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PEN: Book Bans Rise Sharply, with Florida Banning the Most Books

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
12

PEN America released a report documenting that book bans had increased sharply over the past year, with the largest number of books banned reported in Florida, followed by Texas.

The freedom to read is under assault in the United States—particularly in public schools—curtailing students’ freedom to explore words, ideas, and books. In the 2022–23 school year, from July 1, 2022, to June 31, 2023, PEN America recorded 3,362 instances of book bans in US public school classrooms and libraries. These bans removed student access to 1,557 unique book titles, the works of over 1,480 authors, illustrators, and translators. Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals. Amid a growing climate of censorship, school book bans continue to spread through coordinated campaigns by a vocal minority of groups and individual actors and, increasingly, as a result of pressure from state legislation.

The Miami Herald reviewed what had happened in Florida.

One example in Florida is the expanded “Parental Rights in Education” law, signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year and dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” bill as it prohibits discussions of sexuality and gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.

In this year’s session, state lawmakers expanded the restrictions through the eighth grade. The expanded law, which DeSantis signed, also allows a parent or community member to object to instructional material or library books, and requires a school to remove the book or books within five days of a challenge and remain off library shelves until the review is completed.

The process is a “guilty until proven innocent policy” that leads to the removal of more books for more time, said Raegan Miller, director of development at the Florida Freedom to Read Project, a nonprofit that advocates for school libraries being accessible to all students.

Moreover, she said, books are expensive to purchase and public libraries are not accessible to all students — especially young students whose parents are unable to accompany them.

Governor DeSantis insists that there is no book banning:

Desantis, who has championed the bills, has called the “whole book ban thing” a “hoax.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis called book banning in Florida a ‘hoax.’

During his May 24 presidential campaign launch on Twitter Spaces, he said, “there’s not been a single book banned in the state of Florida. You can go buy or use whatever book you want.”

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article279568719.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Censorship, Democracy, DeSantis, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Libraries, Texas

Gary Shteyngart on Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Elon Musk

By dianeravitch
September 23, 2023 //
22

Gary Shteyngart is a successful novelist and author whose family emigrated from the Soviet Union when he was a child. He reviewed Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk in The Guardian. On the site formerly known as Twitter, he described his piece as “my review of a dull book about a silly but dangerous man.” Please open the link and read the full review.

He began:

Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.

There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best….

Highest on the list of things Musk won’t shut up about is Mars. “We need to get to Mars before I die.” “We got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on earth forever.” The messianic part of the Muskiverse is his attempt to put 140m miles between himself and his father as he tries to turn humanity into a “multiplanetary civilization” even though we are having a hard enough time making it as a uniplanetary one. But Musk also knows what’s keeping us from reaching the lifeless faraway planet, and he’s not afraid of telling us: “Unless the woke-mind virus … is stopped, civilisation will never become interplanetary.” There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your saviour turns out to be the world’s loudest crank?

Categories Billionaires, Character, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Ethics, Extremism

Michael Hiltzik: NBC’s “Meet the Press” Interview with Trump Was a Disaster

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
15

Michael Hiltzik, columnist for the Los Angeles Times, excoriates Kristen Welner, the new face of “Meet the Press” for her inability to pose tough questions to Trump or to counter his repeated lies. But, in fairness, Trump knows how to use television to his own advantage far better than the professional journalists who interview him. The bottom line is that no broadcast journalist has figured out how to counter a firehouse of lies.

He writes:

When Chuck Todd announced in June that he would be retiring as host of “Meet the Press,” not a few people who take politics seriously breathed a sigh of relief: No more of Todd’s insight-free, planed-down, both-sides-do-it horse race approach to news.

The NBC News publicity machine immediately built up Todd’s successor, Kristen Welker, as a tough, whip-smart journalist, “dogged” and a master of “sharp questioning of lawmakers.”

That whole PR edifice came crashing down Sunday, when Welker got steamrollered by Donald Trump on national television.

Despite ample evidence that dealing with Trump on his own level — through four years of the Trump presidency and as recently as May, when Trump chewed CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins to pieces at a misbegotten town hall — was a no-win situation, NBC News went ahead and subjected its hopelessly unprepared journalist to ritual humiliation. It was a milepost in the deterioration of network news’ ability and inclination to hold politicians to account.

What Trump received was a nearly hour-long, essentially unmoderated publicity platform, gratis, an opportunity to once again show that he is a feral exploiter of television’s tendency to take everyone at their own level of self-esteem.

Of Welker the sharp questioner of lawmakers, nothing remains. Here’s a fair sampling of her presence during the interview (drawn from the full official transcript of the encounter, of which only a portion was shown during the broadcast):

“But Mr. President—”

“Let’s stay on track, though, Mr. President.”

“Mr. President, we have so many topics to cover.”

“You had —”

“You — Mr. President —”

“But, let me, let me, but Mr. President —”

“Mr. President, let me just ask this question, please —”

Etc, etc….

The transcript fails to illustrate how often Welker, bollixed by Trump, ended up stepping on her own questions. Trump delivered the coup de grace late in the program, when he complained to Welker, “You keep interrupting me.”

