The Chicago media and choice supporters are whooping it up because Stacy Davis Gates, the head of the Chicago Teachers Union, sends her child to Catholic school. Big deal. It doesn’t matter where you choose to send your child. What matters is whether you demand that taxpayers pay for your private choice.
I was anxiously waiting for the six o’clock start of the U.S. Open semi final match between Coco Gauf and Carolina Muchova last night.
It was no disappointment.
But I had to wait for the end of the local news.
I thought local political reporter Mary Ann Ahern was going to have a stroke reporting that local Chicago Teachers Union President Stacey Davis Gates sends her kid to Catholic school.
Apparently Ahern has been on this story for days.
This morning the Chicago Sun-Times runs the story front page.
It’s a phony controversy.
Former CPS schools chief and perpetual losing candidate in every office he runs for penned an op-ed piece for the Tribune attacking Gates for her position against taxpayer funding of private and parochial schools.
That’s what this is all about.
It is no coincidence that this phony controversy over where Stacy Gates sends her son to school just happens to take place when the Illinois General Assembly is considering ending public money on private school vouchers.
Former mayor Lightfoot, Rahm Emanuel, the Obamas, and former secretary of education Arne Duncan all sent their kids to private schools.
Paul Vallas sent his kids to parochial school, as did ex-Mayor Richard M. Daley.
As do thousands of Chicagoans who are willing or able to afford it.
Me? I’m a public school grad as are my own kids and grandkids.
And I’m a retired public school teacher.
But my decision to send my children to public school and to teach in a public school was a personal one as is Stacy Gates’ decision to send her son to Catholic school.
The real issue is one of public policy: Should public money go to fund private and parochial schools?
Illinois and Chicago public schools are notoriously underfunded.
The legislature is now debating school funding.
So, suddenly CTU President Stacy Davis Gates sending her kid to a Catholic school is a headline and Mary Ann Ahern is spending days investigating this non-story.
GOP politicians have become cynically obsessed with “parental rights,” insisting that parents always know best. Parents, the politicians assert, should control what their children learn, how they are taught, what books they should read, etc. Their judgment must take precedence over that of teachers, who are professionals. No one has explained how teachers can respond to the differing views of multiple parents, or why teachers should disregard their professional knowledge and experience and defer to parents.
Hardly a day passes without a news story about parents who abused their children or even murdered them. There are good parents and bad parents. There are well-educated parents who homeschool their children, and there are ignorant parents who pass along their ignorance to their children.
Here is a story that captures some of these points.
Ruby Franke developed a reputation as a child-rearing expert who advises parents to be ultra-strict with their children. She was recently arrested for child abuse after one of her children escaped to a neighbor’s house and asked for food and water. His ankles and wrists were secured with duct tape, and there were lacerations on his legs caused by ropes.
A Utah mother who chronicled her strict parenting style on YouTube and other social media channels was arrested and charged with aggravated child abuse this week after one of her children climbed out a window and ran to a nearby house seeking help, officials said.
Ruby Franke, 41, was arrested on Wednesday in Ivins, a city in southern Utah, at the home of Jodi Hildebrandt, her business partner, who was also arrested. Ms. Franke hosted the now-defunct YouTube channel “8 Passengers,” where she posted videos about her parenting approach with her six children, including refusing them food as a form of punishment.
Ms. Franke and Ms. Hildebrandt were each charged on Friday with six counts of aggravated child abuse, according to the Washington County attorney’s office. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, the attorney’s office said.
According to an affidavit, Ms. Franke’s 12-year-old son, identified as R.F. in the document, climbed out a window at Ms. Hildebrandt’s home and went to a neighbor’s house on Wednesday morning, asking for food and water. The child had duct tape on his ankles and wrists, as well as open wounds. He appeared to be emaciated and malnourished….
At one point, Ms. Franke had nearly 2.5 million subscribers to her channel, following the lives of her six children: Shari, Chad, Abby, Julie, Russell and Eve. In 2020, Chad Franke, then 15, told YouTube viewers in one family video that he had been sleeping on a beanbag for months and that he had lost his bedroom after playing a prank on his little brother, according to Insider.
In one video recorded by Ms. Franke and reposted to TikTok, she said her daughter Eve’s teacher had called her to say Eve had come to school without a lunch. Ms. Franke said the teacher was “uncomfortable with her being hungry” but that Eve was responsible for making her own lunch, and that “the natural outcome is she is just going to be hungry.”
“Hopefully nobody gives her food, and nobody steps in and gives her a lunch, because then she’s not going to learn from it,” Ms. Franke said.
NEW RULES — Friend of Playbook DOUG SOSNIK is out with a new political memo that he has shared exclusively with us this morning that captures his thinking about the unique circumstances of our current political moment. Sosnik breaks it all down into “Ten New Rules of American Politics.” We think you will want to read the entire memo, which is brimming over with smart insights, but here’s his list and some key excerpts:
1. All politics is now national … “There are currently only five U.S. Senators and 23 members of the U.S. House of Representatives from a different party than the presidential candidate who carried their state or district in 2020.”
2. Education is the new fault line in American politics … “Biden carried white college educated voters by 15 points, which is a 29-point swing from Romney’s 14-point margin. At the same time, Trump carried white non-college educated voters by 32 points.”
3. National polling is not an accurate predictor of presidential election outcomes … “Despite losing the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections, Republicans held the White House for 12 years during this period.”
4. There are only a handful of states that determine control of power in the U.S. … “[T]here are at most eight states … that will determine the outcome [of the 2024 election]. The only polls that matter in the upcoming presidential election are in these swing states.”
5. The potency of abortion as a political issue will increase over time … “Republican efforts to further restrict a woman’s right to choose at the state level runs counter to the views of a majority of the country and will further increase the political potency of the issue.”
6. The South and the West are now the center of political power … “In the last decade, nine of the top 10 states with the highest increase in population growth were in the South and the West.”
7. The suburbs are the last remaining battleground … “Suburban voters determined the outcome of the last two presidential elections, as well as at least one branch of Congress in each of the last three election cycles.”
8. Online small-dollar donors are the real test of the strength of a candidate … “Over the course of a campaign, big donor contributions are no match for the money that is continuously raised from small donors.”
9. There is no longer a true Election Day in America … “In the 2020 campaign for president, 69% of the country voted before the election — 43% by mail and 26% in person. This was a sharp increase from 40% early voting in 2016.”
