Archives for category: Corruption
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Texas Law Allows Big Profits for Charter Operators

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2023 //
9

https://www.expressnews.com/politics/article/laws-Texas-charter-school-profits-DRAW-Horizon-17723803.php

Just over two years ago, Universal Academy, a Texas charter school with two campuses in the Dallas area, made a surprising move.

In November 2020, a nonprofit foundation formed to support the school bought a luxury horse ranch and equestrian center from former ExxonMobil Chairman Rex Tillerson. The 12-building complex features a show barn “designed with Normandy-style cathedral ceilings,” a 120,000 square foot climate-controlled riding arena and a viewing pavilion with kitchen and bathrooms.

DRAW Academy, center, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.

RELATED: IDEA Public Schools signed $15M lease for luxury jet despite being under state investigation

Last summer the Texas Education Agency granted Universal Academy permission to create a new elementary campus on the horse property’s manicured grounds. It will offer students riding lessons, according to a brochure, for $9,500.

Sales prices aren’t public in Texas, but the 100-acre property had been listed for $12 million when Tillerson, who also served as secretary of state under former President Donald Trump, bought it in 2009. Because of the foundation’s nonprofit status and its plans to offer equine therapy, the parcel has been removed from the tax rolls.

School board President Janice Blackmon said Universal hopes to use the facility to start a 4H chapter and Western-style horsemanship training, among other programs that take advantage of its rural location. “We’re trying to broaden the students and connect them to their Texas roots,” she said.

Splashy purchases like the horse arena are receiving increasing public scrutiny as charter schools continue to expand aggressively across Texas. Under state law, charter schools are public schools — just owned and managed privately, unlike traditional school districts. 

An analysis by Hearst Newspapers found cases in which charter schools collected valuable real estate at great cost to taxpayers but with a tenuous connection to student learning. In others, administrators own the school facilities and have collected millions from charging rent to the same schools they run.

In Houston, the superintendent and founder of Diversity, Roots and Wings Academy,  or DRAW, owns or controls four facilities used by the school, allowing him to bill millions to schools he oversees. DRAW’s most recent financial report shows signed lease agreements to pay Fernando Donatti, the superintendent, and his companies more than $6.5 million through 2031.

In an email, superintendent Donetti at DRAW said the property transactions were ethical, in the best interest of DRAW’s students and properly reported to state regulators. He said his school was “lucky” he was able to purchase the property because of challenges charters can face finding proper facilities. DRAW Academy, center, photographed Thursday, Jan. 19, 2023, in Houston.Jon Shapley/Staff photographer

Also in the Houston area, at ComQuest Academy Charter High School, the superintendent and her husband also own the company to which the school pays rent.

And Accelerated Learning Academy, a charter school based in Houston, is still trying to get a tax exemption on one of the two condominiums it bought just over a decade ago in upscale neighborhoods in Houston and Dallas. The school claims it has used the condos for storage, despite a nearby 9,600 square foot facility.

The battles between school districts and charter networks have become increasingly pitched, as they are locked in a zero-sum battle for public dollars. 

Last year in Houston, about 45,000 students transferred from the ISD to charter schools, resulting in a loss to the district of a minimum of $276 million. That figure includes only the basic allotment received by the districts, excluding special education funding or other allotments.

In San Antonio, the two largest school districts are Northside ISD and North East ISD. More than 12,000 Northside students transferred to charter schools in the 2021-2022 school year, as did just under 8,000 from North East ISD. That means Northside lost at least $75 million, while North East lost $50 million, using the same basic allotment figures.

Each side cries foul about the other’s perceived advantages: charters are able to operate with less government and public scrutiny, while school districts benefit from zoning boards and can lean on a local tax base for financing. 

Georgina Perez, who served on the State Board of Education from 2017 until this year, noted arrangements such as these would never be permitted at traditional school districts.

“If it can’t be done in (school districts), they probably had a good reason to disallow it,” she said. “So why can it be done with privately managed charter franchises?” 

Lawmaker: ‘Sunshine’ is best cure

The largest charter network in Texas was a catalyst for the increased public scrutiny of charter school spending.

IDEA Public Schools faces state investigation for its spending habits, including purchases of luxury boxes at San Antonio Spurs games, lavish travel expenditures for executives, the acquisition of a boutique hotel in Cameron County for more than $1 million, plans to buy a $15 million private jet and other allegations of irresponsible or improper use of funds. The allegations date back to 2015 and led to the departure of top executives — including CEO and founder Tom Torkelson, who received a $900,000 severance payment.

Over the years lawmakers have steadily tightened rules for charter governance. A 2013 bill included provisions to strengthen nepotism rules; a 2021 law outlawed large severance payments. That bill was sponsored by Rep. Terry Canales, a South Texas Democrat whose district has some of the highest rates of charter school enrollment in the state. 

“There’s a lot of work to be done for the people of Texas when it comes to charter schools,” Canales said. “Sunshine is the best cure for corruption. And the reality is it seems to be sanctioned corruption in charter schools.”

Considering the increased scrutiny, “It’s a myth that charter schools today are unregulated,” said Joe Hoffer, a San Antonio attorney who works on behalf of many charter schools. “Every session, more and more laws get passed.” If anything, he said, charter schools often have to jump through more regulatory hoops than local schools.

