If you are old enough to remember a different America, an America of neighborhood shops, of local bakeries, butchers, drugstores (with a soda fountain), shoe stores, bookstores, and dress shops, you may have wondered why most of them have been replaced by national chain stores and anonymous strip malls. Now we see even neighborhood public schools replaced by national charter chains, some even operated by for-profit corporations. Thom Hartmann explains the roots of this change in his new book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream. He is releasing the book a chapter at a time on his blog, which should whet our appetite to buy and read the book. This chapter describes the legal ploy that resulted in crushing local enterprise and creating billionaires.
He writes:
Robert Bork was Richard Nixon’s solicitor general and acting attorney general and had a substantial impact on the thinking in the Reagan White House—so much so that Reagan rewarded his years of hard work on behalf of America’s monopolists with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench in the DC Circuit, frequently a launching pad for the Supreme Court.
In the years following Lewis Powell’s 1971 memo, as numerous “conservative” and “free market” think tanks and publications grew in power and funding, Bork’s ideas gained wide circulation in circles of governance, business, and the law.
In 1977, in the case of Continental T.V., Inc. v. GTE Sylvania, the Supreme Court took up Bork’s idea and, for the first time in a big way, embraced the “welfare of the consumer” and “demonstrable economic effect” doctrines that Bork had been promoting for over a decade.
Neither of those phrases exists in any antitrust law, at least in Bork’s context. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court embraced Bork’s notion that the sole metric by which to judge monopolistic behavior should be prices that consumers pay, rather than the ability of businesses to compete or the political power that a corporation may amass.
When Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, bringing with him Bork’s free market philosophy and a crew from the Chicago School, he ordered the Federal Trade Commission to effectively stop enforcing antitrust laws even within the feeble guidelines that the Supreme Court had written into law in GTE Sylvania.
The result was an explosion of mergers-and-acquisitions activity that continues to this day, as industry after industry concentrated down to two, three, four, or five major players who function as cartels. (A brilliant blow-by-blow cataloging of that decade is found in Barry C. Lynn’s book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.)
Bork’s reasoning—that antitrust law should defend only the consumer (through low prices), and not workers, society, democracy, or local communities—has become such conventional wisdom that in the 2014 Supreme Court case of FTC v. Actavis, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a virtual word-for-word parroting of Bork: “The point of antitrust law is to encourage competitive markets to promote consumer welfare.”
Barak Orbach, professor of law at the University of Arizona, is one of a small number of scholars today who are genuine experts in the field of antitrust law. In a 2014 paper published by the American Bar Association, he wondered if Bork knew he was lying when he wrote that the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act intended to reduce prices to advance “consumer welfare,” instead of protecting the competitiveness of small and local businesses, and the independence of government at all levels.
His conclusion, in “Was the ‘Crisis in Antitrust’ a Trojan Horse?” was that Bork was probably just blinded by ideology and had never bothered to go back and read the Congressional Record, which, he noted, says nothing of the kind.74
While Bork wrote that “the policy the courts were intended [by the Sherman Antitrust Act] to apply is the maximization of wealth or consumer want satisfaction,” Orbach said, “Members of Congress . . . were determined to take action against the trusts to stop wealth transfers from the public.” So much for that: today the Walton (Walmart) family is the richest in America and one of the richest in the world. They’re worth more than $100 billion, having squirreled away more wealth than the bottom 40% of all Americans. And they spend prodigiously on right-wing political causes, from the national to the local.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is now wealthier than any Walton; with a registered net worth of $112 billion, he is the richest single person in the world. Bezos is so rich that when he divorced his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, she received 19.7 million shares of Amazon worth $36.8 billion. She instantly became the world’s third-richest woman, and Jeff Bezos remained the world’s wealthiest man.75 While local newspapers are shutting down or being gobbled up all over the country, Bezos personally purchased the 140-year-old Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. Now Bezos, like the Walton family, can use his sub- stantial wealth to obtain political ends that protect his wealth and allow Amazon to continue to grow.
We first heard the term “destroy the administrative state” when Steve Bannon used it in 2015 and 2016. Bannon, a close advisor to Trump, viewed the federal government as a danger to life and liberty. Now, Trump supporters echo that language, and it still sounds bizarre. They may be relying on Social Security and Medicare, they may be drinking clean water and breathing fresh air thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, they may enjoy daily safety and security thanks to federal regulations, but they are prepared to toss all of it overboard.
They want to get the administrative state out of our lives, except that they don’t. They want the state to control women’s bodies, to limit parental rights to seek medical care for their children, and to control what we can read and what entertainment we can see. They want frozen embryos and fetuses in utero to be declared children, with all the rights of personhood. They want women and girls to be forced to give birth, even if their pregnancy was caused by rape or uncest, even if it endangers the woman’s life, even if the fetus has fatal deficiencies.
No organization has been more influential than the Heritage Foundation in stoking hostility to the Federal government. This venerable D.C. think tank is now planning the second Trump administration.
Here is another link. The section on the federal role in education starts on page 351.
Trump’s allies believe that his ambitious goals in his first term were stymied by career bureaucrats. So they recommend that his first act must be to reorganize the civil service, removing job protections from civil servants, enabling Trump to replace civil servants with Trump loyalists. It’s worth remembering that the civil service was created to eliminate the “spoils system,” the routine practice of filling government jobs with political cronies. Every president currently has thousands of political jobs to fill, but the core functions of government are staffed by experienced civil servants who serve regardless of the party in power.
The Heritage plan would enhance the powers of the President. Every government agency would be staffed by his loyalists. The Justice Department would no longer enjoy a measure of independence; instead it would serve the President. If he wanted to use it to persecute his political enemies, he could. He could carry out his pledges to jail Hillary Clinton and the Biden family. His Justice Department, led by a Trump attorney (Jeff Clark? Robert Hur? Alina Habba?) would follow proper procedures, arrest Trump’s enemies, and charge them with something or other.
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 ideas contained in Heritage’s coffee table-ready book are both ambitious and parochial, a mix of longstanding 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.
There are proposals to have the Pentagon “abolish” its recent diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, what the project calls the “woke” agenda, and reinstate service members discharged for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine.