10. Political reform is gaining strength across the country … “In addition to taking politics out of drawing congressional and legislative districts, two of the most effective reforms that are increasing in popularity are rank[ed] choice voting and open/jungle primaries.”
Jamelle Bouie is an amazing columnist for the New York Times. if you sign up for his extended column, you get fascinating insights, plus a list of what he’s reading now and even a recipe. This column caught my eye because I was thinking about writing a post about how some counties in Texas are criminalizing travel on roads that lead to the airport or out of state if the traveler intends to get an abortion. They are planning to suspend freedom to travel in order to block abortions. But then I saw that Jamelle Bouie wrote about the same subject, noting that it extended beyond Texas, and drew a parallel with slavery, where different states had different laws regulating human bondage.
Bouie wrote:
One of the ironies of the American slave system was that it depended for its survival on a federal structure that left it vulnerable and unstable.
Within the federal union, the slave-dependent states had access to a national market in which they could sell the products of slave labor to merchants and manufacturers throughout the country. They could also buy and sell enslaved people, as part of a lucrative internal trade in human beings. Entitled to representation under the supreme charter of the federal union, slave owners could accumulate political power that they could deploy to defend and extend their interests. They could use their considerable influence to shape foreign and domestic policy.
And because the states had considerable latitude over their internal affairs, the leaders of slave-dependent states could shape their communities to their own satisfaction, especially with regard to slavery. They could, without any objection from the federal government, declare all Black people within their borders to be presumptively enslaved — and that is, in fact, what they did.
But the federal union wasn’t perfect for slaveholders. There were problems. Complications. Free-state leaders also had considerable latitude over their internal affairs. They could, for example, declare enslaved Black people free once they entered. And while leaders in many free states were unhappy about the extent of their free Black populations — in 1807, as the historian Kate Masur tells us in “Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction,” Ohio lawmakers passed a law requiring free Black migrants to register with the county clerk and have at least two white property owners vouch for their ability to support themselves — they ultimately could not stop the significant growth of free Black communities within their borders, whose members could (and would) agitate against slavery.
The upshot of all of this was that, until the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford settled the matter in favor of slaveholders, the status of an enslaved Black person outside a slave state was uncertain. It was unclear whether property in man extended beyond the borders of states where it was authorized by law.
It was also unclear whether a slave state’s authority over an enslaved Black person persisted beyond its borders. And on those occasions when a free Black person was within the reach of slave-state law — as was true when free Black sailors arrived in Southern ports — it was unclear if they were subject primarily to the laws of their home states or the laws of the slave states. South Carolina assumed the latter, for example, when it passed a law in 1822 requiring that all “free Negroes or persons of color” arriving in the state by water be placed in jail until their scheduled departure.
One would have to conclude, surveying the legal landscape of slavery before Dred Scott, that federalism could not handle a question as fundamental as human bondage. The tensions, contradictions and conflicts between states were simply too great. As Abraham Lincoln would eventually conclude, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
I want you to keep all this in mind while you read about the latest developments in state and local laws regarding abortion. On Monday, Steve Marshall, Alabama’s Republican attorney general, announced in a court filing that the state has the right to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for women to have out-of-state abortions. Those arrangements, he argued, amount to a “criminal conspiracy.”
“The conspiracy is what is being punished, even if the final conduct never occurs,” Marshall’s filing states. “That conduct is Alabama-based and is within Alabama’s power to prohibit.”
In Texas, anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are using local ordinances to try to make it illegal to transport anyone to get an abortion on roads within city or county limits. Abortion opponents behind one such measure “are targeting regions along interstates and in areas with airports,” Caroline Kitchener reports in The Washington Post, “with the goal of blocking off the main arteries out of Texas and keeping pregnant women hemmed within the confines of their anti-abortion state.”
Alabama and Texas join Idaho in targeting the right to travel. And they aren’t alone; lawmakers in other states, like Missouri, have also contemplated measures that would limit the ability of women to leave their states to obtain an abortion or even hold them criminally liable for abortion services received out of state.
The reason to compare these proposed limits on travel within and between states to antebellum efforts to limit the movement of free or enslaved Black people is that both demonstrate the limits of federalism when it comes to fundamental questions of bodily autonomy.
It is not tenable to vary the extent of bodily rights from state to state, border to border. It raises legal and political questions that have to be settled in one direction or another. Are women who are residents of anti-abortion states free to travel to states where abortion is legal to obtain the procedure? Do anti-abortion states have the right to hold residents criminally liable for abortions that occur elsewhere? Should women leaving anti-abortion states be considered presumptively pregnant and subject to criminal investigation, lest they obtain the procedure?
Laws of this sort may not be on the immediate horizon, but the questions are still legitimate. By ending the constitutional guarantee of bodily autonomy, the Supreme Court has fully unsettled the rights of countless Americans in ways that must be resolved. Once again, a house divided against itself cannot stand.
Timothy Snyder, a professor at Yale who writes often about European history and the fate of democracy, wrote a letter from Kyiv. Ukrainians, he says, are determined not to be conquered by Russia. And he notes the strange rules of this war, where Russia can strike civilian targets in Ukraine at will but Ukrainians are not supposed to strike back outside their own territory.
He wrote:
Greetings from Kyiv. I have spent the last several days in Ukraine, here in the capital, and in the southerly regions of Odesa, Mykolaïv, and Kherson, trying to get a sense of the state of the war. I will write more about the experience, but I thought that it might be a good time to share my most general sense.
It is a crucial moment, partly because of what is happening, and partly because of our own sense of time. One and a half years is an awkward period for us. We might like to think that it can be brought to a rapid conclusion, with this or that offensive or weapon. When the war does not quickly end, we jump to the idea that it is a “stalemate,” which is a situation that lasts forever. This is false, and serves as a kind of excuse not to figure out what is going on. This is a war that can be won, but only if we are patient enough to see the outlines and the opportunities.
Russia’s gains in this invasion were made almost entirely during its first few weeks, in February and March 2022. Those gains were largely possible thanks to the fact that Russia had seized the Crimean Peninsula in its earlier invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Over the course of 2022, Ukraine won the battles of Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson, and took back about half of the territory Russia gained.
