Archives for category: Democracy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Most Dangerous and Most Powerful Man in the World

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
12

The New York Times published a startling article about the increasing global dominance of one man. He may be the richest man in the world, but that’s not why he is the most dangerous man in the world. He currently is launching satellites into orbit on a weekly basis. He owns almost 5,000 satellites now, and the number in orbit increases regularly. If you can open the article, you will see graphic visualizations of the thousands of satellites owned by one man and unregulated by any government. That man is Elon Musk.

The article begins:

On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses.

They also talked about Elon Musk.

General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology made by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. Ukraine’s battlefield decisions depended on the continued use of Starlink for communications, General Zaluzhnyi said, and his country wanted to ensure access and discuss how to cover the cost of the service.

General Zaluzhnyi also asked if the United States had an assessment of Mr. Musk, who has sprawling business interests and murky politics — to which American officials gave no answer.

Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, has become the most dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically significant field of satellite internet. Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways.

Since 2019, Mr. Musk has sent SpaceX rockets into space nearly every week that deliver dozens of sofa-size satellites into orbit. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth, so they can beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50 percent of all active satellites. They have already started changing the complexion of the night sky, even before accounting for Mr. Musk’s plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years.

A global satellite network

There are over 4,500 Starlink satellites orbiting Earth. What appear to be long lines here are recently launched satellites approaching their place in orbit.

An animation showing circles that represent Starlink satellites orbiting Earth as it rotates. Most of the satellites are spaced out and move in a gridlike formation between Earth’s poles, while a few are closely clustered and move together in lines. [You must open the link to see the animations that show the global reach of Starlink satellites.]

The power of the technology, which has helped push the value of closely held SpaceX to nearly $140 billion, is just beginning to be felt.

Starlink is often the only way to get internet access in war zones, remote areas and places hit by natural disasters. It is used in Ukraine for coordinating drone strikes and intelligence gathering. Activists in Iran and Turkey have sought to use the service as a hedge against government controls. The U.S. Defense Department is a big Starlink customer, while other militaries, such as in Japan, are testing the technology.

But Mr. Musk’s near total control of satellite internet has raised alarms.

A combustible personality, the 52-year-old’s allegiances are fuzzy. While Mr. Musk is hailed as a genius innovator, he alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built.

In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.

At times, Mr. Musk has openly flaunted Starlink’s capabilities. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” he tweeted in April.

Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment. SpaceX declined to comment.

Worried about over-dependence on Mr. Musk’s technology, Ukrainian officials have talked with other satellite internet providers, though they acknowledged none rival Starlink’s reach.

“Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, said in an interview.

At least nine countries — including in Europe and the Middle East — have also brought up Starlink with American officials over the past 18 months, with some questioning Mr. Musk’s power over the technology, two U.S. intelligence officials briefed on the discussions said. Few nations will speak publicly about their concerns, for fear of alienating Mr. Musk, said intelligence and cybersecurity officials briefed on the conversations.

U.S. officials have said little publicly about Starlink as they balance domestic and geopolitical priorities related to Mr. Musk, who has criticized President Biden but whose technology is unavoidable.

The federal government is one of SpaceX’s biggest customers, using its rockets for NASA missions and launching military surveillance satellites. Senior Pentagon officials have tried mediating issues involving Starlink, particularly Ukraine, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The Defense Department confirmed it contracts with Starlink, but it declined to elaborate, citing “the critical nature of these systems.”

Other governments are wary. Taiwan, which has an internet infrastructure that could be vulnerable in the event of a Chinese invasion, is reluctant to use the service partly because of Mr. Musk’s business links to China, Taiwanese and American officials said.

China has its own concerns. Mr. Musk said last year that Beijing sought assurances that he would not turn Starlink on inside the country, where the internet is controlled and censored by the state. In 2020, China registered with an international body to launch 13,000 internet satellites of its own.

