocacy group, SCW took issue with my data-backed comments, I am surprised they’ve spent as much time as they have issuing new columns and sending me angry emails.

Of course, one way to settle lingering questions about Wisconsin’s voucher program would be to hold another multi-year evaluation, in which groups like School Choice Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and teacher stakeholder groups came together to agree on a third-party review of these programs.

That happened in 2005 Wisconsin Act 125, which helped create the data in our team’s reports that I cite above. But it has not happened since vouchers expanded statewide. If School Choice Wisconsin is as confident in their numbers as they claim, they should welcome such a new evaluation—just like they did back in the program’s early years.

If that happened, Wisconsin taxpayers wouldn’t have to take voucher advocates’ word for it—or mine for that matter. One of the findings from the last evaluation was that once DPI started reporting voucher results by school name (like public schools have to do), their performance improved. Voucher advocates should want new evaluations—if they don’t, what are they worried those new reviews will find?

Absent a new evaluation, what we know for certain based on what’s available to the research community is that voucher programs have extremely high rates of student turnover, and these rates are driven by particularly high rates among at-risk children. In that, the data are quite consistent with the startling report issued by journalists at Wisconsin Watch in May, documenting strategies that Wisconsin voucher schools use to select children out after admitting them originally.

In Wisconsin, as in other states, there is far more state oversight on entry into choice programs than on exits—and yet we know for a fact that exits are where modern voucher programs truly choose their students.

Either way, and based on the independent data we do have, when it comes to using vouchers it’s the school’s choice, not parental choice.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Fake News, Milwaukee, Vouchers, Wisconsin

Houston: Mike Miles Will Create “High-Performance” Culture by Pressuring Teachers

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
22

https://abc13.com/amp/hisd-superintendent-mike-miles-pushes-accountability-for-teachers-administrators-high-performance-culture/13806311/

Categories Education Reform

Pastors for Texas Children Call on Governor Abbott to Respect Separation of Church and State

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Governor Greg Abbott convened a tele-town hall of Christian faith leaders that he would convene a special session of the legislature in October to push for vouchers. If the don’t pass, he will call another special session. He will reconvene the legislature again and again until they pass a voucher that will give about $8,000 to every eligible student. The Texas Senate supports vouchers; the Texas House does not.

The Legislative Budget Board estimated that legislation would cost Texas $4.9 billion through 2028. It failed to get out of the House Public Education Committee.

“I’m never going to be in support of sending our precious taxpayer dollars to unaccountable private schools that don’t have to meet any of the requirements that our public schools have to meet. This is going to destroy public education in the state of Texas,” State Rep. James Talarico, D-Round Rock, told Nexstar Tuesday.

The Pastors for Texas Children have steadfastly defended public schools and opposed vouchers for religious schools. Under the leadership of Pastor Charles Foster Johnson, PTC has inspired similar organizations in other states where public schools are besieged by religious groups and politicians who want the taxpayers to fund religious schools. PTC makes clear that church and state should remain separate as a matter of principle. The Founding Fathers understood that, which is why the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any law regarding the establishment of religion and protects the free exercise of religion.

Pastors for Texas Children issued the following statement in response to Governor Greg Abbott’s aggressive lobbying for voucher legislation.

PTC Responds to Governor’s Town Hall

In an unprecedented violation of God’s law of religious liberty and the American doctrine of the separation of church and state, Governor Greg Abbott this afternoon called on ministers and pastors to use God’s pulpit to push his private school voucher program.

Specifically, October 15 has been designated as pro-voucher Sunday.

“The people of Texas know an eternal truth that seems to escape Gov. Abbott, that all genuine faith is voluntary and cannot properly be endorsed or supported by the authority of the state,” said Rev. Charles Foster Johnson, executive director of Pastors For Texas Children.

“The use of public tax dollars to subsidize religious instruction is a sin against God.”

The governor’s initiative today is in direct response to Pastors For Texas Children’s decade long-opposition to the diversion of public funds for private and religious schools.

PTC is very intentional in its messaging to keep politics out of our pulpits. Our engagements are conducted by individual clergy outside formal times of religious gatherings.

Furthermore, the threats made by the governor this afternoon against pro-public education State Representatives is an inappropriate and desperate attempt to intimidate dedicated public servants representing the interests of their people.

This crass bullying is particularly odious.

The truth of the matter is that the House of Representatives of the State of Texas opposes private school vouchers, as they have for over two decades.

That will not change no matter how many special legislative sessions the governor calls.