Yet acquiring property remains a gray area.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Deregulation, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization, Scandals, School Choice, Texas

Oklahoma: $39 Million in Federal Pandemic Funds Tilted Towards Private Schools, Not the Neediest

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2023 //
3

Two nonprofit news organizations in Oklahoma—The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch—teamed up to discover a misuse of federal funding by special interest groups. One such group was Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. The state received $39 million to aid students during the pandemic.

Millions in federal relief money meant to help Oklahoma students during the pandemic was misspent at the hand of special interest groups who gave preferential treatment to private schoolers while hundreds of needy children missed out on financial aid, a state audit has found.

The Stay in School program provided tuition assistance of up to $6,500 for private school students whose families were financially affected by the pandemic.

An audit released Tuesday also confirmed flaws in how the state handled the Bridge the Gap Digital Wallet pandemic relief program. A joint investigation by The Frontier and Oklahoma Watch last year revealed how families spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bridge the Gap money on video game consoles, Christmas trees and grills.

Both programs were funded through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund, a pot of flexible federal money intended to give governors the power to fund educational programs during the pandemic…

Before he was elected State Superintendent last year, Ryan Walters oversaw the implementation of the pandemic programs funded with federal relief money while he was executive director of the pro-school reform nonprofit Every Kid Counts Oklahoma and after Stitt appointed him Secretary of Education in September 2020. State auditors were unable to find any contract authorizing Every Kid Counts Oklahoma to oversee the programs.

E-mail records obtained by Oklahoma Watch and The Frontier show Walters issued a “blanket approval” for purchases of all vendor items available on the ClassWallet platform, after the company gave him a chance to restrict which items could be purchased….

State Auditor and Inspector Cindy Byrd’s audit found $1.8 million in questioned costs for the Bridge the Gap Program and $6.5 million for the Stay in School program. The report found programs were overseen by individuals and private organizations who were unqualified, didn’t have contracts with the state authorizing them to perform the work and were granted access to confidential student records.

The audit found that almost 20% of purchases through the Bridge the Gap program were spent on non-educational items, against grant guidelines.

According to Byrd’s report, administrators of the Stay in School program were involved in a “deliberate operation to give selected private schools and individuals preferential treatment by allowing early access for application submission prior to the date this program was offered to the general public.”

Jennifer Carter, a prominent school choice advocate and president of Libertas Consulting LLC was named as an administrator for the Stay in School program administrator without entering into a contract with the state, the audit found.

Carter is a senior advisor for former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy Devos’s education privatization organization Federation for Children, served as chief of staff and campaign manager for former State Superintendent Janet Barresi and has been involved in multiple school-choice efforts in Oklahoma. ClassWallet also listed Carter as a district administrator.

With Carter’s direction, five, unnamed private schools were given preferential treatment for the Stay in School program, the audit found.

Students from the preferred schools were awarded the maximum $6,500 per-student and received enrollment exceptions for children who had not previously attended, the audit found.

After funds ran dry, 657 students of low-income families who qualified for the Stay in School program did not get the financial assistance. More than $5.3 million went to families who said they did not have a pandemic-related financial hardship. The audit also found private schools received $1.8 million in excess of families’ tuition responsibilities.

In a statement to The Frontier, Carter said the American Federation for Children did not bill the state for its work on the program.

“As the nation’s leading voice for education freedom, AFC was happy to offer advice to the state around the implementation of the Governor’s Stay in School Fund GEER program,” Carter said. “The Stay in School Fund, which was aimed at minimizing students’ education disruption during COVID, served almost 1900 kids with tuition assistance. We gladly provided this service at no expense to taxpayers….”

The state auditor said:

“This was a tangled web of government agencies, non-profit organizations, and non-government individuals representing special interest groups managing millions of tax dollars with no contracts and no written agreements,” Byrd said. “Sadly, millions of tax dollars were misspent because certain individuals who were put in charge of managing these programs seemingly ignored federal grant guidelines.”

Wasn’t it charitable of the American Federation for Children to divert money away from impoverished children to private school students, at no cost to the state?

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Education Industry, Fraud, Oklahoma

Heather Cox Richardson: The GOP Attacks the Military and Officers of the Law

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2023 //
39

Heather Cox Richardson describes the bitter factionalism among Republicans. They are going ever more extreme; the Freedom Caucus expelled Marjorie Taylor Greene for not being extreme enough. They spend their time attacking the military, the FBI, and the CIA. In addition to the time they spend attacking the integrity of elections. The Republican Party has become a wrecking ball for democratic institutions.

For the first time since 1859, the Marine Corps does not have a confirmed commandant. For five months, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has held up the confirmation of about 250 Pentagon officers in protest of the Defense Department’s policy of enabling military personnel to travel to obtain abortion care. So when Commandant General David Berger retired today, there was no confirmed commandant to replace him. Assistant Commandant General Eric Smith will serve as the acting commandant until the Senate once again takes up military confirmations.

That a Republican is undermining the military belies the party’s traditional claim to be stronger on military issues than the Democrats. So does the attack of House Republicans on our nation’s key law enforcement entities—the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—after traditionally insisting their party works to defend “law and order.”

David Smith of The Guardian this weekend noted that those attacks are linked to former president Trump’s increasing legal trouble.