In the first half of 2023, Russia undertook an offensive that gained almost nothing but the city of Bakhmut. In the second half of this year Ukraine has undertaken a counter-offensive which has taken far more territory than did the Russian offensive, but which has not (yet) changed the overall strategic position (but could). In Russia, a military coup was attempted by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary group that took Bakhmut. He and Putin made a deal, after which Putin killed him. In a related development, Sergei Surovikin, probably the most capable Russian general, has been relieved of his command. Russia now has no meaningful offensive potential. Its strategy is to continue terror against civilians until Ukrainians can endure no longer. This, judging from my experience anyway, is not a tenable approach. On the other hand, Russia has had time to extensively fortify a long long of defense in the east and south, and to prepare for Ukrainian offensives. This makes Ukrainian offensives very difficult.
Ukraine did want to press forward last year, before the fortifications were built. It lacked the necessary weapons, and Elon Musk chose to cut Ukraine off from communications. That move likely extended the war. Because Musk’s decision was based on his internalization of Russian propaganda about nuclear war, and was accompanied by his repetition of that propaganda, he made a nuclear war more likely. If powerful men convey the message that just talking about nuclear war is enough to win conventional wars, then we will have more countries with nuclear weapons and more conventional wars that can escalate into nuclear ones. Ukraine has been resistant to this line of Russian fearmongering, fortunately for us all.
Ukraine did not have the arms it needed last year in part for the same reason: Americans allowed Russian propaganda to displace strategic calculation. By now, though, the American side has generally understood that Russia’s nuclear threat was a psychological operation meant to slow weapons deliveries. The United States and European partners have delivered arms to Ukraine, which has been absolutely indispensable. Hhistorically speaking, though, the pace is slow. Fighter planes are coming, but a year late for the current offensive. So Ukrainians are now trying an offensive in conditions that American staff officers would find challenging. Americans take for granted economic superiority, prior destruction of logistics, and air supremacy, none of which describe the Ukrainian position. Ukrainians do not even have numerical superiority, let alone of the 3-1 or 5-1 variety that would be standard advice for an offensive.
The fighting this summer has been very hard and very costly for Ukraine, harder and costlier, I think, than it had to be. I visited wounded soldiers in a rehabilitation center earlier today; among the many feelings this aroused was some guilt that my people could have done more to protect these people. (If you want to protect them, consider a gift to Come Back Alive or United24 or Unite with Ukraine).
Kherson oblast, Ukraine, September 2023, TS
That said, Ukrainian territorial advances this summer have been sufficient to trigger a barrage of calls for a cease-fire from Kremlin-friendly voices. Given the way or media seems to work, these calls (rather than the events on the ground) sometimes seem to be the news. Pro-Kremlin op-eds smuggle in the assumption that Ukraine is not advancing, when in fact it is. The Kremlin allies make their case in terms of Ukrainian suffering, but never cite Ukrainians, nor the polling data that shows overwhelming support for the war.
There is zero reason to believe that the Kremlin would actually feel constrained by such an agreement in any place; it did not even begin to hold to the terms of the agreement after its last invasion, and in invading again Moscow has violated all of its agreements with Ukraine (while making clear that it does not consider Ukraine a state). Russian propagandists talking to Russian audiences do not hide that the goal is the destruction of the Ukrainian nation, and that a ceasefire would just be meant to buy time. Now that the nuclear bluff has largely worn itself out, Moscow has changed its approach, trying instead to make people believe that nothing is happening on the battlefield. Moscow’s hope is to motivate Ukraine’s allies to restrain Ukraine long enough for Russia to shift the balance of forces in its favor.
Ukraine is deploying its own long-range strike capability to destroy airplanes and logistics in Russian territory, which is a necessary condition for winning the war. This is an awkward development, since western partners don’t always think through how a war like this can be brought to an end. It ends when one side wins. The questions are who wins and under what conditions.
The American allies take the correct view that Ukraine to win must break through the Russian lines. But there are just not that many Ukrainians to throw into surges, and from a Ukrainian perspective those lives should be put at risk when the battlefield has been shaped. The notion of a breakthrough is also too narrowly defined. Even setting aside the value of life, which is what this war is all about, military history does show that battlefield victories are the final stage of a larger process that begins with logistics.
This war has brought an entirely new theory of what a defensive war means: fighting only on one’s own territory. This does not correspond to international law and has never made any sense. It is a bit like rooting for a basketball team but believing it should play without ever taking the ball past halfcourt, or rooting for a boxer but claiming he is not allowed to throw a punch after his opponent does. Had such a notion been in place in past wars, none of Ukraine’s partners would ever have won any of the wars they are proud of winning.
The voiced concern is that Russia could “escalate.” This argument is a triumph of Russian propaganda. None of Ukraine’s strikes across borders has done anything except reduce Russian capacity. None has led Russia to do things it was not already doing. The notion of “escalation” in this setting is a misunderstanding. In trying to undo Russian logistics, Ukraine is trying to end the war. Ukraine will not do in Russia most of the things Russia has done in Ukraine. It will not occupy or seize territory, it will not execute civilians, it will not build concentration camps and torture chambers. What it must be allowed to do, to have some chance of stopping those Russian practices in Ukraine, is to have the capacity to win the war. With every village that Ukraine takes back, we see the most important de-escalation: away from war crimes and genocide, towards something more like a normal life.
Victory will be difficult, but it is the relevant concept. I don’t know any Ukrainians at this point who have not lost a friend or a family member in this war. My friends now tend to have a certain dark circle around the eyes and a tendency to look into the middle distance. And yet the level of determination is very, very high. In the few days I have been here there have been missile attacks in or near both cities where I spent the night, a murderous Russian strike on a market, and a Russian attempt to cut off Ukrainian grain exports with missiles and drones. This is daily life — but it is Ukrainian daily life, not ours. The Ukrainians are doing all of the fighting; we are doing part of the funding. What Ukrainian resistance protects, though, extends far beyond Ukraine.
The Ukrainians are defending the legal order established after the Second World War. They have performed the entire NATO mission of absorbing and reversing an attack by Russia with a tiny percentage of NATO military budgets and zero losses from NATO members. Ukrainians are making a war in the Pacific much less likely by demonstrating to China that offensive operations are harder than they seem. They have made nuclear war less likely by demonstrating that nuclear blackmail need not work. Ukraine is also fighting to restore its grain exports to Africa and Asia, where millions of people have been put at risk by Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian economy. Last but not least, Ukrainians are demonstrating that a democracy can defend itself.
Ukrainians are delivering to us kinds of security that we could not attain on our own. I fear that we are taking these security gains for granted. (In my more cynical moments, I fear that some of us, perhaps even some presidential candidates, resent the Ukrainians precisely for helping us so much.)