As Politico described it, the Project 2025 plan is the product of numerous rightwing groups that are seeking to roll back nothing less than 100 years of what they see as liberal encroachment on Washington. They want to overturn what began as Woodrow Wilson’s creation of a federal administrative elite and later grew into a vast, unaccountable and mostly liberal bureaucracy (as conservatives view it) under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, numbering about two and a quarter million federal workers today. They aim to defund the Department of Justice, dismantle the FBI, break up the Department of Homeland Security and eliminate the Departments of Education and Commerce, to name just a few of their larger targets. They want to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.
And they want to ensure that what remains of this slashed-down bureaucracy is reliably MAGA conservative — not just for the next president but for a long time to come — and that the White House maintains total control of it. In an effort to implement this agenda — which relies on another Reagan-era idea, the controversial “unitary theory” of the Constitution under which Article II gives the president complete power over the federal bureaucracy— Dans has formed a committee to recruit what he calls “conservative warriors” through bar associations and state attorneys general offices and install them in general counsel offices throughout the federal bureaucracy.
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times reports on Elon Musk’s latest foray into disrupting the lives of other people. He’s suing to destroy the National Labor Relations Board because it is weighing in on his company’s decision to fire some workers.
We are witnessing the accelerated rollback of the New Deal and the past nine decades of progressive reforms.
He writes:
Few business leaders have taken to heart more than Elon Musk the old lawyer’s saw that if you don’t have the facts or the law on your side at trial, pound the table.
Musk has truculently flouted regulatory standards of all varieties as the guiding spirit of companies such as Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX — keeping factories open despite pandemic shutdown orders, allegedly committing securities fraud by issuing misleading tweets about his investment plans and ignoring government safety recommendations for self-driving automotive technologies.
Now he’s trying what may be his most audacious flip-off to regulators yet:
Faced with an accusation by the National Labor Relations Board that SpaceX improperly fired nine employees in 2022, among other illegal acts, the company, which is controlled by Musk, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas to declare the NLRB’s action — indeed, the board itself — unconstitutional.
Now he’s trying what may be his most audacious flip-off to regulators yet:
Faced with an accusation by the National Labor Relations Board that SpaceX improperly fired nine employees in 2022, among other illegal acts, the company, which is controlled by Musk, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Texas to declare the NLRB’s action — indeed, the board itself — unconstitutional.
There’s more to it than that, however. The SpaceX lawsuit takes direct aim at the very enforcement structure of the NLRB, through which appointed administrative law judges weigh unfair labor practice charges laid against employers and recommend penalties to be imposed by the board itself.
The company’s argument is that because the judges are largely immune from being fired other than “for good cause,” their role in enforcement deprives accused parties of their constitutional right to trial by jury.
It also asserts that the board’s power to act as judge and jury in employment cases and the members’ immunity from being removed by the president violates the separation of powers principle in the Constitution. In sum, SpaceX claims that it’s being held “subject to unlawful proceedings before an unconstitutionally structured agency.”
More such claims are in the offing from businesses facing regulatory scrutiny. According to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg, grocery chain Trader Joe’s made the same argument at a Jan. 16 NLRB hearing on charges that it engaged in illegal union-busting by retaliating against unionization advocates among its workers.
What are these companies up to? The SpaceX claims are unusual, but they’re not unique in recent regulatory litigation. Similar claims have been brought against the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“This is an effort by a group of lawyers who are foes of the administrative state and the New Deal-era legislation that created the NLRB and the SEC to essentially end enforcement of those statutes,” says Catherine Fisk, an employment and labor law authority at UC Berkeley law school.
Unable to challenge the laws themselves — they’ve been upheld by Supreme Court decisions dating back to the 1930s — or the regulations directly, Fisk told me, “they’re arguing that the administrative structure is in some part unconstitutional.”
Before delving into the details of the SpaceX lawsuit, let’s examine the NLRB’s enforcement case. The agency says SpaceX illegally fired the nine workers for circulating an open lettercomplaining about Musk’s “repeated conduct of issuing inappropriate, disparaging, sexually charged comments on Twitter,” which he owns. The silence of SpaceX management about Musk’s conduct, the letter said, allowed a “culture of sexism, harassment and discrimination” to “pervade … the workplace.”
The NLRB filed a formal complaint against SpaceX on Jan. 3, encompassing not only the firings but charges that it illegally interrogated workers and conducted illegal surveillance of their activities. The agency scheduled a hearing on the charges before an administrative law judge for March 5 in Los Angeles.
The very next day, SpaceX filed its lawsuit.
By some measures, SpaceX’s response to the NLRB charges might be interpreted as overkill. Even if it’s found to have committed all the violations, the consequences are meager. The NLRB can’t levy monetary fines.
It can order back pay and reinstatement for workers who have been wrongly discharged, but those wouldn’t make much of a dent in the finances of a company that was reported to have brought in $8 billion in revenue last year from government and commercial contracts.
Moreover, SpaceX hasn’t yet come before an administrative law judge over the NLRB charges, much less having them voted on by the full board. Its lawsuit, then, looks like a shot across the NLRB’s bow. The company asks the trial judge in Texas to block the NLRB’s case against it, declare that the NLRB’s structure is unconstitutional, and permanently prohibit the agency from pursuing unfair labor practice charges via administrative law judges.
That points to the conclusion that this case, and others like it, aim to exploit the veer to the right seen throughout the federal judiciary generally and the Supreme Court in particular.
This variety of attack on regulations went out of fashion in the 1930s, Fisk observes. The Supreme Court, which had overturned a sheaf of New Deal initiatives as well as state minimum wage laws, turned back to the middle in the face of rising public disdain and the court-packing scheme of Franklin Roosevelt.
FDR ultimately abandoned his proposal, but after 1936 the court ceased ruling against the New Deal — upholding the National Labor Relations Act, which created the NLRB, in 1937.
“For 85 years, those arguments weren’t made,” Fisk says, “because lawyers knew that they would get nowhere with them — they might even get sanctioned. The Supreme Court signaled that it was up to Congress to design regulatory structures.”
