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Jan Resseger: Why Vouchers Are Disastrous Public Policy

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2024 //
6

Jan Resseger can always be counted on to add the voice of reason into heated issues, relying on research and calm discussion.

She writes:

In a thoughtful commentary, the Economic Policy Institute’s Hilary Wething and Josh Bivens deride as bad public policy today’s state-by-state wave of new and expanded private school tuition vouchers:

“Public education is worth preserving—it should be seen as one of the most important achievements in our c0untry’s history and crucial for the social and economic welfare of future generations… In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of  ‘school choice.’  Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.”

Wething and Bivens explore the basic economic flaws in pro-voucher ideology and argue that “conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm.”  In the first place, our nation benefits  from educating all children, and the marketplace can’t be counted on to fill that role: “In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things.” “Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small,” but “switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks.”  Third, markets work when the choice of product affects only the buyer and seller, but, “Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.”

Wething and Bivins describe voucher supporters presuming that diversion of dollars to vouchers will not harm the essential institution of public schools. In fact, however, public schools in most places are underfunded in terms of the actual cost of needed services: “Newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes… In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions.”

Not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, but recent academic research demonstrates that by investing more public resources in their public schools, states and localities can “improve schooling outcomes for children… (with) the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.” Wething and Bivins cite peer-reviewed, 2016, research by Kirabo Jackson, Rucker Johnson, and Claudia Persico on the impact of statewide school finance reforms that increased public school spending between 1972 and 2010: “(A) 10% increase in school spending for 12 years led to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase.”

New research also confirms that vouchers are ineffective as an educational investment. Dollars diverted from public schools often flow to private schools with inferior academics: “Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement… In Ohio, under the EdChoice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 standard deviations in mathematics.”

The expansion of vouchers inevitably sets up a long term drain on public resources: “Vouchers reduce public school resources, but introduce large new fiscal obligations overall… Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased…  The failure to increase per-pupil (public school) funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time.”

Wething and Bivens sum up the evidence: “Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education… Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education.”

The new brief from Wething and Bivens describes in concrete economic terms,what the late political theorist Benjamin Barber formulates as a basic principle of good public policy: “Privatization is a kind of reverse social contract: it dissolves the bonds that tie us together into free communities and democratic republics… Public choices rest on civic rights and common responsibilities, and presume equal rights for all. Public liberty is what the power of common endeavor establishes, and hence presupposes that we have constituted ourselves as public citizens by opting into the social contract. With privatization, we are seduced back into the state of nature by the lure of private liberty and particular interest; but what we experience in the end is an environment in which the strong dominate the weak… the very dilemma which the original social contract was intended to address.” (Consumed, pp. 143-144)

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Vouchers

David Beats Goliath! NYC Retirees Win Legal Battle to Stop City from Forcing Them into a Medicare Advantage Plan!

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2024 //
41

For more than 50 years, New York City recruited new employees with an offer that included strong healthcare benefits in retirement. Recently, the City government decided that it could save money by forcing some 250,000 retirees to abandon Medicare and enroll in a for-profit Medicare Advantage Plan administered by Aetna. Retirees had no choice, and most of their unions sided with the City, not their own members.

One incredibly persistent, bold, fearless retiree refused to accept the deal that took away her Medicare and supplementary plan. Marianne Pizzitola, a retired Emergency Medical Technician with the Fire Department, created a group called the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. The City had promised her those benefits, like other city employees, and she was not going to let the City take them away without her consent.

Pizzitola began to organize. She gathered research, allies, and funds to fight the City and some of its biggest unions, including the United Federation of Teachers. She set up a Facebook account and used social media to recruit other retirees and to explain why the deal was a sell-out. She frequently gave ZOOM briefings to members of her group, whose numbers continued to grow. MA plans, unlike Medicare, require patients to get prior authorizations before allowing major procedures; members of MA plans must use in-network doctors. MA plans have overbilled the federal government by billions of dollars.

