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Insurrectionist Gets 7 Years and Two Months in Prison for Vicious Attack on Police Officer

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2022 //
11

Kyle Young participated in the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and brought his 16-year-old son. For his role in beating a police officer, he was sententeced to prison for seven years and two months. He was justly punished for brutalizing Officer Michael Fanone and attempting to overthrow the government. Anyone who calls these insurrectionists “patriots” or “political prisoners” dishonors the Constitution.

A member of the mob that launched a series of violent attacks on police — including D.C. officer Michael Fanone — in a tunnel under the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, apologized Tuesday as a judge sentenced him to seven years and two months in prison.


Kyle Young, 38, is the first rioter to be sentenced for the group attack on Fanone, who was dragged into the mob, beaten and electrocuted until he suffered a heart attack and lost consciousness.


“You were a one-man wrecking ball that day,” Judge Amy Berman Jackson said. “You were the violence.”


Fanone resigned from the D.C. police late last year, saying fellow officers turned on him for speaking so publicly about the Capitol attack and former president Donald Trump’s role in it. In court Tuesday, Fanone directly confronted his attacker, telling Young, “I hope you suffer.”


“The assault on me by Mr. Young cost me my career,” Fanone said. “It cost me my faith in law enforcement and many of the institutions I dedicated two decades of my life to serving.”

Young pleaded guilty last May.

Young and his 16-year-old son joined the tunnel battle just before 3 p.m., and Young handed a stun gun to another rioter and showed him how to use it. When Fanone was pulled from the police line, Young and his son pushed through the crowd toward him.


Just after that, authorities said, another rioter repeatedly shocked Fanone with the stun gun, and Young helped restrain the officer as another rioter stole his badge and radio.

Young lost his grip on Fanone as the mob moved. He then pushed and hit a nearby Capitol Police officer, who had just been struck with bear spray, according to documents filed with his plea.


Young also pointed a strobe light at the officers, jabbed at them with a stick and threw an audio speaker toward the police line, hitting another rioter in the back of the head, prosecutors said.
In a letter to the court, Young said he cried on the phone with his wife as he left D.C.


“I was a nervous wreck and highly ashamed of myself,” he wrote. “I do not condone this and do not promote this like others have done. Violence isn’t the answer.”


In court, he apologized to Fanone, saying, “I hope someday you forgive me. … I am so, so sorry. If I could take it back, I would.”

Young has a long criminal history.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Trump

January 6, 2021: The Most Shameful Day in U.S. History

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2022 //
38

Time to take a break from Education News and Ukraine to reflect on the most shameful day in U.S. history. We dare not forget, especially as the numbers of anti-democratic, neo-fascist, militant groups surface, and the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down reasonable restrictions on gun control.

In the last two years of Trump’s term in office, I followed him on Twitter. It was a usually horrifying experience to read whatever rant he posted at 6 a.m. But it was necessary, I thought, to be informed, to know what bizarre rages were percolating in his head, unfiltered by senior staff or caution. I recall the tweet he wrote when he said, “come to DC on January 6. Will be wild.” I knew something awful was brewing.

My television was on that day, and I watched his speech to his adoring throng and felt the sense of menace in the air. Like millions of others, I watched in horror as the mob attacked the thinly-guarded Capitol, broke through the lines, began attacking police officers, broke a window, stampeded the entrance, and climbed the walls of that august building.

I couldn’t help but think of the many times I had visited the Capitol to meet with an elected official or staff. Entry to the building is tightly guarded. Visitors wait patiently in line, waiting their turn to put their bags through a scanning machine, then to walk single file through a metal detector.

And here were hundreds or thousands of people streaming through the doors and the windows, or scaling the exterior walls, then running unimpeded through the halls.

I wrote that day, in a state of shock, about what I and millions of others had witnessed: “an attempted coup,” terrorism inspired by Trump.

The next day, as the dust settled, I wrote about what happened and about Trump’s failure to defend the Capitol:

As the rampage continued, Trump was silent. After a few hours of lawlessness, he released a video telling them to go home. He reiterated his lie that the election had been stolen. In the video, he also praised the crowd, who broke into the Capitol, trashed its elegant interior, ransacked the offices of members, terrorized fleeing elected, stole items from its rooms and posed for photographs in the legislative chambers. “We love you,” Trump said. “You’re very special.”

Yeah, very special thugs, looters, and terrorists.

It didn’t occur to me at the time that Trump’s loyal supporters would claim that the mob was created by Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters. Why would Trump have told them that he loved them? Why would he have refused to send in help if he thought the mob was Antifa and BLM? Why would he say they were “special”? If he thought they were BLM and Antifa, I expect we would have seen a massive show of force, not silence.

It certainly didn’t occur to me that the Republican National Committee, to its eternal shame, would call the attack on the Capitol “legitimate political discourse.” Or that Republican members who rushed to safety and cowered in safe spaces would reflect on the day as just another protest or actually defend the insurrectionists as “patriots.”

On January 10, 2021, I wrote “Donald Trump Is a Traitor” and thought about what might have happened if the insurrectionists had succeeded.

What happened on January 6 was a failed coup. Many of Trump’s MAGA base joined the mob innocently.

