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New York City: End Mayoral Control of the Schools!

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2024 //
21

Politico reported recently that Mayor Eric Adams is pulling out all the stops in his campaign to persuade the legislature to extend mayoral control of New York Ciry’s public schools.

That’s understandable. Every mayor wants as much power as he can gather. Guiliani wanted mayoral control. The legislature turned him down. Michael Bloomberg got it after he won the mayoralty in 2001, pledging to make the schools run efficiently and successfully after years of political squabbling and disappointing academic results.

A historical note: the last time that the independent Board of Education was abolished was in 1871, when Boss Tweed pushed through state legislation to create a Department of Education, in charge of the schools. The new Department immediately banned purchase of any textbooks published by Harper Bros., to retaliate for the publication of Thomas Nast cartoons ridiculing the Tweed Ring in Harper’s magazine. The new Department steered lucrative contracts to Tweed cronies, for furniture and all supplies for the schools.

Two years later, the corruption of the Tweed Ring was exposed, and criminal prosecutions ensued. In short order, the Department of Education was dissolved and the independent Board of Education was revived.

In the 2001 race for Mayor, billionaire Mike Bloomberg campaigned on promises to rebuild the city’s economy after the devastating attacks of 9/11/2001. He also promised to take over the school system, make it more efficient, improve student performance, and able to live within its budget of $12 billion plus. He won, and many people were excited by the prospect of a successful businessman taking over the city and the schools.

In 2002, the State Legislature gave Mayor Bloomberg control of the schools in New York City. It replaced the independent Board of Education, whose seven members were appointed by the five borough presidents and the mayor. Bloomberg had complete control of the school system, with its more than 1,000 schools and more than one million students. The new law allowed him to appoint the majority of “the Panel on Education Policy,” a sham substitute for the old Board of Education.

The new law still referred to “the Board of Education,” but the new PEP was a shell of its former self. It was toothless, as Bloomberg wanted. He picked the Chancellor, and he had the policymaking powers. Early on, in 2004, he decided that third graders should be held back based on their reading scores. Some of his appointees on the PEP opposed the idea and he fired them before the vote was taken. He wanted all his appointees to know that he appointed them to carry out his decisions, not to question them. The retention policy was later expanded through eighth grade but quietly abandoned in 2014 because it failed.

I won’t go into all the missteps of the Bloomberg regime, which lasted 12 years, but will offer a few generalizations:

1. The mayor should not control the schools because they will never be his first priority. The mayor juggles a large portfolio: public safety, the economy, transportation, infrastructure, public health, sanitation, and much more. On any given day, he/she might have 30 minutes to think about the schools; more some days, none at all on others.

2. Mayoral control concentrates too much power in the hands of one person. One person, especially a non-educator, gets an idea into his head and imposes it, no need to talk to experienced educators or review research.

3. Mayoral control marginalizes parents and community members, whose concerns deserve to be heard. At public hearings of the PEP, parents testified but rightly thought that no one listened to them. In the “bad old days,” they could speak to someone in their borough president’s office; now the borough presidents have no power. No one does, Except the mayor.

4. The Mayor picked three non-educators as Chancellor. Joel Klein disdained educators and public schools, even though he was a graduate of the NYC public schools. He created a “Leadership Academy” to train non-educators and teachers to bypass the usual path to becoming a principal by serving for years as an assistant principal. Klein surrounded himself with B-school graduates and looked to Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and Jack Welch for advice. Large numbers of experienced teachers and principals retired.

5. Bloomberg loved churn and disruption. He closed scores of schools and replaced them with many more small schools. Some high schools that had programs for ELLs, special education, career paths for different fields, were closed and replaced by schools for 300/400 students, too small to offer specialized programs or advanced classes.

6. New initiatives were announced with great fanfare (like merit pay), thanks to a vastly enlarged public relations staff, then quietly collapsed and disappeared.

7. Bloomberg and Klein imposed a new choice system. But all high schools and middle schools became schools of choice. A dozen students of the age living in the same building might attend a dozen different schools, some distant from their homes. One retired executive told me that this dispersal was intended to obstruct the creation of grassroots uprisings against the new dictates.

8. Bloomberg and Klein favored charter schools. In short order, more than 100 opened. The charters were supported financially and politically by some of the wealthiest Wall Street titans. When there was any threat to charters, their wealthy patrons quickly assembled multi-millions dollar TV campaigns to defend them. Because of the deep pockets of the charter patrons, the charter lobby gave generous contributions to legislators in Albany. The legislature passed laws favoring the charters, including one that required the public schools to provide free space for them or, if no suitable space was available, to pay their rent in private facilities.

9. Bloomberg and Klein made testing, accountability and choice the central themes of their reforms. Their approach mirrored President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which began at the same time. Raising test scores became the goal of the school system. Schools were graded A-F, depending primarily on their ability to raise test scores. Eventually, teachers were graded by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. NYC faithfully mirrored the tenets of the national corporate reform movement.