The Chief-Leader, a publication for city employees, wrote about her battle with the City in April:

Pizzitola’s enterprise began on Aug. 13, 2021, a Friday, the city still under a Covid cloud, when 17 of the 40 people she had invited to hone opposition to the city’s proposed plan joined a Zoom call. Five would volunteer to mount a challenge to the city’s proposal. At the conclusion of the two-hour call, the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees was launched, and Pizzitola was chosen to lead it as president. 

“In a few hours, we had a name, a mission, an attorney, a bank. And then that weekend, I started a PayPal, a YouTube, a Facebook, and I drafted our first website,” she said. 

The organization, funded by donations, most of $25, has since grown to include a board of directors and an administrative board along with advisors and volunteers, some of them former city and union officials.  

Since that August day, over hundreds of emails, at rallies, on YouTube, Threads, Twitter and TikTok, in strategy sessions with attorneys, at gatherings with retirees, and during court hearings, Pizzitola has parlayed her passion, belief and deep knowledge of sometimes opaque policy points and obscure legislation to, so far, preserve what she adamantly believes the retirees, herself among them, are due.

The NYC retirees’ group sued the City, on the grounds that the City was withdrawing benefits that were promised to its members when they were hired. Many had accepted lower pay because of the excellent benefits, especially the healthcare. The group won in the first court that heard the case. The City appealed, and yesterday the State Court of Appeals unanimously ruled in favor of the retirees and “permanently” barred the City from reneging on its promises to retirees.

Marianne Pizzitola proved that one person can win in the face of overwhelming power and money by recruiting allies, gathering sound research, and communicating effectively. Google her name and you will find numerous videos on YouTube where she explains why Medicare is better than Medicare Advantage and why other retirees should support the fight.

Yesterday, the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees issued the following press release. The full decision is attached.

Retiree Update

WE WON!!!

On March 21, 2024 we had oral arguments and today, May 21, we were given a unanimous decision.  We thank all of you for believing in us and our legal team.  Without all of you, we would never have got this far.  The Court said, the City cannot take away our Medicare Supplement.

This is the exact decision, “Accordingly, the judgment (denominated an order) of the Supreme Court, New York County (Lyle E. Frank, J.), entered September 19, 2023, which, in this hybrid proceeding-class action brought pursuant to CPLR article 78, granted the petition complaint to the extent of permanently enjoining the City respondents/defendants from eliminating petitioner/plaintiff retirees’ existing health insurance, automatically enrolling them in a new Aetna Medicare Advantage Plan, enforcing a June 30, 2023 deadline for retirees to opt out of the new plan, and implementing any other aspect of the City’s new retiree healthcare policy, should be affirmed, without costs.”

You can read it here

CELEBRATE.   YOU EARNED THIS! 

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Ethics, Health, New York City, Union

Thom Hartmann: Will the Billionaires Destroy Our Society?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2024 //
23

Thom Hartmann uses this post to illustrate the malign influence of concentrated wealth. Billionaires are giving generously to Trump in hopes of keeping their taxes low and their power intact. He urges us to organize against this threat to our democratic aspirations.

He writes:

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Rightwing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war. 

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things, from a strengthened social safety net to a cleaner, safer environment to quality, free education, that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight yearsago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. …  So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, andThis Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs. 

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said: 

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war. 

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media.
— They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens.
— They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage.
— They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism.
— They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.”
— They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory.
— And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie. 

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England. 

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly: 

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility…” 

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes: 

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.” 

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states: 

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich. 

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all: 

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.” 

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law. 

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world. 

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs. 

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism. 

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to actually raise taxes on rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Greg Olear: “Casablanca” Has a Message for Us Today

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2024 //
27

When I was in college, I remember classmates going to the local art-movie house to see “Casablanca,” and laughing about how many times they had seen it. I had never seen it, but since then have seen it many times, at least a dozen times.

My partner and I recently decided to introduce our 17-year-old grandson to classic movies. The first one we chose was “Casablanca.” (The second was Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”) That was a few months ago. Recently “Casablanca” was playing on Turner Classic Movies, and I was going to skip it but was immediately drawn in and watched to the end. It never grows stale. Then I saw this column by Greg Olear, who explains why the film speaks to us and remains fresh.