But the mob was led by trained militia men, equipped to take hostages, prepared with flex cuffs, which police use to handcuff suspects.

The mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

The mob knew the location of the secret Capitol offices of Democratic leaders.

They went looking for them.

Members of Congress exited the Chambers only a minute or two before the mob. If they had not escaped, there would have been mayhem.

The mob would have seized the leaders of Congress and VP Pence, handcuffed them, perhaps given them a show trial, perhaps executed them.

What then? Our democracy and our Constitution shredded. Would Trump declare himself President for Life?

What happened was terrifying. What might have happened would have been far, far worse.

Trump toadies are incorrigible. How to explain the members of Congress who emerged from their hiding place to vote to sustain Trump’s lies and to overturn a free and fair election? How to explain the perfidy of Senators Cruz and Hawley? How to explain the majority of House Republicans, who voted in support of a man who incited a coup against our democracy and our Constitution?

Now that I have watched the hearings of the January 6 Committee, I realize that the situation was even worse than I imagined on the day of the failed coup. I learned that Trump wanted to join the mob at the Capitol. Well, I’m sorry he didn’t, because there would now be no question about his culpability for inciting the insurrection, and he would be barred from ever seeking office again.

We learned that he watched the riot on television in his private dining room and did nothing to stop it for 187 minutes. He was hoping the mob would succeed and capture the Capitol. We know he did nothing to save the life of his Vice-President.

That led me to wonder: what if the mob had succeeded? There would have been no show trials. They would have executed Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. They would have murdered AOC and the Squad. They would have murdered any member of Congress who stood in the way of their hero Trump. In the chaos, the mob might have murdered some of their Republican allies. Accidents happen.

We now know that the mob was only 40 feet from Pence as he fled. We now know that Officer Eugene Goodman lured the mob away from the floor of the Senate long enough for it to be evacuated. Even Republicans were terrified. We saw video of mob sympathizer Josh Hawley sprinting away from the insurrectionists whom he incited earlier with a raised fist.

January 6, 2021, was the worst day in American history. It was the only time that the seat of our government was attacked by our fellow Americans. It was a rebellion against the Constitution and the rule of law. If ever there was a Day of infamy, a Day of Shame, a day in which our Constitution and our democracy hung in the balance, it was January 6.

We must never forget.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Shame, Trump

Greg Brozeit: What Ken Burns Got Wrong

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2022 //
54

Greg Brozeit is a valued reader of the blog who is deeply knowledgeable about German history. In a private communication, he expressed to me his disappointment about Ken Burns’ “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” We agreed that Burns’s singular focus on Hitler’s Jewish victims slighted the other categories of people that he targeted for annihilation. They included Communists, socialists, trade unionists, the disabled, homosexuals, and Roma, as well as priests and nuns who opposed his monstrous regime. I invited Greg to write about his objections, and he did. Greg reminded me of the famous lines spoken by the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was initially a supporter of Hitler but turned against the Nazi regime as he realized Hitler’s murderous ambitions:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

Greg Brozeit wrote:

The story of the Holocaust is about how the “other” could be created and marginalized through inhumane policies and practices supported by large swaths of people.

Or, if they were not supporters, they had been conditioned over years to live in fear and had little-to-no sense of civic duty or civil courage. That is a complex story in which Jews were specifically targeted, the most numerous of many contrived “groups” of victims. A large number of those classified as German Jews, who were eliminated or driven out of the country, viewed themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Both identities were equally important to many of them. The distinction was lost and later imposed on them.

I often cite the diaries of Victor Klemperer for one reason -they are the only personal, contemporary observations of what actually happened by someone who was “fortunate” to be last on the list of Jews who were to be eliminated in the
final solution. He was one of the latter; one thing few Americans know and his publishers do their best to hide from Americans is that Klemperer returned to Dresden and became a professor and loyal citizen of East Germany until his death. It would have been interesting to read his view of the Berlin Wall had he lived long enough to witness it. He knew he was persecuted by Nazis because they imposed the definition of Jew on him, one he never internalized. He was almost a victim of the Holocaust, but he would have classified himself as not being Jewish long before others would make him a Jew.

After watching the PBS/Burns program on the U.S. and the Holocaust, I was disappointed that he missed so many opportunities to tell a larger story. Burns rarely veered from the “Holocaust = six million Jews” argument and consequently undermined the message that I (and perhaps the producers) had hoped for. The term “Holocaust” is also used for political, not humanitarian or historical, purposes—the definition Burns’ narrative (naively or intentionally) underscored. And therein lies my problem. A casual viewer might easily get the impression that from the 1930s to the end of WW II, Jews were the only victims of the Holocaust. The actual history is more complex.

By focusing only on Jews we risk serious dishonor to the memory of the six million—a view confirmed in my mind after reflecting on the title of Malcolm Nance’s book, “They Want to Kill Americans.”

Nazis claimed they were eliminating Jews and other undesirables to strengthen Germany. They started out by killing Germans: communists, trade unionists, social democrats, writers, artists, ethical conservatives, Protestants, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, gays and lesbians, persons with developmental disabilities, political opponents, those who weren’t acquiescent to the new order, AND Jews, both those who identified themselves so and those who did not. Focusing almost exclusively on any one of these groups risks breeding resentment and isolation. It certainly diminishes the broad inhumanity of the Holocaust.