10. NYC test scores improved on NAEP during the Bloomberg years, but not as much as in other cities that did not have mayoral control.

11. To get a great overview of “The Failure of Mayoral Control in New York City,” read this great summary by Leonie Haimson, which includes links to other sources. See, especially, the recent article in Education Week on the decline of mayoral control. Chicago had mayoral control similar to that in New York City, which allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close 50 schools in black and brown communities in one day, completely ignoring the views of parents. It was an ignominious example of the danger of one-man control.

12. There is no perfect mechanism to govern schools, but any kind of oversight should allow parent voices to count. 95% of the nation’s school districts have elected school boards. Sometimes a small faction gains control and does damage. That’s the risk of democracy. Whatever the mechanism, there must be an opportunity for the public, especially parents, to make their voices heard and to have a role. The mayor controls the budget: that’s as much power as he should have.

History is an excellent overview of New York City school governance—history and myths. Again, by Leonie Haimson. (Note: her history leaves out the two years of mayoral control from 1871-1873.)

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Failure, New York, New York City

New York State Wins $750,000 from College Board for Selling Student Data

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
10

For years, parent advocates for student privacy have been pushing the state to stop the College Board from selling student data to colleges. See Reuters story here. The state Attorney General Letitia James and Board of Regents Chair Betty Rosa sued the College Board and won.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE    
February 13, 2024

Attorney General’s Press Office/212-416-8060nyag.pressoffice@ag.ny.gov

Attorney General James and NYSED Commissioner Rosa
Secure $750,000 from College Board for Violating Students’ Privacy

NEW YORK – New York Attorney General Letitia James and New York State Education Department (NYSED) Commissioner Betty A. Rosa announced a $750,000 settlement with College Board for violating students’ privacy and unlawfully selling their personal data. For years, College Board collected students’ personal information when they took the PSAT, SAT, and AP exams in school, and then licensed this data to colleges, scholarship programs, and other customers who used it to solicit students to participate in their programs. In 2019 alone, College Board improperly licensed the information of more than 237,000 New York students who took their exams. In addition, College Board improperly sent promotional materials to students who signed up for College Board accounts in connection with exams or AP courses. As a result of today’s agreement, College Board must pay $750,000 in penalties and will be prohibited from monetizing New York students’ data that it acquires through its contracts with New York schools and school districts.

“Students have more than enough to be stressed about when they take college entrance exams, and shouldn’t have to worry about their personal information being bought and sold,” said Attorney General James. “New York law requires organizations like College Board to protect the data they collect from students when they take their exams in school, not sell it to customers for a profit. I want to thank Commissioner Rosa for her work on this investigation to ensure we hold College Board accountable and protect New York students’ privacy.”  

“When the organizations we trust to provide meaningful services to our students exploit student information for profit, it violates privacy laws as well as the public trust,” said Commissioner Betty A. Rosa. “We will continue to ensure that every student’s information is appropriately utilized and protected. We are grateful to the Attorney General for her collaboration in protecting the interests of the students and families of New York.”

College Board is a New York-based non-profit institution that develops and administers standardized tests, primarily to high school students who take them as part of the college admissions process. It also develops other college readiness programs, such as AP courses, and has a contract with NYSED to subsidize AP exam fees for low-income students. In addition, College Board operates the Student Search Service (Search), in which it licenses data it collects from students — including their names, contact information, ethnicity, GPAs, and test scores — to customers like colleges and scholarship programs to use for recruiting students. 

Beginning in 2010, College Board contracted with New York schools and school districts to allow schools to offer the PSAT and SAT exams during the school day and to pay for the students’ exam fees. In the past five years, approximately 20 New York schools or school districts, including the New York City Department of Education, which operates more than 500 high schools, have entered into such contracts. Schools across New York have also consistently signed agreements with College Board to offer AP courses and exams.

An investigation led by the Office of the Attorney General (OAG) revealed that prior to June 2022, College Board solicited students to provide information, such as their GPA, anticipated course of study, interest in a religiously affiliated college and religious activities, and parents’ level of income, during the administration of PSAT, SAT, and AP exams, as well as when students signed up for a College Board online account. Although providing this data for participation in Search was optional, students were solicited to participate in the urgent context of an important exam and were encouraged to sign up because it would connect them with scholarship and college opportunities. From 2018-2022, College Board licensed New York student data to over 1,000 institutions through Search and received significant revenue from data related to New York students who took PSAT, SAT, or AP exams during the school day.    

The investigation further found that College Board improperly used student data for its own marketing. Until fall 2022, College Board used student data collected in connection with PSAT and SAT exams administered during the school day to send marketing communications. In addition, until 2023, when New York students registered for the AP program, they were solicited to opt in to receiving College Board marketing materials. 