MAGA Republicans are seeking to protect Trump by calling for impeaching President Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI director Christopher Wray (a Trump appointee), and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Matthew Graves, who has prosecuted those who participated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), and a subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, also chaired by Jordan, have been out in front in the attacks on the DOJ and the FBI. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government has been trying to dig up proof that Biden has “weaponized” the DOJ, the FBI, and the Department of Education against Republicans, especially those supporting former president Trump.

They have not turned up any official whistleblowers—the word “whistleblower” in government context means someone whose allegations have been found to be credible by an inspector general, but House Republicans seem to be using the word in a generic sense of someone with complaints—to support the idea that Biden has weaponized the government.

But Trump did. Last summer the New York Times reported that under Trump, the IRS launched a rare and invasive audit of former FBI director James Comey and Comey’s deputy Andrew McCabe, and Trump talked of using the IRS and the DOJ to harass Hillary Clinton, former CIA director John Brennan, and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post.

On Thursday, a sworn statement from Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly confirmed that Trump asked about using the IRS and other agencies to investigate Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, two FBI agents looking into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia.

Another investigation has also backfired on the Trump Republicans. The House Ways and Means Committee has highlighted the testimony of Gary Shapley, a “whistleblower” from the Internal Revenue Service claiming that Attorney General Merrick Garland interfered with the investigation into Hunter Biden. Shapley said that Garland denied a request from U.S. attorney David Weiss, who was in charge of the case, to be appointed special counsel, which would officially have made him independent. On June 22 the committee released a transcript of Shapley’s testimony.

Garland promptly denied the allegation, but on June 28, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to David Weiss, U.S. attorney for Delaware, repeating the allegations. Weiss, a Trump appointee, replied today, saying he never requested special counsel status. Representative Jordan got around this direct contradiction of Shapley’s testimony by lumping Weiss in with those he’s attacking: “Do you trust Biden’s DOJ to tell the truth?” he asked.

And while the radical right has claimed that Biden is on the take for millions of dollars from foreign countries, today the key witness to that allegation was indicted for being a Chinese agent. Also today, LIV Golf, which is funded by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, announced it is moving its $50 million team championship from Saudi Arabia to Trump National Doral in Miami this October.

In May, LIV Golf allied with the nonprofit PGA Tour to create a new for-profit company in May, but today a prominent member of the PGA board, Randall Stephenson, resigned, saying he and most of the rest of the board were not involved in the deal and that he cannot “in good conscience support” it, “particularly in light of the U.S. intelligence report concerning Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.” (The report concluded that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of Washington Post journalist Khashoggi.) Stephenson had delayed his resignation at the request of the board’s chair while the PGA Tour commissioner was on medical leave.

The Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations is scheduled to start hearings on that merger tomorrow, but they are having trouble lining up witnesses who were involved in making the deal, which was achieved in secret negotiations and has infuriated many of the PGA Tour players.

The MAGA attacks on the Biden administration are part of a larger story. Trump supporters are consolidating around the former president and so-called Christian democracy. They are enforcing loyalty so tightly that the far-right House Freedom Caucus recently expelled Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) either because she is too close to House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) or because she called Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) a “little bitch” on the floor of Congress, or both. Like the far-right Southern Baptist Convention, which is hemorrhaging members but which nonetheless recently expelled one of its largest churches for permitting a female pastor, the MAGAs are purging their members for purity.

But their posturing worries Republicans from less safe districts who know such extremism is unpopular. Today, 21 members of the far right in the House wrote a letter to McCarthy saying they would oppose any appropriations bills that did not reject the June debt ceiling deal that kept the U.S. from defaulting on its debts, threatening to shut down the government. They also rejected any further support for Ukraine.

Larry Jacobs, who directs the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, told The Guardian’s Smith: “Independent voters, who tend to swing US elections that have become so close, don’t buy into the Trump line. You don’t see support for this unhinged view that the justice department and the FBI are somehow corrupt. There’s not support for that except in the fringe of the Republican party. The question, though, is does the fringe of the Republican party have enough leverage, particularly in the House of Representatives, to force impeachment votes and other measures?”

Alex Isenstadt of Politico wrote today that a new group called Win It Back, tied to the right-wing Club for Growth, which has ties to the Koch network, will run anti-Trump ads starting tomorrow. Americans for Prosperity, linked to billionaire Charles Koch, will also run ads opposing Trump.

Meanwhile, President Biden is on his way to Vilnius, Lithuania, for the 74th North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit. NATO was formed in 1949 to stand against the Soviet Union, and now it stands against an expanding Russia. Today, NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg announced that Turkey has dropped its opposition to Sweden’s NATO membership. Hungary, which had also been a holdout, said earlier this month it would back Sweden’s entry as soon as Turkey did.

This means that the key issues before NATO will be Ukraine’s defense, and climate change, a reality that U.S. politicians can no longer ignore (although MAGA Republicans later this month will start hearings to stop corporations from incorporating environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals into their future plans). Currently, forty-two million people in the U.S. South are locked in a devastating heat dome, and Vermont and New York are facing catastrophic flash floods.