But today’s Supreme Court isn’t your great-grandfather’s Supreme Court. “The Supreme Court has given lawyers reason to think that they might be able to invalidate part or all of these statutes as being unconstitutional.”
As recently as last week, a majority of justices appeared ready to overturn or at least pare back the so-called Chevron doctrine, the nearly 40-year-old principle that courts should defer to agencies’ interpretations of their governing laws as long as those interpretations aren’t plainly unreasonable.
Overturning the doctrine, as industry litigants urged the court to do during oral arguments Jan. 17, could sap regulatory agencies’ ability to base their rule-making on expert advice.
Although Congress could theoretically overcome any regulatory problems created by an adverse court ruling by amending the laws in question, that’s not a good bet given the profound dysfunction reigning these days on Capitol Hill. The industries will have achieved their goals for years into the future.
That brings us to Musk’s litigation strategy. SpaceX filed its lawsuit against the NLRB not in Southern California, where the company is headquartered, or Washington, D.C., where the NLRB maintains its main office, but in federal court in Brownsville, Texas, a judicial outpost on the Mexican border. This reflects the practice of filing anti-government lawsuits in remote federal courtrooms in Texas, where plaintiffs have a good chance of drawing a right-wing judge.
On the face of it, that tactic may have failed in this case, because the Brownsville court has two judges, one of whom was appointed by Donald Trump and the other by Barack Obama, and the SpaceX case was assigned to Rolando Olvera, who was Obama’s appointee.
SpaceX, however, is playing a longer game. Any appeal from the Texas federal court would go to the extremely conservative U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which I’ve described in the past as “the hackiest of hack-ridden federal courts.”
The New Orleans-based appellate court upheld Texas’ malevolent SB 8 antiabortion law in 2022, for example, after which the Supreme Court allowed the law to go into effect.
Last year it partially endorsed a ruling by federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas narrowing access to the abortion drug mifepristone. Kacsmaryk’s ruling was based on a tendentious and long-abandoned reading of an antique 1873 law, but that was enough for the issue to come before the Supreme Court, which has the case on its docket this year.
More to the point, the 5th Circuit has implicitly endorsed the practice of challenging regulations by taking aim at the constitutionality of regulatory agencies. It did so in a case targeting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau brought by the payday lending industry, which has long been in the CFPB’s crosshairs.
A 5th Circuit panel composed of three Trump-appointed judges ruled the bureau’s funding mechanism unconstitutional; the government appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments on Oct. 3 but hasn’t yet ruled….
The NLRB has called foul on SpaceX’s choice of venue, calling the company’s rationale for filing in Brownsville “less than paper thin.” The allegedly unlawful conduct of SpaceX took place entirely at the company’s headquarters in the Southern California enclave of Hawthorne, and nothing actually happened in Texas. The government has asked Olvera to transfer the case to federal court in Los Angeles, but he hasn’t yet ruled.
Put it all together, and the SpaceX lawsuit bears watching.
As I’ve written before, conservative federal judges, many of them appointed by Trump, have the power to move the country to the far right for decades to come, eroding reproductive health care, eviscerating gun control laws and making life more difficult for ordinary Americans depending on the federal government to protect their rights. Elon Musk, pursuing his own personal interests, is urging them to keep at it.
This excellent article in The Atlantic by Rogé Karma should be widely read. Something changed radically in our economy and our society in the past several decades, limiting access to “the American Dream.” He explores the reasons why.
He writes:
If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than their parents; among those born in 1980, just 50 percent did. Over the course of a few decades, the chances of achieving the American dream went from a near-guarantee to a coin flip.
What happened?
One answer is that American voters abandoned the system that worked for their grandparents. From the 1940s through the ’70s, sometimes called the New Deal era, U.S. law and policy were engineered to ensure strong unions, high taxes on the rich, huge public investments, and an expanding social safety net. Inequality shrank as the economy boomed. But by the end of that period, the economy was faltering, and voters turned against the postwar consensus. Ronald Reagan took office promising to restore growth by paring back government, slashing taxes on the rich and corporations, and gutting business regulations and antitrust enforcement. The idea, famously, was that a rising tide would lift all boats. Instead, inequality soared while living standards stagnated and life expectancy fell behind that of peer countries. No other advanced economy pivoted quite as sharply to free-market economics as the United States, and none experienced as sharp a reversal in income, mobility, and public-health trends as America did. Today, a child born in Norway or the United Kingdom has a far better chance of outearning their parents than one born in the U.S.
This story has been extensively documented. But a nagging puzzle remains. Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it?
Since 2016, policy makers, scholars, and journalists have been scrambling to answer those questions as they seek to make sense of the rise of Donald Trump—who declared, in 2015, “The American dream is dead”—and the seething discontent in American life. Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.
“The American landscape was once graced with resplendent public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands of swimmers at a time,” writes Heather McGhee, the former president of the think tank Demos, in her 2021 book, The Sum of Us. In many places, however, the pools were also whites-only. Then came desegregation. Rather than open up the pools to their Black neighbors, white communities decided to simply close them for everyone. For McGhee, that is a microcosm of the changes to America’s political economy over the past half century: White Americans were willing to make their own lives materially worse rather than share public goods with Black Americans.
From the 1930s until the late ’60s, Democrats dominated national politics. They used their power to pass sweeping progressive legislation that transformed the American economy. But their coalition, which included southern Dixiecrats as well as northern liberals, fractured after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” exploited that rift and changed the electoral map. Since then, no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote.
Crucially, the civil-rights revolution also changed white Americans’ economic attitudes. In 1956, 65 percent of white people said they believed the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living. By 1964, that number had sunk to 35 percent. Ronald Reagan eventually channeled that backlash into a free-market message by casting high taxes and generous social programs as funneling money from hardworking (white) Americans to undeserving (Black) “welfare queens.” In this telling, which has become popular on the left, Democrats are the tragic heroes. The mid-century economy was built on racial suppression and torn apart by racial progress. Economic inequality was the price liberals paid to do what was right on race.
