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Politico: Why the Kremlin Loves Social Media

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2024 //
20

Catherine Kim wrote a fascinating account in Politico of the Russian program to sow division in the United States and to influence the 2024 elections. Kim interviews a Finnish scholar of disinformation who says that Finnish children are taught media literacy in school to help them spot propaganda. His final advice: Turn off the computer; take a walk; play; live your life.

She writes:

A DOJ indictment on Wednesday alleged that content created and distributed by a conservative social media company called Tenet Media was actually funded by Russia. Two Russian government employees funneled nearly $10 million to Tenet Media, which hired high-profile conservative influencers such as Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin to produce videos and other content that stoked political divisions. The indictment alleges that the influencers — who say they were unaware of Tenet’s ties to Russia — were paid upward of $400,000 a month.

These “conservative influencers” were chosen because they have large and devoted fans who believe whatever content they create. They apparently didn’t know who was footing the bill, but were no doubt thrilled to be paid $100,000 for each video they produced, up to four per month. Why ask questions when the pay is so good?

Now that they know who their sugar daddy was, will they rethink any of their views?

Should we think about teaching our children to be discerning consumers of social media so they are not taken in by propaganda?

Categories Corruption, Dark Money, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, International, Media, Propaganda, Trump

President Joe Biden Recommends Reform of Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2024 //
41

In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, President Joe Biden proposed important reforms to the U.S. Supreme Court. He recommended a term limit of 18 years and an ethics code for Justices of the Supreme Court. Public opinion of the Court is at its lowest since polling began in 1987. This may be in response to ethical and partisan scandals associated with the Court, as well as politically-motivated decisions.

During Trump’s single term, he was able to add three justices to the Court, stacking it with a 6-3 hard-right majority (thanks to the Federalist Society, its leader Leonard Leo, President Trump, and the canny Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell).

The Court first showed its radicalism by overturning Roe v. Wade, then followed with several other extremist decisions, giving the President “absolute immunity” for any crimes he commits while in office (Trump v. U.S.), sharply reducing the powers of regulatory agencies (the “Chevron Doctrine”), eroding the line between church and state (Carson v. Makin)), and more. You might reasonably wonder why President Biden didn’t push these goals sooner. As an institutionalist, he was loath to breach the separation of powers, and he knew he did not have the votes in Congress to win. Nonetheless, he is laying out important aims for the future.

President Biden wrote:

This nation was founded on a simple yet profound principle: No one is above the law. Not the president of the United States. Not a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. No one.

But the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision on July 1 to grant presidents broad immunity from prosecution for crimes they commit in office means there are virtually no limits on what a president can do. The only limits will be those that are self-imposed by the person occupying the Oval Office.

If a future president incites a violent mob to storm the Capitol and stop the peaceful transfer of power — like we saw on Jan. 6, 2021 — there may be no legal consequences.
And that’s only the beginning.

On top of dangerous and extreme decisions that overturn settled legal precedents — including Roe v. Wade — the court is mired in a crisis of ethics. Scandals involving several justices have caused the public to question the court’s fairness and independence, which are essential to faithfully carrying out its mission of equal justice under the law. For example, undisclosed gifts to justices from individuals with interests in cases before the court, as well as conflicts of interest connected with Jan. 6 insurrectionists, raise legitimate questions about the court’s impartiality.

I served as a U.S. senator for 36 years, including as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee. I have overseen more Supreme Court nominations as senator, vice president and president than anyone living today. I have great respect for our institutions and the separation of powers.

What is happening now is not normal, and it undermines the public’s confidence in the court’s decisions, including those impacting personal freedoms. We now stand in a breach.

That’s why — in the face of increasing threats to America’s democratic institutions — I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.
First, I am calling for a constitutional amendment called the No One Is Above the Law Amendment. It would make clear that there is no immunity for crimes a former president committed while in office. I share our Founders’ belief that the president’s power is limited, not absolute. We are a nation of laws — not of kings or dictators.

Second, we have had term limits for presidents for nearly 75 years. We should have the same for Supreme Court justices. The United States is the only major constitutional democracy that gives lifetime seats to its high court. Term limits would help ensure that the court’s membership changes with some regularity. That would make timing for court nominations more predictable and less arbitrary. It would reduce the chance that any single presidency radically alters the makeup of the court for generations to come. I support a system in which the president would appoint a justice every two years to spend 18 years in active service on the Supreme Court.

Third, I’m calling for a binding code of conduct for the Supreme Court. This is common sense. The court’s current voluntary ethics code is weak and self-enforced. Justices should be required to disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest. Every other federal judge is bound by an enforceable code of conduct, and there is no reason for the Supreme Court to be exempt.

All three of these reforms are supported by a majority of Americans — as well as conservative and liberal constitutional scholars. And I want to thank the bipartisan Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States for its insightful analysis, which informed some of these proposals.