The European Union, partly driven by misgivings about Starlink and Mr. Musk, also earmarked 2.4 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year to build a satellite constellation for civilian and military use.

“This is not just one company, but one person,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert who co-founded the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank and has advised governments on satellite internet. “You are completely beholden to his whims and desires.”

The graphics in the article are powerful. Please open the link if you can.

As I read the article, I could not help thinking of the super-villains in James Bond movies who wanted to control the world.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Deregulation, Media, Technology

Texas: Big Government Seizes Power from Municipalities

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
4

Something weird has happened to the Republican Party. It used to favor local control. Not any more. Now Republicans think it okay to seize control of school districts instead of helping them with resources, as happened in Michigan, Ohio and Texas. And Texas just passed a law called “the Death Star” that allows the state to cancel local laws. No more local control in Texas!

Why have Republicans doubled down on suppressing the vote, gerrymandering legislatures to crush opposition, and undermining democracy whenever possible?

Gus Bova of The Texas Observer has the story here:

On November 3, 2020, as America watched the first results of a fateful presidential contest roll in, voters in a North Texas suburb struck a blow for workers’ rights. Euless residents approved a proposition limiting some large companies’ ability to force employees to work overtime if they didn’t want to.

The “fair workweek” initiative, comparable to measures passed recently in a handful of other cities, was led in Euless by employees of LSG Sky Chefs, an airline catering giant and meal-supplier for American Airlines. These workers, unionized with Unite Here, said they were being overwhelmed with mandatory overtime hours, often announced at the last minute, as American Airlines, headquartered near the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth airport, sought to dramatically increase flight volume.

“You can have a wife and children, and yet every day you are forced to stay at work, and you have no time to even go back and sit and relax and play and take care of children,” said Samuel Tandankwa, a Sky Chefs driver and Unite Here member, recalling the conditions in 2019 and leading up to the COVID pandemic.

Despite getting voters’ approval, the initiative faced legal troubles from the first. Some city officials doubted it could be enforced. Sky Chefs told the Texas Observer it didn’t apply to them since they maintain a national contract with Unite Here. And Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had already written a letter stating the policy would violate a state law that bans cities from setting minimum wages. Nevertheless, Tandankwa told the Observer in July that since the campaign, the company actually has turned away from using mandatory overtime, freeing up workers to meet family obligations, and neither he nor local worker advocates want to lose the ordinance.

But Euless’ overtime measure is among the local ordinances that will be vaporized by Texas’ House Bill 2127, dubbed the “Death Star” bill by critics, which was signed by GOP Governor Greg Abbott last month and takes effect in September. It’s causing uproar around the state, as city officials, workers, and others try to figure out what parts of municipal law and regulation the bill will nullify.

The bill’s sweeping, alleged purpose is stated in its opening sections: “returning sovereign regulatory powers to the state where those powers belong.” However, closer examination suggests that the legislation’s real intent is both narrower and potentially more profound than just upending city ordinance-making powers. First, it is a laser beam aimed at a small group of progressive ordinances improving worker and tenant protections—local victories won through hard-fought campaigns over the course of more than a decade. Second, and more importantly, it’s a bid to permanently hamstring municipal democracy in Texas, especially in its big blue cities. Cities are where most Texans live; they are increasingly liberal, their populations often majority nonwhite, and they are the level of government most responsive to ordinary citizens. In essence, the Legislature decided there was too much Democracy afoot in Texas, so it did something about it.

“To me, that’s the will of the people being taken away,” said Tevita Uhatafe, a Euless resident who works for American Airlines and is also a vice president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “We voted for it … and here we are, we’re going to get it taken away because people who claim to hate big government are acting just like [it].”

“There is no precedent for what they did this time,” said Rick Levy, president of the Texas AFL-CIO. “It was not a measured response to a given policy that corporate interests didn’t like; it was a wholesale transfer of power from cities to politicians in Austin.”