Welker allowed Trump to emit lie after lie in what I’ve described as his “Gish gallop,” a technique named for a notorious creationist who would conduct debates with experts in evolution by “spewing forth torrents of errorthat the evolutionist hasn’t a prayer of refuting in the format of a debate.”

Welker tried, here and there, to counter Trump’s lies, but on the whole she failed miserably; they just keep coming at too great a pace. But she displayed abject ignorance about too many of the issues she herself raised. NBC News posted a “fact check” online after the broadcast, but at a mere 1,800 words it couldn’t possibly correct the record adequately.

Let’s take a look at some of Trump’s most egregious lies.

On abortion, Trump claimed that Democrats advocate allowing abortions “after five months, six months, seven months, eight months, nine months, and even after birth.”

Not only is after-birth abortion a contradiction in terms, but late-term abortions aren’t done out of a casual decision not to proceed with birth, but because the fetus is not viable or suffers from extreme deformities, or the pregnancy is a threat to the woman’s health.

Welker’s response to this was a wan, “Only 1% of late-term abortions happen.”

When Welker asked about the consequences of anti-abortion laws in red states — “How is it acceptable in America that women’s lives are at risk, doctors are being forced to turn away patients in need, or risk breaking the law?” — Trump simply failed to give an answer, and Welker failed to insist on one.

Trump claimed that abortion is “a 50/50 issue,” meaning that the U.S. public is evenly split. That’s not true.

According to Gallup, 67% of Americans believe that abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy — the first 90 days. The most stringent anti-abortion laws enacted in red states don’t allow abortion at all or restrict it to the first six weeks, a period in which many women don’t even know they’re pregnant.

Importantly, Gallup finds that 58% consistently oppose the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning Roe vs. Wade, which had guaranteed abortion rights nationwide. Trump has long bragged about having installed the court majority that overturned the 1973 ruling.

Trump defended his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including his notorious call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger urging him to find enough votes to flip the Georgia results from Joe Biden to himself. He said Raffensperger “again last week said I didn’t do anything wrong… Raffensperger said ‘it was a negotiation.’ ”

This is a lie. Raffensperger has not said Trump did not do anything wrong. At a federal court hearing last month on a motion by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to move the trial over his indictment over conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, Raffensperger was asked point-blank by the judge whether the call was a “negotiation.” He replied that it was not.

Trump has also been indicted in that case, brought by Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis.

Turning to economic affairs, Trump claimed that his 2017 tax cuts, which went mostly to corporations and wealthy people, “created tremendous jobs…. More importantly, we had more revenue with lower taxes than we did with higher taxes.” These assertions are false or highly misleading.

Job growth under Trump fell short of the mark set by former President Obama. In the first three years of Trump’s administration (leaving out 2020, when the pandemic provoked huge job losses), 6.36 million jobs were created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; in the last three years of the Obama administration, 8 million jobs were created.

In the two years following the tax cuts, job growth was meager — 2.3 million new jobs in 2019, and 2 million in 2019. Those were worse than the annual figures for 2013-16. Under Biden, incidentally, nearly 14 million jobs have been created, in part thanks to the post-pandemic recovery.

Higher revenues after enactment of the Tax Cut and Jobs Act? No, not really.

Corporate income tax receipts fell to $224.9 billion in 2018 from $230.34 billion the year before and fell again to $210.45 billion in 2019. Personal income tax receipts held their own in 2018, coming in at $1.615 trillion, up modestly from $1.613 trillion in 2017, then rose to $1.7 trillion in 2020.

But those figures fell significantly below what had been projected by the Congressional Budget Office in 2017 — a shortfall of $275 billion, or 7.6% of pre-tax cut projected revenues, the Brookings Institution calculated.

Put it all together, and Brookings found that despite conservatives’ promises, “The TCJA did not pay for itself, nor is it likely to do so in the future.”

Welker, of course, was utterly ill-equipped to push back on Trump’s job and revenue claims. He simply blamed the pandemic, though the consequences of the tax cuts were felt long before then.

What’s most shocking is that almost none of Trump’s lies was new — he’s been spouting most of them nonstop. So how could Welker be so unprepared to address them head-on?

Given that the quality of Welker’s interrogation scraped the bottom of the barrel clean, it’s hard to pinpoint the lowest of low notes.

My vote for the single stupidest question she put to Trump is this one, which wasn’t heard during Sunday’s broadcast but appears in the full transcript: “Is there any scenario by which you would seek a third term in office?”

Leaving aside that Trump has served only a single term, lost his bid for a second term, and is not yet the official GOP candidate for the 2024 campaign, there’s this little thing out there known as the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

That amendment states forthrightly, in black and white, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Perhaps Welker hasn’t had a chance to learn about it yet, it’s been around only since 1951.

Trump was perhaps too canny to answer her question; he turned it into an attack on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is challenging him for the nomination.

But one can only ask: What the hell was Welker thinking? Was this her way of asking Trump if he would stage an anti-constitutional coup d’etat? If so, why not ask that outright?