An accurate recounting would never gloss over the genocidal priority the Nazis tragically bestowed upon Jews, but neither would it underplay the fate so many others were consigned to in this tragedy. And in fairness, Burns occasionally hinted at this reality. In the film’s final hour a doctor who took pride in the T4 program to eliminate persons with developmental disabilities was highlighted.

But the narrative all too quickly returned to the storyline of “aggressions against only Jews.” While Burns gives an excellent introduction to US policy on Jews and the Holocaust, the series title, “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” is misleading and inevitably expands (and eventually disappoints) the expectations and hopes for viewers who are not novices. The real story of the wide compass of inhumanity subsumed under the Holocaust is a profound lesson relevant to our present circumstances. Sadly, the program missed this larger opportunity.


Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, International, Media

Heather Cox Richardson: Putin’s War on Ukraine is not Going Well

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2022 //
57

The historian Heather Cox Richardson puts the situation in Ukraine into context. Please open the link to read her footnotes and consider subscribing to her excellent blog.

After a two-month stalemate, earlier this month Ukraine launched a game-changing counteroffensive against the Russians occupying their eastern territories of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia.

Over the summer, Ukrainian forces destroyed Russian arms, command centers, and supplies behind Russian lines with U.S.-supplied long-range High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), then began to talk of a counteroffensive in the south, near Kherson. To guard against such a move, Russia moved many of its soldiers from the northeast to Kherson, leaving its northeastern troops stretched thin.

On September 6, Ukrainians moved, but not near Kherson in the south. Instead, they struck hard on the weakened northeastern lines, cutting quickly through the stretched and disheartened Russian occupiers and capturing more than 6000 square miles in less than a week. Russian troops abandoned their weapons and fled.

Russian president Vladimir Putin had launched the war on February 24 with the expectation that a lightning-quick attack would give him control of Ukraine before other nations could react, much as when he had invaded Crimea in 2014, or Georgia in 2008.

But he did not reckon with the careful rebuilding and training the Ukrainian military had undergone since 2014 as it worked to hold off Russia. He also misjudged the strength and commitment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which former president Trump had worked hard to dismantle. In office only a year at that point, President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken had made reconstructing the world’s democratic alliances a top priority.

Those alliances held against Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation as they had not before when Putin had bought appeasement with promises: “Don’t believe those who try to use Russia to scare you, who say that, after Crimea, other [Ukrainian] regions will follow,” he said in 2014. “We don’t want to carve up Ukraine. We don’t need this.” In 2022, international sanctions began to bite into and then to bring down the Russian economy, while shipments of weapons and economic support kept the Ukrainians supplied. Rather than a quick, successful strike, Putin found himself in a drawn-out and deeply unpopular conflict.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive tightened the screws further. Putin responded to it on September 21 by hinting that he might use nuclear weapons and calling for what initially was described as “partial” mobilization, a move he had tried to avoid because of its potential to turn the Russian people against him. Immediately, Russian men headed for the country’s borders, while civilians and draftees, provided with few supplies and no training, began to resist.

Putin also announced that the four occupied regions would hold referenda on joining Russia and would be part of Russia as soon as those referenda occurred, so any attacks on them would be considered attacks on Russian territory. With this upfront admission that the vote was predetermined, Putin’s move was clearly designed to enable him to keep the Ukrainian territory he seems about to lose. It also violated international law by attacking another nation’s sovereignty, and Biden and other democratic leaders condemned it in advance.

Then, on September 26, the Nord Stream pipelines on the floor of the Baltic Sea that send natural gas from Russia to Europe appear to have been sabotaged with TNT in what appears to have been a warning that Russia could attack the critical infrastructure of NATO countries. In this case, neither of the pipelines was in use, and blowing them up might simply have been a way to get rid of them in such a way to collect insurance on assets that are losing value as Europe turns to alternative energy.

But the explosions might also have been a warning that the seven major pipelines delivering Norwegian gas to Europe could be next. Former president Trump promptly “truthed”: “Do not make matters worse with the pipeline blowup. Be strategic, be smart (brilliant!), get a negotiated deal done NOW. Both sides need and want it. The entire World is at stake. I will head up group???”

Today, in a televised ceremony, Putin announced that the sham referenda had taken place and that “there are four new regions of Russia.” The four territories, which Russia does not fully control, cover about 18% of Ukraine. Putin’s speech seemed to indicate a concern that the countries under his sway are sliding away. He focused on the “West,” claiming that Russia itself is under attack from western democracies. “The West is looking for new opportunities to hit us and they always dreamt about breaking our state into smaller states who will be fighting against each other,” he said. “They cannot be happy with this idea that there is this large country with all [these] natural riches and people who will never live under a foreign oppression.”

He offered to negotiate for an end to the war, but said that the “four new regions of Russia aren’t up for negotiation.”