Under New York law, it is illegal to use student data obtained under a contract with a New York educational agency for commercial or marketing purposes. The investigation found College Board improperly used student data obtained in connection with PSAT and SAT exams administered during the school day and the AP program by licensing student data to Search clients and using student data to send its own marketing materials.  

Under the settlement announced today, College Board must pay $750,000 in penalties, disgorgement, and costs to the state. College Board is also prohibited from using New York student data it collects or receives in connection with a contract with a New York educational agency for any marketing or commercial purposes. This includes data obtained from administering PSAT, SAT, or AP exams during the school day. In addition, College Board cannot solicit students to participate in Search or similar programs during these exams.

This matter was handled for OAG by Assistant Attorneys General Laura Mumm, Jina John, and Hanna Baek of the Bureau of Internet and Technology, under the supervision of Bureau Chief Kim Berger and Deputy Bureau Chief Clark Russell, with special assistance from former Special Advisor and Senior Counsel for Economic Justice Zephyr Teachout. The Bureau of Internet and Technology is part of the Division for Economic Justice, which is overseen by Chief Deputy Attorney General Chris D’Angelo and First Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Levy.

This matter was handled for NYSED by Chief Privacy Officer Louise De Candia and Counsel & Deputy Commissioner for Legal Affairs Daniel Morton-Bentley.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, For-Profit, New York, Privacy and Privacy Rights

Los Angeles School Board Passes Policy Limiting Charter Co-Locations

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
9

By a vote of 4-3, the Los Angeles Unified Schiol District Board adopted a policy barring charter schools from co-locating in public schools with high-needs students. The charter lobby immediately threatened to sue the district. Currently one of every five students in the LAUSD district attends a charter school. For years, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Bill Bloomfield, the Walton family, and Michael Bloomberg have poured millions into school board races on behalf of privatization. But for the moment, the anti-privatization supporters of public schools have a slim majority.

The seats of two of the four-person majority—Scott Schmerelson and George McKenna—are up for election next month. Both are veteran educators and pro-public schools. Schmerelson is running for re-election; McKenna is retiring and has endorsed veteran educator Sherlett Hendy Newbill. I endorsed both Scott Schmerelson and Sherlett Hendy Newbill.

The new policy could be ditched by pro-charter replacements or by a legal challenge from the charter lobby.

Howard Blume wrote in the Los Angeles Times:

The struggle between traditional and charter schools intensified Tuesday when a narrow Los Angeles school board majority passed a sweeping policy that will limit when charters can operate on district-owned campuses. 

Access to public school campuses for charter schools is guaranteed under state law — and charter advocates immediately threatened to sue over the new restrictions.

The policy, passed 4 to 3, prohibits the new location of charters at an unspecified number of campuses with special space needs or programs. One early staff estimate put the number close to 350, but there’s uncertainty over how the policy will be interpreted. The school system has about 850 campuses, but advocates are concerned that charters could be pushed out of areas where they currently operate, making it difficult for them to remain viable.

Under the policy, district-operated campuses are exempt from new space-sharing arrangements when a school has a designatedprogram to help Black students or when a school is among the most “fragile” because of low student achievement. Also exempt would be community schools — which incorporate services for the broader health, counseling and other needs of students and their families. 

The district argued these programs need space beyond the normal allotments for classrooms, counselors, health staff and administrators — for example, rooms for tutoring, enrichment or parent centers. Such spaces had frequently been tabulated as unused or underutilized — and then made available to charters…

In the current school year 52 independent charters operate on 50 campuses, according to L.A. Unified. The number is expected to be smaller for next year and down significantly from a peak of more than 100. But even 50 schools would make for one of the larger school systems in California.

In all, there are 221 district-authorized charters and 25 other local charters approved by the county or state, serving about 1 in 5 public school students within the boundaries of L.A. Unified — about 535,000 students total. Most charters operate in their own or leased private buildings.

The L.A. school system has more charters than any other district in the nation. Most were approved under charter-friendly school boards and under state laws — since changed — that made it difficult for school districts to reject charters.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Elections, Los Angeles

Heather Cox Richardson: History Is Watching!

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
20

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the supine behavior of Republicans in the House of Representatives, as they worship at the shrine of Trump. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel: 22 Republican Senators voted for it, openly defying the Orange Menace. But in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t allow the bill to come to a vote because it is likely to pass. Johnson is collaborating with Trump who is collaborating with the enemies of freedom (aka Putin).

She writes:

History is watching,” President Joe Biden said this afternoon. He warned “Republicans in Congress who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held accountable” that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”

At about 5:00 this morning, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security supplemental bill, providing funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Most of the money in the measure will stay in the United States, paying defense contractors to restock the matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine. 

The vote was 70–29 and was strongly bipartisan. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats in support of the bill, overcoming the opposition of far-right Republicans.

