This article in Mashable contains a gripping video in which Arnold Schwarzenegger compares the Trump coup attempt to Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass.” He remembers his childhood, surrounded by broken men, swept up and destroyed by the powerful men who ruled their society.
Archives for category: Education Reform
The Houston Chronicle reported that Ted Cruz criticized Trump for the violent siege of the Capitol.
No kidding.
Even after the vandals stormed into the buildings, even after they spread feces on the floors and invaded private offices, even after five deaths, Cruz resumed his campaign to discredit Biden’s election victory. He persuaded a few other Senators and the majority of House Republicans to join him in claiming that an “audit” was needed in states that Biden won, even those states had already conducted recounts and audits.
There must be a metaphor for the role Cruz is playing: raising doubts about the elections, repeating them endlessly, stoking Trump’s claims that the election was stolen, despite ample evidence to the contrary.
“Shame on you,” Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo tweeted on Friday, saying to Cruz “You fanned the flames of mistrust and history will hold you accountable for the ensuing chaos. Outrageous!”
Cruz bears responsibility with Trump for the violence on January 6. He has blood on his hands.
The Houston Chronicle called on Ted Cruz to resign for his disgraceful behavior on January 6, and before January 6:
In Texas, we have our share of politicians who peddle wild conspiracy theories and reckless rhetoric aiming to inflame.
Think U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “terror baby” diatribes or his nonsensical vow not to wear a face mask until after he got COVID, which he promptly did.
This editorial board tries to hold such shameful specimens to account.
But we reserve special condemnation for the perpetrators among them who are of sound mind and considerable intellect — those who should damn well know better.
None more than U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
A brilliant and frequent advocate before the U.S. Supreme Court and a former Texas solicitor general, Cruz knew exactly what he was doing, what he was risking and who he was inciting as he stood on the Senate floor Wednesday and passionately fed the farce of election fraud even as a seething crowd of believers was being whipped up by President Trump a short distance away.
Cruz, it should also be noted, knew exactly whose presidency he was defending. That of a man he called in 2016 a “narcissist,” a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”
Cruz told senators that since nearly 40 percent of Americans believed the November election “was rigged” that the only remedy was to form an emergency task force to review the results — and if warranted, allow states to overturn Joe Biden’s victory and put their electoral votes in Trump’s column.
Cruz deemed people’s distrust in the election “a profound threat to the country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future.”
What he didn’t acknowledge was how that distrust, which he overstated anyway, was fueled by Trump’s torrent of fantastical claims of voter fraud that were shown again and again not to exist.
Cruz had helped spin that web of deception and now he was feigning concern that millions of Americans had gotten caught up in it.
Even as he peddled his phony concern for the integrity of our elections, he argued that senators who voted to certify Biden’s victory would be telling tens of millions of Americans to “jump in a lake” and that their concerns don’t matter.
Actually, senators who voted to certify the facts delivered the truth — something Americans haven’t been getting from a political climber whose own insatiable hunger for power led him to ride Trump’s bus to Crazy Town through 59 losing court challenges, past state counts and recounts and audits, and finally taking the wheel to drive it to the point of no return: trying to bully the U.S. Congress into rejecting tens of millions of lawfully cast votes in an election that even Trump’s Department of Homeland Security called the most secure in American history.
The consequences of Cruz’s cynical gamble soon became clear and so did his true motivations. In the moments when enraged hordes of Trump supporters began storming the Capitol to stop a steal that never happened, desecrating the building, causing the evacuation of Congress and injuring dozens of police officers, including one who died, a fundraising message went out to Cruz supporters:
“Ted Cruz here,” it read. “I’m leading the fight to reject electors from key states unless there is an emergency audit of the election results. Will you stand with me?”
Cruz claims the message was automated. Even if that’s true, it’s revolting.
This is a man who lied, unflinchingly, on national television, claiming on Hannity’s show days after the election that Philadelphia votes were being counted under a “shroud of darkness” in an attempted Democratic coup. As he spoke, the process was being livestreamed on YouTube.
For two months, Cruz joined Trump in beating the drum of election fraud until Trump loyalists were deaf to anyone — Republican, Democrat or nonpartisan journalist, not to mention state and federal courts — telling them otherwise.
And yet, Cruz insists he bears no responsibility for the deadly terror attack.
“Not remotely,” he told KHOU Thursday. “What I was doing and what the other members were doing is what we were elected to do, which is debating matters of great import in the chamber of the United States Senate.”