Journalist Anne Applebaum, who is a specialist on Central and Eastern Europe, identified Putin’s actions as a war not just on Ukraine, but on world order and the rule of law, a system embraced by the democratic world. It is, she writes in The Atlantic, “a statement of contempt for democracy itself.” That world order says that big countries cannot attack smaller countries and that mass slaughter is unacceptable. In contrast, in Putin’s world, she writes, “Only brutality matters.”

Secretary of State Blinken tweeted: “Today, we took swift and severe measures in response to President Putin’s attempt to annex regions of Ukraine—a clear violation of international law. We will continue to impose costs on anyone that provides political or economic support for this sham.”

In turn, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Ukraine is applying for “accelerated ascension” into NATO. Ukraine’s membership in the organization would require other NATO countries to send troops to fight Russia. Admission to NATO requires the consent of all 30 members, and that consent is unlikely to materialize in the midst of a war, but Zelenky’s announcement overshadowed Putin’s.

Zelensky appealed to the ethnic minorities conscripted into Russian armies not to fight, telling them that more than 58,000 Russian soldiers had already died in Ukraine and warning them that they do not have to die for Putin. If they do come, he warned, those who are sent without dog tags should tattoo their names on their bodies so the Ukrainian authorities can inform their relatives when they are killed.

“The United States condemns Russia’s fraudulent attempt today to annex sovereign Ukrainian territory,” President Biden said. “Russia is violating international law, trampling on the United Nations Charter, and showing its contempt for peaceful nations everywhere. Make no mistake: these actions have no legitimacy.”

The U.S. announced new sanctions against Russians and Russian entities and will continue to provide aid to the Ukrainians. In what sounded like a reference to the damaged pipelines, Biden told reporters “America’s fully prepared with our NATO allies to defend every single inch of NATO territory, every single inch,” Mr. Biden said, adding: “Mr. Putin, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying.”

Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops have advanced around the city of Lyman and appear to be on the cusp of encircling the Russian troops there. Lyman is a key logistics and transportation hub, and the Institute for the Study of War, a think tank, says its loss “will likely be highly consequential to the Russian grouping.”

—

Categories Accountability, Courage, Cruelty, Evil, Failure, International

NYCLU Denounces Admission Screens for Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2022 //
6

It is surprising that a city with an African-American Mayor, who controls the city school system, and an African-American schools Chancellor, would revive screened admissions for the city’s middle schools and high schools. Some high schools have competitive admissions that are mandated by the state legislature. Most admission screens, however, are a matter of policy. They exist because of decisions by the Mayor and the Chancellor.

Just in from the New York Civil Liberties Union:

NYCLU Statement on Screening in NYC Schools

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 30, 2022

MEDIA CONTACT: Mohamed Taguine, 212-607-3372, media@nyclu.org

NEW YORK – New York City’s school chancellor David C. Banks announced on Thursday the City’s selective middle and high schools can once again use grades to choose which students to admit. In response, the New York Civil Liberties Union issued the following statement from Education Policy Center’s director Johanna Miller:

“Screening props up a separate and unequal school system and feeds the notion that only some students deserve a great education. Allowing middle and high school screens is a step backward that will increase the exclusion of Black, Latinx and lower-income students from our city’s best educational opportunities.

“In the most segregated school system in the country, we will never make progress without intentional measures. Instead of using precious education dollars to discriminate, we urge this administration to center racial equity, advance inclusion, and help our students heal and grow together.”

***

Categories Accountability, Competition, Cruelty, New York City, Racism, Segregation

Jan Resseger: Yes, We Can Reduce Child Poverty!

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2022 //
9

Jan Resseger, outstanding advocate for children and the common good, argues in this post that we DO know how to reduce child poverty and must pursue that goal. I agreee. When I realized the high correlation between poverty and academic failure, I saw that the best way to improve education is to improve the lives of children. I thank Jan for being one of the people who taught me that crucial lesson.

She writes:

This blog has strongly advocated that Congress should enact legislation to make permanent last year’s temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. New research confirms the urgency of Congressional action on the Child Tax Credit this year.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Census reported* a stunning drop in poverty among U.S. children in 2021, largely thanks to the Biden Administration’s action—temporarily for 2021 alone—to expand the Child Tax Credit and make it fully refundable under the American Rescue (COVID-relief) Act. That expansion of the Child Tax Credit ended in 2022. Now it is apparent that unless Congress acts to restore what was a temporary reform to the Child Tax Credit, millions of American children will fall back into poverty.

The U.S. Census created a new measure of poverty in 2011, the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which reflects how government programs like SNAP, school lunch benefits, and refundable tax credits supplement family income and reduce poverty. The Census Bureau’s new report explains: “The SPM (Supplemental Poverty Measure) extends the official poverty measure by accounting for many of the government programs that are designed to assist low-income families but are not included in the official poverty measure. The SPM also includes federal and state taxes and work and medical expenses… Though the SPM does not replace the official poverty measure, it provides a different metric of economic well-being that includes resources from government programs and tax credits to low income families.”