This war will not end because of one sudden event, but nor will it go on indefinitely. When and how it ends depends largely on us, on what we do, on how much we help. Even if we did not care at all about Ukrainians (and we should), getting this war to end with a Ukrainian victory would be by far the best thing Americans could do for themselves. Indeed, I do not think that, in the history of US foreign relations, there has ever been a chance to secure so much for Americans with so little effort by Americans. I do hope we take that chance.
Politicians should choose their words with care. When they whip up animus towards any group, there are mentally ill people who take them seriously and act out violently on their impulses.
That’s what a Black man said to DeSantis. He accused DeSantis of responsibility for the murder of three innocent Black people in a Dollar General store by unleashing a hate campaign against “woke” and against teaching the history of racism. And by making it easier to buy guns.
Gov. Ron DeSantis railed at a Black questioner in Jacksonville on Thursday who suggested his policies bore some blame for the racist shooting there last month that left three Black people dead. “You have allowed people to hunt people like me,” the man said, leading DeSantis to angrily respond, “I’m not going to let you accuse me of committing criminal activity! I am not going to take that.”
The confrontation happened at the end of an event in which DeSantis and state Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo continued their longstanding campaign attacking masks, vaccine boosters and other COVID measures.
The man said the governor his policies have “allowed weapons to be put on the street in the hands of immature, hateful people that have caused the deaths of the people that were murdered.”
“You don’t get to come here and blame me for some madman,” DeSantis said as his supporters cheered. “That is not appropriate, and I’m not going to accept it. That is nonsense.”
DeSantis noted how gunman Ryan Palmeter was temporarily held for a mental health examination in 2017 under the Florida law known as the Baker Act.
“That guy was Baker Acted,” DeSantis told the questioner. “He should have been ruled ineligible [to own firearms], but they didn’t involuntarily commit him.”
DeSantis signed a bill this year allowing people to carry guns without getting a state permit.
The questioner was escorted out of the restaurant where the event was being held….
Behind a lectern sign reading “Mandate Freedom,” DeSantis and Ladapo slammed some of the COVID measures being done in other states in response to rising infections. They also attacked the new round of COVID booster shots expected to be made available soon.
“We will not allow the dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs to control our health policies, let alone our state,” DeSantis said.
Ladapo, who was admonished by U.S. public health agencies earlier this year that his fueling of vaccine hesitancy is harming the public, told residents they should ignore expert guidance on vaccines if “you have an intuition about what the right thing is.”
Watch the number of COVID deaths in Florida. DeSantis and Lapado will both have blood on their hands for urging people not to get vaccinated.
On Saturday, President Joe Biden and First Lady Dr. Jill Biden went to Florida, where he surveyed the damage, praised the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and told the people of Florida: “Your nation has your back, and we’ll be with you until the job is done.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated, “It doesn’t matter if it’s a red state or a blue state, the president’s going to show up and be there for the community.” Florida governor Ron DeSantis declined to meet with the president, apparently fearing a backlash from anti-Biden primary voters, but Republican senator and former Florida governor Rick Scott did meet with Biden and praised his rapid response to the hurricane.
Biden’s promise to the Republican-dominated state of Florida even in the face of DeSantis’s pettiness was a striking contrast to former president Trump’s withholding of federal aid from Malden and Pine City, Washington, almost exactly three years ago, when a September 2020 wildfire destroyed 15,000 acres and 85% of the buildings, including 65 homes. Trump held up Washington governor Jay Inslee’s request for a disaster declaration, which frees up federal funds, for more than four months out of spite at the Democratic governor.
It was Biden who finally approved the declaration days after taking office. According to Emma Epperly and Orion Donovan Smith of the Spokane, Washington, Spokesman-Review, when he heard the declaration was finally in place, Malden Mayor Dan Harwood teared up in relief. “Our citizens are going to be able to go forward now,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. It’s a very, very good day.”
Yesterday the three most senior civilian officials in the Department of Defense responsible for their branches—Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, and Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth—wrote in the Washington Post that Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL, though it turns out he lives in Florida) is actively eroding “the foundation of America’s…military advantage” with his blanket hold on military promotions.
Tuberville says he launched the hold in protest of the military’s policy of ensuring that military personnel can obtain reproductive health care, including abortions, but as the authors of the Post op-ed say, his policy “is putting our national security at risk.” More than 300 of our critical posts have acting officials in place, and three of our five military branches—the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps—have no Senate-confirmed service chief.
In defense of his position, Tuberville has begun to attack the military leaders whose promotions he is opposing, much as former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson lashed out repeatedly at Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Mark Milley for his support for diversity and inclusion in the military. In their op-ed, the secretaries warned of the danger of politicizing our military and noted that the damage Tuberville is inflicting on the service will echo for years as today’s colonels and captains gather that their service is not valued by members of Congress.
Tonight, Secretary of the Navy Del Toro, who was born in Cuba, said on CNN: “I would have never imagined that…one of our own senators would actually be aiding and abetting communist and other autocratic regimes around the world. This is having a real negative impact and will continue to have a real negative impact on our combat readiness. That’s what the American people truly need to understand.”
Today marked the start of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial in the Texas Senate, which has taken on a meaning far larger than the fate of a single state official and become a fight over the future of the Republican Party.
Paxton is a hard-right Republican who has based his political career on his identity as a Christian conservative advancing evangelicals’ culture wars. He has pushed Texas rightward since he took office in 2015, first challenging President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and immigration orders, then championing Trump, then celebrating his wins against “woke Biden administration rules” and defending states’ rights.
Paxton supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, filing a lawsuit drafted by the Trump campaign to challenge other states’ elections and then, when the Supreme Court declined to hear that case, criticizing both the court and other states when he spoke at the January 6 rally at the Ellipse that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
But Paxton has been embroiled in scandals since being indicted for securities fraud just months after he took office as the state’s top law enforcement officer. That trial has yet to take place, but now he is embroiled in other scandals that have led the Republican-dominated Texas House of Representatives to pass 20 articles of impeachment against him by a vote of 121 to 23. The House started impeachment proceedings after Paxton asked for $3.3 million in state funds to pay a settlement to four whistleblowers who accused him of abuse of office and bribery in 2020 and who were fired within a month.
But the impeachment charges center around his ties to his friend and donor Nate Paul. Paxton is accused of helping Paul in exchange both for gifts and for hiring Paxton’s mistress.