The measure went to the House of Representatives, where House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he will not take it up, even though his far-right supporters acknowledged that a majority of the representatives supported it and that if it did come to the floor, it would pass. 

Yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH)—who had just returned from his third trip to Ukraine, where he told President Volodymyr Zelensky that reinforcements were coming—told Politico’sRachel Bade: “We have to get this done…. This is no longer an issue of, ‘When do we support Ukraine?’ If we do not move, this will be abandoning Ukraine.” 

“The speaker will need to bring it to the floor,” Turner said. “You’re either for or against the authoritarian governments invading democratic countries.… You’re either for or against the killing of innocent civilians. You’re either for or against Russia reconstituting the Soviet Union.”

Today, Biden spoke to the press to “call on the Speaker to let the full House speak its mind and not allow a minority of the most extreme voices in the House to block this bill even from being voted on—even from being voted on. This is a critical act for the House to move. It needs to move.”

Bipartisan support for Ukraine “sends a clear message to Ukrainians and to our partners and to our allies around the world: America can be trusted, America can be relied upon, and America stands up for freedom,” he said. “We stand strong for our allies. We never bow down to anyone, and certainly not to Vladimir Putin.”

“Supporting this bill is standing up to Putin. Opposing it is playing into Putin’s hands.”

“The stakes were already high for American security before this bill was passed in the Senate last night,” Biden said. “But in recent days, those stakes have risen. And that’s because the former President has sent a dangerous and shockingly, frankly, un-American signal to the world” Biden said, referring to Trump’s statement on Saturday night that he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—the 75-year-old collective security organization that spans North America and Europe—but are not devoting 2% of the gross domestic product to their militaries. 

Trump’s invitation to Putin to invade our NATO allies was “dumb,…shameful,…dangerous, [and] un-American,” Biden said. “When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it. And NATO is a sacred commitment.” NATO, Biden said, is “the alliance that protects America and the world.”

“[O]ur adversaries have long sought to create cracks in the Alliance. The greatest hope of all those who wish America harm is for NATO to fall apart. And you can be sure that they all cheered when they heard [what] Donald Trump…said.”

“Our nation stands at…an inflection point in history…where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of our future for decades to come. This is one of those moments.

And I say to the House members, House Republicans: You’ve got to decide. Are you going to stand up for freedom, or are you going to side with terror and tyranny? Are you going to stand with Ukraine, or are you going to stand with Putin? Will we stand with America or…with Trump?”

“Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together to send a message of unity to the world. It’s time for the House Republicans to do the same thing: to pass this bill immediately, to stand for decency, stand for democracy, to stand up to a so-called leader hellbent on weakening American security,” Biden said. 

“And I mean this sincerely: History is watching. History is watching.”

But instead of taking up the supplemental national security bill tonight, House speaker Johnson took advantage of the fact that Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) has returned to Washington after a stem cell transplant to battle his multiple myeloma and that Judy Chu (D-CA) is absent because she has Covid to make a second attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for his oversight of the southern border of the United States. 

Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas by a vote of 214 to 213. The vote catered to far-right Republicans, but impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.

“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” Biden said in a statement. He called on the House to pass the border security measure Republicans killed last week on Trump’s orders, and to pass the national security supplemental bill.

House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said he will use every possible tool to force a vote on the national security supplemental bill. In contrast, as Biden noted, House Republicans are taking their cue from former president Trump, who does not want aid to Ukraine to pass and who last night demonstrated that he is trying to consolidate his power over the party by installing hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric, at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC). 

This move is likely due in part to outgoing RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s having said the RNC could not pay Trump’s legal bills once he declared himself a presidential candidate. After his political action committees dropped $50 million on legal fees last year, he could likely use another pipeline, and even closer loyalists might give him one. 

In addition, Trump probably recognizes that he might well lose the protective legal bulwark of the Trump Organization when Judge Arthur Engoron hands down his verdict in Trump’s $370 million civil fraud trial. New York attorney general Letitia James is seeking not only monetary penalties but also a ban on Trump’s ability to conduct business in the New York real estate industry. In that event, the RNC could become a base of operations for Trump if he succeeds in taking it over entirely. 

But it is not clear that all Republican lawmakers will follow him into that takeover, as his demands from the party not only put it out of step with the majority of the American people but also now clearly threaten to blow up global security. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told his colleagues as he urged them to vote for the national security supplemental bill.

Politicians should recognize that Trump’s determination to win doesn’t help them much: it is all about him and does not extend to any down-ballot races. 

Indeed, the attempt of a Republican minority to impose its will on the majority of Americans appears to be sparking a backlash. In today’s election in New York’s Third Congressional District to replace indicted serial liar George Santos, a loyal Trump Republican, voters chose Democrat Tom Suozzi by about 8 points. CNN’s Dana Bash tonight said voters had told her they voted against the Republican candidate because Republicans, on Trump’s orders, killed the bipartisan border deal. The shift both cuts down the Republican majority in the House and suggests that going into 2024, suburban swing voters are breaking for Democrats. 