And where the hell was the NBC News staff, who surely were in the room at Trump’s New Jersey golf club where the interview took place? Did no one say, “Er, Kristen….”

So that was that. At the end of the interview Welker docilely asked Trump, “If you have time, I think we want to get one little shot of us walking together.” Because, of course, what’s important to NBC News and its fellow TV enterprises is the optics.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Lies, Media, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson: GOP Prepares to Shut Down the Government

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2023 //
3

Heather Cox Richardson writes about the tumultuous showdowns yesterday:

The fight over how we conceive of our federal government was on full display today.

The Biden administration announced the creation of the American Climate Corps. This will be a group of more than 20,000 young Americans who will learn to work in clean energy, conservation, and climate resilience while also earning good wages and addressing climate change.

This ACC looks a great deal like the Civilian Conservation Corps established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democrats in 1933, during the New Deal. The CCC was designed to provide jobs for unemployed young men (prompting critics to ask, “Where’s the She, She, She?”) while they worked to build fire towers, bridges, and foot trails, plant trees to stop soil erosion, stock fish, dig ditches, build dams, and so on.

While the CCC was segregated, the ACC will prioritize hiring within communities traditionally left behind, as well as addressing the needs of those communities that have borne the brunt of climate change. If the administration’s rules for it become finalized, the corps will also create a streamlined pathway into federal service for those who participated in the program.

In January, a poll showed that a climate corps is popular. Data for Progress found that voters supported such a corps by a margin of 39 points. Voters under 45 supported it by a margin of 51 points.

While the Biden administration is establishing a modern version of a popular New Deal program, extremists in the Republican Party are shutting down the government to try to stop it from precisely this sort of action. They want to roll the government back to the days before the New Deal, ending government regulation, provision of a basic social safety net, investment in infrastructure, and protection of civil rights.

Extremists in the House Republican conference are refusing to acknowledge the deal worked out for the budget last spring by President Biden and Republican speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). Instead, in order to pass even a continuing resolution that would buy time for Congress to pass an actual budget, they are insisting on cuts of up to 8% on discretionary spending that Senate Democrats, as well as Biden himself, are certain to oppose.

The White House has noted that the cuts the Republicans demand would mean 800 fewer Customs and Border Protection agents and officers (which, in turn, would mean more drugs entering the United States); more than 2 million women and children waitlisted for the WIC food assistance program; more than 4,000 fewer rail inspection days; up to 40,000 fewer teachers, aides, and key education staff, affecting 26 million students; and so on.

House speaker McCarthy cannot corral the extremists to agree to anything unless they get such cuts, which even other Republicans recognize are nonstarters (those cuts are so unpopular that Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News reported today that Republicans are somewhat bizarrely considering changing their messaging about their refusal to fund the government from concerns about spending to concerns about border security).

Meanwhile, the extremists are threatening to throw McCarthy out of the speakership. There are rumors that Republican moderates are considering working with Democrats to save McCarthy’s job, but Democrats are not keen on helping him when he has just agreed to open a baseless impeachment inquiry into the president in order to appease the extremists.

“If you’d asked about two months ago I would have said absolutely,” Representative Dean Phillips (D-MN) told Manu Raju, Lauren Fox, and Melanie Zanona of CNN. “But I think sadly his behavior is unprincipled, it’s unhelpful to the country,” he said.

As a shutdown appears more and more likely, even Republicans acknowledge that the problem is on their side of the House. Until the 1980s, funding gaps did not lead to government shutdowns. Government agencies continued to work, with the understanding that Congress would eventually work out funding disputes. But in 1980 a fight over funding the 1,600-employee Federal Trade Commission led President Jimmy Carter to ask Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti if the agency could continue to operate when its funding ran out. Civiletti surprised participants by saying no.

Four years ago, Civiletti told Ian Shapira of the Washington Post that his decision was about a specific and limited issue, and that he never imagined that politicians would use shutdowns for long periods of time as a political weapon. And yet, shutdowns have become more frequent and longer since the 1990s, usually as Republicans demand that Congress adopt policies they cannot pass through regular procedures (like the 34-day shutdown in 2019 over funding for the border wall former president Trump wanted).

Many observers note that “governing by crisis,” as President Barack Obama put it, is terribly damaging and that Civiletti’s decision should be revisited. Next month’s possible shutdown has the potential to be particularly problematic because there is no obvious solution. After all, it’s hardly a surprise that this budget deadline was coming up and that the extremists were angry over the deal McCarthy cut with Biden back in May, and yet McCarthy has been unable in all those months to bring his conference to an agreement.

Republicans appear resigned that voters will blame them for the crisis, which, honestly, seems fair. “We always get the blame,” Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID), a senior appropriator, told Katherine Tully-McManus and Adam Cancryn of Politico. “Name one time that we’ve shut the government down and we haven’t got the blame.”