The Texas Senate will conduct the impeachment trial. There are 31 members of the Senate, but one of them is Paxton’s wife, whom the Senate banned from voting after she refused to recuse herself. So to convict him, it will take 21 of the 30 state senators who can vote (his wife’s presence makes the conviction threshold 21 rather than 20). If all 12 Democrats in the Senate vote to convict, it will require 9 of the 18 voting Republicans to convict him.
Robert Downen and Zach Despart of the Texas Tribune yesterday reported that the impeachment trial is expected to focus on Paxton’s infidelity to his wife. He told his staff about the extramarital affair at the center of his relationship with Nate Paul in 2018, when he promised it was over and he was recommitting to his marriage. But, in fact, he didn’t. To hide the affair from his wife and his deeply religious constituents, impeachment managers say, Paxton worked with Paul to get a job for his girlfriend and hide the relationship, and then used his office to help Paul weather lawsuits and bankruptcy.
The Republican Party in Texas is split over Paxton much as the country is split over former president Donald Trump. Some say that Paxton’s extraordinary behavior warrants impeachment and trial and that, after all, a majority of Republicans in the Texas House were so concerned they impeached him.
But others insist that he is, as he claims, a victim of political persecution. They maintain that a flawed man can do God’s will, and they support Paxton no matter what his failings out of support for his political crusades on their behalf. J. David Goodman reported yesterday in the New York Times that right-wing donors have embarked on an expensive, high-pressure campaign to convince Republicans in the Texas Senate to vote against conviction, threatening to primary anyone who votes against Paxton.
Still, his approval rating among Republicans has dropped by 19 percentage points since April, while his disapproval rate has more than tripled since last December.
In other court news, a Florida judge this weekend struck down a state congressional map pushed through the legislature by Florida governor Ron DeSantis, saying it violates the state constitution by diluting Black voting power. The state will automatically appeal.
Today, three Republican-appointed federal judges struck down Alabama’s new congressional map after the state legislature ignored a court order to redraw the state map to include a second majority Black district since the state map put in place after the 2020 census likely violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The judges wrote that they were “disturbed” by the state legislature’s refusal to correct its illegal maps. “We are not aware of any other case in which a state legislature—faced with a federal court order declaring that its electoral plan unlawfully dilutes minority votes and requiring a plan that provides an additional opportunity district—responded with a plan that the state concedes does not provide that district.”
The court will appoint a special master to draw Alabama’s congressional map, but Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall, a Republican, has already appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In Wisconsin, where Republicans have called for impeaching Supreme Court justice Janet Protasiewicz for violating ethics codes by calling the state’s congressional maps “unfair” and “rigged,” a state judiciary disciplinary panel has dismissed those complaints. Republicans drew the congressional map in Wisconsin so fully in favor of their party that in 2018, Democratic candidates for the state assembly won 54% of the popular vote but Republicans “won” 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats, only three seats short of a supermajority that would enable them to override a veto by the Democratic governor.
And finally, U.S. district judge Tim Kelly sentenced former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio today to 22 years in prison. This is the longest sentence handed down for any of the January 6 rioters, though far shorter than the 33 years prosecutors had requested. Kelly also handed down sentences significantly below the guidelines for the crimes Proud Boys leaders committed: Joseph Biggs was sentenced to 17 years; Zachary Rehl, 15 years; and Ethan Nordean, 18 years. Dominic Pezzola, who was found not guilty of seditious conspiracy but guilty of other crimes, received a 10-year sentence.
Tarrio is the last of the gang to be sentenced and was not present at the January 6 attack, underscoring the wide reach of a conspiracy conviction
Ruth Conniff, editor-in-chief of The Wisconsin Examiner, brilliantly summarizes the war against public education in Wisconsin, which reflects what is happening in many other states. Parents and teachers have mobilized to defend their public schools, while the governor and legislature agree on expanding vouchers and an austerity budget for public schools. She points out that the rightwing angst about CRT and gender is a giant smokescreen to distract public attention from the diversion of public funds to private schools. The attacks are funded, of course, by rightwing billionaires.
Conniff writes:
It’s an understatement to say that public school advocates are not happy with the state budget Gov. Tony Evers signed.
“We’re not here to cheer for crumbs,” Heather DuBois Bourenane, executive director of the Wisconsin Public Education Network, declared at the group’s annual Summer Summit last week. “This budget did not deliver and will not adequately meet the needs of kids.”
It’s a “weird moment” for public school advocates, DuBois Bourenane added, noting the conspicuous absence of Evers, a longtime ally, from the annual gathering of public education organizers. Evers has signed a budget DuBois Bourenane described as “disgusting,” leaving 40% of school districts with less funding this year than they had under last year’s zero-increase budget.
School superintendents who attended the summer summit reeled off program cuts and school closings around the state as districts are forced to tighten their belts even though the state is sitting on more than $6 billion in surplus funds. Wisconsin is entering its 16th year of school funding that doesn’t keep pace with inflation. The toll is visible in districts that have had to close buildings and cancel programs.
“It’s a difficult line, I suppose, to walk,” an unsmiling State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly told me, standing in the hallway outside the auditorium at South Milwaukee High School after delivering the welcoming speech at the summit. Her theme was growth and change and how no one is perfect, drawing on a poem about caterpillars and butterflies.
“I feel like the governor is caught in a bad spot,” Underly added. Evers had to negotiate a deal with Republicans who were threatening to withhold shared revenue funds from Milwaukee, potentially plunging the state’s largest urban area into bankruptcy.
“It’s all part of politics and negotiation,” Underly said. “I do feel bad for the schools, because we got little, on top of no increase in the past.”
Although the budget deal does allow most school districts to levy an additional $325 per pupil from local property tax payers, that just “puts the burden back on the local districts to make up for that revenue rather than the state,” Underly said. And the state’s failure to meet public school demands that it cover at least 60% of the cost of special education — an expense that is devouring school district budgets, leading to program cuts in other areas — was a “missed opportunity,” Underly said, given the huge budget surplus. “I do feel strongly that our public schools lost out again.”
As for the big increase in taxpayer money going to finance private schools through the voucher expansion Evers signed as part of his deal with Republicans, “It’s hard to swallow,” Underly said, “because, really, we can’t afford two school systems.”
In just two years, all the enrollment caps will come off the school voucher program in 2026 and the problem of supporting two school systems, one public and one private, from the same limited pool of education funds, is going to get even worse.