We can and must prevent the abuse of presidential power. We can and must restore the public’s faith in the Supreme Court. We can and must strengthen the guardrails of democracy.
In America, no one is above the law. In America, the people rule.

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

Kathy Gebhardt Wins State Board Race in Colorado, Despite Dark Money

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2024 //
3

Kathy Gebhardt was elected to the Colorado State Board of Education, despite nearly $1 million behind a charter school candidate. Kathy says she is not opposed to charters, but she did stop a Hillsdale College Barney charter school from opening in her district. Governor Jared Polis, a charter enthusiast, backed her opponent; Polis opened two charters himself, years ago. Kathy’s experience was far more extensive that that of her opponent. The voters paid attention. Kathy won. Her election assures that the charter lobby will not control the state board of education.

For the background, read Peter Greene’s summary of the race and Carol Burris’s endorsement of Kathy, whom she has worked with.

Carol Burris wrote:

No one is more qualified to serve. Kathy is an education attorney with expertise in school finance, a long-time school board member, and has served on both state and national school board organizations. All five of her children attended public schools.

The Denver Post reported:

Former Boulder school board president Kathy Gebhardt won the Democratic primary for a seat on the Colorado State Board of Education on Tuesday, despite a group supporting charter schools having spent nearly $1 million to oppose her campaign and back political newcomer Marisol Lynda Rodriguez.

The preliminary results for the 2nd Congressional District seat on the state education board almost certainly ensure Gebhardt will win the seat in November as there is no Republican candidate in the race. She will replace board member Angelika Schroeder, whose six-year term ends in January.

“It shows that money can’t buy an election,” said Gebhardt, adding that the results so far showed that “people were stepping up for public education.”

As of 10:15 p.m., Gebhardt led with 43,156 votes, or 56% of the total. Rodriguez had 33,911 votes, or 44%.

Rodriguez told The Denver Post that she called Gebhardt to concede shortly before 9 p.m.

Categories Charter Schools, Colorado, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections

Carol Burris Endorses Kathy Gebhardt for Colorado State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2024 //
2

There’s a crucial election on June 25 in Colorado for an open seat on the state school board.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, gives her personal endorsement to Kathy Gebhardt. She has worked with Kathy and knows that she has the experience to be an excellent member of the state school board. Her opponent has no qualifications for the seat other than having worked for the charter lobby. Less than 20% of the children in the state attend charter schools but the charter lobby wants to control education policy for the all students, especially so they can keep on expanding the charter sector and opposing accountability and transparency for charters (while insisting on accountability and transparency for public schools).

Burris writes:

The Colorado charter lobby is worried. It may be about to lose its rubber stamp through its majority on the state board. That is because Kathy Gebhardt is running for the Colorado State Board of Education. No one is more qualified to serve. Kathy is an education attorney with expertise in school finance, a long-time school board member, and has served on both state and national school board organizations. All five of her children attended public schools.

 

I met Kathy when we worked together on the National Education Policy Center’s Schools of Opportunity Project, which honored public high schools that did an outstanding job providing students with excellent and equitable opportunities. Kathy is a smart, serious professional with a kind heart who cares deeply about all children.

 

From her well of kindness and devotion to equity, she took a courageous stand. As a School Board member, she joined the majority decision to deny an Ascent Classical charter school connected with the Hillsdale College Barney Charter School initiative from opening in her district. The poorly prepared application from Ascent sought waivers from nearly all district requirements, including protections against discrimination based on LGBTQ status and disabilities. 

 

The charter school lobby, like the NRA, is known for its staunch opposition to reforms and regulations. It is not above using NRA tactics to put down challenges to protect its privilege. The lobby and its billionaire supporters view every reasonable denial of a charter school as an attack. This is why Kathy was perceived as a threat despite her track record of supporting high-quality, truly public charter schools that cater to unmet community needs.

 

In this Forbes article, Peter Greene explains how they put forth an unqualified candidate, a consultant who worked for the Waltons and whose clients include Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change, the National Alliance of Charter Schools, and PIE, a network of “reform” organizations.

 

When the unqualified Marisol Rodriguez jumped in the race at the last minute, dark money flooded the race. Negative ads against Kathy making ridiculous accusations started flooding mailboxes. 

 

Kathy needs your help. Voting has begun by mail and will continue until June 25. She also needs funds to help get her message out and reply to the barrage of dark money-funded deception. Please give here up to the personal legal limit of $450 if you can. And if you know anyone who lives in Congressional District 2 (Joe Neguse’s district), tell them to vote for Kathy Gebhardt for State School Board. 