He writes:

Dear Reader,

The first time I saw Casablanca was in 1992, at the Key Theatre, a now-defunct arthouse cinema on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, at a special theatrical release celebrating the film’s 50th anniversary. The most recent time I saw Casablanca was last night. In between, I’ve seen it probably two dozen times. On each viewing, I notice something I hadn’t seen before, walk away with something new.

Casablanca is often described as a romance—and it is. Bogart and Bergman are one of the all-time Hollywood pairings, and, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” is probably the film’s best known line. The conflict in romances derives from the insurmountability of the obstacle, on what is keeping the two lovers apart: Romeo and Juliet are the teenage kids of two families in a blood feud; Harry and Sally don’t want to risk their friendship for a romantic engagement that might not work out; Tom Hanks lives in Baltimore and Meg Ryan lives in Seattle. The obstacle in Casablanca, which I will not spoil, is realistic, tragic, and completely insurmountable. It is a riddle that cannot be solved, a problem that has no solution, like how to fix the United States while the Senate exists.

But Casablanca is not just a romance. It is a drama. It is a war film. It is a buddy movie, replete with some of the sharpest comic dialogue ever written. It is a heist picture—we don’t see the two German couriers murdered on the train, we don’t see the letters of transit stolen from them, but the rush to obtain those two documents animates one of cinema’s greatest plots. It is an exploration of how to deal with heartbreak and loss. It is a story about sacrifice and courage and redemption and standing up to tyranny. It is an allegory for a world that, when it was made in 1942, was very much still at war—and, as such, is an overtly political film. Casablanca contains multitudes.

When I first watched the movie, I was more concerned with the romantic content. I loved Rick, loved his café, loved his white tuxedo jacket and his gruff manner and how he threw the best party but always held himself at a remove. But it is impossible to watch Casablanca in 2024 and not focus on the Nazis.

The first action we see in Casablanca is a violent police crackdown. And not just any violent police crackdown. This part of North Africa is controlled by unoccupied France, the German rump state based in Vichy. A prominent Nazi is coming to town, and the local authorities are detaining all the potential rabble-rousers—the usual suspects, as it were—who might not welcome the Gestapo’s jackbooted presence in French Morocco. One fellow is menaced by the police, who shoot and kill him when he tries to resist arrest; when they search his body, they find he is carrying leaflets for Free France.

If the film were made today, this scene would have been shot on location, in Casablanca or a city that could reasonably pass as Casablanca, and the terror of the crackdown would be amplified in one of those grandiose action scenes that modern movies often open with. But the film was produced in 1942. It was shot on a soundstage in Hollywood. The danger is cloaked behind old-timey cinematic production. No matter. The opening distinctly shows brutal, Nazi-aligned cops using unnecessary force, shooting and killing an agent of the Resistance: an anti-Fascist.

Similarly, the first time we see Rick—after we meet Captain Renault, the French prefect of police, and Major Strasser, the Nazi big wheel—he is alone at a chess board in the casino part of the club. His first lines of dialogue are directed to an arrogant Nazi—an official at Deutsche Bank, no less!—whom he bars from entering the inner sanctum:

—Your cash is good at the bar.
—What? Do you know who I am?
—I do. You’re lucky the bar’s open to you.

Rick owns and manages the café, and he is a good boss. He supports his employees, reassuring Emil after the house loses 20,000 francs, and keeping everyone on the payroll when the police shut him down. But he keeps himself aloof. “I stick my neck out for no one,” he says when the police arrest Ugarte. “I’m the only cause I’m interested in,” he tells Ilsa. But this is a false front, a defense mechanism. He doesn’t want his heart broken again. He is, as Victor Laszlo astutely observes, a man trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t really believe.