As Trump tries to complete his takeover of the formerly grand old Republican Party, its members have to decide whether to capitulate.

History is watching.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Freedom, Funding, Republicans, Trump

Open Secrets Reports: Trump Network Paid More Than $60 Million in Legal Fees

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
3

Open Secrets is a website that tracks and reports on political spending and donors. Its latest report says that the Trump political network paid more than $60 million for legal fees, which was unprecedented for him, possibly for any presidential candidate ever. The money comes not from his pockets but from his fundraising appeals. It’s surprising but true that small donors would send $10 or $25 to a man who claims to be worth $10 billion.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Funding, Politics, Trump

What Do Test Scores Measure? How I Lost My Faith in Their Value

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2024 //
58

For many years, I was a staunch advocate of standardized testing. But I lost my enthusiasm for standardized testing after spending seven years on the governing board of NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress). NAEP is the federal test administered every two years to measure academic progress in reading and math, as well as testing other subjects. The test takers are randomly selected; not every student answers the questions on any test. There are no stakes attached to NAEP scores for any student, teacher, or school. The scores are reported nationally and by state and for nearly two dozen urban districts. NAEP is useful for gauging trends.

Why did I lose faith in the value of standardized testing?

First, over the course of my term, I saw questions that had more than one right answer. A thoughtful student might easily select the “wrong” answer. I also saw questions where the “right” answer was wrong.

Second, it troubled me that test scores were so highly correlated with socioeconomic status. Invariably, the students from families with the highest income had the highest scores. Those from the poorest families had the lowest scores.

Third, the latter observation spurred me to look at this correlation between family wealth and test scores. I saw it on the results of every standardized test, be it the SAT, the ACT, or international tests. I wondered why we were spending so much money to tell us what we already knew: rich kids have better medical care, fewer absences, better nutrition, more secure and stable housing, and are less likely to be exposed to vermin, violence, and other health hazards.

Fourth, when I read books like Daniel Koretz’s “Measuring Up” and “The Testing Charade” and Todd Farley’s “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry,” my faith in the tests dissipated to the vanishing point.

Fifth, when I realized that the results of the tests are not available until the late summer or fall when the student has a new teacher, and that the tests offer no diagnostic information because the questions and answers are top-secret, I concluded that the tests had no value. They were akin to a medical test whose result is available four months after you see the doctor, and whose result is a rating comparing you to others but utterly lacking in diagnostic information about what needs medication.

So, all of this is background to presenting a recent study that you might find useful in assessing the value of standardized tests:

Jamil Maroun and Christopher Tienken have written a paper that will help you understand why standardized tested is fatally flawed. The paper is on the web and its title is:

The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States

Here is the abstract:

The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.

The paper was peer-reviewed. It was published last week.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, NAEP, Standardized Testing

John Sweeney: When Tucker Carlson Met Putin

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
26

I have not seen Tucker Carlson’s interview of Vladimir Putin but I’ve heard plenty about it. On Chris Wallace’s show, Bret Stephens of the New York Times called Tucker the “Tokyo Rose” of our time. Hillary Clinton, interviewed on MSNBC by Alex Wagner, said he was “a useful idiot,” a term first used by Lenin to describe the dupes who parroted Soviet propaganda.

British investigative journalist John Sweeney reviewed Tucker’s interview and was even more scathing in his reaction. John Sweeney blogs at JohnSweeneyRoars. There is more to read so open the link.

He wrote:

Two narcissists but only one looking-glass: what was so bleakly and blackly comical about the Russian strong man Vladimir Putin granting an audience to the far-right showman, Tucker Carlson, was that even the American stooge could not hide his irritation at how boring the little man in the Kremlin was. Putin sensed that annoyance and gave Carlson bitch-slap after bitch-slap.

It would have been more amusing if Carlson had tottered out but the gravity of their shared neo-fascist agenda kept the two planet-sized egos in orbit, just. However, the big reveal of the-useful-idiot-meets-serial-killer show was that the two beauties really didn’t get on. Down the track, I look forward to a leak of what Carlson really felt about Putin. Lines like: “ungrateful dwarf sonofabitch” come to the novelist in me.

Sweeney the journalist notes the glorious moment when Putin upends the conventions and attacks the supplicant for a previous job application. Putin, puffy cheeked on steroids as ever, is waxing long about the 2014 Maidan revolution when the unarmed Ukrainian opposition took to the streets to bring down Kremlin puppet President Viktor Yanukovych:
Putin: “The armed opposition committed a coup in Kiev. What is that supposed to mean? Who do you think you are? I wanted to ask the then US leadership.

Tucker: With the backing of whom?

Vladimir Putin: With the backing of CIA, of course, the organization you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. We should thank God, they didn’t let you in.