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Republicans, Texas

Ron DeSantis, Hypocrite

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2023 //
19

On August 20, the New York Times published a story about how Ron DeSantis joined the “ruling class” but now campaigns against it. His story is shot through with hypocrisy. He paints himself as the public school kid from middle-class Dunedin, Florida, surrounded by snobs from private schools who looked down on him. Yet now as governor, he treats public schools and their teachers with contempt and expanded vouchers to pay billions of taxpayer dollars for kids to go to private schools, including high-income families.

Why is he, the public school kid, subsidizing private and religious schools? Why is he so hostile to public schools? He complains that public schools indoctrinate their students yet he’s willing to send kids to religious schools whose purpose is indoctrination. Why does he subsidize the tuition of rich kids who go to private schools? Aren’t those the kind of kids who treated him with condescension?

Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.

The story begins:

“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.

Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”

Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk…

For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.”

DeSantis has aggressively taken political control of Florida’s schools and universities, passing laws that limit or eliminate what may be taught about gender and race. He has encouraged parent vigilantes to scour classrooms and libraries for books on controversial topics and ban them. His ally, radical conservative Chris Rufo, is quoted in the article:

“The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees [of New College], said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.

“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”

At Yale, DeSantis joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes), which was known for its vicious hazing of pledges. As an upper-class member, DeSantis was known for bullying pledges and forcing them to engage in pranks like dropping their pants and exposing their genitals, while the older members mocked their private parts.

The story says that DeSantis took a course on the Cold War taught by the esteemed scholar John Lewis Gaddis, who was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. In other words, DeSantis lied about being exposed to pro-Soviet views of the Cold War.

DeSantis portrayed Harvard Law School, where he studied, as a bastion of left wing thought. But the Dean of the law school when DeSantis arrived belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. And he was not the only member of that group on the faculty.

A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”

DeSantis neglects to mention that he was an active member of the Harvard Law School’s Federalist Society. He prefers to play the victim.

When he ran for Congress and then for governor, he tapped his Yale and Harvard networks to raise money.

But then he discovered there was even more political advantage for him if he played the role of the enemy of the ruling class.

How better to attack the ruling class than to destroy the public schools that enabled him to enter Yale? If this makes no sense, neither does DeSantis’ fable about being victimized at Yale and Harvard.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Character, Charter Schools, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Hypocrisy, Privatization, Religion, School Choice, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Has the GOP Become a Party of Hate and Trolls?

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
29

Thom Hartmann, journalist and blogger, describes the loathsome identity of the Republican Party. It was once a sensibly Conservative Party that believed in local control and minimal government. It boasted leaders like Dwight D. Eisenhower, Howard Baker, Leverett Saltonstall, and Margaret Chase Smith.

What does the GOP believe today, other than cutting taxes for the richest?

Today, the GOP leaders peddle lies and conspiracy theories. On social media, they take turns smearing Biden (“the Biden crime family”) and retailing any charges they stumble across on the internet. I am appalled whoever I read any Tweet (X) posted by Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Jim Jordan, or other current GOP leaders.

You will not hear from any of them a hint of bipartisanship. It’s all hate, hate, hate. They call their opposition whatever names come to mind: socialists, Communists, radical left, fascists. Their words have no substantive meaning. They are intended to spread hate and fear.

Hartman explains why they stoke hate: They have no substantive ideas to improve people’s lives.

Hartmann writes:

So, Donald Trump says that if Judge Tanya Chutkan orders him not to reveal details of the prosecution’s case before they can be presented to a jury, including the names, addresses, and testimony of witnesses against him, he’s going to do it anyway and challenge the court.

And there’s little reason to believe he won’t do it: he’ll take what he’s asserting as his First Amendment right to troll and threaten witnesses against him all the way to the Supreme Court he packed with three rightwing crackpots. If nothing else, it may buy him enough time to get elected president and pardon himself before he’s convicted.

In this, Trump has raised vicious social media trolling into a form of electoral performance art. He’s become our troll-in-chief.