President Biden told CNN yesterday that he does not support NATO membership for Ukraine while it is at war, noting that since NATO’s security pact means that a war on one automatically includes all, admitting Ukraine would commit U.S. troops to a war with Russia. Instead, NATO members will likely consider continuing significant military support for Ukraine.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Bigotry, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Republicans

Robert Hubbell: What Can We Do About Our Rogue Supreme Court? Expand It.

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2023 //
61

Robert Hubbell shares some interesting and informative comments about our Supreme Court, which seems determined to roll back the past century of social progress. The Court is whittling away—in some cases, hacking away—at our rights. Whereas we long believed that the High Court would always defend the rights of citizens, we can no longer count on it. The Court majority seems determined to impose a far-right “Originalist” philosophy on the entire nation. Of course, if they were really Originalists, pretending that it was 1790, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas would resign at once. The Founding Fathers never imagined that women and Blacks would vote, become lawyers and judges. Resign, Amy and Clarence.

Robert Hubbell writes:

Last week’s rulings from the Supreme Court continue to lead the news as the nation celebrates the 4th of July holiday. The Washington Post’s headline reads Biden faces renewed pressure to embrace Supreme Court overhaul. The details matter less than the fact that the notion of Supreme Court reform is the top story on a day when the Court issued no opinions. And the Supreme Court is top of mind for many readers, many of whom recommended articles and action items for other readers in yesterday’s Comment section. Chief among those recommendations was Rebecca Solnit’s exhortation in The Guardian, The US supreme court has dismantled our rights but we still believe in them. Now we must fight.

Solnit is a gifted writer who hit the mark in capturing the feelings of millions of Americans. She first addresses the feelings of anger and frustration about a Court that is out of control:

The first thing to remember about the damage done by the US supreme court this June and the June before is that each majority decision overturns a right that we had won. [¶]

Each of those victories was hard-won, often by people who began when the rights and protections they sought seemed inconceivable, then unlikely, then remote, and so goes the road of profound change almost every time. [¶]

To recognize the power of this change requires a historical memory. . . . Memory is a superpower, because memory of how these situations changed is a memory of our victories and our power. Each of these victories happened both through the specifics of campaigns to change legislation but also through changing the public imagination. The supreme court can dismantle the legislation but they cannot touch the beliefs and values.

In words that I wish I had written, Solnit urges us to action:

[H]istory shows us that when we come together with ferocious commitment to a shared goal we can be more powerful than institutions and governments. The right would like us to feel defeated and powerless. We can feel devastated and still feel powerful or find our power. This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.

Other readers shared Jennifer Rubin’s op-ed in The Washington Post, Self-government is worth defending from an illegitimate Supreme Court.

On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable.

On this Independence Day, we should reaffirm the twin pillars of democracy: Voters (not the mob) pick their leaders, and elected leaders (not unelected judges) make policy decisions for which they are held accountable.

Rubin identifies the many ways in which the Court has strayed from its legitimate role as a judicial body (familiar ground for readers of this newsletter) but highlights the particularly destructive role of the “Major Questions Doctrine.” That judge-made doctrine arrogates to the Court the right to overturn any decision by a federal agency with which the reactionary majority disagrees. The pseudo-rationale for the doctrine is that if Congress intends to delegate discretion to federal agencies on “major questions,” it should use a level of specificity that is to the liking of the Supreme Court.

Says who?

The doctrine was invented from whole cloth to justify judicial activism in service of an anti-government agenda. As Jennifer Rubin writes,

The mumbo-jumbo “major questions doctrine” is not the stuff of judging. No wonder the chief justice got touchy when Kagan pointed out that the court “is supposed to stick to its business — to decide only cases and controversies and to stay away from making this Nation’s policy about subjects like student-loan relief.”

Ian Millhiser explains the Major Questions Doctrine in detail in his article in Vox, entitled, The Supreme Court’s student loan decision in Biden v. Nebraska is lawless and completely partisan. Millhiser does not mince words:

Let’s not beat around the bush. The Supreme Court’s decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the one canceling President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, is complete and utter nonsense. It rewrites a federal law which explicitly authorizes the loan forgiveness program, and it relies on a fake legal doctrine known as “major questions” which has no basis in any law or any provision of the Constitution.

Roberts’s opinion in Nebraska effectively overrules the decision of both elected branches of government. It overrides Congress’s unambiguous decision to give this power to the secretary of Education. And it overrules the executive branch’s judgment about how to exercise the authority that Congress gave it. As Kagan writes in dissent, “the Secretary did only what Congress had told him he could.”

Like Rebecca Solnit, Jennifer Rubin ends her op-ed on a note of optimism and determination to right the wrongs of the Court:

On this Independence Day, which celebrates rebellion against a monarch lacking consent of the governed, it behooves us to dedicate ourselves to robust and authentic democracy: government of the people, by the people, for the people — not by arrogant right-wing justices….

Without regard to any of the present controversies surrounding the Court, substantially increasing the Court’s size is a reasonable proposition. But considering the Court’s descent into illegitimacy and usurpation of legislative power, increasing its size substantially is an easy call: We must do it to overcome the reactionary majority. We have no other choice.

Enlarging the Court requires only a majority vote in both chambers of Congress, while virtually every other structural reform would require a constitutional amendment—a 2/3rds approval in both chambers of Congress and ratification by 3/4ths of the states. That will never happen. (If you propose imposing 18-year term limits, I urge you to read the plain words of the Constitution: Article III Section 1 | U.S. Constitution.)