In their September 13 report, using the SPM measure, U.S. Census Bureau researchers documented an extraordinary reduction in child poverty during 2021: “The SPM child poverty rate fell 46 percent in 2021, from 9.7 percent in 2020 to 5.2 percent in 2021, a 4.5 percentage-point decline. This is the lowest SPM child poverty rate on record.” “The decline in the SPM rate for children was largely driven by stimulus payments and the refundable Child Tax Credit, which led to increased resources for families with children.”

To review: In the American Rescue (COVID-relief) Act passed in the spring of 2021, Congress made several significant changes in the Child Tax Credit: raising the maximum Child Tax Credit from $2,000 to $3,600 per child through age 5, and $3,000 for children age 6-17; allowing families to receive a Child Tax Credit for 17-year-olds; sending the payments monthly instead of once a year, and making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable for the year 2021. Making the Child Tax Credit fully refundable was an extremely significant reform. While, since 1997, families with comfortable incomes have qualified for the full Child Tax Credit, until the American Rescue (COVID-relief) Act, families with such small incomes that they pay little income tax received only a partial credit and not the full amount. Families without any income (who do not pay federal income tax) could not qualify at all for the tax credit. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained in a November 2021 report: “Prior to the Rescue Plan, 27 million children received less than the full Child Tax Credit or no credit at all because their families’ incomes were too low. That included roughly half of all Black and Latino children and half of children who live in rural communities… This upside-down policy gave less help to the children who needed it most. The American Rescue Plan temporarily fixed this policy by making the tax credit fully refundable for 2021.”

When the new Census data came out on September 13, the President of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Sharon Parrott, immediately released a statementinterpreting the significance of the drop in U.S. child poverty: “The data for 2021 show that the nation knows how to reduce poverty, broaden opportunity, and expand coverage. Temporary measures drove progress… The new data show that due chiefly to the Child Tax Credit, child poverty fell sharply in 2021 and reached a record low of 5.2 percent, as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM)…. As recently as 2018, 13.7 percent of children were below the SPM poverty line.”

Parrot scrutinizes the meaning of Congress’s temporary action last year to reduce American child poverty: “The Child Tax Credit expansion drove the large reduction in child poverty between 2020 and 2021…. In the absence of the expansion, child poverty would have fallen to 8.1 percent, rather than 5.2 percent, and some 2.1 million more children would have lived in families with incomes below the poverty line. The year-to-year decline in the child poverty rate was the largest on record (4.5 percentage points). Child poverty rates plunged widely across racial and ethnic groups…. For Black non-Latino children, the poverty rate fell to 8.3 percent in 2021 from 17.2percent in 2020…. This is stunning progress—in 2018 nearly 1 in 4 Black children lived in families with incomes below the poverty line. In 2021, fewer than 1 in 10 did… In 2021, poverty among Latino children fell to 8.4 percent and for American Indian and Alaska Native children it fell to 7.4 percent.”

Washington Post columnists, Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent believeCongressional action permanently to expand the Child Tax Credit would redefine our society morally: “We can choose to make our economic arrangements fairer. We can make collective decisions that children shouldn’t be disadvantaged at a very young age through no fault of their own. Making the choice to alleviate poverty early in people’s lives… puts children on a path to becoming healthier, happier, more fulfilled, more productive adults.”

Please read the rest of this important post. When I am asked what one thing I would do to improve students’ educational success, I invariably answer: “Reduce child poverty.”

Why don’t we?

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Health, Poverty

Tennessee: Hillsdale Charters Withdraw Applications

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2022 //
13

In a stunning turn of events, the charter schools affiliated with ultra-conservative Hillsdale College withdrew their applications in three counties. The counties rejected them, but the state charter commission had the power to override the local school boards. The charters stirred controversy in the rural counties, and the president of Hillsdale College made matters worse by insulting teachers.

American Classical Education — a group set up to create a network of charter schools affiliated with Hillsdale College across Tennessee — has withdrawn its applications to open schools in Madison, Montgomery and Rutherford counties.

This follows months of controversy since Gov. Bill Lee announced a “partnership” with the ultraconservative Michigan college during his State of the State Address in January.

ACE’s application had been rejected in all three counties, and they faced a contentious appeal next week before the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, which could have overruled the local school boards.

“We made this decision because of the limited time to resolve the concerns raised by the commission staff and our concerns that the meeting structure and timing on Oct. 5 will not allow commissioners to hear directly from the community members whose interests lie at the heart of the commission’s work,” board chair Dolores Gresham wrote in a letter delivered Thursday to the commission….

Lee had praised Hillsdale’s “patriotic” approach to education and asked Hillsdale president Larry Arnn to open as many as 100 of the taxpayer-funded schools across the state.

But a NewsChannel 5 investigation had highlighted issues with Hillsdale’s curriculum, including a rewriting of the history of the civil rights movement.

Hidden-camera video also revealed Arnn making derogatory comments about public school teachers coming from “the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges.”

More recently, NewsChannel 5 Investigateshad uncovered video of a Hillsdale College professor, who teaches part of an online course about the civil rights movement, questioning the achievements of famous Black Americans.

Early on, Governor Lee asked Hillsdale to open 100 charters in Tennessee, and Hillsdale College scaled the number back to 50. At the moment, Hillsdale has none. Governor Lee underestimated the close ties between rural communities and their public schools. The people of Tennessee were unwilling to toss aside the teachers they know and the schools that are the hub of their communities.