America has been under the sway of rightwing trolls before. When I was a child in the 1950s, Republican Senator Joe McCarthy was conducting an active witch-hunt for “communists” in the federal government. This was the era when Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance for, in part, declaring himself a “New Deal Democrat” and standing up to the witch hunters, as characterized in the new movie about his making the bomb.

McCarthy destroyed the lives of thousands of people, and many were imprisoned because of his efforts. Historian Ellen Schrecker estimates his victims at over 10,000. He — and his right hand man, Roy Cohn (who went on to be Trump’s mentor) — were classic trolls in the worst sense of the word.

Some of McCarthy’s efforts live to this day, including his insistence throughout the Army-McCarthy hearings on never saying “Democratic Party” but, instead, always saying, “Democrat Party.”

Similarly, McCarthy echoed the John Birch Society’s (JBS) argument that America is not a democracy but a republic, an argument that James Madison made — and then refuted — when he was trying to sell the US Constitution. McCarthy’s and the JBS’s apparent rationale was that “democracy” sounds too much like Democratic while “republic” evokes good feelings for the Republican Party.

Nelson Rockefeller, who would become Gerald Ford’s Vice President, got a dose of this with the John Birch Society-pushed Goldwater sweep of the Republican Party at their 1964 convention.

“It is essential that this convention repudiate here and now,” he said over boos and chants, “any doctrinaire, militant minority, whether Communist, Ku Klux Klan, or Bircher (pause for ‘republic not democracy!’ chants set off by his attacking the John Birch Society)…”

Today’s trolling, however, has gone beyond the fringes defined in that era by the JBS, Cohn, and the occasional McCarthyite wannabee. It’s become the core, the essential identity, of the post-Trump GOP.

From “rolling coal” trucks blowing poisonous smoke at Prius and EV drivers, to “Free helicopter rides for liberals” tee shirts invoking Pinochet’s murders, to hate groups and militia members showing up at school board meetings, today’s Republican Party has fully embraced hate and trolling.

“Owning the libs” is the main online sport of many Republicans today, as you can see by following the social media feeds or reading the hate mail of any high-profile progressives or Democrats.

In large part that’s because Republicans don’t have anything else to present to Americans as a positive national governing agenda.

Please open the link to read the rest of this excellent post.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

Katherine Stewart: The Fascist Intellectuals and Crackpots of the Right

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
34

Katherine Stewart has written several important books about the insidious Right and their radical, racist views. In this article in The New Republic, she looks at an influential reactionary organization, the Claremont Institute, and traces its ideological forebears. From crackpots to intellectual gurus, she traces the Right’s fascination with manliness, racism, anti-Semitism, and its longing for a world led by a new Caesar, a strong man who will protect other men from rapacious women and immigrants.

It’s a long read but worth your time. Stewart looks at the Fascist underbelly of conservatism, and it’s repulsive.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Censorship, Cruelty, Democracy, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Gender, Trump

Tom Ultican: The Delaware School Reform Disaster

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2023 //
5

Tom Ultican writes about the Delaware disaster. Delaware went all in for neoliberal school reform, being one of the first winners of a Race to the Top award, and has seen its academic performance decline. It’s time to switch gears, he says, and let teachers teach without threats and fear. He writes that the Delaware story should be a lesson for the nation on the failure of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top ideology —both representative of neoliberal school reform. This is one of Tom’s very best posts. Open the link and read it all!

He begins:

An unholy alliance between neoliberal Democrats and education reform oligarchs is harming Delaware public education. This is a lesson for the rest of the nation.

A new charter school law introduced to reduce principal professionalism is the latest example. Data clearly shows for almost two decades, top-down education reform has been ineffective and seriously damaged a once exemplary system.

In March, the Delaware Professional Standards Board recommended charter school certification requirements match public school rules. Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network, immediately responded, “All Delaware charter schools are led by highly qualified administrators.” She said charter school principals have a different role than public school leaders and need to be excellent marketeers to raise funds and drive enrollment.