Since the Capitol siege, Cruz has condemned the violence, tweeting after the death of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick that “Heidi and I are lifting up in prayer” the officer’s family and demanding the terrorists be prosecuted.
Well, senator, those terrorists wouldn’t have been at the Capitol if you hadn’t staged this absurd challenge to the 2020 results in the first place. You are unlikely to be prosecuted for inciting the riots, as President Trump may yet be, and there is no election to hold you accountable until 2024. So, we call for another consequence, one with growing support across Texas: Resign.
This editorial board did not endorse you in 2018. There’s no love lost — and not much lost for Texans needing a voice in Washington, either.
Public office isn’t a college debate performance. It requires representing the interests of Texans. In your first term, you once told reporters that you weren’t concerned about delivering legislation for your constituents. The more you throw gears in the workings of Washington, you said, the more people back home love you. Tell that to the constituents who complain that your office rarely even picks up the phone.
Serving as a U.S. senator requires working constructively with colleagues to get things done. Not angering them by voting against Hurricane Sandy relief, which jeopardized Congressional support for Texas’ relief after Harvey. Not staging a costly government shutdown to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2013 that cost the economy billions. Not collecting more enemies than friends in your own party, including the affable former House Speaker John Boehner who famously remarked: “I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch in my life.”
We’re done with the drama. Done with the opportunism. Done with the cynical scheming that has now cost American lives.
Resign, Mr. Cruz, and deliver Texas from the shame of calling you our senator.
Bill Eville wrote an article about his family’s long friendship with Reverend Raphael Warnock. They became friends years ago, maintained a close relationship, and worked on his campaign.
Here is an excerpt from the account of their experiences:
One summer, about nine years ago, when my daughter was three years old and the Rev. Raphael Warnock came for his annual visit to Martha’s Vineyard, she grabbed him by the hand and led him upstairs to her room to take him on a tour of her extensive dead bug collection.
Raphael reminds us of that moment while letting on that his son, now two years old, has a dead bug collection, although his is more specific.
“Lady bugs,” Raphael says with a deep laugh. “He collects dead lady bugs.”
It is New Year’s Eve. Pickle (her nickname) is now 12 years old and instead of showing Raphael her dead bug collection she is canvassing for him every day in Atlanta, going door to door to get out the vote and help voters in his historic U.S. Senate run, to poster the streets and, at this moment, to hand him a hat and noisemaker to celebrate the New Year.
My wife, the Rev. Cathlin Baker, and Raphael have been friends since they met as Union Seminary students in the 1990s — studying together, fighting for social justice together, marching together and growing together. Their relationship deepened, along with the whole family, as Raphael came to preach at the West Tisbury Congregational Church every summer on the Vineyard, and Cathlin preached twice at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
And so when the Georgia runoff election for the U.S. Senate was announced we made the decision to drive to Atlanta to help out in any way we could. We left the day after Christmas, bringing with us family friends Kyra Whalen and Jennifer Frank.
•
Election day is five days away and we feel honored that Raphael has chosen to spend a quiet New Year’s Eve with us, along with his sister Wandetta. The windows are open, we are masked and social distanced, but we are together.
Raphael tells us stories about the campaign trail, about all the people he has met around the state, about hiring a staff and learning the ways of campaigning (his first), and the origins of his puppy commercials which went viral.
In turn we tell him about watching training videos every evening and then being deployed around the city during the day, getting out the vote and helping to counter voter suppression.
Most of the neighborhoods we visit are poor, disenfranchised places where people struggle in ways I cannot imagine. In a former life I would have avoided these neighborhoods. Now I take my children there and burst with pride as I watch my 16-year-old son Hardy walk up to a stranger’s door to encourage him to vote. I am impressed with Hardy and to be honest I am a bit impressed with myself as a parent, offering up this experience to him. But my bubble quickly pops as a hard looking young man comes to the door and tells Hardy to get off the porch in expletive-laced words.
We beat a hasty retreat.
•
That is what the ground game looks like. Moments of anger or knocking for nothing — no one home yet again — offset with moments of beauty when a woman comes to the door and you explain that her absentee ballot has been rejected for any number of reasons but here is how to fix it and she puts her hands together in prayer and thanks you.