Meanwhile, the House extremists continue to push their vision for the nation by undermining the institutions of the government. The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), today held what normally would have been a routine oversight hearing focused on policy, law enforcement, and so on. Instead of that business, though, Jordan and the hard-right Republicans on the committee worked to construct a false reality in right-wing media by attacking Attorney General Merrick Garland over his role in the investigation of President Biden’s son Hunter, begun five years ago under Trump.

Glenn Thrush of the New York Times noted drily that “[m]any of the claims and insinuations they leveled against Mr. Garland—that he is part of a coordinated Democratic effort to shield the Bidens and persecute Mr. Trump—were not supported by fact. And much of the specific evidence presented, particularly the testimony of an investigator who questioned key decisions in the Hunter Biden investigation, was given without context or acknowledgment of contradictory information.”

Instead, Jordan and his extremist colleagues shouted at Garland and over his answers, producing sound bites for right-wing media. Those included the statement from Representative Victoria Spartz (R-IN) that the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were actually “good Americans” who brought “strollers and the kids.” Even as both Biden and Garland have prioritized restoring faith in the Justice Department after Trump’s use of it for his own ends, the extremist Republicans are working to undermine that faith by constructing the false image that the Department of Justice is persecuting Trump and his allies.

Their position was not unchallenged on the committee, even within their own party. Representative Ken Buck (R-CO) defended Garland from their attacks, while Democrats on the committee went after the Republicans themselves. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) accused Jordan of making the Judiciary Committee into a “criminal defense firm for the former president.”

Garland, who is usually soft-spoken, pushed back too. “Our job is not to take orders from the president, from Congress, or from anyone else, about who or what to criminally investigate,” he told the committee. “I am not the president’s lawyer. I will add I am not Congress’s prosecutor. The Justice Department works for the American people.”

“We will not be intimidated,” he added. “We will do our jobs free from outside influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Please open the link for the footnotes and consider subscribing to this valuable blog.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Democrats, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Republicans

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Paxton’s Acquittal is Evidence of Authoritarian Lawlessness

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2023 //
16

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is an expert on fascism and authoritarianism. She teaches European history at New York university. I subscribe to her blog Lucid, where this post appeared. The acquittal of a corrupt State Attorney General is a warning to the nation about what the GOP has become (if further warning were needed).

She writes:

For two reasons, it’s unsurprising that Paxton was acquitted of all charges by his cronies in the Texas Senate. The Texas GOP is one of the most extreme in the nation. Paxton has been a vociferous supporter of Trump’s claim that Trump won the 2020 election. In October 2021 Paxton, a hard-core Trump defender, characterized Joe Biden’s presence in the White House as an “overthrow” –the word implying that Biden pulled off a coup to take power.

A 2022 Texas GOP resolution expands on this attempt to make Biden a lawless figure: it calls him an illegitimate and “acting” president. For those who study authoritarianism, this is a red flag: it not only discredits Biden but implies that he won’t be there for long and can be removed at any time..

The logic of corruption also matters here. The GOP has embraced the methods and values of authoritarianism. It now depends on propaganda (the “Big Lie”), intimidation, and corruption –election denial being a form of corruption–for its identity and to maintain itself in power. In particular, it is a party that has remade itself in Trump’s image, with the goal of protecting the corrupt and the criminal dictating its actions.

With its leader and many luminaries now indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 election, and those running for president pledging on live television that they will support a convicted criminal as nominee, it is dangerous for the GOP to stand up at the state level for accountability. How much more appropriate to keep a corrupt attorney general in office. Authoritarianism is rule by the lawless. At its peak, as in the states of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, authoritarianism becomes political rule in support of kleptocracy.

The dangers of accountability, transparency, impartial investigation and other bedrock values of democracy for authoritarian leaders and parties is why these inevitably go after members of the press and the judiciary and often the intelligence sector as well. In the American case, this motivates attacks against the FBI, which is still investigating Paxton (who also faces a state securities fraud case).

In the short term, Paxton will be further emboldened to aggressively undermine the rule of law in his state. On cue, Paxton denounced the “weaponization of the impeachment process to settle political differences.” No matter that the GOP as a whole is seeking to impeach Biden, at Trump’s bidding, to “settle political differences” and take revenge on Biden for having committed the sin of having been legally elected to the office of the presidency.

For the authoritarians of the GOP, who no longer see free and fair elections as valid ways of deciding America’s leadership, that amounts to an “overthrow,” to use Paxton’s word. This is where the GOP is now.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Justice, Texas

Politico Advises Democrats to Act Like GOP on School Choice

By dianeravitch
September 18, 2023 //
26

In what has to be the worst, most unbalanced article about education in all of 2023, Politico urged Democrats to act like Republicans and promote school choice.

Politico’s education writer, Juan Perez Jr., interviewed Democrats who are well known as advocates for charter schools as proof that Democrats must support choice policies.

He begins:

MINNEAPOLIS — President Joe Biden’s education chief believes public schools are facing a “make or break moment.” The rescue plan coming from some Democrats, however, rings of policies that have already landed wins for conservatives.