“I think there’s going to be a reckoning,” Underly said. “I think the people in this state are going to have to do some soul-searching and really answer the question: What future do they want for public schools and kids and communities? Do they want a system that serves everybody? Or do they want to have two systems where the one that serves everybody keeps shrinking?”
That pretty much sums up not just the battle over the future of public schools in Wisconsin this year, but all of the struggles over the future of democracy in our state and around the country that suddenly seem to be coming to a head this year.
Are we going to have a society where we come together around shared values and common interests, or are we going to continue to break into increasingly isolated, hostile camps, tearing down our shared institutions, and leaving individuals and families on their own to grab what they can for themselves?
The Wisconsin Public Education Networks’ slogan, “Public Schools Unite Us” captures the more optimistic of those two roads.
“I don’t know anyone who disagrees with that slogan,” podcaster Todd Albaugh, a former Republican who spent 30 years in government and politics, said during the summit. He talked about the state champion high school baseball team in the little town of Ithaca, Wisconsin, and how everyone rallied around them. “Wisconsin public schools, they are the identity of our communities,” he said.
The Wisconsin Public Education Network has done an admirable job of reinforcing that identity, and defying the “politics of resentment” by bringing people together from urban and rural parts of the state. Together, rural and urban districts hammered out a shared set of priorities and pushed for them in the Capitol. Although they didn’t get what they wanted in the budget, they showed unity of purpose in pushing for a big raise in the state reimbursement for ballooning special education costs and a $1,510 per pupil increase to make up for 15 years of budgets that haven’t kept pace with inflation.
The vision of schools as cradles of a healthy, diverse, civic society was on display at South Milwaukee High, which hosted the summit Aug. 10, with representatives from mostly white rural districts mixing with students of color and teachers and administrators from urban, majority-minority schools.
There was a lot of talk about school funding and not so much on the hot buttons pushed by the right: “critical race theory,” gender pronouns and “parents rights.”
Politicians and school-privatization lobbyists have put a lot of money and energy into stirring up anger and distrust based on those culture war topics, in an effort to distract voters and undermine public schools. But the real aim of rightwing attacks on public schools is not just to teach conservative family values or racist rewrites of history. School privatization advocates have been working for decades to get their hands on the public funds that flow to public schools. As Rupert Murdoch put it, discussing News Corp’s foray into the business of education: “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.” In Wisconsin, that transformation is well underway.
Rod Gramer, president and CEO of Idaho Business for Education, a group of 250 Idaho business leaders who helped beat back publicly funded private school vouchers in their state, urged Wisconsin public school advocates gathered in South Milwaukee last week to keep the focus on the bigger picture.
“People don’t understand this is not a state problem,” Gramer said. “They don’t understand there’s a large group of billionaires who want to abolish public education.
“Billionaires who’ve never set foot in your state are spending billions to elect friendly legislators,” Gramer correctly pointed out. “I think people would be outraged if they know these elite billionaires are trying to undermine education in your state…”
We can do better. Voters, whether they are rural Republicans or urban Democrats, really can get together on defending a shared vision of a decent society. A cornerstone of that society is a free, high-quality public education system with beloved teachers, music programs, sports teams, and the whole sense of community that builds. Public schools do unite us. And as Evers said, before he got his arm twisted and signed the current budget, we should always do what’s best for kids.
Please open the link and read this important article to its conclusion.
Thom Hartmann explains that if you get people to vote for racism, against trans people, and against other imaginary threats, they will ignore the facts of poverty, health care, and the extreme income inequality and wealth inequality that characterizes our nation today.
Hartmann writes:
There’s a popular internet meme going around that says:
“Say you’re in a room with 400 people. Thirty-six of them don’t have health insurance. Forty-eight of them live in poverty. Eighty-five are illiterate. Ninety have untreated mental illnesses. And every day, at least one person is shot. But two of them are trans, so you decide ruining their lives is your top priority.”
Consider some of the basic realities of life in modern America:
— Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.
— Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, almost a quarter of Americans — 23 percent — work for wages that can’t support a normal lifestyle. (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)
— More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools suffer from a sustained, two-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels.
— Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.
— Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in theworld.
And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s forty-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people.
— Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknownin any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).
— Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).
And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year.
— The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.
— Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.
Given all this, it’s reasonable to ask why Republicans across the nation insist that the country’s most severe problems are teaching Black History and trans kids wanting to be recognized for who they are.
If you give it a minute’s thought, though, the answer becomes pretty obvious. We have a billionaire problem, compounded by a bribery problem, and the combination of the two is tearing our republic apart.
The most visible feature of the Reagan Revolution was dropping the top income tax bracket for the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent and then shooting the tax code so full of loopholes that today’s average American billionaire pays only 3.4 percent income tax. Many, like Trump for decades, pay nothing or next to nothing at all. (How much do you pay?)
But for a few dozen, maybe a hundred, of America’s billionaires that’s not enough.
Afflicted with the hoarding syndrome variant of obsessive compulsive disorder, there is never enough money for them no matter how many billions they accumulate.
If they’d been born poor or hadn’t gotten a lucky break, they’d be living in apartments with old newspapers and tin cans stacked floor-to-ceiling; instead, they have mansions, yachts, and virtual money bins worthy of Scrooge McDuck.
That in and of itself wouldn’t be so problematic if those same billionaires hadn’t worked together to get Clarence Thomas to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Citizens United case a few billionaires helped bring before the Supreme Court.
After Thomas and his wife, Ginni, were showered with millions in gifts and lavish vacations, the corrupt Supreme Court justice joined four of his colleagues — several of whom (Scalia, Roberts) were similarly on thetake — to legalize political bribery of politicians and Supreme Court justices.
The rubric they used was to argue that money isn’t really money; it’s actually “free speech,” so the people with the most money get to have the loudest and most consequential voices in our political and judicial discourse.
To compound the crisis, they threw in thenotion that corporations aren’t corporations but, instead, are “persons” fully deserving of the human rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to theConstitution — including the First Amendment right of free speech (now redefined as money).
In the forty-two years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich.
As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.
In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.
As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our children with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.
The price of all this largesse for America’s billionaires is defunding the social safety net, keeping the minimum wage absurdly low, and gutting support for education and public services.
While there are still a few Democrats who are openly and proudly on the take (Manchin, Sinema, the corporate “problem solvers” in Congress), most of the Democratic Party has figured out how severe the damage of these neoliberal policies has been.