At one house Pickle and I knock on a door and then step back to create social distance while we wait for a response. But as I step I nudge something metallic. I look down and see that I have kicked a bullet shell casing. In fact, the front yard is full of bullet shell casings. Pickle and I back away quickly and move on to the next house.
As Pickle relates this story to Raphael, he suggests that we come to Savannah for the weekend. He will hold a rally there, in his hometown, with Vice President elect Kamala Harris, among others.
•
Open the link to read the rest of the story. You will enjoy reading about election night at the Warnock headquarters. His victory was the victory of a multi-racial coalition. It might signal a new day for Georgia, a day.
Larry Cuban turned his blog over to retired Swedish teacher Sara Hjelm, a reader of his blog, who took the opportunity to warn American readers about the dangers of the free-market reforms adopted in Sweden.
Sweden adopted the “reforms” in 1992, allowing families to choose any school, public or private, and send their child there with his/her taxpayer dollars. It is the “backpack full of cash” theory behind the demand for school choice, as advocated here by Betsy DeVos and Jeanne Allen of the Center for Education Reform. The voucher system has led to a growing industry of private, for-profit schools, called “free schools.” Two of the companies that run “free schools” are listed on the stock exchange. They are comparable to our charter schools.
Hjelm writes:
The huge private for profit school companies exist on all these levels, competing for student vouchers. Largest part is in the upper secondary where more than 30% of students today attend such a free school. By cherry-picking “easy” students through aggressive marketing to parents (we offer good behavior, academic excellence, high grades, etc.) they attract students that are more or less self going and enable a profit for shareholders or owner consortiums by keeping wages low, having large groups, substituting some teaching for on-line learning, employing teachers from abroad on short term contracts and more hours of teaching, etc.
As a result real student achievements and school climate are mediocre, about the same as in municipal schools and with a considerable grade inflation to that according to PISA and national tests. Students from municipal upper secondary schools have a slightly lower grade point average than students from free upper secondary schools, but still generally show higher performance and less dropouts during the first year of higher education.
There are also plenty of examples of parents told that their child does not really fit in, that the support needed is not available and they should seek a more suitable school. With a queue system for admission on compulsory level, where you can put your baby in line at birth, they keep all groups filled. And being private businesses they only have to share whatever follow up data they choose due to international business and stock market legislation of secrecy. If a school is not as profitable as expected it can simply close down with short notice or apply for bankruptcy when as much monetary resources as possible have been moved somewhere else in the organization. Stranded students are the municipality’s responsibility. The risk is minimal. At least for now.
She recognizes the important role of venture capital in the expansion of the publicly-subsidized “free schools,” and notes that it has led to persistent cost-cutting.
What matters most in this free-market system, she concludes, is profit, not education, not students.
This is a very worthwhile read.
Nancy Bailey is hopeful that 2021 will bring a new agenda for public schools and their students and teachers.
All are worried about the pandemic and whether there will be the resources to protect students and staff.
There will surely be a teacher shortage due to the numbers of teachers who felt threatened by returning to school when it was not safe, as well as the necessity to reduce class sizes to make social distancing a reality.
The need for social justice should be high on the agenda, and it has nothing to do with vouchers and school choice.
Students with disabilities have been seriously affected by the pandemic and need extra instruction and resources.
The pandemic threw a harsh light on the condition of school infrastructure. Many states have not invested in school facilities. Will they?
The arts were dropped in many schools during the disastrous reign of NCLB and Race to the Top. Today they are needed more than ever.
What will become of assessment? Will the new Secretary follow those who think that testing produces equity? Or will he listen to teachers and parents? Twenty years of federally mandated testing produced a static status quo, locking the neediest students into their place in the social hierarchy and denying them equality of educational opportunity.
With only a few days left in Trump’s term of office, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos resigned. She says she objected to his rhetoric in inciting the insurrection of his devoted loyalists. This is certainly an anti-climax. DeVos had to clear out anyway, but by resigning now she avoids the painful decision about forcing Trump to resign by the terms of the 25th Amendment. Whether she resigns or stays is irrelevant. Whether she uses her position to force the ouster of a malevolent, incompetent president does matter. She opted out.
The Washington Post reported:
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos submitted her resignation Thursday, citing the president’s role in the riot on Capitol Hill. “There is no mistaking the impact your rhetoric had on the situation, and it is the inflection point for me,” she wrote in a letter to President Trump. The behavior of the “violent protestors overrunning theh U.S. Capitol” was “unconscionable,” she wrote.
“Impressionable children are watching all of this, and they are learning from us. I believe we each have a moral obligation to exercise good judgment and model the behavior we hope they would emulate,” she wrote. “They must know from us that America is greater than what transpired yesterday.”
She said her resignation is effective Friday. The resignation, she said was “in support of the oath I took to our Constitution, our people, and our freedoms.”
DeVos had been one of Trump’s most loyal and longest serving Cabinet secretaries, and also one of his most controversial, despised by many on the left. In recent days, though, even as Trump disputed the election results, DeVos acknowledged that Joe Biden had defeated him.
DeVos joined several other Trump administration officials who quit with less than two weeks left in Trump’s term, in protest of the violence that unfolded Wednesday.
Earlier in the day, Elaine Chao — who is married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.)—also resigned as transportation secretary, saying she was “deeply troubled” by what had happened at the Capitol. In addition, Mick Mulvaney quit his job as the U.S. special envoy for Northern Ireland.
DeVos’s sensibilities were not offended by the separation of children from their families at the border. She was not offended by his effort to pressure the president of Ukraine to give him dirt on Joe Biden. She was not offended by his destruction of the independence of the Justice Department or his politicization of every other Department, including her own. She was not offended by his racism, sexism, xenophobia. She was not offended by his persistent lying about everything. She was not offended by his flagrant lies about losing the election, and his refusal to concede his loss more than two months after the election.
She happily served this morally and ethically bankrupt man.
But she bails out rather than stand up to her duty to vote to oust him by the terms of the 25th Amendment, which requires a vote of the Vice President and the Cabinet to remove him.
In the early 2000s, media mogul Rupert Murdoch brought New York City Chancellor Joel Klein to Australia to spread the word about the “New York City Miracle.” This alleged miracle was as phony as George W. Bush’s “Texas Miracle,” all hat and no cattle. Unfortunately, the Education Minister (who subsequently became Australia’s Prime Minister) bought the tale and imposed national standards and testing on the entire country.
Pasi Sahlberg, teacher, researcher, scholar, is currently based in Australia. As a chronicler of Finnish education (see his book Finnish Lessons), Sahlberg has achieved international renown. In Australia, he heads the Gorski Institute and is trying to change the course of Australian education.
Pasi Sahlberg writes here about Australia’s refusal to own up to the dire consequences of the wrong path that it has taken. It is not too late to change course.
He writes that Australia has done a great job in controlling the coronavirus, but it has been unwilling to bring the same focus to education.
Like the United States, Australia continues to fund failure.
He writes:
Despite frequent school reforms, educational performance has not been improving. Indeed, it has been in decline compared to many other countries. International data makes that clear. Australian Council for Educational Research concluded it by saying that student performance in Australia has been in long-term decline. The OECD statistics reveal system-wide prevalence of inequity that is boosted by education resource gaps between Australian schools that are among the largest in the world. And UNICEF has ranked Australia’s education among the most unequal in rich countries.
Often the inspiration for the education reforms in Australia are imported from the US and Britain. Yet, the evidence base to support many of these grand policy changes here is weak or non-existent. For instance, research shows that market-based models of school choice, test-based accountability, and privatisation of public education have been wrong strategies for world-class education elsewhere. Yet, market models have been the cornerstone of Australian school policies since the early 2000s.
Australian education is failing because of reform, not in spite of it.
Jan Resseger writes here about Montana Senator Jon Tester’s deep and well-grounded belief in public education. He says that Democrats would have greater success in red states if they talked about the importance of public schools and the elites who are trying to privatize them.
Think about it. The vast majority of students in the United States attend public schools even when school choice is offered to them. Only 6 percent choose to attend charter schools; about 2 percent use vouchers. By now we know that neither charter schools nor vouchers offer a better education than democratically controlled public schools. Yet the billionaires continue to fund failure.
I hereby add Senator Jon Tester to the blog’s honor roll of champions of public education.
Resseger writes:
In mid-December, the NY Times‘ Jonathan Martin interviewed Montana Senator Jon Tester about his new book, Grounded: A Senator’s Lessons on Winning Back Rural America. Tester, a Democrat and U.S. Senator in his third term, represents a deep red state.
Tester tells Martin: “Democrats can really do some positive things in rural America just by talking about infrastructure and what they’re doing for infrastructure, particularly in the area of broadband. And then I would say one other policy issue is how some Republicans want to basically privatize public education. That is very dangerous, and I think it’s a point that people don’t want to see their public schools close down in Montana…”
Many hope President Joe Biden’s administration will significantly reshape federal education policy. During last year’s campaign for President, Biden, the candidate, declared a public education agenda that contrasts sharply with what happened to federal policy in public education beginning in the 1990s and culminating in the 2002 No Child Left Behind and later in 2009 in Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top. Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire describe the past couple of decades: “Together, led by federal policy elites, Republicans and Democrats espoused the logic of markets in the public sphere, expanding school choice through publicly funded charter schools. Competition, both sides agreed, would strengthen schools. And the introduction of charters, this contingent believed, would empower parents as consumers….”
Now with Biden’s election, many are looking for a turn by prominent Democrats back to the urgent needs of the public schools as a new COVID-19 recession compounds funding problems lingering in state budgets from the Great Recession a dozen years ago and as school privatization through charter school expansion and vouchers continues to thrust public schools deeper into fiscal crisis. Senator Jon Tester believes Democrats can rebuild support in rural America by attending to the needs of rural public education.
Tester’s new book folds policy ideas into memoir, with the back story a tribute to small town public schooling. An indifferent high school student, Tester was encouraged by a debate coach, “who taught me how to articulate political arguments” and “taught us how to structure speeches to build an arc of suspense. He taught us the importance of clarity and simple language.” Tester was elected student body president at Big Sandy High School: “For Government Day, on behalf of Big Sandy’s students, I invited one of our area’s most familiar elected leaders to visit with us about his long career in public service… Senator James was a tall, soft-spoken old farmer who accepted my invitation graciously and visited with us Big Sandy students for the better part of a day. He made the art and war of state politics sound fun.”
A trumpet player and college music major, Tester taught elementary school music at F.E. Miley Elementary School but was forced to resign when the paltry salary, even on top of what he could earn from farming, made it impossible for his family to get by. Tester ran for the local board of education and served for nearly a decade, including stints as vice chair and chair: “To this day, I’m asked about my most difficult job in politics. Without a doubt, my answer is the nine years I spent on the Big Sandy school board; it seemed everyone had strong opinions about public school policies, disciplinary actions, money, pay, taxes, ethics, graduations, grades, teacher performance, coaches, bullies, scholarships—it was a nine-year roller-coaster ride, and I loved every twist and turn.”
There is more. Open the link and read the rest of her piece about this wonderful Senator from Montana.
Last spring, when the pandemic began crippling the economy, Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act). It was a rare moment of bipartisan action. Included in the act was the Paycheck Protection Program, which offered $660 billion to help small businesses weather an economic catastrophe in which many would be forced to close their doors and lay off their employees. The PPP would enable these businesses to pay their employees and survive the pandemic.
However, in the inevitable lobbying, someone added nonprofits to the list of organizations eligible to receive government aid under the PPP.
The PPP grants are called loans, but they are forgivable if used for payroll, rent, heating, and other expenses. It’s unlikely that any will be repaid.
Public schools were not eligible to apply for PPP, because they received a fund of $13.2 billion, which they were required to share with charter schools. Charter schools, however, were eligible to apply for PPP as “nonprofits,” meaning they could double dip into both funds. Over 1,200 charter schools got very generous payouts, with some collecting more than $1 million. The average public school received $134,500 from the CARES Act.
Private and religious schools flocked to the PPP and collected far more than public schools. An organization called Good Jobs First created a website called Covid Stimulus Watch to see who got the money. They estimated that private, religious, and charter schools collected nearly $6 billion from PPP, about six times more per school than public schools.
While the federal PPP was scooped up by charter schools, private schools, and religious schools, more than 110,000 restaurants closed, ending the employment and income of many hundreds of thousands of employees, while wiping out the life savings of thousands of owners.
To understand how incredibly generous the Treasury Department was in handing out PPP money to private and religious schools, you should review the list of grants that are attached, representing awards in four states: New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Michigan. You will be stunned to see the amounts collected by religious schools and elite private schools. The data were collected by Mellissa Chang of Good Jobs First. If you are wondering about your own state, you can contact her at mellissa@goodjobsfirst.org.
You can get the pdf for the New York data here.
You can get the pdf for the Massachusetts data here.
You can get the pdf for the Ohio data here.
You can get the pdf for the Michigan data here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 