Please open the link to read the rest of the story. Hillsdale might try again.

C

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Community Schools, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Rural Schools, Separation of church and state, Tennessee

Steve Hinnefeld: Vouchers Have Failed. Why Do Red States Want More of Them?

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2022 //
19

Indiana blogger Steve Hinnefeld is puzzled, as am I. School choice has not fulfilled any of its bold promises. The charter industry is rife with waste, fraud, and abuse, and large numbers of them close every year. Vouchers were supposed to “save poor kids from failing schools,” but mostly they subsidize well-off kids who never attended public schools. Why do red states keep pumping more resources into failed programs that are neither innovative nor successful?

He writes:

Pundits have been wringing their hands over the “learning loss” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed the largest decline in decades.

But if people care about what kids are and aren’t learning, they should be every bit as alarmed by the private school voucher programs that are spreading across the country.

That’s according to Joshua Cowen, a Michigan State University education policy professor. He’s been studying vouchers and following the research for two decades, and he says the evidence is crystal clear that voucher programs don’t work when it comes to helping students learn.

In a recent episode of “Have You Heard,”an education podcast, he said thorough evaluations of large-scale voucher programs – in Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio and Washington, D.C. – found overwhelmingly negative effects on learning as measured by test scores.

“We’ve seen some of the biggest drops in test scores that we’ve ever seen in the research community for people who take vouchers and go to private schools,” he said.

The impact on math scores, in some cases, was twice as large as the test-score decline associated with the pandemic, he said. It was on the scale of what New Orleans students lost when Hurricane Katrina shut down schools and forced families from their homes.

“They suffered that badly, in terms of their test scores,” he said. “We’re talking about nine or 10 months loss of learning. It’s massive….”

Cowen said he naively thought the conclusive research findings would put a nail in the coffin for state voucher programs. In fact, the opposite has happened. There are now 29 voucher programs in 16 states enrolling over 300,000 students, according to the pro-voucher group EdChoice. Arizona recently adopted a “universal voucher” program. Some states have adopted Education Savings Accounts, private-school tax credits and other neo-voucher programs.

Indiana expanded its already large voucher program in 2021. The program grew last year to over 44,000 students at a cost to the public of nearly a quarter billion dollars. Nearly all participating private schools are religious, and some discriminate by religion, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. A 2018 evaluation of the effects of Indiana’s program – cited by Cowen and conducted by professors at Notre Dame and the University of Kentucky – found significant test-score declines in math.

Why haven’t voucher programs disappeared if they don’t work? The title of the “Have You Heard” episode sums it up: “Moving the Goalposts.”

Parents have the right to send their children to low-performing religious schools or to homeschool them. But why should taxpayers subsidize their personal choices?

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Indiana, Privatization, Vouchers

Federal Audit of Federal Charter Schools Program Finds Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

By dianeravitch
September 28, 2022 //
11

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an in-depth audit of the federal Charter Schools Program, which was initiated in 1994 with a few million dollars by the Clinton administration. Thanks to astute lobbying by the charter industry, the modest program grew to $440 million a year with little or no accountability. Betsy DeVos pushed it aggressively to large charter chains, including for-profit chains.

You will be interested in this account of the audit, written by Valerie Strauss on her blog “The Answer Sheet” in the Washington Post, introducing an analysis by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education.

This audit demonstrates the power and persistence of the Network for Public Education, a small but smart advocate for public schools. NPE operates with one full-time employee and a small number of part-time employees. Our work is motivated not by greed but by idealism and a passionate commitment to the common good. We believe in well-funded schools with experienced teachers for all children.

The introduction by by Strauss and the analysis by Burris has many links, but none transferred when I copied it. I copied some, but not all of them. I urge you to open the original and find the links.

Strauss begins:

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Inspector General has released a new audit of the federal Charter School Program that found some alarming results about how charter school networks have used millions of dollars in funding. Among other things, the audit found that charter school networks and for-profit charter management organizations did not open anywhere near the number of charters they promised to open with federal funding. This piece looks at the new audit and what it tells us.


The reason this is not surprising is that investigations into the Charter School Programs by the Network for Public Education, an advocacy group that opposes the growth of charter schools, found that same problem, as well as others and reported it a few years ago. You can read my stories about their “Asleep at the Wheel” here and here. (The second report noted that the state with the most charter schools that never opened was Michigan, home to former education secretary Betsy DeVos, who has pushed to expand charter schools for decades.)


Charter schools are publicly funded but privately managed. The federal charter program, which began in 1994 with the aim of expanding high-quality charters, had bipartisan support for years, but many Democrats have pulled back from the movement, citing the fiscal impact on school districts and repeated scandals in the sector. The Biden administration is making some changes to the program in an effort to stop waste and fraud and provide more transparency to the operation of charters.


This piece was written by Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education and a former award-winning principal in New York. She has been chronicling the charter school movement and the standardized-test-based accountability movement on this blog for years. The Network for Public Education is an alliance of organizations that advocates for the improvement of public education and sees charter schools as part of a movement to privatize public education.