Categories Bigotry, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Colorado, Dark Money, Education Industry, Elections

Peter Greene: Dark Money Pours into Race for Colorado State Board of Education

By dianeravitch
June 16, 2024 //
4

Peter Greene asks and answers a curious question: Why would anyone spend more half a million dollars to win a race for the State Board of Education in Colorado? The money is not coming from the candidate’s bank account. It is coming from unnamed people in the powerful charter school lobby. Right now, the state board has a 5-4 pro-charter majority. One of the five charter supporters is stepping down due to term limits. The charter industry can’t take the risk that someone they don’t control might flip the majority out of their hands.

More than 15% of students in Colorado attend charter schools, one of the highest ratios in the nation. For some reason, the lobbyists representing that small minority of students think they should control the state school board, not people who want to represent the interests of 100% of the state’s students.

As background, be aware that the charter industry fights any effort to require accountability and transparency. They say that any law that requires them to be more accountable or transparent is “an attack” on their right to exist. There used to be a saying that was universally accepted: with public money, there must be public accountability and transparency. But not for the charter industry.

In Colorado, the charter industry has the support of Democratic Governor Jared Polis. He is good on many issues, but not on charter schools. Many years ago, when charter schools presented themselves as “innovative” alternatives to stodgy public schools, Polis sponsored two charters himself and became a charter zealot. Even when it became clear that the charter idea was a Trojan Horse for vouchers and that its backers were right wingers like the Walton family and Betsy DeVos, Polis remained loyal to the original hoax.

Greene writes about the Colorado race in Forbes, where he is a regular columnist:

An ordinarily quiet primary in Colorado finds a Democrat challenged by a candidate with an extraordinary influx of money apparently from charter school backers.

Marisol Rodriguez is in many ways a conventional Democratic candidate. Her website expresses support for LGBTQIA+ students. She’s endorsed by Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America, and the Colorado Blueflower Fund, a fund that supports pro-choice women as candidates. Kathy Gebhardt, the other Democratic candidate, is also endorsed by the Blueflower Fund and Moms Demand Action, as well as the Colorado Education Association, Colorado Working Families, Boulder Progressives, and over 65 elected officials.

Rodriguez is running against Gebhardt for a seat on the state board of education, a race she entered at the last minute. The race will be decisive; the GOP candidate has disappeared from the race, so the Democratic primary winner will run unopposed in the general election.

Gebhardt has served on a local school board as well as the state and national association of school board directors, rising to leadership positions in each. She’s an education attorney (the lead education attorney on Colorado’s school finance litigation) whose five children all attended public schools. Asked for her relevant experience by Boulder Weekly, Rodriguez listed parent of two current students and education consultant.

Besides a major difference in experience, one other difference separates the two. Gebhardt was generally accepting of charter schools while she was a board member, but she drew a hard line against a proposed classical charter, linked to Hillsdale College’s charter program, that would not include non-discrimination protections for gender identity and expression. She told me “charters don’t play well with others.” While Rodriguez has stayed quiet on the subject of charter schools, her allegiance is not hard to discern.

Rodriguez’s consulting firm is Insignia Partners. She has previously worked for the Walton Family Foundation, a major booster of charter schools. Her clients include Chiefs for Change, a group created by former Presidential aspirant Jeb Bush to help promote his school choice policies; the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group for charter schools and charter school policy; and the Public Innovators in Education (PIE) Network, a national network of education reform organizations.

Some of that consulting work appears to have been with the Colorado League of Charter Schools. A February meeting of that board shows her discussing some aspects of CLCS strategic planning.

There’s plenty for CLCS to deal with. Colorado spent the spring debating HB 1363, a bill that would have required more transparency and accountability from charter schools. Critics call it “a blatant attack on charter schools.” Heavy duty lobbying efforts have been unleashed to battle this bill, including work by the Betsy DeVos-backed American Federation for Children, as reported by Mike DeGuire for Colorado Newsline.

It is no surprise to find Republicans in Colorado supporting charter schools; this is, after all, the state where the GOP issued a “call to action” that “all Colorado parents should be aiming to remove their kids from public education.”

But Democratic Governor Jared Polis, a former member of the state board of education, has also been a vocal supporter of charter schools. And now he is also a vocal supporter of Rodriguez and features in many of her campaign images.

Support from CLCS is more than vocal. The Rodriguez campaign has received at least $569,594 from Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students. PSTS filed with the state as a non-profit on May 21, 2024; on May 23 CLCS donated $125,000 to the group according to Tracer (Colorado’s campaign finance tracker).

The registered and filing agents of PSTS are Kyle DeBeer and Noah Stout. DeBeer is VP of Civic Affairs for CLCS and head of CLCS Action, the CLCS partner 501(c)(4). Noah Stout is a member of the Montbello Organizing Committee, a group that receives money through various foundations that support charter schools, including the Gates Foundation and RootEd, and previously served as attorney for the DSST charter school network in Denver. The address for PSTS is the address for 178 other organizations.