Political skirmishes over classrooms have left Democrats underwater, or dead even, with Republicans among voters in a clutch of battleground states. And as they worried their party has not honed a strategy to reverse declining test scores, enrollment and trust in public schools, liberals watched Republican governors sign historic private school choice laws this year.

The GOP wins and a generational crisis in schooling has convinced some Democrats that the Biden administration needs to promote a liberal version of public school choice in the 2024 campaign, or risk losing votes.

“We’ve lost our advantage on education because I think that we’ve failed to fully acknowledge that choice resonates deeply with families and with voters,” said Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform and its affiliate Education Reform Now think tank.

Please open the link. It doesn’t get any better. Not only does he quote DFER, the hedge managers group that does not support public schools, he also quotes Kerri Rodrigues of the “National Parents Union,” funded by the billionaire Waltons as a leader of the 2016 failed campaign to increase charters in Massachusetts.

Not exactly typical Democrats. More like charter advocates.

I sent Mr. Perez the following email:

Dear Mr. Perez,

I am writing to express my strong disagreement with your article today about Democrats and schools. Democrats will not improve their popularity by acting more like Republicans.

Republicans are on a mission to transfer public funds to nonpublic schools. Whenever vouchers have been put to a state referendum, they are defeated by large margins, as they were in Florida, Arizona, and Utah. The Republicans leaders of those states ignored the will of the voters and authorized vouchers.

In every state with vouchers, 70-80% are claimed by students who never attended public schools. Vouchers are a giveaway to families who already put their kids in private and religious schools.

Nearly 90% of the parents in this country send their children to public schools.

The most recent Gallup Poll showed that the overwhelming majority of parents are happy with their public schools.

For decades, Republicans have promoted school choice by attacking public schools.

The way forward for the Democratic Party is not to embrace GOP policies but to support the adequate and equitable funding of public schools and to stand against the privatization of public schools.

Volumes of research show that charter schools on average do no better than public schools, even though they admit whom they want and oust whoever has low scores or is disruptive. The Network for Public Education, in which I am involved, reports frequently on the high rates of closings by charter schools, as well as the scandals that occur almost daily due to embezzlement and other financial misdeeds.

Voucher students do not take state tests. Their schools are not accountable. Their teachers need not be certified. They may discriminate against students and families on grounds of religion, LGBT, or any other reason. They are not required to accept students with disabilities. Students who leave public schools for voucher schools typically fall behind their public school peers, and many drop out and return to public school.

Why in the world should Democrats support schools that are free to discriminate, free to hire uncertified and unqualified staff, managed by for-profit entities, and are not as successful as public schools?

That is bad political advice, which you got by interviewing people whose organizations advocate for charter schools (DFER and the so-called “National Parents Union”). The only pro-public school voices in your article were Randi Weingarten and Miguel Cardona, a union leader and the Secretary of Education.

Why didn’t you interview parents engaged in the fight to keep public education public? They are in every state, fighting billionaire-funded organizations like DFER and Moms for Liberty.

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, could introduce you to them. Why don’t you come to our 10th annual national conference, which will be held at the Capitol Hilton in DC on October 28-29. You would meet parents from every state who are working to preserve their public schools and keep them safe from entrepreneurs, grifters, corporate chains, and religious interests.

Diane Ravitch

You too can write him at jperez@politico.com.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Democracy, Democrats for Education Reform, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Republicans

Frank Breslin: Critical Thinking Is the Most Important Lesson in High School

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2023 //
48

Frank Breslin, a retired high school teacher in New Jersey, wrote recently at Medium that critical thinking is the missing ingredient in high school, even though it is the most important tool that students need.

Breslin writes:

The following warning should be affixed atop every computer in America’s schools: Proceed at your own risk. Don’t accept as true what you’re about to read. Some of it is fact; some of it is opinion masquerading as fact; and the rest is liberal, conservative, or mainstream propaganda. Make sure you know which is which before choosing to believe it.

Students are exposed to so many different viewpoints on- and offline and so prone to accepting whatever they read, that they run the very real risk of being brainwashed. If it’s on a computer screen, it becomes Holy Writ, sacrosanct, immutable, beyond question or doubt.

Teachers continually caution students against taking what they read at face value, since some of these sites may be propaganda mills or recruiting grounds for the naïve and unwary.

Not only egregious forms of indoctrination may target unsuspecting young minds, but also the more artfully contrived variety, whose insinuating soft-sell subtlety and silken appeals ingratiatingly weave their spell to lull the credulous into accepting their wares.

To prevent this from happening, every school in America should teach the twin arts of critical thinking and critical reading, so that a critical spirit becomes a permanent possession of every student and pervades the teaching of every course in America.

Teaching students how to be their own person by abandoning Groupthink and developing the courage to think for themselves should begin from the very first day of high school. More important than all the information they will be learning during these four crucial years will be how they critically process this information either to accept or reject it, or to keep an open mind.

It is a rare high-school graduate who can pinpoint 20 different kinds of fallacies while listening to a speaker or reading a book; who can distinguish between fact and opinion, objective account and specious polemic; who can tell the difference between facts, value judgments, explanatory theories, and metaphysical claims; who can argue both sides of a question, anticipate objections, rebut them, and undermine arguments in various ways.