Did she mean charter school principals don’t need to be professional educators?

For the Standards Board recommendation to take effect, adoption by the State Board of Education is required. Before they acted, Senate President Pro Tem David P. Sokola introduced senate bill 163 to relax certification rules for charter school principals.

The heart of Democrat Sokola’s legislation says:

“The bill creates new subsections in Section 507(c) of Title 14 of the Delaware Code to define the licensure and certification requirements more clearly within Chapter 5 of Title 14. Finally, the bill requires the Secretary of Education to work with the Delaware Charter Schools Network to create a qualified alternative licensure and certification pathway for charter school administrators engaged in the instruction of students (Instructional Administrators).”

Teachers’ union leader, Mike Matthews, wrote to the Senate Executive Committee:

“I was disheartened to see that SB 163 — a bill that will actually deprofessionalize the education profession — was introduced by Senator Sokola. I was even more disappointed — and concerned — to see it filed in the Senate Executive Committee instead of the Senate Education Committee where it belongs. Why was that?”

The Bill was passed by the State Senate and is currently awaiting action in the House Administration Committee. The House Education Committee, like its counterpart in the Senate, is not involved.

Neoliberal Education Reform

A Delaware Live headline howls, “School test scores dismal again despite new math, reading plans.” Two decades of 4th and 8th grade reading and math data on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) support the headline. NAEP is often referred to as the nation’s education report card. The above graphs beg the question,“what happened in 2010?”

Long-term NAEP data showed that from 1971 until 2002, there was steady growth in math and reading. The steady growth ended concurrent with the adoption of the bipartisan Kennedy-Bush education reform called No Child Left Behind. The graphs illustrate this phenomenon.

Why did Delaware’s scores start falling?

In 2010 educator and blogger, Susan Ohanian, reported,

“Delaware and Tennessee came out on top in round one of RTTT: Delaware got $100 million (about $800 per student), and Tennessee $500 million (about $500 per student). Since these states radically changed their education strategies to receive what amounts to 7 percent of their total expenditures on elementary and secondary education, the feds are getting a lot of bang for the buck.”

The $4.5 billion dollar Obama-era Race To The Top (RTTT) program was administered by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Grants were given to states that complied with three key elements: (1) Evaluate teachers based on student test scores (2) Close and turn into charter schools public schools that continue to get low test scores (3) In low-test score schools, the principal and half of the staff are to be fired and replaced. In addition, states were encouraged to create more privately-managed charter schools.

Education historian and former Assistant US Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch predicted the program’s utter failure when it was announced:

“All of these elements are problematic. Evaluating teachers in relation to student test scores will have many adverse consequences. It will make the current standardized tests of basic skills more important than ever, and even more time and resources will be devoted to raising scores on these tests. The curriculum will be narrowed even more than under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind, because of the link between wages and scores. There will be even less time available for the arts, science, history, civics, foreign language, even physical education. Teachers will teach to the test. There will be more cheating, more gaming the system.”

For more than a century, brilliant educators have been skeptical of top-down coerced education reform like those from Duncan, Obama, Bush and Kennedy. Alfred North Whitehead published his essay, “The Aims of Education” in 1917, stating:

“I suggest that no system of external tests which aims primarily at examining individual scholars can result in anything but educational waste.” (Page 13)

“But the first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung-hill of inert ideas into another.” (Page 13)

Former McKinsey Consultant and Democrat with neoliberal inclinations, Jack Markell, was elected Delaware Governor in 2009. His first major victory was winning the RTTT grant. He said:

“What’s really important today is where we go from here; whether we have the will to put our children first and move forward with reforms to improve our schools so that Delaware children can successfully compete for the best jobs in an increasingly competitive global economy. That won’t be easy, but we have proven in these past few months that it can be done.  I would like to thank all those who worked with us in support of our application and look forward to moving ahead to improve our schools.”