Urgency is required. As reader John C. posted in response to my 4th of July newsletter,

I agree that the long term looks promising, but many people cannot wait for the long term. Women who want abortions, victims of gun violence, refugees, same-sex couples who want goods or services, students who are barred from colleges, and so forth are suffering now and lack the luxury of waiting.

We can work our way out of this daunting situation in the short term at the ballot box—by retaking the House and defending the Senate in 2024. And then demand boldness from our leaders. While they have temporized and appointed commissions and fretted about the “legitimacy” of an enlarged Court, tens of millions of Americans have been injured by a rogue Court that abandoned the rule of law and adopted the agenda of religious nationalism. The solution is staring us in the face and is within our grasp. Let’s take it!

In the words of Rebecca Solnit, “This is not a time to quit. It’s a time to fight.”

And if you are looking for guidance on where and how to direct your fighting spirit, there is no better place to look than Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood Carry Water on Substack. Her post on the 4th of July is filled with action steps you can take, including word scripts for calling your elected officials in Washington, D.C., and important organizing / fundraising events, such as:

  • An event on Wednesday, July 5th at 5:30 PM Eastern with Senator Sherrod Brown and Ohio Democratic Party Chairwoman Liz Walters about how you can help get out the “NO” vote in the Ohio special election set for August 8th. Register here.
  • A Force Multiplier event with Senators John Tester and Raphael Warnock on Monday, July 10, 7:00 PM Eastern. The event will help build grass roots support for Senator Tester in what is expected to be a hard-fought campaign. Register and donate here.

While you are at it, sign up for Jessica Craven’s Chop Wood, Carry Water for the latest on daily actions you can take to help defend democracy!

Please open the link to read Robert Hubbell’s concluding thoughts.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Justice

Florida: Orange County Removes Classics from Schools

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2023 //
116

Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel reports that the Orange County school district has removed classic literature in its efforts to comply with state laws.

She writes:

The classic novels “A Room With a View” and “Madame Bovary” and the epic poem “Paradise Lost” — published in England more than 350 years ago — have been at least temporarily rejected by Orange County Public Schools for sexual content that educators fear runs afoul of a new Florida law.

Novels that in past years were frequently taught in OCPS high school classes, such as “The Color Purple,” “Catch-22,” “Brave New World,” and “The Kite Runner” have been put on the rejected lists, too, as have novels by Toni Morrison and Ayn Rand and popular, turned-into-movies books like “Into the Wild,” and “The Fault in Our Stars.”

The lists of books rejected and approved for OCPS classrooms are not finalized yet as district media specialists continue their summer work of reviewing all books in classroom libraries, said several people familiar with the process.

Some books rejected earlier this summer, among them “The Scarlet Letter” and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” have since been approved, according to the lists shared with the Orlando Sentinel by a district teacher and by an advocacy group that obtained a rejection list through a public records request. Other books have been approved but only for certain grades.

Four plays by William Shakespeare, including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” are currently listed as approved for grades 10 through 12 only, as is Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” the lists show.

For many of the books, the reason for at least a temporary rejection is sex. “Depicts or describes sexual conduct (not allowed per HB 1069-2023,” reads the explanation, referencing a new state law passed by the Republican-dominated Florida Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The new law makes book challenges easier and, if the concern is sexual content, requires the books to be removed from the shelves within five days and remain inaccessible to students while being reviewed. Republican lawmakers said they passed it to make sure pornography and books that depict sexual activity are kept from children.

But critics say the effort has wrongly labeled many books pornographic, when state law says, in part, that books with sexual content or nudity are considered pornography only if they are “without serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

This could be a clever plot to entice teens to read forbidden books. (“Come over to my house, I have ‘Paradise Lost!’”) But Florida’s legislators and state education officials are not clever. They are narrow minded bigots.

Categories Academic Freedom, Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Gender, Libraries, Literature

Greg Olear: Leonard Leo, the Man Who Stacked the Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
July 5, 2023 //
31

Greg Olear is a novelist and journalist who writes a blog called PREVAIL. The following post appeared there. I post only part of it. If you want to see his complete list of Leonard Leo’s claque, open the link and continue reading. This is part one of a two-part report.

Greg Olear writes:

He’s one of the most powerful individuals in the country. His spiderweb of connections is extensive. But most Americans, including many working in Washington, have never heard of him.

Occupying the center of an intricate web of political, legal, religious, and business connections, Leonard Leo is the quintessential Man in the Middle, a veritable dark-money spider. Like a spider, he is patient, painstaking, relentless, and much more powerful that he appears. And like a spider, he prefers to stay hidden.

I first wrote about him in February 2021, in a piece called “Leo the Cancer.” Leo, who I described as “a dandier George Constanza, or if The Penguin worked at Jones Day,” has, I explained,

made himself one of the most powerful figures in the United States. He’s put five—count ‘em, five!—justices on the Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito, and John Roberts. A sixth, Clarence Thomas, is one of his closest friends. And, perhaps most impressively, he quietly led the 2016 crusade to deny Merrick Garland a hearing, when Barack Obama nominated the highly-regarded jurist to replace the late Antonin Scalia (another of Leo’s pals). In the lower courts, he’s been even busier. He’s installed so many judges on so many courts, it makes you wonder if he really is the instrument of God’s will he believes himself to be. I mean, there are only three branches of government. One of those three—arguably the most important one—is Leonard Leo’s domain.