It appears that CLCS created and funded Progressives Supporting Teachers and Students for this election.

The $569,594 are listed on Tracer as PSTS’s only expenditures as of the beginning of June. They consistent entirely of payments for Rodriguez-supporting consultant and professional services to 40 North Advocacy and The Tyson Organization (Tracer shows that CLCS has employed both before). The money has paid for video advertising, digital advertising, phone calling, newspaper advertising, and multiple direct mailings.

When he wrote the article, Greene could not discern who put up the money. No doubt, the usual anti-public school rightwingers with a few pseudo-liberals like Bill Gates or their front groups.

It is typical of the charter industry to name its lobbying group with a deceptive name, so of course they name themselves “Progressives Supporting Parents and Teachers,” when in reality they are “Highly Paid Consultants Advancing the Charter Industry.” Or, HPCACI.

There is nothing “progressive” about the charter industry. They are not more successful, on average, than public schools. They are a foot in the door for vouchers. They are beloved by rightwingers who see them as the first nail in the coffin for public schools. They claim to be “public schools,” but resist the accountability and transparency required of real public schools. Their lobbyists in Washington and in the states are funded by billionaires who want to privatize everything. They swamp state and local school board races with out-of-state dark money, making it hard for regular people to compete.

Will the charter lobby buy that crucial seat on the Colorado State board of Education? The Democratic primary for the State Board of Education is June 25.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Colorado, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Privatization

Jessica Winter: The Looting of Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2024 //
14

Writing in The New Yorker, Jessica Winter deftly connects the spread of vouchers with deep-seated racism, phony culture war issues, and the war on public schools. Winter is an editor at The New Yorker.

She writes:

In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, days later, a special meeting was called by the board of the Carroll Independent School District—“Home of the Dragons”—one of the wealthiest and highest-rated districts in the state. At the meeting, parents of Black children shared painful stories of racist taunts and harassment that their kids had endured in school. Carroll eventually convened a diversity council made up of students, parents, and district staffers to address an evident pattern of racism in Southlake, although it took nearly two years for the group to present its plan of action. It recommended, among other things, hiring more teachers of color, requiring cultural-sensitivity training for all students and teachers, and imposing clearer consequences for racist conduct.

As the NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton recounted in the acclaimed podcast “Southlake,” and as Hixenbaugh writes in his new book, “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” Southlake’s long-awaited diversity plan happened to emerge in July, 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality across the United States. It was also the same month that a journalist named Christopher Rufo published an article in City Journal headlined “Cult Programming in Seattle,” which launched his campaign to make “critical race theory”—an academic discipline that examines how racism is embedded in our legal frameworks and institutions—into a right-wing panic button. A political-action committee called Southlake Families pac sprang up to oppose the Carroll diversity plan; the claim was that it would instill guilt and shame in white children and convince them that they are irredeemably racist. The following year, candidates endorsed by Southlake Families pac swept the local elections for school board, city council, and mayor, with about seventy per cent of the vote—“an even bigger share than the 63 percent of Southlake residents who’d backed Trump in 2020,” Hixenbaugh notes in his book. Some nine hundred other school districts nationwide saw similar anti-C.R.T. campaigns. Southlake, where the anti-woke insurgency had won lavish praise from National Review and Laura Ingraham, was the blueprint.

“Rufo tapped into a particular moment in which white Americans realized that they were white, that whiteness carried heavy historical baggage,” the education journalist Laura Pappano writes in her recent book “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education,” which also digs into the Southlake controversy. Whiteness could feel like a neutral default mode in many communities because of decades of organized resistance to high-density housing and other zoning measures—the bureaucratic backhoes of suburbanization and white flight. Today, the Carroll school district, though still majority white, has significant numbers of Latino and Asian families, but less than two per cent of the district’s students are Black.

In this last regard, Southlake is not an outlier, owing largely to persistent residential segregation across the U.S. Even in highly diverse metro areas, the average Black student is enrolled in a school that is about seventy-five per cent Black, and white students attend schools with significantly lower levels of poverty. These statistics are dispiriting not least because of ample data showing the educational gains that desegregation makes possible for Black kids. A 2015 analysis of standardized-test scores, for instance, identified a strong connection between school segregation and academic-achievement gaps, owing to concentrated poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools. A well-known longitudinal study found that Black students who attended desegregated schools from kindergarten to high school were more likely to graduate and earn higher wages, and less likely to be incarcerated or experience poverty. Their schools also received twenty per cent more funding and had smaller classroom sizes. As the education reporter Justin Murphy writes in “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York,” this bevy of findings “lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that ‘green follows white.’ ”