The essence of an education — the ability to think critically and protect oneself against falsehood and lies — is a lost art in America’s high schools today. This is unfortunate for it is precisely this skill that is of transcendent importance for students in defending themselves.

Computers are wonderful things, but, like everything else in this world, they must be approached with great caution. Their potential for good can suddenly become an angel of darkness that takes over young minds.

A school should teach its students how to think, not what to think; to question whatever they read, and never to accept any claim blindly; to suspend judgment until they’ve heard all sides of a question; and interrogate whatever claims to be true, since truth can withstand any scrutiny.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Ethics, Students

Michael Hiltzik: Elon Musk Blames “the Jews” for X’s Problems

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2023 //
24

I don’t know about you, but I have trouble referring to Twitter as X. A single letter is not a name. And I have decided to stay on Twitter, because that’s how I reach nearly 150,000 people. When they retweet (re-X?) my posts, I reach even more. So I’m sticking with Twitter, despite Elon Musk and the proliferation of racists and anti-Semites on Twitter.

Michael Hiltzik, my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times, recently blasted Musk for blaming the misfortunes of Twitter on the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fights racial and religious hatred, and especially anti-Semitism. Musk has threatened to sue the ADL for defamation. That’s ironic, almost funny.

Hiltzik writes:

Elon Musk has long been known for blaming everyone else but himself for the various fiascos visited upon his companies — meddlesome bureaucrats for COVID-related production slowdowns at Tesla, the Pentagon and conniving rivals for the loss of a government contract by SpaceX, nasty woke advertisers for the decline of X (ex-Twitter).

So what were the chances that he would get around to blaming the Jews? Based on the evidence at hand, 100%.

Over the weekend, Musk launched a ferocious, spittle-flecked attack on the Anti-Defamation League, which describes itself (accurately enough) as “a global leader in combating antisemitism, countering extremism and battling bigotry wherever and whenever it happens.”

Musk decided that the ADL is responsible for (in his words) “most of our revenue loss [at X]….Giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so ~$4 billion.”

My goodness! When does he blame George Soros?

He asserted that the U.S. advertising revenue at X is “down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!” And he tweeted that he has “no choice but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.”

Not to put a fine point on things, but all this shows Musk to have gone utterly off the rails and over the edge of conspiracy-mongering paranoia. It’s the most extreme outburst of antisemitism by a purportedly mainstream public figure in more than 100 years.

Musk’s hate-spasm easily outflanks the previous champion of public antisemitism, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was caught on tape in July arguing that COVID-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people” while leaving Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese relatively immune. It’s as if Musk challenged Kennedy’s effort to seize the antisemitism crown by saying, “Oh, yeah? Watch this.”

Musk’s outburst makes the position of Linda Yaccarino, the formerly respected entertainment executive who accepted the job of X’s CEO to restore the platform to the good graces of corporate advertisers, hopelessly untenable. Why she doesn’t resign is a mystery. His words also should prompt the federal government to question his suitability, and that of his company SpaceX, to hold government contracts of any kind.

Musk has bought into the notion — advanced by openly antisemitic X accounts — that the ADL fosters antisemitism by calling it out wherever it appears.

“The ADL, because they are so aggressive in their demands to ban social media accounts for even minor infractions, are ironically the biggest generators of anti-Semitism on this platform,” he tweeted on Sunday. He was responding to a tweet quoting the far-right conspiracy-monger Alex Jones calling the ADL “the most pro-Hitler organization I’ve ever seen.” He further implied that the ADL is “somehow complicit in creating the very thing they complain about!”

So in this bizarro world, fighting antisemitism promotes antisemitism!

Musk implicitly endorsed the hashtag #BantheADL,” advocating banning the organization from X, by replying, “Perhaps we should run a poll on this.” Surely he knows that his right-wing followers would swamp any such poll on the “yes” side.

It’s crystal clear that X’s revenue problem is Elon Musk and his policies. He has welcomed dispensers of antisemitism, racism and other varieties of hate speech back onto the platform, while amplifying misinformation about purported COVID treatments and homophobic slurs retailed by conspiracy movements such as QAnon.

Corporate advertisers in the consumer market don’t need the ADL to tell them that it’s bad for their brands to be associated with a social media platform bristling with neo-Nazis and other denizens of the cultural underworld.

It’s true that the ADL has had its eyes on Musk and X for some time. That’s because the platform’s content moderation policies have fostered a documented surge of hate speech since Musk acquired it last October.

In March, the ADL reported that Twitter had refused to remove tweets or accounts that incited violence against Jews. Two months later, it followed up with a report that Musk’s decision to reinstate 65 Twitter accounts that had previously been banned for hate speech had contributed to the antisemitism surge.

The tweet-and-reply threads of many of these accounts, the ADL found, had become “magnets for vile antisemitic content.” They were rife with such “familiar antisemitic tropes” as “conspiracy theories about George Soros and the Rothschild banking family controlling global politics, finance, and media” and accusations that Jews are aiming to “destroy ‘the West’ by promoting transgender identities and lifestyles and ‘replacing’ white people via immigration (e.g., the Great Replacement).”