The New York Times writer David Leonhardt is less inclined to let liberals off the hook. His new book, Ours Was the Shining Future, contends that the fracturing of the New Deal coalition was about more than race. Through the ’50s, the left was rooted in a broad working-class movement focused on material interests. But at the turn of the ’60s, a New Left emerged that was dominated by well-off college students. These activists were less concerned with economic demands than issues like nuclear disarmament, women’s rights, and the war in Vietnam. Their methods were not those of institutional politics but civil disobedience and protest. The rise of the New Left, Leonhardt argues, accelerated the exodus of white working-class voters from the Democratic coalition…
McGhee’s and Leonhardt’s accounts might appear to be in tension, echoing the “race versus class” debate that followed Trump’s victory in 2016. In fact, they’re complementary. As the economist Thomas Piketty has shown, since the’60s, left-leaning parties in most Western countries, not just the U.S., have become dominated by college-educated voters and lost working-class support. But nowhere in Europe was the backlash quite as immediate and intense as it was in the U.S. A major difference, of course, is the country’s unique racial history.
The 1972 election might have fractured the Democratic coalition, but that still doesn’t explain the rise of free-market conservatism. The new Republican majority did not arrive with a radical economic agenda. Nixon combined social conservatism with a version of New Deal economics. His administration increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, raised the capital-gains tax, and created the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, laissez-faire economics remained unpopular. Polls from the ’70s found that most Republicans believed that taxes and benefits should remain at present levels, and anti-tax ballot initiatives failed in several states by wide margins. Even Reagan largely avoided talking about tax cuts during his failed 1976 presidential campaign. The story of America’s economic pivot still has a missing piece.
According to the economic historian Gary Gerstle’s 2022 book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, that piece is the severe economic crisis of the mid-’70s. The 1973 Arab oil embargo sent inflation spiraling out of control. Not long afterward, the economy plunged into recession. Median family income was significantly lower in 1979 than it had been at the beginning of the decade, adjusting for inflation. “These changing economic circumstances, coming on the heels of the divisions over race and Vietnam, broke apart the New Deal order,” Gerstle writes. (Leonhardt also discusses the economic shocks of the ’70s, but they play a less central role in his analysis.)
Free-market ideas had been circulating among a small cadre of academics and business leaders for decades—most notably the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman. The ’70s crisis provided a perfect opening to translate them into public policy, and Reagan was the perfect messenger. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” he declared in his 1981 inaugural address. “Government is the problem.”
Part of Reagan’s genius was that the message meant different things to different constituencies. For southern whites, government was forcing school desegregation. For the religious right, government was licensing abortion and preventing prayer in schools. And for working-class voters who bought Reagan’s pitch, a bloated federal government was behind their plummeting economic fortunes…
The top marginal income-tax rate was 70 percent when Reagan took office and 28 percent when he left. Union membership shriveled. Deregulation led to an explosion of the financial sector, and Reagan’s Supreme Court appointments set the stage for decades of consequential pro-business rulings. None of this, Gerstle argues, was preordained. The political tumult of the ’60s helped crack the Democrats’ electoral coalition, but it took the unusual confluence of a major economic crisis and a talented political communicator to create a new consensus. By the ’90s, Democrats had accommodated themselves to the core tenets of the Reagan revolution. President Bill Clinton further deregulated the financial sector, pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement, and signed a bill designed to “end welfare as we know it.” Echoing Reagan, in his 1996 State of the Union address, Clinton conceded: “The era of big government is over.”
In the remainder of the article, the author says that the nation is at an inflection point, ready for a change. But what that change will be determined by voters next year.
The Washington Post identifies a serious problem with home schooling: No one is monitoring the well-being of children. In public schools, teachers and staff are designated reporters of children’s physical health; if they see signs of abuse, they are legally bound to report it to authorities. In home schooling, child abuse may be hidden. Read this horrifying story and bear in mind that some states are paying parents to keep their children home instead of sending them to school.
His family had searched, taping hand-drawn “missing” posters to telephone poles and driving the streets calling out the 11-year-olds name. So had many of his neighbors, their flashlights sweeping over the sidewalks as the winter darkness settled on the Sierra Nevada foothills.
The police were searching, too, and nowthey had returned to the place where Roman had gone missing earlier that day: his family’s rented home in Placerville, Calif. Roman’s stepmother, Lindsay Piper, hesitated when officers showed up at her door the night of Jan. 11, 2020, asking to comb the house again. But she had told them that Roman liked to hide in odd places — even the clothes dryer — and agreed to let them in.
Brock Garvin, Roman’s 15-year-old stepbrother, was sitting in the dimly lit basement when police came downstairs shortly after 10:30 p.m. He ignored them, he said later, watching “Supernatural” on television as three officers began inspecting the black-and-yellow Home Depot storage bins stacked along the back wall.
Brock had no idea what had happened to Roman. But he did know something the police did not: Much of what his mother had said to them that day was a lie.
When she reported Roman’s disappearance, Piper told the police she was home schooling the eight kids in her household. This was technically true. It was also a ruse.
Most schoolshave teachers, principals, guidance counselors — professionals trained to recognize the unexplained bruises or erratic behaviors that may point to an abusive parent. Home education was an easy way to avoid the scrutiny of such people. That was the case for Piper, whose children were learning less from her about math and history than they were about violence, cruelty and neglect.
Left to their own devices while she lay in bed watching TV crime procedurals, and her husband, Jordan, worked long hours as a utility lineman, their days and nights passed in a penumbral blur of video games, microwave dinners and fistfights. Almost nothing resembling education took place,her sons said. But there was a shared project in which she diligently led her children: the torture of their stepbrother, Roman.
Roman had been a loving, extroverted 7-year-old who obsessed over dinosaurs when Piper came into his life, a mama’s boy perpetually in search of a mother as Jordan, his father, cycled from one broken relationship to the next.
On the day he was reported missing, he was a sixth-graderwho weighed only 42 pounds. He had been locked in closets, whipped with extension cords and bound with zip ties, according to police reports and interviews with family members who witnessed his treatment. Unwilling to give him even short breaks from his isolation, Piper kept him in diapers.
The Washington Post reconstructed Piper’s torment of her stepson from hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed law enforcement records, as well as interviews with two of her four biological children, other relatives, friends of the family, neighbors and police officers.