Carlson looks so mortified that I wondered whether his carefully coiffed hairdo might levitate in horror, as well it might. Who would have known that this career anti-elite hobgoblin had once tried to join the Company? Well, the former head of the Russian intelligence service, for one.

I feel I am entitled to be critical of Tucker Carlson because, firstly, he is a traitor to the human soul, and, secondly, I have interviewed Putin myself. Back in 2014, after the shooting down of MH17 by a Russian BUK missile, my colleagues at BBC Panorama and I worked out that the little man in the Kremlin was going to open some museum of mammothology in Yakutsk in the far east of Siberia. I rocked up, popped my question, Putin was caught in the bright lights of the Kremlin’s patsy media cameras – they thought my popping up had official permission – and Peskov, his PR man, was embarrassed. A few hours a goon came and punched me in the stomach. The Kremlin didn’t like my question. Still, I got off lightly.

Carlson’s interview set out several things about Putin to his core audience of ignorant white Americans who don’t like the twenty-first century (although they have been pretty clear to some of us for two decades, more): that Putin is boring, very; that he is nasty, very; that he is used to getting his own way to a pathological extent; that he is a liar; that he is incapable of explaining why he has invaded Ukraine in simple terms that make sense because he can’t.

Carlson wanted so little from the Russian dictator but the pleonexic couldn’t bring himself to be the least bit generous. Pleonexia is a term first applied to Putin by the great Kremlin-watcher Masha Gessen, meaning: having an irresistible urge to take things that rightfully belong to another. I wrote a whole chapter of my book, Killer In The Kremlin, on Putin’s craving to take from others: objects, countries, yes and yes, but also the time of others too. Putin turned up late for our departed Queen, late for the King of Spain, late for the Pope and four and a half hours late, of course, for then German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. So Carlson should not have been the least bit surprised that Putin stole his time, wasting the precious first half hour of the interview by setting out a dark fairy story that history showed that Russia has a right to repress Ukraine.

How can I best summarise Putin’s case? He was talking bollocks, total bollocks. The evolution of Ukraine and then Russia – Kyiv was a well-organised citadel in the tenth century when Moscow was still a few sticks in a bog – is messy and complicated. But the modern world started in 1945 and rule number one, in Europe at least, was that no country should invade another. Nothing whatsoever from the past trumps that. Full stop.

One other Putin comment which will drive up the Polish defence budget by another five percentage points was that the Poles somehow brought on 1939 themselves, that they should have negotiated with Hitler. What? Hello?

Carlson is a great showman, his glands unctuous, his tongue fluent but he is also a profoundly stupid man who even failed to get a degree from the rich kid’s diploma factory his family money sent him to.  I didn’t expect him to challenge Putin on the Russian’s fairytale history lesson but there is one simple thing that even a very thick CIA reject should have cottoned on to. One of Putin’s beefs about Ukraine is that their leaders are Nazi. President Zelenskiy is Jewish. Hello?

OK, let me break this down in a simple way by telling a true story of just how un-Nazi Ukraine is, from my own personal experience. At the height of the Battle of Kyiv, when the Russian army was twelve miles away from the city centre, I got a call from the Jewish Chronicle in London, inviting me to be their stringer. I explained that I wasn’t Jewish. They replied that they knew but there was no-one else. I said yes because it struck me as funny to work for a Jewish paper in a country the Kremlin said was Nazi. I got to hang out with the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine, to see Jewish aid relief to the front lines of Ukraine, to talk to soldiers who were Jewish – and also Muslim and Christian and those with no faith. The one thing I have not seen is strong evidence of Ukraine being Nazi. Because it isn’t.

All Carlson had to do was say: “but Mr Putin, how could Ukraine be Nazi if the President is Jewish?”

He did nothing of the kind. Carlson’s commitment to the cause, some kind of lower case Fascist International, was greater than his nous. But we knew that, didn’t we?
The worry remains that Carlson’s core audience will, once again, place their prejudices above their ability to weigh evidence. That is what the political religion they call MAGA does. What we all saw is a thoroughly horrible human being with a closed mind meeting the President of Russia. The latter, it turns out, is also a thoroughly horrible human being with a very closed mind and a bore – a crushing one at that.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Bias, Extremism, History, International, Media

Mississippi: Parent Group Sues to Block Public Funds from Private Schools

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
7

In a court case in Mississippi, a parent group is seeking to prevent the state from disbursing public funds to private schools. The parents rely on a clause in the state constitution that explicitly bars public funding of private schools.

The story was reported by the Mississippi Free Press. SUPPORT LOCAL JOURNALISM!

Schoolchildren could be heard playing less than a block away from the Mississippi Supreme Court building as attorneys argued over whether federal public funds should be awarded to the state’s private schools on Tuesday.