At 17 and a half minutes into the movie, Ferrari, criminal overlord and owner of the Blue Parrot, remarks to Rick that “isolationism is no longer a practical policy.” That line may as well have been spoken to the entire country. Rick and Sam, his friend and piano player, are the only Americans in Casablanca, and as such, represent the United States. The staff and clientele at his club come from everywhere: Carl is an anti-Nazi German, Sascha is Russian, Emil and Yvonne are French, Abdul is Moroccan, Berger is Norwegian, and so on. In that sense, the café is a microcosm of Europe. (In real life, many of the supporting actors are European war refugees who had escaped the actual Nazis—including the astonishingly good actor who plays the Gestapo’s Major Strasser, Conrad Veidt, who fled his native country with his Jewish wife when Hitler came to power.) 

It is no accident that the action in Casablanca takes place over three days in early December, 1941—just before Pearl Harbor. Rick, like the U.S. in the late fall of 1941, preferred to remain neutral. But ultimately, like the U.S., he is drawn into the fight—and his presence ultimately helps the good guys prevail.

Perhaps the film’s most rousing scene is when the orchestra, with its brass instruments, overpowers the Germans singing patriotic songs at the piano, with a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. In 1992, I chalked it up to Hollywood schlock; now, I recognize the scene’s awesome power: music becomes the field of battle. Even Yvonne, last scene flirting with a handsome Nazi, is moved to tears:

But the film is not all doom and gloom. Casablanca rewards us with sharp dialogue and genuinely funny moments. When Victor Laszlo arrives at Rick’s, he orders drinks, only to have his orders upgraded and put on someone else’s tab, which annoys him; it’s a running joke that he can’t pay for his own drink. Carl’s aside with the couple practicing their English before leaving for America is comic gold. And as Captain Renault, Claude Reins drops one-liner after one-liner, in a remarkably modern performance—not least of which the famous “I’m shocked, shocked” scene.

When Rick sits down for his interrogation by the Nazis, he is asked his nationality. “I’m a drunkard,” he says dryly—and it looks like the men at the table are genuinely laughing, as if the line was ad-libbed. But Renault immediately supplies the rejoinder: “And that makes Rick a man of the world.”

We learn that what causes Rick’s moral paralysis is his heartbreak. Ilsa Lund—the wife and traveling companion of the Resistance leader Victor Laszlo, who has just arrived in town—is, improbably, the woman who broke his heart. The chances of them meeting again like this are a million to one, which Rick alludes to in yet another famous line: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

During their confrontation later in the film, Ilsa accuses him of, basically, nurturing a grievance: “You want to feel sorry for yourself, don’t you? With so much at stake, all you can think of is your own feelings. One woman has hurt you, and you take your revenge on the rest of the world. You’re a coward and a weakling.” She may as well be addressing Elon Musk, or any one of a thousand other alt-right Twitter incels.

But by then, Rick has already started to change. Precedents are being broken. He’s having a drink with customers now. He’s involving himself in politics more overtly. This is made clear in the scene with the Bulgarian refugee, Annina. She is, Rick observes, underage and should not be at the bar. But she seeks him out. She wants to be reassured, without explicitly saying so, that if she has sex with Captain Renault, he will honor his promise and let her and her husband leave for America. This is dark, dark stuff, concealed by the soft lighting and the beautiful actress:

Oh, monsieur, you are a man. If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world—but she did a bad thing to make certain of it—could you forgive her?

Rick replies with a punch to the gut: “No one ever loved me that much.”

But this is not true, although he doesn’t realize it yet. Ilsa did love him that much. And he is sufficiently moved by Annina to arrange for her husband to win at roulette, securing enough money to finance their visas—much to the delight of the staff.

The first time I saw the movie, I knew what the last line was, so I had some idea of the ending, but I didn’t know anything else. Twenty minutes from the end, Rick gives Victor Laszlo the letters of transit. Renault emerges from the shadows to arrest him. And I remember thinking, “Holy shit! How the hell are they going to resolve this?” I wasn’t the only one. Even the screenwriters didn’t know, well after production began. All they did was devise the best ending of all time.

[This is a good time to stop reading, if you haven’t seen the movie, because spoilers are coming.]

We think Rick and Ilsa will take the letters of transit and leave. Ilsa thinks that, too. But that’s not what happens. Once at the airport, Rick informs Renault that Ilsa and Victor will be the ones leaving. This surprises Ilsa, Renault—and the audience. But this is Rick putting away his personal grievance for the greater good. This is him atoning for the sins of the past. This is also him entering the fray, as Laszlo tells him on the tarmac, in a line I use in the intro to my podcast: “Welcome back to the fight. This time, I know our side will win.” That line is spoken in December of 1941—for all we know, Japanese planes are bombing Pearl Harbor as Laszlo’s plane flies to Lisbon. If Rick represents America, this is America entering the war. And, remember, the movie came out in 1942! “Our side” winning was not a sure thing.

(Also: Rick told Victor that the letters of transit were not for sale at any price. At the end, he refuses to take Victor’s money—which both makes the comment about the letters not being for sale true, and also continues the running joke about Laszlo not being able to pay for his own drinks.)

The Resistance leader and his wife get on the plane. The plane taxis out to the strip. And then, the Nazi big wheel shows up! After warning him to put down the phone, Rick shoots and kills him. Renault explains how “unpleasant” this is going to be. “I’ll have to arrest you, of course.”

The plane takes off, heading for Lisbon. The couple makes it out of Casablanca. Rick wins his 10,000 franc bet with Renault. Then the police show up. And watching the movie, we prepare for Rick’s impending arrest. “Major Strasser has been shot,” Renault tells his charges. And there is a long, dramatic pause, before he delivers yet another of the film’s famous lines: “Round up the usual suspects.” With those five words, he lets Rick go free.

Renault—an unscrupulous lech who “blows with the wind,” a “poor, corrupt official” who exploits his authority by bedding desperate refugee women—has found his own way back to the light. He, too, is back in the fight. And he and Rick leave together, bound for the French garrison at Brazzaville, and adventures to come, and a continuation of what is already a beautiful friendship.

Watching the film again last night, there was something else I realized about Casablanca. No one wants to be in Morocco. Everyone wants to go to America. The word is spoken countless times: America, America, America. Rick is American but can’t go back to America, although he desperately wants to. America is the symbol of freedom, of safety, of security, of respite from the Third Reich. The entire black market of French Morocco revolves around guarantees of safe passage to America. It’s taken as a given that America is the land of the free. 

But now, somehow, 82 years after the release of Casablanca, this is no longer a given. Nazis are again on the rise—only this time, they’re not in Europe or North Africa but here, in America, among us. What would those supporting actors who fled the Third Reich have made of that? What would Rick have thought?

While helping dress his wound, Rick asks Victor if he thinks what he’s fighting for—that is, democracy, freedom, anti-fascism—is worth it. I leave you with Laszlo’s response: “You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”

The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

Categories Creativity, Democracy, History

New York Times: Justice Alito Flew an Upside-Down U.S. Flag, a Trump Symbol, at His Home After 2020 Election

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
21

Judges and justices are supposed to be impartial arbiters of conflicting claims. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is not. The New York Times reported that an upside-down flag flew in front of Justice Alito’s home after the 2020 election. That symbolism was adopted as a protest by Trump’s zealous and disappointed fans. Alito was one of them. He blamed his wife, as if he had no decisions about what flag was flying in his front yard. How can he be expected to rule impartially on cases about that election?

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.

While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Justice

Georgia: Students Demand Fully Funded Public Schools, Not Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
23

Seventeen high school students in Georgia marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision by writing an article calling on the state’s political leaders to fully fund public schools, instead of funding vouchers. They are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition.

They wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

As young Georgians, we share the belief that all children should have the freedom to pursue their dreams and that our futures depend on receiving a great education. To get there, we must equip every public school with the resources to deliver a quality education for every child, no matter their color, their ZIP code or how much money their parents make.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves in yet another moment of massive resistance to public education with increasingly aggressive efforts on behalf of the state of Georgia to privatize our public schools and return us to a two-tiered system marked by racial segregation. As public school students in high schools across Georgia, we believe that the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is not just a cause for celebration but an invitation to recommit ourselves to the promise of a public education system that affirms an essential truth: Schools separated by race will never be equal.

Even as our country celebrates the anniversary of Brown this month, we know that our state actively worked to obstruct desegregation, which did not meaningfully take place for another 15 years. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, the Georgia General Assembly revoked its school segregation law in 1961. Another 10 years later, a court-ordered desegregation plan finally took effect — in 1971.

In 2024, educators across Georgia, from Albany to Atlanta, from Valdosta to Vinings, from Dalton to Dublin, and everywhere in between, are working hard to provide students like us with a quality education, empowering us to build a brighter future in Georgia for all. Yet politicians in the Georgia Capitol seem dedicated to resegregating and privatizing our public schools by taking tax dollars meant to support all of the students in our communities and giving it to unaccountable voucher programs that favor the wealthiest few.

The long and shameful history of vouchers is something that politicians who forced them to become law this year don’t want us to know. In many cities, public education funding was funneled to private “segregation academies” where white children received better resources than children of color. Instead of making our public schools stronger and moving us all forward together, these politicians are defunding our public schools by more than $100 million and working to drag us backward to the days when Georgia was still resisting court-ordered desegregation.

We want our leaders to get serious about what works: fully funding our public schools so that we can improve our neighborhood schools. That’s where 1.7 million public school students in Georgia learn and grow, and where we all can have a say. Research all across the country shows that voucher programs will not improve student outcomes in Georgia, but we know what will best serve students.

Young Georgians like us need investments in our public schools so we have the opportunity to learn and thrive. Gov. Brian P. Kemp has $16 billion of unspent public funds — enough to cover the costs of funding our schools and investing in our communities. Georgia has one of the highest overall rates of child poverty in the nation. Yet our state is one of only six states that provides schools with no specific funding to support children living in poverty. By refusing to give our schools what they need, we are setting our schools and our students up for failure.

Politicians brag about Georgia’s teachers being among the highest paid in the South even though they know they have created a crisis around public education that puts our teachers, our parents and students like us in an impossible position. Right now, nearly every school district in Georgia operates with a waiver to avoid adhering to classroom size restrictions because they cannot afford to hire enough teachers. And though the American School Counseling Association recommends a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:250, Georgia mandates a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:450 students. Many schools cannot even meet that ratio because of a lack of funding. All of that is by design because politicians have refused to update Georgia’s school funding formula for nearly 40 years.

This year, as we celebrate 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, we invite every Georgian to join us in our call for fully funded neighborhood public schools so that every Georgia student has an inviting classroom, a well-rounded curriculum, small class sizes and the freedom to learn.

The writers are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. Nia G. Batra is a sophomore at Decatur High School. Hunter Buchheit is a senior at Walton High School. Ava Bussey is a senior at Marietta High School. Keara Field is a senior at McDonough High School. Saif Hasan is a junior at Lambert High School. Jessica Huang is a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School. Shivi Mehta is a junior at the Alliance Academy for Innovation. Bryan Nguyen is a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Rhea Sethi is a senior at North Gwinnett High School. Maariya Sheikh is a senior at Campbell High School. Harrison Tran is a junior at Jenkins High School. Sharmada Venkataramani is a sophomore at South Forsyth High School. Thomas Botero Mendieta is a junior at Archer High School. Kennedy Young is a senior at Campbell High School.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Georgia, Inequality, Injustice, Privatization, Racism, Segregation, Students

Steve Suitts: The New Segregation Looks Like the Old Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
3

Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.

Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.

Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.

He begins:

Overview

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.

INTRODUCTION

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.

More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling. 

In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.

States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.

The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.

If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.

THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM

By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2

The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9

The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10

In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.

In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.

AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES

During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40

Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.

Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.

Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all. 

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Racism, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Where Do We Stand Today in the Struggle to Save Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2024 //
3

A few days ago, I joined a discussion with Dr. Tim Slekar and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci about the current state of public education. It was aired on their show “Busted Pencils,” which is dedicated to teachers, students, and public schools.

We talked about charters, vouchers, testing, and how to get involved. Everyone can stand up for what they believe.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Civics, Community Schools, Corporate Reform, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Resistance, Teachers, Vouchers

Heather Cox Richardson: Biden Exposes Trump’s Wisconsin Scam

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2024 //
8

Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following post on May 8 about President Biden’s recent visit to Wisconsin. She compares Biden to FDR. Under Trump, Wisconsin lost jobs. Under Biden, Wisconsin has gained jobs. That’s the heart of the Biden agenda: building a strong middle-class and creating good union jobs.

She writes:

Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers. 

Microsoft has also partnered with Gateway Technical College to train and certify 200 students a year to fill new jobs in data and information technology. In addition, Microsoft is working with nearby high schools to train students for future jobs. 

Speaking at Gateway Technical College’s Racine campus, Biden contrasted today’s investment with that made by Trump about the same site in 2018. In that year, Trump went to Wisconsin for the “groundbreaking” of a high-tech campus he claimed would be the “eighth wonder of the world.” 

Under Republican governor Scott Walker, Wisconsin legislators approved a $3 billion subsidy and tax incentive package—ten times larger than any similar previous package in the state—to lure the Taiwan-based Foxconn electronics company. Once built, a new $10 billion campus that would focus on building large liquid-crystal display screens would bring 13,000 jobs to the area, they promised. 

Foxconn built a number of buildings, but the larger plan never materialized, even after taxpayers had been locked into contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for upgrading roads, sewer system, electricity, and so on. When voters elected Democrat Tony Evers as governor in 2022, he dropped the tax incentives from $3 billion to $80 million, which depended on the hiring of only 1,454 workers, reflecting the corporation’s current plans. Foxconn dropped its capital investment from $10 billion to $672.8 million.  

In November 2023, Microsoft announced it was buying some of the Foxconn properties in Wisconsin.

Today, Biden noted that rather than bringing jobs to Racine, Trump’s policies meant the city lost 1,000 manufacturing jobs during his term. Wisconsin as a whole lost 83,500. “Racine was once a manufacturing boomtown,” Biden recalled, “all the way through the 1960s, powering companies—invented and manufacturing Windex…portable vacuum cleaners, and so much more, and powered by middle-class jobs.

“And then came trickle-down economics [which] cut taxes for the very wealthy and biggest corporations…. We shipped American jobs overseas because labor was cheaper. We slashed public investment in education and innovation. And the result: We hollowed out the middle class. My predecessor and his administration doubled down on that failed trickle-down economics, along with the [trail] of broken promises.” 

“But that’s not on my watch,” Biden said. “We’re determined to turn it around.” He noted that thanks to the Democrats’ policies, in the past three years, Racine has added nearly 4,000 jobs—hitting a record low unemployment rate—and Wisconsin as a whole has gained 178,000 new jobs. 

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have fueled “a historic boom in rebuilding our roads and bridges, developing and deploying clean energy, [and] revitalizing American manufacturing,” he said. That investment has attracted $866 billion in private-sector investment across the country, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs “building new semiconductor factories, electric vehicles and battery factories…here in America.” 

The Biden administration has been scrupulous about making sure that money from the funds appropriated to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and manufacturing base has gone to Republican-dominated districts; indeed, Republican-dominated states have gotten the bulk of those investments. “President Biden promised to be the president of all Americans—whether you voted for him or not. And that’s what this agenda is delivering,” White House deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian told Matt Egan of CNN in February. 

But there is, perhaps, a deeper national strategy behind that investment. Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.

“When folks see a new factory being built here in Wisconsin, people going to work making a really good wage in their hometowns, I hope they feel the pride that I feel,” Biden said. “Pride in their hometowns making a comeback. Pride in knowing we can get big things done in America still.” 

That approach might be gaining traction. Last Friday, when Trump warned the audience of Fox 2 Detroit television that President’s Biden’s policies would cost jobs in Michigan, local host Roop Raj provided a “reality check,” noting that Michigan gained 24,000 jobs between January 2021, when Biden took office, and May 2023.

At Gateway Technical College, Biden thanked Wisconsin governor Tony Evers and Racine mayor Cory Mason, both Democrats, as well as Microsoft president Brad Smith and AFL-CIO president Liz Schuler. 

The picture of Wisconsin state officials working with business and labor leaders, at a public college established in 1911, was an image straight from the Progressive Era, when the state was the birthplace of the so-called Wisconsin Idea. In the earliest years of the twentieth century, when the country reeled under industrial monopolies and labor strikes, Wisconsin governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette and his colleagues advanced the idea that professors, lawmakers, and officials should work together to provide technical expertise to enable the state to mediate a fair relationship between workers and employers. 

In his introduction to the 1912 book explaining the Wisconsin Idea, former president Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, explained that the Wisconsin Idea turned the ideas of reformers into a workable plan, then set out to put those ideas into practice. Roosevelt approvingly quoted economist Simon Patten, who maintained that the world had adequate resources to feed, clothe, and educate everyone, if only people cared to achieve that end. Quoting Patten, Roosevelt wrote: “The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results and reaches them by means made available by economic efficiency. Only in this way is social progress possible.”

Reformers must be able to envision a better future, Roosevelt wrote, but they must also find a way to turn those ideals into reality. That involved careful study and hard work to develop the machinery to achieve their ends. 

Roosevelt compared people engaged in progressive reform to “that greatest of all democratic reformers, Abraham Lincoln.” Like Lincoln, he wrote, reformers “will be assailed on the one side by the reactionary, and on the other by that type of bubble reformer who is only anxious to go to extremes, and who always gets angry when he is asked what practical results he can show.” “[T]he true reformer,” Roosevelt wrote, “must study hard and work patiently.” 

“It is no easy matter actually to insure, instead of merely talking about, a measurable equality of opportunity for all men,” Roosevelt wrote. “It is no easy matter to make this Republic genuinely an industrial as well as a political democracy. It is no easy matter to secure justice for those who in the past have not received it, and at the same time to see that no injustice is meted out to others in the process. It is no easy matter to keep the balance level and make it evident that we have set our faces like flint against seeing this government turned into either government by a plutocracy, or government by a mob. It is no easy matter to give the public their proper control over corporations and big business, and yet to prevent abuse of that control.”

“All through the Union we need to learn the Wisconsin lesson,” Roosevelt wrote in 1912.

“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”

Go to the post to read her footnotes.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Economy, Elections, History, Wisconsin

Join a Virtual House Party to Support Jitu Brown for Chicago School Board Tomorrow at 6 p.m. CST!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2024 //
4

Jitu Brown is running for the new school board in Chicago. Please join me for a virtual house party Monday at 6 p.m.

I have known and admired Jitu Brown for over a decade. For years, Jitu has fought for great neighborhood public schools in Chicago, even putting his health on the line by engaging in a hunger strike to keep Dyett High School open when then-Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel attempted to shut it down. 

Jitu is one of my heroes and one of my teachers.

Jitu is not only an extraordinary warrior for educational justice and equity in Chicago but also the leader of a national organization, Journey for Justice, that networks public school advocates in all of our major cities fighting for excellent and equitable public schools.  For years, Jitu served as a member of the NPE Action Board.

One of Jitu’s causes, fighting to restore elected local control of Chicago’s public schools, has now been realized. 

I am delighted that Jitu is running for a seat on the newly formed local school board, representing the 5thDistrict Seat on the West Side of Chicago. However, to gain that seat he will need our help. 

 I am asking that you join me in supporting Jitu’s campaign by attending a virtual house party for Jitu this Monday, May 13, beginning at 7:00 pm EST./6 pm CST. The link to this important event is below. I hope to see you there!

 Virtual House Party for Jitu Brown (Chicago’s 1st Elected School Board!) Time: Monday, May 13, 2024 06:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada) Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us06web.zoom.us/j/82630667170?pwd=tB1A9KkDg8a9DXKgbBonCgqlRmUApU.1 (https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82630667170?pwd=tB1A9KkDg8a9DXKgbBonCgqlRmUApU.1) Meeting ID: 826 3066 7170 Passcode: JITU!

 

Categories Chicago, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Hope
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