By Carol Burris


A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) entitled “The Effectiveness of Charter School Programs in Increasing the Number of Charter Schools” documents how states, charter management organizations, and charter developers often make wildly exaggerated claims regarding the number of charter schools they will open or expand to secure large grants.

The OIG, an independent watchdog of the U.S. Department of Education (the Department), found that for grants issued between 2013 and 2016, only 51 percent of the schools promised by Charter School Programs (CSP) recipients opened or expanded.


The OIG audit also exposed the sloppy record keeping and weak oversight that characterize CSP operations. Since 2006, the department has paid a private corporation, WestEd, millions of dollars to compile, check and update CSP records. WestEd’s present CSP contract exceeds $12 million. In total, WestEd has active contracts with the U.S. Department of Education worth more than $27.6 million. Yet an alarming number of grant records could not be found when requested by the OIG auditors. And while the Biden administration is attempting to clean up and reform the CSP, according to the independent OIG, more work needs to be done.


What did the Office of the Inspector General audit?
The audit had three goals. The first was to describe how the department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education tracked and reported the number of charter schools that opened and expanded using Charter School Program funds. A second goal was to determine whether CSP grant recipients actually delivered the number of charter schools they promised when they applied for their often multimillion dollar awards. Finally, the audit sought to determine how many schools were still open two years after CSP funding ended.


As its title stated, the audit was an attempt to measure the program’s effectiveness in fulfilling its mission. To conduct the audit, the OIG examined 2013 through 2016 CSP grant records. During that period, the department awarded 103 CSP grants to states, charter management organizations, or individual charter developers. Ninety-four were closely investigated by the OIG. The likely reason these years were chosen was that most grants are for five years. The auditors also found that the department often extends them further when grantees have not spent all of their money. Therefore, more recent grants were excluded because records were likely to be incomplete.

Incomplete and inaccurate records

The auditors noted that while the department, through WestEd, tracked spending and schools while grants were open, the tracking stopped as soon as the grant was complete. Therefore, the department had no way of knowing whether schools remained open beyond the years federal funds propped them up. This speaks to the purpose of the program — to open and expand high-quality charter schools.


When auditors asked the department to define the term high-quality, the department responded that the “CSP office does not determine whether a charter school is high-quality because state rules for determining high quality vary.”


“Additionally,” it said, “the determination of whether a charter school is a high quality is often the responsibility of charter school authorizers.” The department also told auditors that tracking a school’s existence after all money was doled out was not its job.


Even if the department wanted to do a quality check of schools as they were funding and expanding, the OIG found that there was no accurate base of information that they could rely on to determine whether they should continue what was often a multimillion-dollar grant. From the audit:


Although the CSP office created processes for tracking and reporting on charter schools that opened and expanded and charter schools that remained open through the grant performance period end date, those processes did not result in CSP grant recipients reporting precise, reliable, and timely information in their FPRs [final performance reports], APRs [annual performance reports], and data collection forms. The processes also did not result in the CSP office receiving all the necessary information to assess grant recipients’ performance or evaluate the overall effectiveness of the CSP.


Specifically, the department could not produce 13 percent of the required final reports from grantees and 43 percent of the required final data collection sheets. Auditors noted that grantees would report different numbers of schools opened or expanded among required collection forms and final reports. The accuracy of the final documents prepared by WestEd for the department was beyond the scope of the audit.

During our research for our second “Asleep at the Wheel” report, we found that the data collection sheets produced by WestEd and published in 2019 by then Education Secretary Betsy De Vos were replete with errors. Schools that had closed or never opened were reported as open or future. We also noted inaccuracies in recently submitted sheets we received from a Freedom of Information Act request, especially relating to the for-profit management status of the awardee.


But the OIG discovered a far worse problem yet. More than half of the schools that grantees committed to opening or expanding did not open or expand at all.

CSP grantees failed to meet commitments
Grant applicants asked for and received millions of dollars based on their promises to open and expand charter schools. However, when the auditors examined 94 grantee applications, they found that many grantees fell far short of their commitments.

The OIG determined that based on the commitments made in the 94 applications, state education agencies, CMOs, and developers promised to open or expand 1,570 charter schools using CSP funds.


As of July 2021, approximately 75 percent of the grant funding had been spent, yet grantees had only opened or expanded 51 percent of the charters they had promised.


This begs the question, where did millions of tax dollars go? I identified grantees by matching applications on the department website along with numbers in the data set with grant codes in the OIG report.


In its 2016 CSP application, the Florida Department of Education put forth what it called a “bold and ambitious plan to … develop a high-impact system to dramatically improve the opportunities of educationally disadvantaged students. The department said that it would use the grant to “support the creation of 200 new high-quality charter schools over the next five years.”

Florida received $70.7 million to achieve its “bold and ambitious” plan. According to the OIG report, it had only opened 33 percent — or 66 — of the schools it promised to open as of July 2021, although it had spent over 51 percent of the CSP funds.


Colorado’s 2015 application promised that it would open 72 charter schools with its over 24.2 million dollar grant. In the end, it opened fewer than half — just 33 — and expanded three schools. Nevertheless, it spent 87.5 percent of its funds.