These numbers, of course, don’t necessarily reflect the emotional and psychological toll of being one of a relatively few Black kids in a predominantly white school. Other recent books, including Cara Fitzpatrick’s “The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America” and Laura Meckler’s “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” have also considered how those costs have been weighed against the moral imperative of desegregation. This is the axial force of a lineage that runs from the monstrous chaos that followed court-ordered integration in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the busing debacles of the seventies to the racist slurs thrown around at Southlake. As my colleague Louis Menand wrote last year in his review of Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation,” “It was insane to send nine Black teen-agers into Central High School in Little Rock with eighteen hundred white students and no Black teachers. . . . Desegregation was a war. We sent children off to fight it.” To Rufo and his comrades, there was no such war left to be fought; there were only the bitter-enders who hallucinate microaggressions in the wallpaper and whose books need to be banned from school libraries. A mordant irony of Rufo’s imaginary version of critical race theory is that Derrick Bell, the civil-rights attorney and legal scholar who was most closely associated with C.R.T., eventually came to be skeptical about school-integration efforts—not because racism was effectively over or because legally enforced desegregation represented government overreach, as the anti-C.R.T. warriors would hold today, but because it could not be eradicated. In a famous Yale Law Journal article, “Serving Two Masters,” from 1976, Bell cited a coalition of Black community groups in Boston who resisted busing: “We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit…”

In the years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the N.A.A.C.P.—through the brave and innovative work of young lawyers such as Derrick Bell—had brought enough lawsuits against various segregated school districts that some states were moving to privatize their educational systems. As Fitzpatrick notes in “The Death of Public School,” an influential Georgia newspaper owner and former speaker of the state’s House declared, in 1950, “that it would be better to abolish the public schools than to desegregate them.” South Carolina, in 1952, voted 2–1 in a referendum to revoke the right to public education from its state constitution. Around the same time, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman began making a case for school vouchers, or public money that parents could spend as they pleased in the educational marketplace. White leaders in the South seized on the idea as a means of funding so-called segregation academies. In 1959, a county in Virginia simply closed down its public schools entirely rather than integrate; two years later, it began distributing vouchers—but only to white students, as Black families had refused to set up their own segregated schools.

Despite these disgraceful origins, vouchers remain the handmaiden of conservative calls for “school choice” or “education freedom.” In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Rufo expanded his triumphant crusade against C.R.T. into a frontal assault on public education itself, which he believed could be replaced with a largely unregulated voucher system. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public-school distrust,” Rufo explained. He had been doing his best to sow that distrust during the previous two years.

Twenty states currently have voucher programs; five states launched universal voucher programs in 2023 alone. But reams of evidence show that vouchers negatively impact educational outcomes, and the money a voucher represents—around eight thousand dollars in Florida, sixty-five hundred in Georgia—is often not nearly enough to cover private-school tuition. In practice, then, vouchers typically act as subsidies for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools; or they pay for sketchy for-profit “microschools,” which have no oversight and where teachers often have few qualifications; or they flow toward homeschooling families. Wherever they end up, they drain the coffers of the public schools. Arizona’s voucher system, which is less than two years old, is projected to cost close to a billion dollars next year. The governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former social worker, has said that the program “will likely bankrupt the state.”

Back in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has become the Captain Ahab of school choice—he fanatically pursued a voucher program through multiple special sessions of the state legislature, failed every time to sink the harpoon, and then tried to use the rope to strangle the rest of the education budget, seemingly out of spite. Abbott’s problem is not only that Democrats don’t support vouchers but that they’ve also been rejected by Republican representatives in rural areas, where private options are scarce and where public schools are major local employers and serve as community hubs. (Southlake’s state representative, a Republican with a background in private equity, supports Abbott’s voucher scheme—a bizarre stance to take on behalf of a district that derives much of its prestige, property values, and chauvinism from the élite reputation of its public schools.) White conservatives in Texas and elsewhere were roused to anger and action by Rufo-style hysteria. But many of them may have realized by now that these invented controversies were just the battering ram for a full-scale sacking and looting of public education.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom to Read, Funding, History, Injustice, Lies, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, School Choice, Segregation, Texas, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: How to Fix the Supreme Court’s Devotion to Big Money

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2024 //
10

Thom Hartmann is convinced that We, the People, must find a way to restrict the Supreme Court’s devotion to the financial interests of the wealthiest Americans. There is a way, he writes, but note that it will require Democratic control of both houses of Congress. Another reason to vote and make sure your friends and family vote.

Hartmann writes in The Daily Kos:

Is there a way to reverse the decision by five Republicans on the Supreme Court that it’s OK for billionaires and big corporations to bribe politicians?

Americans are watching with increasing shock and dismay:

— President Biden tried to knock up to $20,000 off the debt of every person in the country with a student loan. Republicans decided this might somehow, someday mean fewer profits for banks — who financially support the GOP — so they sued at the Supreme Court. The Republican appointees on the Court, over the objections of the three Democratic appointees, killed the president’s effort without providing any cogent constitutional rationalization.  