Piper, 41, who is in prison, did not respond to two letters requesting comment for this story. Her former public defender did not return calls or emails. Jordan Piper, 38, also in prison, declined a request to comment through his attorney.
Little research exists on the links between home schooling and child abuse. The few studies conducted in recent years have not shown that home-schooled children are at significantly greater risk of mistreatment than those who attend public, private or charter schools.
But the research also suggests that when abuse does occur in home-school families, it can escalate into especially severe forms — and that some parents exploit lax home education laws to avoid contact with social service agencies.
In 2014, a group of pediatricians published a study of more than two dozen tortured children treated at medical centers in Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, Utah and Washington. Among the 17 victims old enough to attend school, eight were home-schooled.
After a home-schooling mother killed her autistic teenager, government analysts in Connecticut gathered data from six school districts over three years. Their report, released in 2018 by the state’s Office of the Child Advocate, found that 138 of the 380 students withdrawn from public schools for home education during that period lived in households with at least one prior complaint of suspected abuse or neglect.
Child-welfare advocates have long pushed fora minimal level of oversight for home-schooled students — calls that have grown more urgent as home schooling has exploded, becoming the country’s fastest growing form of education.But home-school parents, arguing that serious episodes of abuse are rare, have fiercely resisted. And nowhere have their efforts been more successful than in the state where Roman and his siblings spent most of their lives: Michigan.
Michigan is one of 11 states in which parents are not even required to tell anyone they are home schooling, let alone demonstrate they are teaching their children anything. Its lack of regulation, the result of a 1993 state Supreme Court decision still celebrated by home-school advocates, has repeatedly concealed the actions of abusive parents like Piper.
“She told people we were home-schooled, but we weren’t,” Carson Garvin, one of Roman’s stepbrothers, now 16, later wrote in a victim impact statement. “Now I can see it wasn’t for us that she made this decision. It was to protect herself from the school counselors and staff. I believe that if we had went to school that someone would have had a feeling that something was off and that she would have been reported at some point.”
Despite what Piper told the police, Roman had never really liked hiding. The truth was that he had been hidden. And home schooling is what allowed her to hide him.
As Brock Garvin sat in the basement watching TV on the night of Roman’s disappearance, listening to the police officers banter as they opened the Tough Storage Tote bins, he was in a fog. He had been up all night playing “Dark Souls” on his Xbox, and was upset that he hadn’t been allowed to sleep for most of the day, as he usually did.
He was also jarred by the entrance of unknown grown-ups into the house. The family had moved to California from Michigan just a few months earlier. Long isolated, they were now strangers to everyone around them.
But Brock wasn’t worried about Roman. If his stepbrother had run away, whatever he found could hardly be worse than what he had escaped.
Then the lid on one last bin snapped open, and the officers’ laughter stopped.
Even in his benumbed state Brock felt something strange pass through the room, as if the air pressure had suddenly dropped. It was quiet for a moment, then the police began pulling on latex gloves.
‘I’ll behave’
Romanloved beingalive. It was a strange thing to say about an infant, but that was Jennifer Morasco’s first impression of the sunny 5-month-old boy who would become her stepson when she married Jordan Piper in 2010.
“He’d be teething, but he wouldn’t cry,” recalled Morasco, now 41. “He was just so happy to be in existence, and loved being around people and doing stuff with everyone.”
Roman’s mother, Rochelle Lopez, was a soldier who deployed to Iraq when he was 14 months old. After returning, she struggled with heart problems, anxiety and addiction to pain medication, according to police records. Lopez, who died in 2021 at age 34, fought with Jordan in court for years over custody of Roman.
But none of that seemed to weigh on the boy that Morasco largely raised until he was about 4 years old. Morasco still remembers the lyrics to “Life is a Highway,” a song from Roman’s favorite movie, “Cars,” that he sang over and over. Another favorite was “Rainbow Connection,” the banjo-accompanied Muppet ode to life’s unfulfilled promises.
“He thought he was Kermit the Frog, essentially,” Morasco said.
Even after Morasco left Jordan Piper, she kept in touch with Roman, calling every year on his birthday. But in 2016, Jordan wasn’t picking up his phone, so she tried sending a Facebook message to Roman’s new stepmom, asking her to tell him “he is loved all the way to the moon and back.”
Lindsay Piper reacted harshly, warning Morasco not to contact her again and boasting that Roman “has excelled in ways I can’t begin to explain.”
Piper herself had barely graduated high school, according to her sister, Chanel Campbell. Her interest was never in academics; it was in babies. It wasn’t an unusual fixation for a young girl, but there was something off-kilter about the intensity that Lindsay brought to her aspirations of motherhood, her sister said.
“She carried a baby doll around with her until she was, like, 12,” said Campbell, who was raised with her sister in and around Flint. “She just had this fascination with baby dolls and dressing them up and changing them and putting them in diapers.” This treatment extended to the family’s miniature schnauzer, which Lindsay forced into footed pajamas.
By the time she married Jordan Piper, Lindsay had four children of her own. Their father, Marcus Garvin, was an infantryman in the Army and Army National Guard. He returned from his service in Iraq to years of marital turmoil with Lindsay, who eventually gained full custody of their children. After marrying Jordan, she became the parent of a fifth: her stepson, Roman.
In Piper’s frequent Facebook posts, they were a happily blended family, all beaming smiles and matching flannel shirts. But Campbell knew this image was no more real than the dolls her sister had once carried around. At family gatherings, Piper’s children tended to run wild, and she responded in disturbing ways: pinching them, or biting them on their forearms. When Campbell protested, she said, her sister would storm off.
Reached by phone, Piper’s mother, the guardian of Carson’s twin brother, initially said she would consider speaking to The Post but did not respond to subsequent calls or text messages. Piper’s eldest daughter, now 21, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Shortly after her marriage to Jordan, Piper started to complain about her boys’ experience at their elementary school.
“She said, ‘I’m just going to home-school them. I’m tired of the teachers singling them out. I’m tired of everyone picking on them,’” Campbell recalled. “I thought to myself, ‘You’re definitely right. We’ve got a problem here. But home schooling isn’t going to be the answer to it.’”