Tellingly, beyond stating his determination to “clear our platform’s name on the matter of anti-Semitism,” and declaring, “I’m pro free speech, but against anti-Semitism of any kind,” Musk in his weekend outburst made no effort to address the specific points raised by the ADL — he merely asserted that the organization’s accusations were “unfounded.”

Obviously, that won’t do. According to ADL Chief Executive Jonathan Greenblatt, Yaccarino reached out to him last month, leading to a “frank + productive conversation…about @X, what works and what doesn’t, and where it needs to go to address hate effectively on the platform,” he tweeted.

ADL will “give her and Elon Musk credit if the service gets better… and reserve the right to call them out until it does,” Greenblatt added.

It’s a safe bet that as long as Musk reigns over X, the platform will have a long, long way to go to warrant any credit for eradicating hate speech at all.

There are few precedents in American history for someone with the public renown of Elon Musk voicing or hosting opinions of such unalloyed virulence. The closest analogue is probably Henry Ford, who in 1920 began publishing screeds in the Dearborn Independent, a local weekly he had acquired, alleging the existence of a vast Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination.

“Musk is sometimes compared to the innovator Henry Ford,” Josh Marshall observed Tuesday on his website, Talking Points Memo. “The comparison seems increasingly apt, if not in the way many have intended.”

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Ethics, Extremism, Media

Wisconsin: GOP Thinking of Impeaching Newly Elected State Supreme Court Judge

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2023 //
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Democrats in Wisconsin celebrated the election last spring of a liberal judge to the State Supreme Court. Her election was decisive—she won by 11 points. Her election shifted the balance on the court to 4-3 favoring liberals. Justice Janet Protasiewicz made clear as she campaigned that she would support abortion rights and oppose partisan gerrymandering. Republicans claim that her campaign statements demonstrate she is prejudiced, which is grounds for impeachment. The legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, which is evidence of partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts in a state with a Democratic governor.

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled Legislature is talking about impeaching a newly elected liberal state Supreme Court justice even before she has heard a case.

The unprecedented attempt to impeach and remove Justice Janet Protasiewicz from office comes as the court is being asked to throw out legislative electoral maps drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature in 2011 that cemented the party’s majorities, which now stand at 65-34 in the Assembly and a 22-11 supermajority in the Senate.

Here is a closer look at where things stand:

Protasiewicz won election in April to a 10-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court beginning Aug. 1. Her 11-point victory gave liberals a 4-3 majority, ending a 15-year run with conservatives in control.

During her first week in office, two lawsuits were filed by Democratic-friendly groups and law firms seeking to overturn Republican-drawn legislative maps.

WHY IS THERE TALK OF IMPEACHMENT?

Republican lawmakers who have talked about the possibility, most notably Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, allege Protasiewicz has prejudged redistricting cases pending before the Supreme Court because of comments she made during her campaign. They also argue her acceptance of nearly $10 million from the Wisconsin Democratic Party disqualifies her.

The state Democratic Party is not part of either redistricting lawsuit, but supports the efforts.

The court has yet to say whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Protasiewicz also has yet to say whether she will step aside in the cases, including the decision on whether to hear them.

If she does step aside, the court would be divided 3-3 between liberal and conservative justices. However, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn has sided with liberals on major cases in the past, angering Republicans.

WHAT EXACTLY DID PROTASIEWICZ SAY?

Protasiewicz frequently spoke about redistricting during the campaign, calling the current Republican-friendly maps “unfair” and “rigged.”

“Let’s be clear here,” she said at a January forum. “The maps are rigged here, bottom line.”

“They do not reflect people in this state,” Protasiewicz said at the same forum. “I don’t think you could sell any reasonable person that the maps are fair. I can’t tell you what I would do on a particular case, but I can tell you my values, and the maps are wrong.”

She never promised to rule one way or another.

WHAT DOES THE LAW SAY ABOUT RECUSAL AND IMPEACHMENT?

On recusal, the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause says a judge must recuse if they have a financial interest in the case, or if there is a strong possibility of bias.

There are also state rules laying out when a judge must step aside from a case. Those generally include any time their impartiality on a case can be called into question, such as having a personal bias toward one of those suing, having a financial interest or making statements as a candidate that “commits, or appears to commit” the judge to ruling one way or another.

On impeachment, the Wisconsin Constitution limits the reasons to impeach a sitting officeholder to corrupt conduct in office or the commission or a crime or misdemeanor.

HAS A WISCONSIN SUPREME COURT JUSTICE EVER BEEN IMPEACHED?

The Wisconsin Legislature has voted only once to impeach a state judge who was alleged to have accepted bribes and heard cases in which he had financial interests. It happened in 1853, just five years after statehood, and the state Senate did not convict.

HOW WOULD SHE BE IMPEACHED?

It takes a majority vote in the Assembly to impeach and a two-thirds majority, or 22 votes, in the Senate to convict. Republicans have enough votes in both chambers to impeach and convict Protasiewicz.