Markell praised then Senate Education Committee Chair, David Sokola, for his work on the RTTT grant proposal, the same Senator who just introduced legislation to soften certification requirements for charter school principals.

Since the RTTT announcement, Delaware has gone from consistently scoring above the national average on all NAEP testing to dropping well below.

Please open the link and keep reading.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Data, Delaware, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top

Oklahoma: Will the State’s Extremist Secretary of Education Seize Control of Tulsa Schools?

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
9

Oklahoman John Thompson writes about the conflict enveloping the Tulsa public schools: Ryan Walters, the extremist Secretary of Education, wants to take over Tulsa’s public schools. Opposition to Walters’ plans by Tulsa’s parents and political leaders is growing. State takeovers if school districts have historically failed but Walters doesn’t appear to know it.

Thompson writes:

Oklahoma Secretary of Education Ryan Walters has a history of threatening the accreditation of the Tulsa Public schools, promising to fire its superintendent, Deborah Gist, and driving “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) out of the classes, as well as mandating his ideology-driven curriculums. Walters’ attacks grew dramatically as he responded to the news in June that he might be in danger because his department’s “administration of federal GEER funds is being investigated by FBI agents and the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office, according to people with direct knowledge of the inquiry.”

For instance, Walters said at a Moms for Liberty event, “Tulsa Public Schools is getting money from the Chinese communist government,” He said, “They funneled it through a nonprofit — I mean, money-laundered it through a nonprofit in Texas.”

But then Walters said he “had been in regular communication with Houston [HISD] about their school takeover.” According to HTUL news, he has said “there’s currently a standards team and textbook committee to gather information on possible vendors like Hillsdale College and PragerU.”

Immediately afterwards, journalists, educators, and public school supporters studied the history of Broad Foundation takeovers in Dallas and the HISD. Even better, they spoke out in ways I had never seen in Oklahoma’s edu-politics. For example, TPS board member, Jennettie Marshall, “said during the board’s 90-minute discussion of the district’s accreditation status. ‘We are under attack. If you’re not keeping up with Houston, … if we continue the course we’re on, that’s where we’re headed. That shouldn’t be.’”

Just as important, the Tulsa World balanced its excellent reporting with editorials and publishing letters to the editors. The following 13 headlines were cited in just one day, August 18, 2023, of the paper’s E-Edition:

Letter: Many good things, successes happening in Tulsa Public Schools

Letter: State School Board needs to show support for Tulsa community, stop antics of top official

Letter: Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum must be more forceful defending Tulsa schools

Letter: Tulsa Superintendent Deborah Gist deserves credit for leading through times of crisis

Letter: State Education Department ought to help improve schools, not tear down

Letter: State superintendent has no specific plans for Tulsa schools, only insults


Letter: State superintendent’s attack on Tulsa schools harms students across the state

Letter: Tulsa clergy leaders urge state to build bridges with TPS, not hurl rocks

Letter: Oklahoma education crisis comes from state superintendent pushing a personal agenda

Editorial: Silence is no way to improve schools or defend representative democracy

Editorial: Losing control of Tulsa schools to state bureaucrats bad for city and students

Ginnie Graham: Manufactured crisis in schools takes time away for big-picture discussions

Opinion: Set aside political rhetoric, provide Tulsa schools help to keep good teachers

The first thing that stands out stands out about the World’s coverage is its excellent journalism, and its fact-checking of Walters. The first thing that stands out from the World’s opinion pieces and letters to the editor is the strong wording when opposing Walters’ threat to the Tulsa Public Schools. The letters opposed Walters’ “antics;” his “personal agenda;” his “political rhetoric;” how he “has no specific plans for Tulsa schools, only insults;” and how he “harms students across the state; as well as how he should “help improve schools, not tear down;” and how the mayor “must be more forceful defending Tulsa schools.”