Between late 2016 and the summer of 2017, Piper withdrew the children from school, Brock and Carson said. With the exception of a few brief interludes when they were sent back for days or weeks, they would not regularly attend school again for the next five years.
At first, they sporadically logged on to an online learning program, Brock and Carson recalled. Then any pretense of education was dropped.
Piper spent the day watching “Criminal Minds” and “Law & Order,” her sons said, and in the evenings, when Jordan returned from work, the couple would sit around drinking Jack Daniels.
By this time, the family had moved to Gaines, a tiny town amid soybean fields about 20 miles southwest of Flint. At midday, the sound of children at recess echoed past their house from the elementary school three blocks away. But for Piper’s kids, the high-pitched laughter and shouting might as well have come from another planet.
“My world got very, very small,” recalled Brock, who was then 12. “I wouldn’t see the sun or moon. I would just be in my room 24/7.” He at least had his Xbox; Carson had his twin brother. Roman had nothing and nobody, because the things thatmade him human were methodically stripped away.
It happened slowly, his stepbrothers said. Early on, when the boys scuffled, Piper blamed Roman, the one to whom she had not given birth, punishing him with lengthy timeouts. Then she began locking the door to his room. Then she began covering his window with a blanket.
“He would sit in the dark on his bed all day. And she would have us, like, scratch on the walls and make creepy noises so he’d think there’s demons trying to kill him,” said Brock, who expressed deep regret about participating. “He’d sit there and scream, like, ‘Stop it, please’ or ‘I’ll behave’ … that was his life.”
Soon there was no disciplinary pretext for the harm inflicted on Roman, Carson and Brock said. It was simply what the family did. Piper ordered her sons to join in when she whipped him with phone charger cords. Roman began trying to escape, so she tied him down. She took away his clothes. Most of her kids were overweight, but Roman was put on something worse than a starvation diet.
“She would feed him oatmeal with huge amounts of salt in it,” Carson said. “He puked it up, so he wouldn’t have to keep eating it. And she would make him eat his puke.”
Campbell suspected there was something badly wrong inside her sister’s house. She said that after seeing bruises on Roman’s face at a Christmas get-together in 2016, she called child protective services.
She made two follow-up calls, she said, but could never determine whether any action was taken. Police later said they found no records of CPS investigations into Piper’s treatment of Roman. A spokesman for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services — which oversees such investigations — declined to comment, citing the confidentiality of child-welfare cases.
Roman kept appearing in Piper’s Facebook photos, increasingly wraithlike beside his grinning siblings.
“He was just lifeless, just sad. You could just see it in his face, aside from the puffy eyes and the bruising on his forehead,” Campbell said. “The love had been sucked out of him.”
It seemed unimaginable that a child could fall so completely through the safety net because a parent like Piper decided to home-school. But in Michigan, it had happened before.
‘A shield for child abuse’
About two years before Roman was withdrawn from school, an eviction crew entered Mitchelle Blair’s Detroit apartment on March 24, 2015. The 35-year-old mother of four wasn’t home, so they began removing her furniture. But their work came to an abrupt halt when they opened a deep freezer in the living room: inside were the bodies of two children.
Stoni Blair and Stephen Berry — estimated to have been ages 13 and 9 when their mother killed them — had been pulled out of Detroit public schools with their siblings two years earlier. During Blair’s conviction and sentencing to life in prison for first-degree murder, it emerged that she had burned her children with scalding water and beaten them with wooden planks.
She also claimed to be home-schooling them.
Stephanie Chang, then a freshman Democratic state representative whose district included the site of the murders, was horrified by the case. She was also alarmed by what she perceived as a yawning gap in the state’s child protection system.
It wasn’t just Stoni and Stephen. Seven years earlier, there had been Calista Springer, a home-schooled 16-year-old who died in a house fire in Centreville, Mich., unable to free herself from a choke chain her parents used to tie her to her bed. Marsha and Anthony Springer were convicted of torture and child abuse and sentenced to lengthy prison sentences.
Chang understood such cases didn’t represent most children’s home-schooling experiences. But she also believed abusive parents were taking advantage of Michigan’s absence of any notification or monitoring requirements for home educators, with devastating consequences.
“There are so many amazing home-school parents who I have so much respect for. But when people use home schooling as a shield for child abuse, that’s not acceptable,” said Chang, now a state senator. “That lack of a notification requirement creates an environment where parents can basically just do whatever they want.”
It is a concern that extends beyond Michigan, and that pediatricians share with politicians….
A month after Mitchelle Blair’s children were discovered dead in Detroit, Chang introduced a bill requiring that parents notify their local school district of a decision to home-school and that home-schooled children meet at least twice a year with a mandated child abuse reporter, such as a teacher, doctor or psychologist.
“It’s such a common-sense thing, in my view,” Chang said.
The state board of education in Michigan endorsed the legislation. But the possibility of any oversight infuriated home-schoolers, and they organized to defeat Chang’s modest proposal.
The story goes on to explain that Roman died of salt poisoning. He was 11, but weighed the same as a six-year-old.
When the older boys were returned to their biological father in Michigan, who had not seen them for years, he insisted on sending them to public school.
His parents were arrested and jailed in California for second degree murder. The mother has been sentenced to a term of 15 years to life. Roman’s father awaits sentencing.
In the face of such horrifying stories, it is incomprehensible that state officials do not pass laws to regulate home schooling: first, to check in the health of the children, and second, to determine whether they are learning anything. A parent with several children, like the one in this story, could collect almost $60,000 a year from the state in Florida or in other states where vouchers go to unregulated home schooling parents.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, noticed that the Carnegie Unit is under fire. Do you know what a Carnegie Unit is? It’s a measure of time spent learning a subject. Here’s the definition on the website of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching:
The unit was developed in 1906 as a measure of the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in one subject—meeting 4 or 5 times a week for 40 to 60 minutes, for 36 to 40 weeks each year—earns the student one “unit” of high school credit. Fourteen units were deemed to constitute the minimum amount of preparation that could be interpreted as “four years of academic or high school preparation.”