Pastors For Texas Children stands strong for the universal education of all God’s children, provided and protected by the public trust, and opposes all attempts to privatize it for sectarian religious and political reasons.

Categories Religion, Separation of church and state, Texas

Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Prepares to Shut Down the Government

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the tumultuous showdowns yesterday:

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change.

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on.

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program.

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points.

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Extremists in the House Republican conference are refusing to acknowledge the deal worked out for the budget last spring by President Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Instead, in order to pass even a continuing resolution that would buy time for Congress to pass an actual budget, they are insisting on cuts of up to 8% on discretionary spending that Senate Democrats, as well as Biden himself, are certain to oppose.

The White House has noted that the cuts the Republicans demand would mean 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers (which, in turn, would mean more drugs entering the United States); more than 2 million women and children waitlisted for the WIC food assistance program; more than 4,000 fewer rail inspection days; up to 40,000 fewer teachers, aides, and key education staff, affecting 26 million students; and so on.

House speaker McCarthy cannot corral the extremists to agree to anything unless they get such cuts, which even other Republicans recognize are nonstarters (those cuts are so unpopular that Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported today that Republicans are somewhat bizarrely considering changing their messaging about their refusal to fund the government from concerns about spending to concerns about border security).

Meanwhile, the extremists are threatening to throw McCarthy out of the speakership. There are rumors that Republican moderates are considering working with Democrats to save McCarthy’s job, but Democrats are not keen on helping him when he has just agreed to open a baseless impeachment inquiry into the president in order to appease the extremists.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

As a shutdown appears more and more likely, even Republicans acknowledge that the problem is on their side of the House. Until the 1980s, funding gaps did not lead to government shutdowns. Government agencies continued to work, with the understanding that Congress would eventually work out funding disputes. But in 1980 a fight over funding the 1,600-employee Federal Trade Commission led President Jimmy Carter to ask Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti if the agency could continue to operate when its funding ran out. Civiletti surprised participants by saying no.

Four years ago, Civiletti told Ian Shapira of the Washington Post that his decision was about a specific and limited issue, and that he never imagined that politicians would use shutdowns for long periods of time as a political weapon. And yet, shutdowns have become more frequent and longer since the 1990s, usually as Republicans demand that Congress adopt policies they cannot pass through regular procedures (like the 34-day shutdown in 2019 over funding for the border wall former president Trump wanted).

Many observers note that “governing by crisis,” as President Barack Obama put it, is terribly damaging and that Civiletti’s decision should be revisited. Next month’s possible shutdown has the potential to be particularly problematic because there is no obvious solution. After all, it’s hardly a surprise that this budget deadline was coming up and that the extremists were angry over the deal McCarthy cut with Biden back in May, and yet McCarthy has been unable in all those months to bring his conference to an agreement.

Republicans appear resigned that voters will blame them for the crisis, which, honestly, seems fair. “We always get the blame,” Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID), a senior appropriator, told Katherine Tully-McManus and Adam Cancryn of Politico. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

Meanwhile, the House extremists continue to push their vision for the nation by undermining the institutions of the government. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), today held what normally would have been a routine oversight hearing focused on policy, law enforcement, and so on. Instead of that business, though, Jordan and the hard-right Republicans on the committee worked to construct a false reality in right-wing media by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over his role in the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, begun five years ago under Trump.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted drily that “[m]any of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland—that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump—were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.”

Instead, Jordan and his extremist colleagues shouted at Garland and over his answers, producing sound bites for right-wing media. Those included the statement from Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) that the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually “good Americans” who brought “strollers and the kids.” Even as both Biden and Garland have prioritized restoring faith in the Justice Department after Trump’s use of it for his own ends, the extremist Republicans are working to undermine that faith by constructing the false image that the Department of Justice is persecuting Trump and his allies.

Their position was not unchallenged on the committee, even within their own party. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) defended Garland from their attacks, while Democrats on the committee went after the Republicans themselves. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused Jordan of making the Judiciary Committee into a “criminal defense firm for the former president.”

Garland, who is usually soft-spoken, pushed back too. “Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” he told the committee. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Please open the link for the footnotes and consider subscribing to this valuable blog.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Republicans

Texas: Trump-Appointed Judge Enjoins Law Requiring Bookstores to Rate Books

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
13

Small bookstores in Texas sued to block a law passed in June requiring them to rate every book they ever sold to the state by its sexual content. The bookstores maintained that the law was so burdensome and arbitrary that it would put them out of business.