— Scientists have developed lab-grown meat that is healthier, easier on the planet, and, when manufactured at scale, cheaper than beef, pork, or chicken. The animal ag industry freaked out and threw a bunch of cash at Republican members of Congress, who are now trying to outlaw the product before the companies developing it can get to scale. Even the buggywhip makers back in the day didn’t think the way to protect their industry was to buy off politicians (of course that was before five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery).  

— Climate change is devastating our planet and fine particle emissions from trucks cause hundreds of thousands of deaths and illnesses from heart disease, COPD, asthma, and cancer every year. To solve the problem, the EPA put forward new truck emission standards that will phase in between 2027 and 2032. This week, twenty-seven Republican-controlled states whose politicians take money from the fossil fuel industry sued to block the rules and protect the profits of the trucking and petroleum industries.

— Title IX of the federal code, which forbids gender-based discrimination in education, is being extended by the Department of Education to protect members of the queer community. Rightwing Christian groups, which provide billions of dollars and millions of votes to Republicans, pinged state-level politicians, so now Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oklahoma have filed suit before hand-picked rightwing judges to allow schools to legally trash LGBTQ+ students.

— The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) promulgated a new rule limiting credit card late fees to $8 each, protecting America’s most vulnerable families. The banks pulled the GOP’s chain and Republican senators Tim Scott, John Thune, John Barrasso, Jerry Moran, John Boozman, Steve Daines, Mike Rounds, Thom Tillis, Marsha Blackburn, Kevin Cramer, Mike Braun, Bill Hagerty, and Katie Britt introduced legislation to reverse the policy and allow banks to again screw low-income people.

— In 2003, George W. Bush signed legislation to privatize Medicare through the so-called Medicare Advantage scam, which last year overcharged our government more than $140 billion while denying millions of claims from Americans unfortunate enough to have signed up for it. Republicans on the take from the insurance industry are now pushing a plan to gut or even shut down real Medicare, leaving all seniors to the tender mercies of this predatory industry.

— Ultra-processed foods are accused of causing obesity, diabetes, cancer, and host of other illnesses both physical and mental: American children, who consume as much as two-thirds of their calories from these products, are experiencing an epidemic of obesity and diseases associated with it. With Republican politicians running interference for them, the processed food industry has now succeeded in getting their ultra-processed “food” products placed in thousands of school lunch programs, paid for with our tax dollars. As The Washington Post noteda few months ago, “Republicans have continued to fight stricter standards” and, “Some Republicans are now threatening to block the USDA from further limiting sodium and reducing added sugar in milk…”  

Increasingly, Americans are realizing the cancer eating our democracy is the power of great wealth and Supreme Court-legalized political bribery. And Sam Alito flying his flag upside-down in support of Trump’s coup and Clarence Thomas openly taking bribes are their ways of saying they think they’re completely immune from accountability. 

In a 1978 Republican-only decision written by Lewis Powell (author of the notorious “Powell Memo” which told rich people how to take over our politics, schools, media, and courts), five corrupt members of the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” with full access to the Bill of Rights, including the First Amendment right of free speech. They added that money is the same thing as “free speech,” legalizing political bribery by both billionaires and giant corporations.

In 2010, five other Republicans on the Court doubled down on that Bellottidecision with Citizens United, which overturned hundreds of good government and anti-bribery laws, some dating all the way back to the 19th century. As a result, it’s almost impossible to prosecute any but the most obvious and egregious examples of bribery (see: Menendez) of both American politicians and judges, including billionaires and religious corporations blatantly bribing Supreme Court justices.

Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito openly flaunt the gifts they receive from wealthy interests with business before the Court, as Trump fangirl Aileen Cannon and hundreds of other federal and state court judges are routinely wined and dined at luxury resorts. As long as they continue to rule the way the morbidly rich want and bribery continues to be legal, it appears the gravy train will never end.

Unless we do something about it.

Every single one of these problems — and hundreds more — continue to exist in the face of overwhelming public disapproval because one or another industry or group of rightwing billionaires has been empowered by the Supreme Court’s Bellotti and Citizens United decisions to bribe politicians and judges.

Democrats in Congress must reverse those bizarre, democracy-destroying decisions with a new law declaring an end to this American political crime spree. If they retake the House and hold the Senate and White House this fall, it’ll be their opportunity to re-criminalize bribery of elected officials.  

To do that, they need to defy the Court’s declaration that money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.” That defiance requires something called “court-stripping.”

Republicans understand exactly what I’m talking about: Since the 1950s, they’ve introduced hundreds of pieces of court-stripping legislation. They tried to do the same thing most recently in 2005 with the Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004.  