In the last session of Congress, for example, the For The People Act passed the House of Representatives with near-united Democratic votes (and not a single Republican) and only died in the Senate when Manchin and Sinema refused to go along with breaking a Republican filibuster.
The Act would have rolled back large parts of Citizens United by limiting big money in politics, providing for publicly funded elections, restoring our political bribery laws, and ending many of the GOP’s favorite voter suppression tactics.
All of this, then, brings us back around to that meme that opened this article:
Why are rightwing billionaires funding “activist” groups and politicians who’re trying to end the teaching of Black History and make the lives of trans people miserable?
When you think about it a minute — and look at the headlines in the news — the answer becomes apparent: as long as we’re all fighting with each other about history or gender, the “hoarding syndrome billionaires” and their corporations are free to continue pillaging America while ripping off working people and their families.
Mike Petrilli, head honcho of the right-tilted Fordham Institute thinky tank, made it into the New York Times today to do some chicken littling about Learning Loss and suggest a bold solution. Don’t have a NYT subscription? That’s okay– let me walk you through the highlights of this festival of Things We Can Stop Saying About Education Right Now, Please.
Let’s start by invoking general Learning Loss panic. Petrilli points out that students “lost significant ground” during covid, and now NWEA says that students continue “backsliding” and “falling further behind.” People, in Petrilli’s view, are not panicking enough about “America’s massive learning loss.”
First, let’s use some more precise language, please. In all discussions of learning loss, we are actually talking about scores on a Big Standardized Test of reading and math going down. We will never, ever know how much of the slippage in tests scores is the result of students going a year or two without practicing for the BS Test. But in the meantime, it would be great if we stopped talking about test scores as if they were infallible equivalents of learning and achievement.
Second, “learning loss” is a misnomer. I’m willing to bet that verrrrrrry tiny number of students in this country actually lost learning. I’m equally certain that the vast majority of students did not learn as much as they would have in a non-pandemic year, but that’s not the same.
Think of it this way. It’s budget time, and the Mugwumps’ proposed budget increases spending on widgets from $500 to $600. The Wombats say, “Let’s only increase widget spending to $550.” That gets us to the part where the Mugwump talking point is “The Wombats want to cut spending on widgets.” When in fact everybody wants widget spending to go up.
That’s where we are. During the pandemic, learning occurred–just not as much as might have been expected in a normal-ish year. And this looks most like a crisis if you think of test scores like stock prices and focus on data rather than individual human students. (Petrilli does not invoke the baloney about impact on future earnings, so we’ll not go there right now.)
And, it should also be pointed out, it is where we were for a decade before covid even hit.
Having sounded the alarm, Petrilli bemoans the surfeit of leaders willing to make alarmy noises.The country is in desperate need of leaders who will speak the truth about what’s happening in our K-12 schools, and are willing to make the hard choices to fix it. Simply put, we need to bring some tough love back to American education.
Tough love? Back? Petrilli doesn’t really explain how the pandemic led to a loss of tough love in education. But that’s the dog we’re going to try to hunt with.
He cites Michael Bloomberg, who is ceaselessly alarmed about anything going on in public schools. Bloomberg wants a plan from Washington, a joint session of Congress, a Presidential address.
Ah, says Petrilli–you know when politicians were on the same page about education, presumably flinging tough love around with wild abandon.
We’re talking, of course, about the golden days of No Child Left Behind.
Petrilli remembers it fondly, citing how we saw “significant progress” which of course means “test scores went up,” which they did, at first, for a few years. Anyone who was in a classroom, especially a math or reading classroom, can tell you why. Within a couple of years, schools figured out what test prep would be most effective. Then they targeted students who were teetering on the line between High Enough Scores and Not High Enough Scores, especially the ones in special subgroups, and test prepped the hell out of those kids. At which point scores started stagnating because schools had done all they could do.
The Average Yearly Progress requirements were set up as a bomb that would go off during the next administration. Again, if you were working in a school at the time, you remember that chart, showing a gentle upward glide for a bit before jutting upward to 2014, the magical year in which 100% of students were to score above average on the BS Test. Oh, Congress will fix that before it happens, we were told. They did not. By the early 20-teens, there were two types of school districts–those that were failing, and those that were cheating.
Petrilli claims maybe success probably, saying NCLB “likely contributed” to graduation rates (no, schools just learned how to game those), college attainment rates (eh, maybe, but correlation is not causation) and “possibly” future real-life outcomes (absolutely not a shred of evidence–even reformster Jay Greene said as much).”It’s true that No Child Left Behind was imperfect,” says Petrilli. No. It stunk. But Petrilli has quite the tale here.There were fierce debates over “teaching to the test” and “drill and kill” instruction; about closing low-performing schools versus trying to fix them; and about the link between student achievement and family poverty. But once the law’s shortcomings became apparent, policymakers responded by adopting common standards and improving standardized tests, so as to encourage higher-level teaching. They poured billions into school turnarounds, invested in stronger instructional materials and started grading schools on how much progress their kids made from year to year, rather than focusing on one snapshot in time — an approach that is markedly fairer to high-poverty campuses. Still, the bipartisan effort that was No Child Left Behind ultimately fell apart as our politics fractured.
That’s quite the load. There was no debate about teaching to the test or drill and kill, because nobody was in favor of it except shrugging administrators who were staring at 2014. Petrilli also forgets that “teach to the test” ended up meaning “cut out any other classes–or recess–that does not appear on the test.” Arts slashed. History and science cut (at least for those teetering students). Closing low-performing schools was, in fact, the quickest way for a district to free itself of the low scores; who knows how many districts were restructured to put predictably low 8th grade scores under the same roof as better scores from lower or higher grades. And yes, poverty affects scores, despite all the No Excusing in the world.
What came next did not address any of these issues, The Common Core was an amateur hour fiasco. Were standardized tests improved? Not really (as witnessed by the fact that states dumped the SBA and PARCC as quickly as they could)–but it made a lucrative contract for some test manufacturers. Including progress in scores is great–unless you’re teaching kids who are already scoring at the top. School turnarounds have consistently failed (e.g. Tennessee’s failed Achievement School District).
But he’s right that Trump’s election and appointment of Betsy DeVos hurt the reformster alliance (despite the fact that DeVos had long been part of the club). But then, so was the increasing split between the social justice wing of reform and the free marketeer AEI-Fordham wing.