When I began researching that piece, I didn’t know much about the guy beyond his silly, comic-book-villain name. I was surprised to discover that he was, like me, a middle-class product of Catholic upbringing and Italian descent who graduated from a public high school in New Jersey—not at all the well-heeled, oenophilic Master of the Universe he has become. He’s also much younger than I expected; born in 1965, he’s solidly Gen X—only seven years older than Yours Truly.

Yet Leonard Leo, somehow, is the individual most responsible for stripping away federal abortion rights. (The anniversary of the odious Dobbs decision was this past weekend.) As his admiring chum Ed Wheelan presciently wrote in 2016, “No one has been more dedicated to the enterprise of building a Supreme Court that will overturn Roe v. Wade than the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo.”

As Politico reported—and as I outlined on these pages three months ago—Leo has been rewarded handsomely for his troubles. “I personally don’t believe that Leonard is motivated by greed,” Steven Calabresi, who founded the Federalist Society with Leo and still runs the organization, told Politico. “I think Leonard is motivated by ideology and ideas. I do think he likes to live a high-rolling lifestyle, but I don’t think he’s in the business because of the money.”

To be fair, Leo does spread that money around. He endows more organizations than I can succinctly list here. Friends like Ginni Thomas get a taste. He brings his SCOTUS cronies on lavish fishing trips with his billionaire backers. And yet Payoff Lenny—as I call him—has amassed a fortune for himself, and spends that fortune lavishly: on tailored suits, palatial vacation homes in Maine, and bottles of wine that cost more that what most Americans pay for a month’s rent.

Jesus liked wine, yes, and Jesus hung out with fishermen, sure, but I’m not sure the Son of God would approve of Leo’s stockpile of dirty loot—although his fellow Knights of Malta don’t seem to mind. Money washes away a lot of sins, as anyone familiar with the history of the Catholic Churchwell knows.

And so the rich and powerful Leonard Leo presides spider-like over Washington, moving chess pieces across the great board, raising unfathomably vast sums of money, and cultivating his extensive network, which I have attempted to map out here.

Note: Leo has so many connections that it became unwieldy to confine them to a single dispatch. In today’s installment, I will cover the judges, non-profiteers, lawyers, media members, and titled Europeans. Part Two will focus on the billionaire donors, the politicians, and the religious contacts.

Judges

Antonin Scalia (1936-2016), Clarence Thomas (b. 1948), John Roberts (b. 1955), Sam Alito (b. 1950)
Supreme Court justices

Leonard Leo worshiped at the altar of Scalia, has been close with Thomas for decades and regards him as a sort of godfather, and worked maniacally to secure the confirmations of Roberts and Alito. Thomas and Alito, in particular, he remains tight with, as recent reporting by ProPublica has made clear.

Regarding Alito, the author of the dreadful Dobbs decision: in his 2018 Daily Beast piece on Leo, Jay Michelson points out that “few people had heard of [Alito] before Leo first promoted him.” Alas, we’ve all heard of that sneeringly arrogant dickhead now.

To learn more about Leonard Leo’s circle, open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom, Gender, History, Injustice, Justice, Republicans

Diane Francis: Russia’s Sopranos

By dianeravitch
June 29, 2023 //
89

I discovered Diane Franscis’s blog while reading the latest Robert Hubbell. She writes here what many people suspected: Russia is controlled by a ruthless gang. In this country, we call them the mafia. In Russia, they are the government.

She writes:

The bizarre events in Russia over the weekend provide a glimpse into the reality that the country is not a nation, but an empire with warring factions that is run by a mafia. Vladimir Putin has reigned as the “Boss” for 23 years and remained in place by enriching Russia’s thugs, bridling them, and playing one off against another. Under his rule, they have built palaces, stolen the national wealth, become warlords, amassed staggering portfolios, and lived like Czars. But on February 24, 2022, Putin decided to escalate the grift by invading Ukraine to steal more of its resources. Now this war is failing, as is Russia’s economy and Putin’s grip on power. And on June 23, Putin’s inability to control a wartime feud between warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin and Russia’s military brass turned into a full-blown armed mutiny. Prigozhin pulled his mercenaries from the frontline in Ukraine and led a “march for justice” against Putin’s military inside Russia. Putin labeled Prigozhin a “traitor” on national television, ordered his arrest, then instructed his puppet in Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko, to make an offer to Prigozhin that he couldn’t refuse: Stand down, charges would be scrapped, and move to Minsk. The crisis ended quickly, but Putin, the Russian Federation, and the war in Ukraine, will never again be the same.

Putin and the gangsters. David Gothard. WSJ

Prigozhin grew up in St. Petersburg, where Putin did, and went to jail as a young man for fraud and theft. He has since become a billionaire oligarch as a result of his connections to Putin and business smarts. More recently, he has become a household word in Russia because of the success of his personal army, the Wagner Group mercenaries, as well as his diatribes on social media against Russia’s generals. He has accused them of poor strategies, corruption, and of using Russian soldiers as cannon fodder. His gutsy stances have made him a populist hero even though he is also a member of the elite. But Prigozhin is different. He’s gone “native” and dons fatigues, is on the frontlines with his mercenaries in the Ukrainian war zone, and excoriates Putin’s generals for drafting young Russians from poor families and regions then sending them to their deaths by the thousands without training or proper equipment.