That law, designed to override Supreme Court protections of LGBTQ+ people, contained the following court-stripping paragraph:

“No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.”

In other words, Congress wrote, the Supreme Court has no say in the matter of this particular legislation.

The Marriage Protection Act died in the Senate, but it’s one of hundreds of pieces of court-stripping legislation introduced — almost all by Republicans (House Whip Tom Delay was the master of this) — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Brown v Board and Roe v Wade.

This process of “court-stripping” is based in Article 3, Section 2 of the US Constitution, which says:

“[T]he supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Regulations? Exceptions?!?

Turns out, the Constitution says Congress can regulate the Court by, for example, expanding the number of its members, determining if Court hearings must be public/televised, or if they must live by a Judicial Code of Conduct (among other things).

Congress should be doing all these things as soon as possible.

Additionally, Congress can create what the Constitution calls “Exceptions” to the things the Court can rule on. 

In today’s crisis, Congress could say, “Supreme Court, you may no longer rule on whether money in politics is ‘free speech.’ We’re taking that power from you because the Constitution gives it to us and you have screwed it up so badly.”

And, it turns out, Congress has already gone there, most recently creating exceptions to what our courts may do in a law that waspassed and signed by President Bush the very next year: The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. 

That law explicitly strips from federal courts — including the Supreme Court — their power to hear appeals against the Bush administration detaining, torturing, imprisoning in Guantanamo, or even killing suspected Muslim terrorists. It says:

“[N]o court, justice, or judge shall have jurisdiction to hear or consider an application for a writ of habeas corpus filed by or on behalf of an alien detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…”

And that’s just the beginning.  There’s even, as the Brennan Center notes, a court-stripping provision in the PATRIOT act of 2001. I lay out dozens of other examples and a history of court-stripping that extends back to the presidency of Thomas Jefferson — an outspoken advocate or reducing the power of the Supreme Court — in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

As House Speaker Tom Delay said back in the days of his court-stripping Marriage Protection Act: “Judges need to be intimidated” and “Congress should take no prisoners in dealing with the courts.”

Putting forward such a law would highlight how Citizen United’s SCOTUS-legalized political bribery is at the core of our political dysfunction, even if it doesn’t pass Congress or even if the Court itself strikes it down. 

Rightwing oligarchs and giant corporations have now taken total control of the entire GOP and corrupted more than a few Democrats, all while polluting our public discourse with their think tanks and media outlets: such legislation would, at the very least, highlight this and pressure the Court to change their policies. “Intimidate” the Court, to quote Tom Delay.

Congress must stand up for what’s right and is consistent with American values: Legally bribed politicians and judges aren’t that.

It’s high time to end the bribery and get something done for We the People.

Categories Corruption, Dark Money, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Justice

Nancy Flanagan: Just Who Is Trashing Public Education?

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2024 //
14

Veteran teacher Nancy Flanagan explores the question of who is trying to destroy our public schools. She nails some of the loudest critics, who have personally benefitted from public schools. She doesn’t explore why they are trying to annihilate the schools that educated them, but that may because we know what the privatization movement has to offer: money. There is a gravy train overloaded with munificent gifts from Betsy DeVos, the Waltons, Charles Koch, Michael Bloomberg, and a boatload of other billionaires. They can endlessly underwrite anti-public school organizations that offer well-paid jobs.

On the pro-public education side, it’s hard to find big spenders or highly compensated jobs. The two big unions have resources, all of which come from the dues of their members. They do not have the funds to support the numerous grassroots groups that are found in every state. Most, if not all of the state and local groups, operate on a shoestring; typically, their employees are volunteers. They do not have six-figure jobs for someone who tweets and writes statements. No one who works for a state “Save Our Schools” group makes big money.

The Network for Public Education is the biggest pro-public education groups; it has 350,000 people who have signed up to support it, but there is no membership fee. NPE has one full-time employee and a few part-timers.

So, Nancy Flanagan asks, just who is trashing public schools?

She writes:

Get ready for a big dump–a deliberately chosen word–of anti-public education blah-blah over the next five months. It’s about all the right wing’s got, for one thing–and it’s one of those issues that everybody has an opinion on, whether they went to public school. have children in public schools, or neither.

Public education is so big and so variable that there’s always something to get exercised over. There’s always one teacher who made your child miserable, one assigned book that raises hackles, one policy that feels flat-out wrongheaded. There’s also someone, somewhere, who admires that teacher, feels that book is a classic and stoutly defends whatever it is—Getting rid of recess? The faux science of phonics? Sex education that promotes abstinence? —that someone else finds ridiculous or reprehensible.

Not to mention—teaching is the largest profession in the country, So many teachers, so many public schools, so much opportunity to find fault.

In other words, public education is the low-hanging fruit of political calculation. Always has been, in fact.