A Trump-appointed judge agreed and enjoined enforcement of the law. (Thanks to reader FLERP for bringing this important decision to my attention)

Publishers Weekly reported:

After nearly three weeks of waiting, federal judge Alan D. Albright delivered a major victory for freedom to read advocates, issuing a substantive 59-page written opinion and order officially blocking Texas’s controversial book rating law, HB 900, from taking effect. The decision comes after Albright orally enjoined the law at an August 31 hearing and signaled his intent to block the law in its entirety.

Signed by Texas governor Greg Abbott on June 12, HB 900 would have required book vendors to review and rate books for sexual content under a vaguely articulated standard as a condition of doing business with Texas public schools. Under the law, books rated “sexually explicit” (if the book includes material deemed “patently offensive” by unspecified community standards) would be banned from Texas schools. Books rated “sexually relevant” (books with any representation of sexual conduct) would have required written parental permission for students to access them. Furthermore, the law would have given the state the ultimate power to change the rating on any book, and would have forced vendors to accept the state’s designated rating as their own, or be barred from selling to Texas public schools.

In suing to block the law, the plaintiffs (two Texas bookstores—Austin’s BookPeople and Houston’s Blue Willow Bookshop—together with the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild, and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund) argued that the law is blatantly unconstitutional, and would impose an untenable burden on vendors and publishers. After two hearings held in August, Albright agreed in an opinion handed down September 18.

“The Court does not dispute that the state has a strong interest in what children are able to learn and access in schools. And the Court surely agrees that children should be protected from obscene content in the school setting,” Albright concluded. “That said, [the law] misses the mark on obscenity with a web of unconstitutionally vague requirements. And the state, in abdicating its responsibility to protect children, forces private individuals and corporations into compliance with an unconstitutional law that violates the First Amendment.”

In defending the law, Texas attorneys had moved to dismiss the suit, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge the law, and that the state has the right to regulate vendors who wish to do business with Texas public schools—essentially asserting that rating books would simply be part of the cost of doing business in Texas. Albright demolished those arguments in his opinion, and harshly criticized the ill-conceived law in denying the motion to dismiss.

At one point, Albright observed that the burden placed on vendors by the law are “so numerous and onerous as to call into question whether the legislature believed any third party could possibly comply.”

Please open the link to read more.

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Texas

Republicans Hold Congressional Hearings on Chinese Influence in American Schools

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
25

The Republican leadership of the House Education Committee held hearings on the threat posed by Communist China to American public and private schools. Read the summary and ask yourself the following questions: Would red states grant the Confucius Classrooms a charter to run their own schools? Would they let a school organized by the Confucius Classrooms accept voucher students? Are they equally concerned about the scores of Gulen schools that receive public funds and operate as charter schools? Gulen is a Turkish imam who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania; the board of trustees of his schools are led by Turkish men; the Gulen schools have a large number of Turkish teachers on staff. When will the House Committee on Education investigate the Gulen schools?

The release from the committee begins:

Hearing Recap: Confucius Classrooms Edition

Today’s Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education (ECESE) Subcommittee hearing, led by Chairman Aaron Bean (R-FL), investigated the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to infiltrate America’s K-12 schools.

In postsecondary education, the CCP exerts soft power on the American education system through cultural exchange outposts known as Confucius Institutes. The K-12 arms of this propaganda machine, called Confucius Classrooms, were under the microscope today for their potential malignant influence.

Chairman Bean opened the hearing by pointing out, “The risk posed by the proliferation of Confucius Classrooms is threefold, threatening America’s national, geopolitical, and academic interests.”

Expert witnesses testifying today included Mike Gonzalez, Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation; Nicole Neily, President of Parents Defending Education (PDE); and Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Public Instruction at the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

The seminal report on Confucius Classrooms, and therefore the spark for congressional investigation, was led by Nicole Neily and PDE. In her opening testimony, Ms. Neily laid out the key findings of her organization’s report: “Our research found that over the past decade, over $17 million has been given to 143 school districts and private K-12 schools across 34 states (plus DC) – impacting over 170,000 students in 182 schools.” Furthermore, these classrooms were identified near 20 U.S. military bases, posing a potential national security threat.