The scant coverage of this initiative—and the limited number of players involved—implies that many see this as just a technocratic reform, one that merely seeks to replace “credit hours” with mastery-based approaches to learning. Don’t be mistaken: If it gets traction, this move is likely to spark a battle royale that will make the Common Core wars look like child’s play.
While recognizing the Carnegie Unit – where graduation standards are driven by time in class and credits earned – is flawed, Petrilli correctly argues “we can’t just focus on ‘disrupting’ the current system.” Moreover, he says the heart of this disruptive model would be “a lot more high-stakes testing.”
Petrilli notes that a rapid, digital transformation of schooling “has huge potential upsides for high-achieving students.” Even though Petrilli was one of the true believers in college-readiness who pushed Common Core without, I believe, adequately thinking ahead, he now asks whether they should set the graduation bar “at the ‘college-ready’ level” if that “means denying a diploma to millions of young people who are nowhere near that bar today and not likely to clear it tomorrow?” For instance:
How do we deal with the enormous variation in student readiness upon arrival in high school? Will the new system allow students prepared to tackle advanced material to do so, even if it means further stratification along line(s) of achievement, race, and/or class?
In 2019, Chalkbeat reported on the slow growth and mixed successes and setbacks of Jobs’ innovation schools. Back then, Matt Barnum wrote, “what kinds of change, exactly, XQ wants people to get behind remains unclear to some.” And he quoted Larry Cuban on the number of schools that abandoned the effort, “To have that kind of mortality rate at the end of three years — that would strike me as high given that huge amount of money.”
And, I’d certainly worry about transformative changes, such as those pioneered in Rhode Island, that are “driven” by XQ’s Educational Opportunity Audit (EOA). Given the failure of data-driven reformers’ efforts to create reliable and valid metrics for measuring classroom learning “outputs,” it’s hard to imagine how they could evaluate the learning produced by the large (perhaps limitless?) number of their untested approaches.
I followed the few links to Tulsa’s experiment, under Deborah Gist, to “re-imagine” high schools.” In 2019, the district received $3.5 million for three schools for “Tulsa Beyond,” using a “nationwide high school redesign model,” which was “funded through Bloomberg Philanthropies and XQ Super Schools.” It would be hard to evaluate any reforms’ outcomes during the Covid years and today’s rightwing attacks. But, then again, those reforms were based on the claim that data-driven accountability can do more measurable good than harm.
Only two of the three Tulsa schools have published state “grades” before and after their experiment. Daniel Webster H.S received a “D” in both 2017-2018, and a “D” in 2021-2022. Nathan Hale H.S received an “F” in both years. Again, I don’t have data to make a serious evaluation of the Tulsa reforms, but it is the corporate reformers who have promised a method of evaluating them. And they should carry the burden of proof, as opposed to dumping the costs of failed gambles on students.
Petrilli’s article, and the sources he cited, convinced me that the push to replace the current system without learning the lessons of edu-political history and adequately planning for a post-Carnegie Unit era is extremely worrisome. I checked with another corporate reformer who I have opposed, but also respect, about the lessons of history that mastery-learning advocates should consider. He said, “Nothing ever gets learned.” Given the failed track record of the disruptive change, as well as Petrilli’s advocacy for it, we need to pay attention when he goes on record saying that the under-reported story of “‘multiple pathways’—via multiple diplomas” could create “multiple pitfalls.”
Peter Greene writes faster than most people can read, and what he writes is always worth reading. In this article, he describes a remarkable occurrence: the pro-charter Thomas B. Fordham Institute debunked a study by charter advocates claiming that deregulation spurs innovation in the charter sector.
In his latest article, Greene writes:
It’s an ordinary day when a pair of charter school boosters conclude that charters work best when mean old government doesn’t make them follow a bunch of rules and stuff. It is an ordinary day when someone points out they’re full of regular non-innovative baloney. It is a less ordinary day when the baloney is being called out by a piece in the house organ of the Thomas Fordham Institute.
So let’s pretend for a moment that the question of regulations vs. charter innovation is a real question. David Griffith, the Fordham Associate Director of Research, frames this as the old tension between autonomy and accountability, which makes more sense than talking about charter school innovation, because after a few decades of charter proliferation, the amount of innovation they have produced is somewhere between jack and squat. Despite being billed as “laboratories of innovation,” charter schools haven’t come up with much of anything that public schools were not already well aware of.
The study argues for less regulation of charters. Greene responds:
The more regulation, the less innovatiness in charter schools. For charter fans, it’s simple–more options means they can move more product, and while I get their point, it is also true that we would have far more innovation in the food industry without all those government regulations about poison and stuff.
The study was thoroughly demolished by David Griffith, Fordham’s associate director of research.
Greene writes:
Griffith makes a similar observation. Their technique of quantifying “innovation” gives the charter points for being unusual, and that’s problematic:
From a purely normative perspective, an obvious problem with the authors’ approach is that it is content neutral. So, for example, a school that was grounded in Satan Worship would count as highly innovative (provided it didn’t start a movement), as would one that imparted no knowledge whatsoever (as seems to be the case for many virtual schools).
And he doesn’t think “innovation” means what they think it means either, noting that many of their “innovations” aren’t particularly new but instead include “longstanding programs such as Core Knowledge (est. 1986), Waldorf (1919), and Montessori (1907), not to mention “single-sex” education (Harvard, circa 1636) and “project-based” learning (the Pleistocene).” (That is Griffith’s snark there, not mine).
Kudos to David Griffith and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Child labor laws have been in place for more than a century. Republican-controlled states are weakening so that children are “free” to earn some money. Florida is the latest state to entertain the idea that children need “freedom” to work, not protection from dangerous working conditions. This is not progress. This is turning back the clock.
A proposed Republican bill to loosen child labor laws in Florida is part of a national trend aimed at repealing or weakening workplace protections for young people that have been in place for more than 100 years.
The bill could worsen graduation rates and hurt lower-income families, experts said, and could also be a way to replace some immigrant labor as Florida and other GOP-led states continue to crack down on undocumented workers.
“Are we willing to return to a world where we accept that children of the poorest families are working more than full-time jobs under hazardous conditions?” said Jennifer Sherer, director of the Economic Analysis and Research Network at the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute.
State Rep. Linda Chaney, though, said in a statement that her bill “intends to provide teenagers with the flexibility to work whatever hours they deem fits best with their schedule and financial goals.”
“Families are struggling in the worst economy in decades and I want to do what I can to help by providing opportunity,” said Chaney, R-St. Petersburg. “Government should not be in the way of people wanting to learn skills and make a living.”
The bill (HB 49) would remove all work guidelines for 16- and 17-year-olds, including the current requirements that they can’t work more than eight hours on school nights and more than 30 hours a week during the school year.
It also prevents local governments from passing ordinances stricter than state law.
In addition, the measure includes what Sherer called a “confusing” change to the language about 14- and 15-year-olds.
Where the current law states 14- and 15-year-olds “shall not” work before 7 a.m. or after 7 p.m. for more than 15 hours a week during the school year, or more than three hours per day on school days, the bill would replace “shall not” with “may not.”
Sherer said it was unclear whether the proposed language revision was meant to make work standards for younger teens “optional” rather than mandated.
Terri Gerstein, a fellow at the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School who testified before Congress earlier this year about child labor, said she couldn’t see any other reason to change it.
“To me, as a normal human being, ‘shall not’ and ‘may not’ sound like the same thing, right?” Gerstein said. But, she added, “‘shall’ is obligatory and ‘may’ is optional. … I can only infer that there’s something nefarious [going on], because otherwise, why would you change the language? It makes no sense…”
Child labor laws were one of the premier achievements of the Progressive Era of the early 1900s, when presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson helped usher in major changes to social and public policy at the state and national levels.
Florida passed laws at the time to protect children working in cigar factories and in agriculture. But now, it’s the 16th state in the past few years to have legislation filed to roll back those protections, Sherer said.
“Those are state laws that have often been in place for over a century,” Sherer said. “States began regulating child labor before the federal government did. And they play a really important role in regulating certain aspects of child labor protections that the federal government doesn’t cover.”
The most notable rollback was in Arkansas, where Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee signed the Youth Hiring Act that repealed a Progressive Era law requiring employers to verify a child’s age, acquire a permit and get parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds to work.
“The Governor believes protecting kids is most important, but this permit was an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job,” Sanders’ communications director Alexa Henning told NPR.
Iowa also passed “what is probably the most extreme bill on child labor,” Sherer said, weakening guidelines on which work is considered too dangerous for minors.
“We know that certain jobs have proven dangerous and even fatal more often for youth and teens,” Sherer said. “That’s why those restrictions were put in place decades ago. So it’s a real slippery slope.”
The changes came as the Federal Labor Department has reported a significant increase in child labor violations over the past five years, Gerstein said, including minors working the night shift or being employed at places such as poultry processing plants and construction sites.
A meat-processing plant in Minnesota paid $300,000 in penalties after an investigation showed it employed children as young as 13, while a Michigan meat plant owner pleaded guilty to employing a 17-year-old in a dangerous job. The boy’s hand was severed by a meat grinder.
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.
New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu just gave Prenda a whopping $6 million cut of the granite state’s pandemic school relief. It’s a relatively small slice (the full pile of money is $156 million), but it’s notably a larger per-pupil amount than the state gives in normal “adequate aid.” So who is Prenda, and what is the money for, exactly?
Prenda is a company riding the new microschools wave. Microschools are the next evolutionary strep in homeschooling. Says the Micro Schools Network website, “Imagine the old one-room schoolhouse. Now bring it into the modern era.” Or imagine you’re homeschooling, and a couple of neighbors ask if you’d take on their children as well. Or to look at it another way, imagine back to the beginning of a public system, only this time, your system would only include the students and families you wanted to include.
Microschools like to emphasize their modern awesomeness. From the Micro Schools Network site: While no two micro schools are identical, most share several common traits: a small student population, an innovative curriculum, place-based and experiential learning, the use of cutting-edge technology, and an emphasis on mastering or understanding material. The education that micro schools provide is highly personalized.”
The microschools movement seems marked by a lot of educational amateur columbussing–the breathless announcement of “discoveries” plenty of people already knew. Again, from the network’s website:
Teachers typically guide students’ curiosity rather than lecture at them. Instead of utilizing a fixed curriculum, they integrate subjects that students are passionate about into daily lesson plans and account for each student’s unique strengths, learning style, and existing knowledge.
Because nobody who works professionally in education ever thought of any of those things. Or you can check out a video from Prenda founder/CEO Kelly Smith in which he may tell you ecitedly about how cool it was running his own microschool and seeing students become lively and excited about something they had learned. The microschool movement seems to be very much excited about its discovery of the wheel….
Needless to say, Prenda CEO Kelly Smith is not an educator.
Prenda has said it wants to be the Uber of education, but that really only makes sense if Uber were a service where the state paid the company and then you drove (or “guided”) yourself to your destination. Prenda does exist in a grey area that allows it to escape virtually all oversight. In Arizona, they don’t need a charter, don’t have to get their curriculum approved, and are not subject to any kind of oversight or audits.
There’s no explanation out there of why Sununu decided to spend $6 million on Prenda of all things. Their administration claimed that the microschools “are particularly helpful to students who have experienced learning loss and will thrive with more individualized attention,” but when the individual attention comes from a guide with no educational training (but lots of caring) and a computer program, it’s unclear how helpful it will be. Last fall they had 400 pods of roughly ten each in action; there’s virtually no information about how well these things actually work.
And yet, New Hampshire is handing over a sweet $6 mill in federal dollars. Said Rep Mel Myler (D), member of the House Committee on Education:
Chris Sununu’s decision to use federal funds to advance his anti-public school agenda and help a shady for-profit organization, rather than providing public schools the resources they need to prepare for the next phase of the pandemic, could have serious consequences for our teachers and students.
Good luck to the children of New Hampshire.
And good luck to New Hampshire’s taxpayers, who usually expect recipients of public dollars to have some accountability.
Open the link to see who’s funding this latest “innnovation.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 