Rob McDuff, a Mississippi Center for Justice attorney representing the pro-public education nonprofit organization Parents For Public Schools, called a prohibition in the state’s constitution on funding for private schools “an ironclad principle” that “doesn’t have exceptions” during oral arguments.

Mississippi Supreme Court justices Leslie King, Robert Chamberlain and David Ishee also heard arguments from attorneys representing the Mid-South Association of Independent Schools and the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office defending the use of COVID-19 relief funds for private schools..

Parents for Public Schools filed the initial lawsuit in June 2022 after state lawmakers passed bills appropriating $10 million to help MAIS member schools pay for broadband, water and infrastructure projects. One bill Gov. Tate Reeves signed into law created the Independent Schools Infrastructure Grant Program. The other allocated American Rescue Plan funds for the program. The Legislature had set the grant to go into effect on July 1, 2022.

The pro-public education organization’s lawyers argued that awarding the funds to private schools violates Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution and would give private schools a competitive advantage. That section of the Constitution says that “no religious or other sect or sects shall ever control any part of the school or other educational funds of this state; nor shall any funds be appropriated toward the support of any sectarian school, or to any school that at the time of receiving such appropriation is not conducted as a free school.”

“This is a case about a lot more than 10 million dollars,” Will Bardwell, an attorney from Democracy Forward, who also argued on behalf of Parents for Public Schools, told media after the Feb. 6 hearing. “This is a case about part of the Mississippi Constitution that reserves all of the state’s education funding for public schools. If we’re going to make exceptions to that for a 10 million dollar appropriation, then we can make exceptions about that for a 100 million dollar appropriation or a 500 million dollar appropriation. This is a simple case and it’s about a lot more than 10 million dollars.”

Please open the link to finish the story.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Justice, Mississippi, Parent Groups, Privatization, Separation of church and state

Thom Hartmann: 56 Years Of Treasonous Acts by GOP Candidates and Presidents

By dianeravitch
February 13, 2024 //
38

Thom Hartmann scores a bulls-eye again with this article.

The American people want the borders to be secure; they want a controlled flow of legal immigrants. It’s up to Congress to establish adequate border security, screening, judges, and border patrol. The Republicans have refused to send additional funds to Ukraine or Israel without a plan for the border. In the Senate, the two parties were close to reaching agreement on a bipartisan deal for the border.

But then, after his victory in New Hampshire, Trump stepped in and told them to kill the almost final agreement. He wants the issue of immigration and border security alive and unresolved for his fall campaign. Terrified of the Wrath of Trump, Senate Republicans fell meekly into line.

Hartmann writes here about previous Republican presidential candidates and presidents who have cynically put their political self-interest above the national interest:

Once again, America and the world are watching with horror as a Republican candidate for president — just to win an election — manipulates world affairs in a way that will cause widespread death and destruction while damaging the interests and reputation of America.

There’s a long tradition of Republicans running for president committing what can best called treason, or at least criminal manipulation of international affairs, to advantage themselves and hurt incumbent Democratic presidents.

Yesterday, Mitch McConnell let the proverbial cat out of the bag. A bipartisan group of senators had been working on a bill to provide funding to Ukraine and Israel, with money for the southern border, and when it looked like they were going to produce something that would actually pass the House and Senate, Donald Trump inserted himself, telling the Republicans they should kill the bill.

Trump apparently wants to run on chaos at the border, and solving the problem as this legislation is intended to do would take that issue away from him. But he’s also explicitly opposed to any further US aid to Ukraine. This is a treasonous twofer, putting Trump’s election above the interests of the United States and world peace.

Trump, of course, knows that if it weren’t for Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, he never would have been president. And he desperately needs a repeat to hold onto his fortune and stay out of jail: he’s in a far greater bind now than when he first ran for president as a hustle to get GE to pay him more for his TV show.

His 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, admitted that during that election he was handing secret internal campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook, an effort that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states.

Now, Trump wants Putin’s help again for 2024. He knows that Putin can do things from overseas, including using deepfakes and posing as Americans to spread explicit lies on social media, that would send people to prison for election interference if done here in the US.

Putin’s number one goal, of course, is to seize control of Ukraine while destabilizing western democracies. So, Trump, wanting Putin’s help, is now trying to deliver Ukraine to Putin by killing US aid.

This pattern of Republican presidential candidates criminally intervening in foreign policy just to win elections started in 1968 and has been a feature — not a bug — of every Republican president who succeeded in taking the White House since: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.

It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.

Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that that fall.

But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.

Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.

The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):

President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.

Sen. Dirksen: I know.

Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.

At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.

Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.

In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”

But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.

An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.

Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.

Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.

Next up was Ronald Reagan.

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President of Iran that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:

“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.

This is the story that was finally confirmed just last year with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom, including the lieutenant governor of Texas.

This was the second modern-day act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.

The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “Iran/Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.

As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:

“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.

The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.

Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran/Contra” scandal.

But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. Which is one reason Bush Jr. and Trump believed they could get away with anything.

After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.

The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.

And Walsh was now looking into actual criminal activity by Bush himself in support of the Iran/Contra October Surprise.

Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation and protect himself, which Bush did.

The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, AVERTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”

And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.

Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.

In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:

“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”

Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.

And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).

Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busily accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)

More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.

As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:

“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”

That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.

To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.

The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency.

Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election but then — when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won — she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”

As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:

“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.

“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”

George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million nationwide) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.

Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.

The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.

So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.

To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.

Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.

“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.

“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.

“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”

Bush lying us into that war was an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.

But it did what it was supposed to do: it got Bush re-elected in 2004.

Which brings us to this year’s election.

In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.

Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.

It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring Trump a “Russian asset.”

It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, as mentioned, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.

And now Trump is trying to exacerbate a crisis on our southern border and screw Ukraine in a way that will lead to mass causalities and disrupt the international order — all to give Putin what he wants — the same way Nixon used Vietnam, Reagan used Iran, and Bush used Iraq, just to win a damn election.

While we can’t rewrite history, at least we can try to prevent it from being repeated. Call your members of Congress — your representative and both your senators — and let them know if you agree that Ukraine aid and resolving the issue at the southern border shouldn’t be held hostage to Trump’s need for Putin’s help and approval.

The number for the congressional switchboard is: 202-224-3121.

It’s way past time that America ceased to be the dog wagged by the tail of corrupt Republicans who want to be president.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, International

Ohio: Fund Public Schools, Not Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2024 //
5

Tanisha Pruitt, Ph.D., wrote the following statement on behalf of Policy Matters Ohio last June. She urged the legislature not to expand vouchers. Her plea was ignored. The legislature decided to raise the cap on vouchers to 450% of the federal poverty level. Given research that shows the failure of vouchers in Ohio and elsewhere, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that the Republican dominated legislature doesn’t care about the state’s children or their future.

Regardless of race, neighborhood, or how much money is in their parents’ bank account, every child should be able to attend an excellent school that has everything they need to learn and grow. Every dollar spent on vouchers makes this vision less achievable. Vouchers take public money and give it to private schools, with real consequences for the 90% of our kids who attend Ohio’s public schools.

With their recent budget proposal, Senate leadership has shown they are willing, even eager, to sacrifice Ohio’s kids to ram through a universal voucher scheme they’ve been planning for years. The Senate plan would make EdChoice vouchers — worth $8,407 a year for students in grades 9-12, and $6,165 a year for those in grades K-8 — available to households with incomes up to 450% of the federal poverty rate. (For a family of four, that’s about $135,000 a year.) And they wouldn’t stop there: Senate leadership would also allow households making more than that to get 10% of the value of EdChoice vouchers, subsidizing a discount on private school tuition for the children of the wealthiest Ohioans.

<<< And that’s just one of the ways the Senate proposal will disproportionately benefit the rich while hurting the rest of us.>>>

Kids bring their whole selves to the classroom. To succeed they need well-funded schools — and they need good food, health care, and quality child care to build a solid foundation. Senate leadership would make it very easy to qualify for vouchers, while Ohio already makes it very difficult to qualify for other, more fundamental public programs. Legislators impose tight caps on family income to participate in SNAP, Medicaid, publicly funded child care and free school meals. Compare those income limits to the proposal for limitless access to private school vouchers and you get a good sense of where the Senate majority’s priorities and loyalties lie.

Public schools in Ohio are responsible for educating 1.6 million students. The Senate proposal cuts their funding by $245.6 million in FY 2024 and by $295.8 million in FY 2025. At the same time, Senate leadership would increase funding for vouchers by $182 million in FY 2024 and $191 million in FY 2025 — pushing the total annual cost to more than a billion dollars by the end of this budget cycle. That’s $1 billion of Ohio taxpayers’ money being funneled to unaccountable private schools, many of which are operated by churches and other religious entities.

The budgetary choices that we see in the Senate proposal begs the question of where our legislators’ priorities lie when it comes to funding our education system. How we fund our schools now will impact education — and our workforce and economy — for years to come. Ohio is currently ranked near the bottom at 46th in the nation when it comes to equitable distribution of funding in schools. By proposing massive new spending on vouchers, Ohio legislators would only make things worse.

In the last budget, we won the Fair School Funding Plan, with the promise to fully and fairly fund schools so every child in Ohio gets what they need to set them on the path to a good life. Now we need legislators to live up to that promise and finish the job. State leaders have a constitutional duty to protect public schools. Ensuring a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” — as Ohio’s constitution requires — means correcting disparities created by bad policies of the past, which still harm kids today. We do that by prioritizing public schools, cutting spending on vouchers, and paying teachers what they’re worth, so every student in every district in every school can thrive.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Vouchers
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