As a state education officer, Mr. Walters offered a perspective on the impact of these donations in Oklahoma schools. After one of his school districts was named in the PDE report, Mr. Walters ordered a further investigation, which uncovered that, “Through a series of non-profits, that school district maintains an active connection with the CCP through a program called Confucius Classrooms, even after the federal government cracked down on similar programs in 2020.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gulen Charter Schools, International, Republicans, Vouchers

Florida Education Official Paid with Federal $$ to Promote DeSantis’s Extreme Views

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
7

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the DeSantis administration used federal funds to create a new office to network with rightwing school boards, headed by Terry Stoops. DeSantis wants to stamp out anything he thinks is “woke,” that is, any instruction about racism, sexism, homophobia, or any other form of injustice or bigotry.

Leslie Postal writes:

A new Florida Department of Education employee who’s reaching out to conservative school board members makes $126,000 a year, a salary funded by a federal grant designed to boost “well-rounded educational opportunities,” health and safety and effective use of technology.

Terry Stoops was tapped in April to head the department’s new office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts. Most of his contacts during his first months on the job were to school board members who’d been endorsed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and representatives of conservative groups, his emails and calendar show.

In April, for example, he met several school board members at a “Learn Right” summit in Sarasota spearheaded by a founder of Moms for Liberty, the conservative group launched in Florida and focused on schools.

He emailed more than a dozen school board members endorsed by the governor in the 2022 election cycle and others who had the backing of Moms for Liberty, including Alicia Farrant, elected to the Orange County School Board in November.

And in May, Stoops met with the Herzog Foundation; its goal is “Advancing Christian Education.”

Apolitical school boards have not been contacted.

DeSantis, who is running for president, told Fox News in June that if elected he would try to abolish the federal education department and other agencies. If Congress would not approve doing that, “I’m going to use those agencies to push back against woke ideology and against the leftism we see creeping into all institutions of American life,” he said in that interview on June 28…

Stoops also met with people who were not school board members but seemed to share his political views. For example, he attended a virtual meeting about American Birthright, a blueprint for how to teach students social studies that embraces “the ideals of conservative Americans.”

Stoops, who spent nearly two decades in North Carolina mostly working on education policy for the conservative John Locke Foundation, was on the executive committee that helped devise American Birthright, which was released last year.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Racism

Nancy Flanagan: There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch, and That’s Good!

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
14

Retired teacher Nancy Flanagan writes about Michigan’s decision to provide a free lunch to all students. She explains why it’s a good thing and also wonders why some people do not. Open the link and read the entire article.

She writes:

So—Michigan just adopted a policy of offering free breakfast and lunch to all K-12 public school kids. Charter school kids, too– and intermediate school districts (which often educate students with significant disabilities). More than half of Michigan students were already eligible for free-reduced lunch, which says a lot about why free at-school meals are critical to supporting students and their families. Why not streamline the system?

Schools have to sign up for the federal funding that undergirds the program, and still need income data from parents to determine how much they get from the feds. Nine states now have universal breakfast-lunch programs, and another 24 are debating the idea, which—in Michigan anyway—is estimated will save parents who participate about $850 year. That’s a lot of square pizza, applesauce and cartons of milk. Not to mention reducing stress, on mornings when everyone’s running late for the bus and work.

Cue the right-wing outrage.

Headline in The New Republic: Republicans Declare Banning Universal Free School Meals a 2024 Priority.  Because?  “Community Eligibility Provision, or CEP, allows certain schools to provide free school lunches regardless of the individual eligibility of each student.”

It’s hard to figure out precisely what they’re so honked off about: Poor kids getting something—say, essential nutrition– for nothing? Kids whose parents can well afford lunch mingling with their lower-income classmates over free morning granola bars and fruit? No way to clearly identify a free lunch kid in the 6th grade social hierarchy? The kiosks at the HS, where kids can grab something to give them a little fuel for their morning academics?

Open the link and keep reading.

Categories Education Reform, Ethics, Michigan, Students

“Democracy”: AP Courses Are Worthless

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2023 //
91

A reader who identifies as “Democracy” left a comment here about DeSantis’ war against the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) courses. DeSantis manufactured a culture war issue, a familiar tactic for him, but don’t defend the AP exams: They are worthless, says he or she.

Democracy wrote:

While I certainly do not agree with — and am appalled by — the Florida dictate, I hate to see the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) program in the bannerhead of this issue because it makes it appear that the AP program is somehow being victimized, and it helps to propagate the AP brand.

It’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff here. The Florida requirement – state law – is part of a larger effort by conservatives (Republicans) across the country to, as USA Today put it, “restrict learning and materials about controversial topics.” Or, in other words, topics that conservatives hate to talk about: racism, misogyny, equality, sedition, tolerance, democracy, reproductive rights, climate change, sex…..