If the Assembly impeached her, Protasiewicz would be barred from any duties as a justice until the Senate acted. That could effectively stop her from voting on redistricting without removing her from office and creating a vacancy that Democratic Gov. Tony Evers would fill.

Vos, the Assembly speaker, has said he is still researching impeachment and has not committed to moving ahead.

The day after Protasiewicz was elected, Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu seemed to cast doubt on the Senate proceeding with impeachment.

“To impeach someone, they would need to do something very serious,” LeMahieu told WISN-TV. “We are not looking to start the impeachment process as a regular occurring event in Wisconsin.”

WHEN COULD THIS GET CLEARED UP?

The court is under no deadline to decide whether it will hear the redistricting challenges. Likewise, Protasiewicz doesn’t have a deadline for deciding whether she will recuse herself. Both decisions could come at any point.

If the court decides to hear the challenges, it would then set a timeline for arguments. It is unclear when, if Protasiewicz remains on the case, the Legislature might proceed with impeachment proceedings.

Why would the Republicans move to impeach the Justice? Power. They have successfully gerrymandered their state and don’t want to lose their super-majorities in both houses, where they can veto anything that Democratic Governor Tony Evers proposes.

Categories Accountability, Bias, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Wisconsin

Rightwing Zealots Plan for Trump’s Second Term, Politicizing Civil Service, Establishing Authoritarianism

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2023 //
20

Hundreds of radical rightwingers are working on something called Project 2025, a detailed plan to dismantle the federal government and establish an Imperial Presidency if Trump wins the 2024 election. If Republicans win, they will fire tens of thousands of federal employees, turn thousands more into political appointments instead of apolitical civil servants, and centralize authoritarian power in the White House.

The planning is led by the Heritage Foundation. Its plan echoes what Trump advisor Steve Bannon called “destroying the administrative state.” What they really want is to diminish all checks and balances, destroy norms, and place all power in the President’s hands. Their plan sounds like what has happened in several red states, where Republicans have gerrymandered districts to exercise complete control, and if Democrats win a statewide election, the legislature reduces the Democrat’s powers before he or she takes office.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

WASHINGTON — With more than a year to go before the 2024 election, a constellation of conservative organizations is preparing for a possible second White House term for Donald Trump, recruiting thousands of Americans to come to Washington on a mission to dismantle the federal government and replace it with a vision closer to his own.


Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Biden in 2024.


With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy, in part by firing as many as 50,000 federal workers.


“We need to flood the zone with conservatives,” said Paul Dans, director of the 2025 Presidential Transition Project and a former Trump administration official who speaks with historical flourish about the undertaking….

The unprecedented effort is being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations, many new to Washington, and represents a changed approach from conservatives, who traditionally have sought to limit the federal government by cutting federal taxes and slashing federal spending.

Instead, Trump-era conservatives want to gut the “administrative state” from within, by ousting federal employees they believe are standing in the way of the president’s agenda and replacing them with like-minded officials more eager to fulfill a new executive’s approach to governing.

The goal is to avoid the pitfalls of Trump’s first years in office, when the Republican president’s team was ill-prepared, his Cabinet nominees had trouble winning Senate confirmation and policies were met with resistance — by lawmakers, government workers and even Trump’s own appointees who refused to bend or break protocol, or in some cases violate laws, to achieve his goals.

While many of the Project 2025 proposals are inspired by Trump, they are being echoed by GOP rivals Ron DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy and are gaining prominence among other Republicans.
And if Trump wins a second term, the work from the Heritage coalition ensures the president will have the personnel to carry forward his unfinished White House business.

“The president Day One will be a wrecking ball for the administrative state,” said Russ Vought, a former Trump administration official involved in the effort who is now president at the conservative Center for Renewing America.


Much of the new president’s agenda would be accomplished by reinstating what’s called Schedule F — a Trump-era executive order that would reclassify tens of thousands of the 2 million federal employees as essentially at-will workers who could more easily be fired.


Biden had rescinded the executive order upon taking office in 2021, but Trump — and other presidential hopefuls — now vow to reinstate it.
“It frightens me,” said Mary Guy, a professor of public administration at the University of Colorado Denver, who warns the idea would bring a return to a political spoils system.

Experts argue Schedule F would create chaos in the civil service, which was overhauled during President Carter’s administration in an attempt to ensure a professional workforce and end political bias dating from 19th century patronage.


As it now stands, just 4,000 members of the federal workforce are considered political appointees who typically change with each administration. But Schedule F could put tens of thousands of career professional jobs at risk.

“We have a democracy that is at risk of suicide,” Guy said. “Schedule F is just one more bullet in the gun.”


The ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee-table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of long-standing conservative policies and stark, head-turning proposals that gained prominence in the Trump era.


There’s a “top to bottom overhaul” of the Department of Justice, particularly curbing its independence and ending FBI efforts to combat the spread of misinformation. It calls for stepped-up prosecution of anyone providing or distributing abortion pills by mail.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Trump
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