But look– NCLB and the sequel, Race to the Top, were just bad. They started from bad premises: 1) US education is failing because 2) teachers either don’t care or don’t know what they’re doing. They rest on a foundation of using a mediocre BS Test as an unquestioned proxy for student learning and teacher effectiveness, creating a perfect stage on which to conduct a national field test of Campbell’s Law (when you make a measure a proxy for the real thing, you encourage people to mess with the measure instead of the real thing, and it gets worse if the measure isn’t very good). And none of the “policymakers” who championed this mess ever came up with a single solitary idea of how to Fix Things that actually worked on either a local or macro scale.
The pandemic did not help anything in education. But it did lead to some flaming prose, like Petrilli’s assertion that “here we are, with decades of academic progress washed away and achievement trends still moving in the wrong direction.” This kind of overheated rhetoric is nothing new from the folks who gave us The Pandemic Erased Two Decades of Progress in Math and Reading as a headline. But what does it even mean? Washed away to where? Did knowledge dribble out of students’ heads? Did the learning of the past several years retroactively vanish with former students waking up across America feeling a little bit dumber somehow? Did teachers forget everything they knew about how to teach students, so they have to start over? Or do we just mean “test scores are down”?
Petrilli breaks this down to some other issues. His first point starts out fine– there’s an attendance problem right now. But he tries to set that beside an alleged nationwide move to lower standards. I’m not sure what basis there is for that assertion. He points to the “no zeros” rule used in some schools, but that rule existed in many places (like my old district) for ages. Maybe it’s letting slackers slide through in other places, but my own experience with no zeros policy is that it merely kept students working who would otherwise have given up–kind of the opposite of encouraging slacking.
But then he’s slicing NCLB-style baloney again:Virtually all schools and districts have enjoyed a vacation from accountability. Almost nobody is worried about state officials shutting their campuses because of low performance, or forcing district schools to replace their principals or teachers.
You say that like it’s a bad thing, Mike.
Embedded here are many of the same bad assumptions that have driven ed reform for decades. Teachers and schools have no motivation to do their jobs unless they have some kind of threat of punishment hanging over their heads. This isn’t just bad education policy–it’s bad management. As management which W. Edwards Deming pointed out often, fear should be driven out of the workplace. But NCLB and RttT were always all stick, no carrot, always starting out with the worst possible assumptions about the people who had chosen education as their life’s work (assumptions made largely by people who had never actually worked in a school).
And even if you don’t dig Deming, there’s another thing to consider–none of the stuff Petrilli misses actually worked (which was Deming’s point). He points out that the kind of thing being done in Houston right now has become rare, to which I say “Good,” because Houston is a nightmare and it will end just like all the other similar attempts–no actual success, but lots of disruption and dismay and upheaval of children’s education.
Petrilli will now argue for NCLB 3.0. We need “action at scale,” but we can’t ignore “the support and assistance schools require.” Holding schools accountable wasn’t enough because– wait for it– if NCLB failed it was because schools lacked the expertise and know-how to do it right. And now Petrilli almost–but not quite–gets it.“Teaching to the test” and other problems with No Child Left Behind stemmed from schools resorting to misguided practices to meet requirements. Under pressure to boost scores, but without the training to know what to do, some educators engaged in endless practice testing, and stopped instruction in any subject that was unlikely to be on the state assessment. In a few places, educators even resorted to outright cheating. They likely felt they had no choice, because they hadn’t been given the tools to succeed.
Nope. Close but no cigar. No, the reason all those things happened was because, as NCLB 1.0 and 2.0 were designed, those things were the tools to “succeed.” Because “success” was defined as “get maximum number of kids to score well on a poorly-designed multiple-choice math and reading test.” Granted, when most of us think about “success” in education, we have a whole list of other things in mind–but none of those things were valued by NCLB or RttT.
But we’re rolling up to the finish now. But after a decade of building capacity, offering helping hands and adding funds, it’s time once again to couple skill-building with will-building.
That is a great line. But what capacity-building? More seats in unregulated charters and voucher-accepting schools? Which helping hands? And exactly whose will needs to be built? Parents? Children? Teachers? Policymakers? I’m seriously asking, because I think a hell of a lot of will was involved in slogging through the last couple of years.
Petrilli calls on schools to spend their “federal largesse” to “catch their kids up”–and I think the call to accelerate education is one of the most infuriating calls of the last few years. Sure– because all along teachers have known how to educate children faster but they just haven’t bothered to do it, but hey, now that we have certified lower test scores, teachers will all bust the super-secret Faster Learning plans out of their file cabinets.
Petrillii says we don’t actually need to bring back NCLB, though he seems to have been talking about nothing else– just let’s get out those big sticks and get back to (threats of) “tough interventions for persistent underperformance,” because that has totally worked in the past. No, wait. It hasn’t actually worked ever. Kids, too, should know that it’s time to hit the books again. We need to rethink our lax grading policies, make clear to parents that their children need to be at school and bring back high school graduation exams and the like to ensure that students buckle down.
Also, get those kids off our lawns. And while you’re making sure parents know their kids should be in school, maybe talk to all the reform crowd that has been working hard to build distrust of public schools and deepen disrespect of educators.
And the big finish:Education matters. Achievement matters. We need leaders who are willing to say so, and educators who are willing to act like these simple propositions are true.
This seems straightforward enough, though if you replace “achievement matters” with “standardized test scores matter,” which is what he really means, it doesn’t sound quite as compelling. And it’s insulting as hell to suggest that the ranks of educators are filled with people who are unwilling to act as if education matters.
Well, the piece is completely on brand for the New York Times, and it certainly echoes the refrain of that certain brand of reformster whose response to their own policy failures has been, “Well, get in there and fail harder.” No Child Left Behind failed, and it not only failed but left some of its worst policy ideas embedded in the new status quo, continuing to do damage to public education right through today.
The pandemic did many things, and one thing it did was panic the testing industry, which faced an existential threat that everyone might realize that school without the BS Test, or NWEA’s lovely test-prep tests, might actually be okay. It’s no wonder that they feel a special nostalgia for the days when the entire weight of the government reinforced their importance. So here we are, painting low reading and math tests scores as an educational crisis whose only solution is to get more fear, more threats, and especially more testing back into schools.
I’m sorry if this assessment of some reformsters, their policies, and their motives seems harsh, but, you know– tough love.
Diane Ravitch's blog 