A few years back, when folks were going gaga over Hillbilly Elegy, seeing it as the true story of how one could rise above one’s station (speaking of blahblah)—the main thing that irritated me about ol’ J.D. Vance was his nastiness about public education. Vance has since parlayed a best-seller that appealed to those who think a degree from Yale equates to arriving at the top, into a political career—and putting the screws to affirmative action, in case anyone of color tries to enjoy the same leg-up he did.

J.D. Vance’s education—K-12, the military, Ohio State—was entirely in public institutions until he got into Yale Law School. He doesn’t have anything good to say about public ed, but it was free and available to him, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks. When I read Rick Hess’s nauseating interview with Corey DeAngelis in Education Week, I had a flashback to ol’ J.D., intimating that he achieved success entirely on his own, without help from that first grade teacher who taught him how to read and play nice with others.

DeAngelis says:

I went to government schools my entire K–12 education in San Antonio, Texas. However, I attended a magnet high school, which was a great opportunity. Other families should have education options as well, and those options shouldn’t be limited to schools run by the government. Education funding should follow students to the public, private, charter, or home school that best meets their needs. I later researched the effects of school choice initiatives during my Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Education Reform.

So—just to clarify—Corey DeAngelis went to public schools K-12, for his BA and MA degrees (University of Texas), as well as a stint in a PUBLICLY FUNDED program at the notoriously right-focused University of Arkansas. That’s approximately 22 years, give or take, of public education, the nation-building institution DeAngelis now openly seeks to destroy.

I’m not going to provide quotes from the EdWeek piece, because anyone reading this already knows the hyperbolic, insulting gist—lazy, dumb, unions, low bar, failing, yada yada. He takes particular aim at the unions—although it absolutely wasn’t the unions—shutting down schools during a global pandemic. He paints schools’ turn-on-a-dime efforts to hold classes on Zoom as an opportunity for clueless parents to see, first-hand, evidence of how bad instruction is. He never mentions, of course, the teachers, students and school staff who died from COVID exposure.

Enough of duplicitous public school critics. My point is this:

The people who trash public education—not a particular school, classroom or curricular issue, but the general idea of government-sponsored opportunity to learn how to be a good, productive American citizen—have a very specific, disruptive ax to grind:

I got what I needed. I don’t really care about anybody else.

This goes for your local Militant Moms 4 Whatever on a Mission, out there complaining about books and school playsand songs and health class. It’s not about parents’ “rights.” It’s about control. And never about the other families and kids, who may have very different values and needs.

It’s about taking the ‘public’ out of public education. And it’s 100% politically driven.

OPEN THE LINK TO FINISH READING THE ARTICLE!

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Dark Money, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Unions, Vouchers

Tune in! I Discuss “Slaying Goliath” Tomorrow with Tim Slekar

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2024 //
3

Tim Slekar is a fearless warrior for public schools, teachers, and students. I will be talking to him about Slaying Goliath and the struggle to protect public schools from the depredations of billionaires and zealots.

This Thursday on Civic Media: Dive Back into “Slaying Goliath” with Diane Ravitch

Grab your pencils—BustEDpencils is gearing up for a no-holds-barred revival of Diane Ravitch’s game-changing book, *Slaying Goliath*, live this Thursday on Civic Media. 

Launched into a world on the brink of a pandemic, *Slaying Goliath* hit the shelves with a mission: to arm the defenders of public education against the Goliaths of privatization. But then, COVID-19 overshadowed everything. Despite that, the battles Diane described haven’t paused—they’ve intensified. And this Thursday, we’re bringing these crucial discussions back to the forefront with Diane herself.

This Thursday at 7pm EST on BustEDpencils, we’re not just revisiting a book; we’re reigniting a movement. Diane will dissect the current threats to public education and highlight how *Slaying Goliath* still maps the path to victory for our schools. This isn’t just about reflection—it’s about action.

**It’s time to get real. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to tune in this Thursday at 7 PM EST on Civic Media.**

If you believe that without a robust public education system our democracy is in jeopardy, then join us. Listen in, call in (855-752-4842), and let’s get fired up. We’ve got a fight to win, and Diane Ravitch is leading the charge.

Mark your calendars and fire up Civic Media this Thursday at 7pm Central. 

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Fraud, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Resistance, School Choice, Separation of church and state, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teachers, Unions, Vouchers

Bob Shepherd: A Review of a Review of “Slaying Goliath”

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2024 //
16

Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.

As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.

America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.

Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.

Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.

But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.

I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.

So I happily post Bob Shepherd’s review of the review here.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Reform, Corruption, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DFER, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, History, Hoax, Lies, Network for Public Education, Parent Groups, Privatization, Propaganda, Race to the Top, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Unions, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers, Walton Foundation
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