“The children of the elite smear themselves with creams, showing it on the internet; ordinary people’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces,” said Prigozhin, a reference to metallic coffins. “Those killed in action had tens of thousands of relatives, and society always demands justice and, if there is no justice, then revolutionary sentiments arise.”

Prigozhin warns of revolution but is not a revolutionary. He became a successful chef, then caterer and started a mercenary army that has operated for years surreptitiously around the world on Putin’s behalf. For instance, Wagner helped Putin occupy Crimea and Donbas in 2014, it fought in Syria and various African countries for Moscow for years, and has been involved in the 2022 invasion, fighting alongside Russian regulars in Ukraine. But last year he began to aggressively criticize Russia’s Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, and Chief of General Staff, Gen. Valery Gerasimov and Putin never intervened. This was because he was doing Putin’s dirty work again and blaming the generals for military failures. But Shoigu and Gerasimov struck back by sabotaging the Wagner Group on the battlefield. Prigozhin claimed they withheld ammunition and provided only sub-standard equipment. Then, last month, he alleged that the two actually shelled Wagner troops.

By June, Prigozhin’s success in the battlefield and growing social media presence across Russia and abroad was becoming a threat, so Putin sided with his generals. He ordered Wagner fighters to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense by July 1. This represented a de facto expropriation which is why Prigozhin pulled his troops from the front line in Ukraine on June 23 and marched them into Russia. That night, Putin condemned Prigozhin on state television and ordered Lukashenko to deliver the deal. Putin has not surfaced since June 24, and unconfirmed reports are that he fled Moscow.

A coup or armed conflict was avoided, but damage was done. Putin’s climb-down and capitulation to a man he had just called a “traitor” destroyed his tough-guy image. It’s obvious that he is not the “Boss”, but merely a figurehead who sits atop a rotten system of squabbling and greedy oligarchs. Prigozhin’s stunt also unveiled Russia’s vulnerability. He was able to march two-thirds of the way toward Moscow in a few hours without resistance. His troops also reportedly shot down six Russian helicopters and an IL-22 airborne command-center plane, killing 13 airmen, along the way, without consequences.

Prigozhin backed down and agreed to self-exile, but he’s not going to disappear, except physically. The generals he demanded that Putin fire still remain in power so he will continue to broadcast his criticisms from afar and plot a comeback, either from a dacha somewhere around the world or on a yacht. He will rebuild Wagner and may attract allies inside and outside Russia who want to overthrow Putin and his generals. He may aspire to be President but that is unlikely. He would be thoroughly unsuitable as President, but, unless assassinated, his ongoing crusade will be a catalyst for change inside Russia and serve the interests of Ukraine and the West. Prigozhin has already undermined Russia’s leadership, damaged frontline morale, stirred up the public, and shredded Putin’s concocted narrative that the invasion was necessary because Ukraine and NATO were a threat to Russia’s existence.

There’s little likelihood that a grassroots movement against Moscow will sprout around Prigozhin because it is a reign of terror and because he’s another thug whose forces have killed many Ukrainians and others. But his popularity was rising in polls before his armed mutiny because his rants resonated with civil society, mostly younger people. He also attracted international recognition with his condemnation of the war itself in the days leading up to the confrontation: “The war wasn’t needed to return Russian citizens to our bosom, nor to demilitarize or denazify Ukraine,” he said. “The war was needed so that a bunch of animals could simply exult in glory.”

The weekend’s events may not have brought about regime change, but Prigozhin has already dealt Putin, and Russia as currently constituted, a fatal blow. As the war continues to backfire, Ukraine and its alliance will push harder and so will separatist movements inside Russia who want autonomy or secession. Putin’s weakness is now apparent, and his tenure uncertain, which will also convince neighboring nations and Russian allies to recalibrate their relationship or forge new ones. Most significantly, Putin’s cave-in and cowardice concerning Prigozhin also means that his many “red lines” in this war are meaningless which is why many have been crossed and more should be ignored in future.

It is ironic that Prigozhin has opened a Pandora’s Box about corruption and injustice in a country run by criminals like himself. His lightning attack also raises fears internationally as to how secure Russia’s nuclear arsenal is from seizure by disgruntled factions such as Wagner or others. Experts say the events haven’t altered the security status of Russia’s nuclear weapons, and the West carefully monitors their movement and storage facilities.

But the country is run by gangsters who have upended the world order. Only “100 beneficiaries and several thousand accomplices” own everything, said Mikhail Kodorovsky, an oligarch jailed by Putin in 2005 on trumped-up charges. “Most of these people began their careers in the criminal underworld of St. Petersburg. Despite having now taken control of the Presidency, the group retains every aspect of the criminal ilk from which they came.”

Putin’s Russia is a criminal organization that must be overthrown. And finally, one of its own has told the world, and Russian people, why it must disappear.