The original law required a cataloging of all books in “a school library media center.” The DeSantis-controlled Florida DOE interpreted that broadly to include classrooms. The Republican legislature amended the law to say that a school library media center is

“any collection of books, ebooks, periodicals, or videos maintained and accessible on the site of a school, including in classrooms.”

As The Sarasota Herald Tribune reported in April of this year,

“The law, governing instructional materials for classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, passed last year and holds school districts responsible for the content of all materials used in a classroom, made available in a school library or included on a reading list. It requires each book in a school library to be certified by a media specialist and for a list of these materials to be available on school websites. The law took effect in January.”

This is incredibly cumbersome, especially for elementary school teachers who have large troves of books for their students. And if it reeks of conservative religious state-imposed censorship, that’s probably because it is. As ABC News (and other media) reported, “Books targeted by conservative groups were overwhelmingly written by or about people of color and LGBTQ people, according to anti-censorship researchers.”

All of this is worrisome. It’s dangerous territory.

But that does not mean that AP is the victim. Nor should it imply that AP is actually educationally beneficial for most students. As I’ve noted here previously, more colleges and universities are either refusing to accept AP test scores for credit, or they are limiting credit awarded only for a score of 5 on an AP test. The reason is that they find most students awarded credit for AP courses are just generally not well-prepared.

Dartmouth no longer gives credit for AP test scores. It found that 90 percent of those who scored a 5 on the AP psychology test failed a Dartmouth Intro to Psych exam. A 2006 MIT faculty report noted “there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard.”

In The ToolBox Revisited (2006) Clifford Adelman scolded those who had misrepresented his original ToolBox research by citing the importance of AP “in explaining bachelor’s degree completion. Adelman said, “To put it gently, this is a misreading.” Moreover, in statistically analyzing the factors contributing to the earning of a bachelor’s degree, Adelman found that Advanced Placement did not reach the “threshold level of significance.”

College Board executives often say that if high schools implement AP courses and encourage more students to take them, then (1) more students will be motivated to go to college and (2) high school graduation rates will increase. There are educators who parrot the College Board line. Researchers Kristin Klopfenstein and Kathleen Thomas “conclude that there is no evidence to back up these claims.”

Why do students take AP? Because they’ve been told to. Because they’re “trying to look good” to colleges in the “increasingly high-stakes college admission process,” and because, increasingly, “high schools give extra weight to AP courses when calculating grade-point averages, so it can boost a student’s class rank.” It’s a depraved stupid circle that has swept up parents, guidance counselors, administrators and school boards, teachers, and the general public – not to mention public education reporters – into the misbelief that “AP is better.” It isn’t.

One student who got caught up in the AP hype cycle –– taking 3 AP courses as a junior and 5 as a senior –– and only got credit for one AP course in college, reflected on his AP experience. He said nothing about “rigor” or “trying to be educated” or the quality of instruction, but remarked “if i didn’t take AP classes, it’s likely I wouldn’t have gotten accepted into the college I’m attending next year…If your high school offers them, you pretty much need to take them if you want to get into a competitive school.”

What do students actually learn from taking these “rigorous” AP courses and tests? For many, not much. One student remarked, after taking the World History AP test, “dear jesus… I had hoped to never see ‘DBQ’ ever again, after AP world history… so much hate… so much hate.”

And another added, “I was pretty fond of the DBQ’s, actually, because you didn’t really have to know anything about the subject, you could just make it all up after reading the documents.”

Another AP student related how the “high achievers” in his school approached AP tests: “The majority of high-achieving kids in my buddies' and my AP classes couldn’t have given less of a crap. They showed up for most of the classes, sure, and they did their best to keep up with the grades because they didn’t want their GPAs to drop, but when it came time to take the tests, they drew pictures on the AP Calc, answered just ‘C’ on the AP World History, and would finish sections of the AP Chem in, like, 5 minutes. I had one buddy who took an hour-and-a-half bathroom break during World History. The cops were almost called. They thought he was missing.”

And an AP reader (grader), related this about the types of essays he saw:

“I read AP exams in the past. Most memorable was an exam book with $5 taped to the page inside and the essay just said ‘please, have mercy.’ But I also got an angry breakup letter, a drawing of some astronauts, all kinds of random stuff. I can’t really remember it all… I read so many essays in such compressed time periods that it all blurs together when I try to remember.”

The Florida law is clearly not in the interests of kids and learning. But AP ain’t necessarily all that either.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, DeSantis, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Fraud
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