The editorials criticize the “silence” of political leaders, who belatedly pushed back against Walters, saying the “TPS needs partners, champions and advocates to improve — not political firebombs and quiet bystanders.” Another argued that Walters’ “political rhetoric” hurts the retention of good teachers; and that it hurts the city. Ginnie Graham described the chaos that she witnessed when enrolling her child in school, and explained:

The TPS administrators are completely overwhelmed by the firehose of misinformation, distortions and lies coming at them. Their time is monopolized by people seemingly hell-bent on tearing down the district, rather than offering a helping hand or even sitting down for an informative discussion.

And TPS School Board Chair Stacey Woolley closes her editorial with:

Your TPS Board of Education has a plan. Walters does, too, but not one that works on behalf of Tulsans.

I didn’t sign up for this takeover and neither did you. As a community, we must stop it: www.protecttps.com

Moreover, the World reported on powerful philanthropists, like the Schusterman and the Kaiser foundations, who have publicly opposed Walters takeover threats. Then, Mayor G.T. Bynum came out against the takeover. The resistance has even reached the point where the World editorialized, “conservative lawmakers must speak up.” And now, Gov. Kevin Stitt has distanced himself from the extremist (Walters) who he appointed and then repeatedly supported. The World reported, Stitt said he “believes the State Board of Education will not overreact when considering accreditation for Tulsa Public Schools.” Stitt now says, “I don’t know what takeover is, what they are talking about. I believe in local control. I think the local board needs to address that.”

When I first learned about Walters’ new threats, I worried, “If we don’t recognize the extent of the threats of a HISD-style takeover, he might unite the worst of the corporate reform privatizers, with his Moms for Liberty extremism, and impose irreparable damage on the TPS and other school systems.” But, “If we unite, the damage that Walters is promising to inflict on the TPS, and the Tulsa metropolitan area as a whole, could undermine his extremist campaigns.”

It looks to me, that Tulsans and other Oklahomans are pushing back, making it more likely that Walters will lose this fight

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Houston, Injustice, Oklahoma, Privatization, Resistance, Stupid, Tulsa

Dan Rather and Elliott Kirschner: The War to Destroy Public Education

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2023 //
12

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).

It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.


Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.


The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss.
As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.


We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.


The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.


Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.


The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.


Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.

A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.


Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.


Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.

Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.


In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:

Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.

The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.

The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.

A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.

Categories Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Dark Money, Democracy, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Gender, History, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Privatization, Providence, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

How Vouchers Undermine Democracy

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
10

A reader who uses the sobriquet “Retired Teacher” posted the following succinct summary of the harm caused by vouchers.

Vouchers represent anti-democratic education policy. Instead of serving the interests of society, vouchers turn unaccountable public dollars over to unaccountable schools and parents that can often do as they wish with the money. Vouchers are also a form of taxation without representation. When vouchers are used to supplement tuition for affluent children, which is often the case, they represent a massive transfer of wealth from working class to the affluent. They undermine community stability and force austerity on the public schools that serve the most students. They do not save poor students from failing schools. They create an economic reality that legitimizes the defunding of public education.

Categories Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, Vouchers

Maureen Dowd: Trump Is a Sore Loser and a Fool

By dianeravitch
August 20, 2023 //
31

Maureen Dowd is a regular columnist for the New York Times. Here she reviews Trump’s ongoing coup. Dowd refers to Trump at the end of the article as an Amadán. Carol Burris, who is of Irish origin, sent the following explanation: “She calls him amadán at the end, which in Irish is a fool. But the full terminology, “amadán dubh,” comes from Irish folklore and refers to the “dark fool” or “dark fairy.” Amadán Dubh is a trickster fairy found in Irish folklore, and is the ‘bringer of madness and oblivion.’ That he is.”

Maureen Dowd wrote:

WASHINGTON — The man who tried to overthrow the government he was running was held Thursday by the government he tried to overthrow, a few blocks from where the attempted overthrow took place and a stone’s throw from the White House he yearns to return to, to protect himself from the government he tried to overthrow.