Categories Corruption, Cruelty, Extremism, International

Don’t Miss This TV Documentary: “Shiny Happy People” on Amazon Prime

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2023 //
58

I kept seeing references in the news toa documentary called “Shiny Happy People,” so I turned on Amazon Prime and watched four episodes at one sitting. It’s a fascinating look inside the world of Christian fundamentalism. The documentary focuses on the Duggar family, which achieved fame and fortune because they had 19 children. They live in Arkansas.

The Duggar family had its own TV program on TLC. Television cameras recorded every event in the family. They were the perfect, wholesome American family. Until they weren’t.

This is a good summary of the four episodes. You can see that the family was very attractive. Beautiful girls. Handsome boys. All the children did their chores. And all were home-schooled.

The Duggars belonged to a fundamentalist organization (a cult) called the Institute in Basic Life Principles. It was run by an evangelical preacher who taught a strict and patriarchal way of life. God reigns over man. Man rules over his wife. The parents rule over the children. Good parents administer corporal punishment.

The leader of IBLP knew how every family should act, but he was unmarried.

The father of the Duggar family was elected to the legislature.

It was the perfect family until word got out that the oldest son had molested some of his sisters. Eventually, you learn that the leader of the IBLP was accused of sexually assaulting a number of the attractive young women he chose as his assistants.

There are many interviews with thoughtful people, including some of the adult Duggar children, who reflect on being brainwashed.

We need to know who these Christian nationalists are because they are taking a major role in reshaping our nation and its politics. Nothing is said about national politics but it’s clear that the fundamentalists are a rock-solid part of the Republican Party.

To the extent they gain power, this will be a less tolerant, less open-minded society, indifferent to knowledge and hostile to science.

I hope you watch it.

Categories Arkansas, Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Discipline, Extremism, Home Schooling, Parents, Religion

Why Did the Wall Street Journal Publish Alito’s Response Before ProPublica Printed Its Article about Him?

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2023 //
265

The New York Times posted a story about the editorial ethics of the Wall Street Journal. It asked why the WSJ ran Alito’s response to ProPublica before the latter had published its article. Worse, the Times said, the WSJ said that the article in ProPublica was “misleading” even though no one at the WSJ had read it. How can anyone honestly say that an unpublished article is “misleading”?

It sounds like the WSJ is out to protect Alito without knowing or caring about all the facts.

The Times wrote:

The Wall Street Journal faced criticism on Wednesday after its highly unusual decision to let Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. pre-empt another media organization’s article about him by publishing his response in its opinion pages.

The essay by Justice Alito in The Journal’s opinion section, which operates independently of its newsroom, ran onlineon Tuesday evening with the headline “Justice Samuel Alito: ProPublica Misleads Its Readers.”

An editor’s note at the top of the essay said two ProPublica reporters, Justin Elliott and Josh Kaplan, had emailed questions to Justice Alito on Friday and had asked him to respond by noon Tuesday. “Here is Justice Alito’s response,” the editor’s note said.

ProPublica published its investigation into Justice Alito several hours later on Tuesday, revealing that he took a luxury fishing trip in 2008 as the guest of Paul Singer, a billionaire Republican donor, and had not disclosed the trip nor recused himself from cases since then that involved Mr. Singer’s hedge fund.

Stephen Engelberg, the editor in chief of ProPublica, said in a statement on Wednesday that ProPublica always invited people mentioned in articles to offer a response before publication. ProPublica has run several articles in recent months about possible conflicts of interests among some Supreme Court justices.

“We were surprised to see Justice Alito’s answers appear to our questions in an opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal, but we’re happy to get a response in any form,” he said.

“We’re curious to know whether The Journal fact-checked the essay before publication,” he added. “We strongly reject the headline’s assertion that ‘ProPublica Misleads Its Readers,’ which the piece declared without anyone having read the article and without asking for our comment…”

Bill Grueskin, a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, said that while essays on opinion pages usually got some form of fact-checking, The Journal would have been unable to do so in this case because the ProPublica investigation had not yet been published…

Rod Hicks, the director of ethics and diversity for the Society of Professional Journalists, said that “it’s quite uncommon for a news outlet to allow an official to use its platform to respond to questions from a different outlet.”

“And it’s totally unheard-of to post that response before the other outlet even publishes its story,” he added. “If not ethics, professional courtesy should have restrained The Journal.”

It seems that we are in an era when ethical standards are crumbling. The Supreme Court ignores conflicts of interest, rationalizes them, overlooks lavish gifts and doesn’t care whether they are disclosed.

And a major publishing outlet disregards ethical norms.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Lies, Media

Houston: New School Board Meets…and Excludes the Public

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2023 //
12

The state takeover of the Houston Independent School Board involved firing the elected school board, replacing them with a state-picked board, and hiring a new superintendent who was never a teacher but is a military man, a Broadie, and a failure as Dallas superintendent.

The new school board held its first meeting and set up only 35 seats for the public. The room holds 310 people. Everyone else was shunted to a room where they could watch the meeting on a screen. One man who registered to speak was handcuffed when he insisted on entering the room where the board was neeting.

The board unanimously agreed that superintendent Mije Miles should be allowed to serve even though his state license had lapsed in 2018.

This meeting exemplified the state’s contempt for public schools, and its complete indifference to the public, which has a stake in public schools. The public schools belong to the public, not to Republican politicians in Austin.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Houston, Injustice, Texas
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »