It has always been a goal of the billionaires who fund privatization to block accountability and democracy. Eli Broad once memorably said that he prefers to invest in districts under mayoral control so he doesn’t have to deal with the public. The public asks questions and wants to know who is making decisions about their children’s education. So much simpler to have one person to handle problems.
The charter school lobby has persistently fought public oversight and accountability. They are more than willing, even eager, to take public money. But they don’t like public officials asking questions about how the money was spent.
The big battle over public oversight is happening right now in Colorado. All the major right wing groups—the Koch machine, ALEC, Philip Anschutz (producer of “Waiting for Superman”) are there, battling against public schools.
On March 7, three Colorado legislators introduced a charter school accountability bill to establish improved guidelines for authorizing and renewing charter schools by local school districts. The bill would strengthen the authority that elected school boards have regarding their governance of charter schools, and it also provides citizens with expanded information about the operations of charter schools in their districts.
According to its backers and public education advocacy groups, this is the first major legislation to prescribe more charter school accountability since the first Charter Schools Act was passed in 1993. Current state legislation often limits local control over the charter school approval process, funding requirements, and waivers from state legislation. Given that nearly two-thirds of the state’s 64 counties experienced an “absolute decline in the under-18 population over the last decade,” the charter school accountability bill would empower local school boards to address the overall enrollment needs of the district. While charter schools primarily utilize taxpayer dollars for their funding, many charter schools allow private interests to invest in their growth and development, which can create potential conflicts of interest.
Pro-charter school organizations don’t agree with this legislative effort to increase accountability as they believe this bill would “kill” charter schools. Republicans have been especially vocal in their opposition to this bill, even though the bill promotes increased local control over charter schools. The pro-charter organizations hired over 30 lobbyists to oppose the bill. Lobbying can be expensive, but the organizations opposing the bill have connections to several billionaire-funded foundations.
American for Prosperity and Advance Colorado issued a press release on X stating the bill would “mark the beginning of the end of charter schools in Colorado,” and together, the two groups “would work overtime to make sure the bill was soundly defeated.” According to the Colorado Times Recorder, Advance Colorado is a conservative dark money group said to be funded by billionaire Phil Anschutz. Formerly known as Unite Colorado, Advance Colorado has “given over $17 million to support major Republican political groups and efforts in Colorado.” Colorado Dawn, another dark money group headed by State Board of Education member Steve Durham and Colorado state Sen. Paul Lundeen, gave millions to Ready Colorado, which also has lobbyists opposing this bill.
The upcoming lobbying effort in Colorado’s legislature is not unique, as similar high-paid lobbying efforts occur wherever there is significant charter school legislation. In Nashville, a local news reporter exposed who 67 pro-charter lobbyists worked for during legislative hearings on several charter bills in 2022. In the video that accompanied his report, Phil Williams highlighted the direct connections that the pro-charter lobbyists have with billionaires. His investigative report documented that “Americans for Prosperity is linked to billionaire Charles Koch,” and they also “received funding from billionaire Bill Gates and the Walton family of Walmart fame.”
As in Tennessee, the Colorado lobbyists will meet frequently with legislators to convince them this bill is not necessary. The legislators will need to weigh the benefits of the bill with the concerns of those who participate in a massive letter-writing campaign initiated by the lobbying organizations to oppose the legislation. The bill’s backers hope this will be the legislators’ opportunity to update 30-year-old legislation and begin to ensure increased local control and accountability for the millions of taxpayer dollars that fund the charter schools educating 15% of the state’s K-12 student population.
Laurence H. Tribe, the eminent professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School (Democrat), and Judge Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge (Republican), co-authored a lengthy article in The Atlantic, condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overrule the Colorado Supreme Court, which removed Trump from the 2024 ballot.
It seemed, after the Court’s decision, that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendnent had been excised from the Constitution. But just yesterday the Supreme Court rejected an appeal by a New Mexico man who was convicted for taking part in the January 6 insurrection.
Couy Griffin was convicted for his role as a member of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol. Because he previously served as a member of the Otero County board of commissioners, the courts in New Mexico said he was ineligible to hold office ever again. Griffin was a founder of Cowboys for Trump and an outspoken purveyor of lies about election fraud.
The Supreme Court concluded that states could disqualify persons from attempting to hold state offices, but Congress had to enact legislation to implement the disqualification of federal officials.
Since Congress is unlikely to muster a majority of both Houses—or 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster—oath-breaking insurrectionists will not be barred from seeking or holding federal offices.
One good thing: the Griffin decision implicitly agreed that the mob action of January 6 was an insurrection.
The Supreme Court of the United States did a grave disservice to both the Constitution and the nation in Trump v. Anderson.
In a stunning disfigurement of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court impressed upon it an ahistorical misinterpretation that defies both its plain text and its original meaning. Despite disagreement within the Court that led to a 5–4 split among the justices over momentous but tangential issues that it had no need to reach in order to resolve the controversy before it, the Court was disappointingly unanimous in permitting oath-breaking insurrectionists, including former President Donald Trump, to return to power. In doing so, all nine justices denied “We the People” the very power that those who wrote and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment presciently secured to us to save the republic from future insurrectionists—reflecting a lesson hard-learned from the devastation wrought by the Civil War.
For a century and a half before the Court’s decision, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was the Constitution’s safety net for America’s democracy, promising to automatically disqualify from public office all oath-breaking insurrectionists against the Constitution, deeming them too dangerous to entrust with power unless supermajorities of both houses of Congress formally remove their disability. This provision has been mistakenly described by some as “undemocratic” because it limits who may be elected to particular positions of power. But disqualification is not what is antidemocratic; rather, it is the insurrection that is antidemocratic, as the Constitution emphatically tells us.
In any event, all qualifications for office set by the Constitution limit who may be elected to particular positions of power. And no other of these disqualifications requires congressional legislation to become operative, as the Court now insists this one does. To be sure, the other qualifications—age, residence, natural-born citizenship—appear outside the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fifth section specifically makes congressional action to enforce its provisions available. But no such action is needed to enforce the rights secured to individuals by Section 1 of the same amendment, so deeming congressional action necessary to enforce Section 3 creates a constitutional anomaly in this case that the majority could not and did not explain. For that matter, no other provision of the other two Reconstruction amendments requires congressional enforcement either. As the concurring justices explained, the majority “simply [created] a special rule for the insurrection disability in Section 3.”
To read the rest of this brilliant article, open the link or subscribe to The Atlantic.
Jim Hightower is a Texan who represents the best of the state. He blogs at “Jim Hightower’s Lowdown.” This is a terrific post.
In my view, the greatest of America’s “Founding Fathers” was not Washington or Jefferson – nor, technically, he wasn’t even an American. Rather, he was a British immigrant and itinerate agitator for real democracy, enlightenment, and universal human rights.
He was Thomas Paine, a prolific, profound, persuasive, and widely popular pamphleteer in the movement for American Independence. With plain language and genuine passion for the cause, Paine’s 47-page pamphlet, Common Sense, was so compelling in its support of the Revolution that it was passed around from person to person – and even read aloud in taverns! But Paine wasn’t content with democratic rhetoric – he actually believed in an egalitarian society, and his post-revolution writings (including Age of Reason, and Agrarian Justice) unabashedly demanded that the new hierarchy of US leaders fulfill the promise of democracy.
Even before the War for Independence, Paine called for slaves to be freed and slavery prohibited. After the war, he terrified most of the gentlemen of means who’d signed the Declaration of Independence by insisting that non-landowners be eligible to vote and hold office (John Adams was so appalled by this that he decried Common Sense as a “crapulous mess”). But Paine just kept pushing, calling for women’s suffrage, progressive taxation, state-funded childcare, a guaranteed minimum income, universal public education, strict separation of church and state, and adoption of some of the democratic principles of the Iroquois Nation.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Don’t tell small-minded, right-wing demagogues like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott – but Thomas Paine was WOKE! Some 250 years before their push to impose autocracy, plutocracy, and theocracy over us, this revolutionary founder championed social justice and economic fairness. As one historian noted, “we are today all Paine’s children,” for he imbued America’s destiny with democratic impulse and aspiration.
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Voters in the city of Orange appear to have ousted two conservative school board members who had spearheaded policies widely opposed by advocates for LGBTQ+ youth in a recall election viewed as a local bellwether for the culture wars in education.
The fiercely contested recall election in the Orange Unified School District intensified with the board majority’s approval in the fall of a parent-notification policy requiring educators to inform parents when a student requests “to be identified as a gender other than that student’s biological sex or the gender listed on the birth certificate or any other official records.”
A legal battle over the issue is playing out as California Atty. General Rob Bonta pursues a court challenge of such policies enacted by a handful of conservative-leaning school boards. His lawsuit asserts that the rules put transgender and gender-nonconforming students in “danger of imminent, irreparable harm” by potentially forcibly “outing” them at home before they’re ready…
The recall came to be an early litmus test on the resonance with voters of issues that have roiled school boards throughout the nation: the teaching of racism and Black history, the rights of LGBTQ+ youth versus the rights of their parents, restrictions on LGBTQ+ symbols and related curriculum, and the removal of library books with sexual content — especially LGBTQ+ content — from school libraries.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
When I learned about this list of honorees, I thought it was a joke. It’s not.
An award named for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an icon of liberalism and feminism, will be presented to a surprising list of men and women by the Opperman Foundation at the Library of Congress.
A prestigious honor named after liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and originally established to recognize “women of distinction” is being awarded this year to a surprising group of multiple genders that includes Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Martha Stewart, among others.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award, also known as the RBG Award, will be presented by the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation at an April 13 gala at the Library of Congress, ITK can reveal.
In addition to conservative media mogul Murdoch, Tesla CEO and X owner Musk, and lifestyle guru Stewart, the award will be given to actor Sylvester Stallone and financier Michael Milken.
First established in 2020 as a recognition solely for women, previous recipients of the RBG Award have included Queen Elizabeth II, singer Barbra Streisand and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
But this year, organizers expanded the award named after the liberal leader of the Supreme Court to include “trailblazing men and women” who “have demonstrated extraordinary accomplishments in their chosen fields.”
Dwight D. Opperman Foundation chair Julie Opperman said in a statement that Ginsburg “fought not only for women but for everyone.”
The Supreme Court justice, a champion of women’s rights, died in 2020 at 87.
“Going forward, to embrace the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy, we honor both women and men who have changed the world by doing what they do best,” Opperman said.
Cameron Vickrey is communications and development director for Fellowship Southwest; she previously worked for Pastors for Texas children. She is a pastor, her father was a pastor, her husband is a pastor. She believes in separation of church and state. She believes in the importance of public schools. She does not want to impose her views on others.
Any time you are quoted on Twitter, you have to brace yourself for the subsequent comments. Especially if Pastors for Children is the one quoting you.
Their Twitter account is a favorite of trolls (education reformers, neo-libertarians and Christian nationalists) who believe that God is not in the public schools and the only way forward is to tear it all down.
So, I knew there would be pushback when I said this, and it was referenced in a tweet: “If you can, send your children to public schools … because it’s not just about my kids, it’s about what’s good for all kids.”
The replies were predictable and entertaining, although plenty were also disturbing.
Some comments satirically quoted what Jesus definitely did not ever say, like: “‘Let Romans indoctrinate your children.’ – Jesus.” Or, “‘Send your kids to government schools so they will worship the state.’ – Jesus.”
These don’t bother me. Their absurdity speaks louder than any rebuttal would. But there were two Twitter comments that I do want to address.
This one, although asked in the manner of how the Pharisees questioned Jesus, warrants an honest reply: “What is your spiritual justification for this?”
Without knowing exactly to what this question refers, I’m going to assume it’s the claim that as Christians, we should send our children to public school.
Theologically, I believe that God loves every child equally and abundantly. We have denied some children their share of this abundant life by hoarding privileges like education.
If I really believe, and I do, that God loves other peoples’ children the same way that God loves my children and wants the same abundance for their lives, then I should make sure my desire for my children’s success doesn’t come at the expense of someone else’s children.
Now, how could where I send my kids to school ever affect another child’s success or opportunity?
Unfortunately, at least in Texas, public schools are paid for by property taxes and distributed largely by something called average daily attendance funding. So, if you live in a neighborhood with lower property tax rates and lower cost of housing, that school will receive a smaller share of the public education dollars from the state.
Now, there are work-arounds to this, called recapture (a.k.a Robin Hood). But there are many inequities that haven’t been addressed in our funding system, and it’s simply obvious to anyone driving around that the wealthier the neighborhood is, the nicer the school is.
If that school is lower-income, lower-performing or simply hasn’t had a renovation bond passed on their behalf in a few decades, then it’s likelier that families who are zoned there and can opt out will do so.
Because schools receive a certain number of dollars per child counted present each day (or an average of the days), if your child isn’t counted there, then the school is missing out on that money. And if, instead, your child is attending a different public or charter school, that money goes with them.
It’s especially tough for schools who see a mass exodus of students across a few years, like when a shiny new charter school opens nearby. The neighborhood public school might lose a few students from each of their classrooms, but not enough to consolidate classes or reduce any overhead costs.
Essentially, their income is reduced while their expenses stay the same, and they are financially pinched. When a school is financially pinched, it has to cut enrichment programming, the same programs the new charter schools often advertise — like fine arts, gardening or STEM — thereby lowering the quality of that schools’ education.
So, yes, it really does matter to other children which school you choose.
Let’s say you are now with me in supporting our neighborhood public schools. That brings me to the next tweet I want to address: “Any church that follows God doesn’t hesitate to call out the demonic forces within public education. Public Education seeks to separate children from God at almost every turn. Millstones for thy necks.”
Although it is very tempting to accept this challenge and call out the demonic forces within public education, which I absolutely can do [hint: candidates for school boards who don’t seem to care about education], I am going to try to follow Jesus and resist.
God is in all schools with all children. If you are wondering, here’s where I’ve specifically seen God in neighborhood public schools:
God is in the kindergarten teacher who nurtures the little ones and patiently listens to their endless commentary on life.
God is in the fifth-grade teachers who play guitar, build robots and order class snakes for their students who are otherwise not as engaged.
God is in the elementary school that also serves as the regional school for the deaf and hard of hearing, and in the hearing-kids who learn sign language to talk with their classmates.
God is in the schools when nearby church members participate in mentoring programs and form friendships with kids who don’t have very many adult role models.
God is in the schools when volunteers come to deliver food for the weekend to kids who can’t otherwise depend on food being in their home.
God is in the middle school girl who makes room for a new student at her lunch table.
God is in the discussions that happen in middle and high school English and history classes, where kids learn to listen to one another and respect each others’ opinions.
God is in the moment of silence observed at the beginning of each day after the pledges of allegiance, when many children bow their heads to pray.
If you still believe that God isn’t in the public schools, then maybe that’s exactly where God is calling you to go.
I loved President Biden’s State of the Union speech. He was feisty and sharp. It eas gratifying to see President Biden engage the loud-mouth Republicans who interrupted him. That’s always a risky move in a nationally televised speech, because you never know how it will turn out. But Biden pounced at the opportunity to engage in repartee with his challengers from the Republican side. He showed his quick intelligence and mental sharpness. And did it with a smile.
— State of the Union: Dark Brandon shows up & proves he’s still capable of kicking Republican ass. With the exception of rightwing hate media, reviews of President Biden’s SOTU speech Thursday night have been universally positive. He was on fire, filled with energy, and repeatedly went off-script to take on the classless Republicans who heckled and harassed him throughout the speech. Most amazing was how Republicans in the audience refused to applaud lines like, “We will not bow down to Putin” and his call for removing lead pipes to “stop the brain damage they’re causing our children.” The GOP has nearly totally become the party of Putin, and appears to even love lead poisoning America’s kids. They even booed their own legislation to secure the southern border! This is way beyond partisanship: something is really wrong, corrupt, rotten, and bizarre within the party now that it’s been completely taken over by a racist, hateful, orange-faced psychopath. And Senator Katie Britt’s effort to rehearse her tryout for the Scarlett O’Hara role in a high-school performance of Gone With The Wind just made the crisis within the party even clearer: did she really expect people to believe her “American carnage” riff and lies about the border? Now it’s up to us normal people to take our country back and restore sanity to our political processes. Double-check your voter registration, particularly if you live in a Red state, at vote.org.
In case you missed the story, Alabama Senator Katie Britt was caught in a big fat lie when she gave the Republican response to Biden’s address. She claimed that she met a Mexican woman who had been the victim of sex-trafficking since she was 12, and this happened on Biden’s watch in the United States. An independent journalist named Jonathan Katz did the research on when Britt went to the border and whom she met with. He documented that the Mexican woman she met described events that happened in MEXICO, not the U.S., between 2004-2008, when George W. Bush was president. Why did she lie? She made no mention of the recent Alabama state court decision making it a crime to dispose of frozen IVF specimens, on the grounds that these embryos are unborn children.
— Russians are intervening in the election! The New York Times is reporting on a series of new “newspaper” sites that are popping up across America. With names like D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and the Miami Chronicle, Russian disinformation experts have put up what are pretending to be American newspapers. They steal content from local papers and national news sites like Reuters, then toss in the occasional pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, anti-Democrat articles. So far, there’s been no response from our government to this blatant attempt to influence the 2024 election by misleading American voters, and doing anything may be difficult as they’re hosted on Russian servers and outside the reach of US law. Putin was deeply involved in the 2016 election on behalf of Trump — to the point that Robert Mueller indicted nearly two dozen Russians for election interference — and they tried again with a major social media presence in 2020. With Ukraine in the balance (and Medvedev saying last week that they would be taking part of Poland next) expect Moscow to be vigorous in their efforts to get their agent, Trump, back into the White House.
The New York Times reported on Trump’s agenda to limit, exclude, and expel immigrants if he is re-elected. Of course, he would revive his ban on immigration from Muslim-majority nations. And he would create massive detention centers. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be deported. The headline sums it up: “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps, and Mass Deportations.”
The story, written by Charlie Savage, Mafmggir Haberman, and Jonathan Swan, is chilling. Forget that poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Forget the “golden door.” The door will be closed.
Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.
The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.
Mr. Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — though this time he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year.
To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.
To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Mr. Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Mr. Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.
In a public reference to his plans, Mr. Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”
The constellation of Mr. Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of undocumented immigrants would be barred from the country or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.
And here is a policy that should get the attention of Arab-Americans who are thinking of voting for Trump because of Biden’s support for Israel:
In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes…
Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.
Trump’s chief advisor on immigration policy is Stephen Miller, who endorses draconian policies to ban and oust immigrants.
Miller told the Times:
“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