Tennessee ambitiously promised to open 114 charter schools. It opened just 16, though it managed to spend 63 percent of its grant. These states are not outliers. The report shows a pattern.

And CMOs also failed to deliver. The KIPP charter network promised 65 schools for its jumbo $48,750,000 grant, one that well exceeded most states. It delivered 34 schools and expanded one.

Finally, there are grants to developers that the department directly provides. The Innovation Development Corporation received a $405,730 CSP grant to open The Delaware Met. It was open for just a few months before it was shut down. It also received and spent $72,000 to open DE Stem. That school was shut down before it even opened. Willow Public School, a Washington charter school, took and spent a $602,875 grant, opened, ran into trouble, changed its name, and then shut down.


The department and the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools attribute the problem to authorizer reluctance and state caps on the number of schools that can open. Really? Every state that got a grant has a state board that can override local rejections of applications. State applicants and the department are also well aware of caps. Take the case of the 2018 $78,888,888 CSP grant to the New York State Department of Education, which was outside the scope of the OIG audit.

In the New York State application review, which you can find here, raters acknowledge that New York State had not even used up its previous grant which was open beyond its terms and that charter expansion would be limited by the state cap on the number of charters. Yet they gave the application high scores, and it was approved. Where did that 2018 money go? Over $10 million went to provide staff development in technology for charter schools.

Jumbo grants

Why do states and charter management organizations ask for jumbo grants knowing they cannot deliver? Because they want the money to fund their charter school operations.


States and charter management organizations get to keep 10 percent of the cut for grant administration and technical assistance to charter schools. The bigger the grant, the bigger the cut.

Therefore, KIPP was allowed to keep nearly $5 million for its charter management organization, even though it fell way short of its commitment. The Florida Department of Education secured over $7 million for administrative services on its grant.
Second, there are no guidelines about how much an individual charter school can get. We have seen grants as low as $250,000 and grants to schools of $1.5 million. When a state realizes it cannot or will not meet its commitment, it just doles out larger amounts.


Third, until President Biden, no prior administration did anything about it over the Charter School Program’s existence. Therefore, states, CMOs, and individual schools realized pretty quickly that they could create grandiose applications, sometimes including falsehoods, and there would be no real consequences if commitments were never met.

The present department has taken a terrible beating for creating modest CSP reform regulations which are still being fought by the charter trade organizations and their proxies, including the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a charter school authorizer. Challenges include both a lawsuit and a Republican-sponsored bill to overturn the new rules.

But as the OIG audit shows, reforms are desperately needed.

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Categories Accountability, Biden, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Scandals, School Choice

Florida Will Spend $1.3 Billion on Vouchers This Year, Diverted from Public Schools

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2022 //
33

A new report on Florida’s education budget found that vouchers will divert $1.3 billion from public schools this year alone. This is money that goes mainly to religious schools that meet no accountability standards and are free to discriminate and ignore state and federal laws.

The amount of public money being spent on private schools in Florida has increased substantially since 2019, according to a new report by the Florida Policy Institute and the Education Law Center.

The analysis estimates that some $1.3 billion in taxpayer funds will be diverted school vouchers this year, amounting to 10% of the overall funding the state earmarked for public school districts for the 2022-2023 school year.

“This enormous increase in the flow of public dollars to fund private education has happened so quickly that many Floridians are likely unaware of the financial impact being placed upon public school districts and the way these voucher programs are affecting the availability of their tax dollars for public education,” the report reads in part.

Private schools don’t have to comply with federal civil rights laws or state laws on standardized testing, teacher certification or certain building codes in the way that public schools do.

Leon County Schools Superintendent Rocky Hanna, who spoke at a press conference about the report’s findings, said expanding vouchers is taking away resources away from traditional public schools.

“Enough is enough,” Hanna said. “What’s happening is, we are diverting funds from students with special needs, from students who otherwise are going to lose programs that are vitally important to their academic success later in life….”

The report – titled ‘Florida’s Hidden Voucher Expansion’ – traces the growth in the state’s voucher programs to 2019, when the state legislature created the Family Empowerment Scholarship or FES.

State lawmakers expanded the program in 2021, loosening the qualifications for applying and rolling two other voucher programs into the FES – the McKay Scholarship and Gardiner Scholarship, which set aside funding for students with disabilities.

Now, families who make nearly $100,000 a year are able to qualify for the FES. Students are no longer required to have attended public schools to apply for a voucher; now, students who were homeschooled can also qualify. Families also have greater flexibility in how the funds can be spent, including on transportation, private tutoring, online learning and other costs.

The impact of the vouchers on school districts varies depending on how much they rely on state versus local money. Funding for the FES comes from the Florida Education Finance Program or FEFP – which allocates money on a per student basis and is a key source of revenue for local school districts.

The report estimates that in the Miami-Dade school district, $225 million will be diverted to private schools in the 2022-2023 school year, amounting to “8% of the district’s total FEFP budget”.

Bacardi Jackson is the Interim Deputy Legal Director for Children’s Rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center. She argues that diverting public funds into private schools is part of a long legacy of undermining students’ equal access to education – especially Black students.

Open the link and read on.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Privatization, Vouchers
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