Donald Trump is in the dock for trying to cheat America out of a fair election and body-snatch the true electors. But the arrest of Trump does not arrest the coup.

The fact is, we’re mid-coup, not post-coup. The former president is still in the midst of his diabolical “Who will rid me of this meddlesome democracy?” plot, hoping his dark knights will gallop off to get the job done.

Trump is tied with President Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll, and if he gets back in the Oval, there will be an Oppenheimer-size narcissistic explosion, as he once more worms out of consequences and defiles democracy. His father disdained losers and Trump would rather ruin the country than admit he lost.

The Trump lawyer John Lauro made it clear they will use the trial to relitigate the 2020 election and their cockamamie claims. Trump wasn’t trying to shred the Constitution, they will posit; he was trying to save it.

“President Trump wanted to get to the truth,” Lauro told Newmax’s Greg Kelly after the arraignment, adding: “At the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.”

In trying to debunk Jack Smith’s obstruction charges, Lauro confirmed them. Trying to halt the congressional certification is the crime.

Smith’s indictment depicts an opéra bouffe scene where “the Defendant” (Trump) and “Co-Conspirator 1” (Rudy Giuliani) spent the evening of Jan. 6 calling lawmakers attempting “to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol” by sowing “knowingly false allegations of election fraud.” Trump melodramatically tweeted about his “sacred landslide election victory” being “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.”

Giuliani left a voice mail message for a Republican senator saying they needed “to object to numerous states and raise issues” to delay until the next day so they could pursue their nefarious plan in the state legislatures.

Two words in Smith’s indictment prove that the putz knew his push for a putsch was dishonest: “too honest.” Bullying and berating his truant sycophant, Mike Pence, in the days leading up to Jan. 6, Trump told his vice president, “You’re too honest.”

The former vice president is selling “Too honest” merchandise, which, honestly, won’t endear him to the brainwashed base. Pence’s contemporaneous notes helped Smith make his case.

It’s strange to see Pence showing some nerve and coming to Smith’s aid, after all his brown-nosing and equivocating. He and Mother, who suppressed her distaste for Trump for years, were the most loyal soldiers; in return, according to an aide, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows saidTrump felt Pence “deserved” to be hanged by the rioters.

Pence told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump and his advisers wanted him “essentially to overturn the election.”“It wasn’t just that they asked for a pause,” Pence said, at odds with Lauro. “The president specifically asked me and his gaggle of crackpot lawyers asked me to literally reject votes.”

Ron DeSantis, another presidential wannabe who enabled Trump for too long, acknowledged on Friday that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.” But Trump and his henchmen were busy ratcheting up the lunacy.

“IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” Trump threatened on Truth Social on Friday.

On the same day and platform, he accused “the corrupt Biden DOJ” of election interference. Exquisite projection. In Trump’s warped view, it’s always the other guy who’s doing what Trump is actually doing.

Kari Lake told House Republicans to stop pursuing a Biden impeachment and just decertify the 2020 election because Biden is not “the true president.” Lake said of Trump: “This is a guy who’s already won. He won in 2016. He won even bigger in 2020. All that Jan. 6 was, was a staged riot to cover up the fact that they certified a fraudulent election.”

Before laughing off this absurdity, consider the finding from CNN’s new poll: Sixty-nine percent of Republicans and those leaning Republican believe Biden is an illegitimate president, with over half saying there is “solid evidence” of that.

While Trump goes for the long con, or the long coup — rap sheet be damned, it’s said that he worries this will hurt his legacy. He shouldn’t. His legacy is safe, as the most democracy-destroying, soul-crushing, self-obsessed amadán ever to occupy the Oval. Amadán, that’s Gaelic for a man who grows more foolish every day.

Categories Accountability, Cheating, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Pence, Republicans, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »