Fred Klonsky says there are many reasons to worry about postal service, including delivery of medicines.
Open the link and see the photograph of the discarded mailboxes.
Destroying federal property is a crime, isn’t it?
Archives for category: Education Reform
Control of the Los Angeles Unified School District is up for grabs in the 2020 election.
You can be sure that the LAUSD prioritizes public schools by voting for incumbent Scott Schmerelson and newcomer Patricia Castellanos.
The issue now is the same issue that has drawn a sharp divide on the school board for the past decade. Will the schools be controlled by a cabal of billionaires who favor privatization by charter schools or will it be controlled by people who are dedicated to the public schools of Los Angeles, which enroll 80 percent of the district’s children?
The charter lobby supports privatization and high-stakes testing for students and teachers.
California state law defines charter schools as “public schools” because the law was written by charter lobbyists. They have private management, private boards, and they are almost entirely free from scrutiny by public agencies; due to lack of oversight, several charter executives in California have been arrested and convicted of embezzlement from school funds. Lack of oversight explains why so many charters felt empowered to apply for and receive federal Paycheck Protection Program money as “small businesses.” They are charter schools when it is time to collect money available only to public schools, then they shape shift into “small businesses” or “non-profits” when it is time to collect money that is not available to public schools. That is called “double dipping.” It is wrong. It is unethical.
The charter industry is powerful in California due to the support of billionaires such as Eli Broad, Reed Hastings (Netflix), the Fischer Family (owners of The Gap and Old Navy), and Republican Bill Bloomfield. The candidates supported by California billionaires enjoy funding from out-of-state billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York City. The fact that these billionaires are supporting the privatization agenda of Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump doesn’t seem to bother them at all or make them think twice.
They want more privately managed charter schools, period, even though the vast majority of the district’s charter schools have empty seats (Schmerelson posted on his Facebook page that more than 80% of LA charter schools have vacancies). Once again, the billionaires are pouring money into a school board election. This one will be held on November 3, but early balloting will begin in a matter of weeks.
In the November election, there are two seats on the school board that will determine the near-term destiny of the district: Scott Schmerelson is up for re-election. He has served one term with great distinction. There is also an open seat, and one candidate stands out as a strong supporter of public schools, Patty Castellanos.
Scott is a career educator, who rose through the ranks in LAUSD as a teacher, assistant principal and principal. He has literally devoted his life to the students of LAUSD.
Patricia Castellanos is the parent of a child in the Los Angeles public schools and a community activist.
Both deserve a seat on the board of the second largest school district in the nation.
Jen Gibson, who lives in Charleston, writes about how school choice will drain resources from underfunded public schools while not providing access to better schools or better education:
Normally this time of year, my son and I are on the hunt for new shoes and the perfect pencil pouch. This year, we are struggling with masks and stocking up on hand sanitizer.
Like most parents, our family is wrestling with decisions about our work schedules, our vulnerable parents, and our child’s academic and social needs. All of our energy is focused on supporting students, teachers and our community during this unprecedented crisis.
That is why I was shocked and saddened when U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, Gov. Henry McMaster and S.C. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, took advantage of this crisis to declare war on our public schools with their coordinated effort to move tax dollars allocated for public schools into private schools.
Under the guise of giving parents a choice, deceitful Republicans are trying to divert millions of our tax dollars to subsidize elite private schools. They argue that low-income students and parents deserve the choice to opt out of their poorly-performing public school. I have bad news for them. Research proves that vouchers for private schools will not improve educational outcomes for students.
Forget the fact that vouchers won’t even pay for the basic tuition at a local private school. Let’s talk about book fees, uniform costs, fieldtrip fees, transportation costs and the loss of income for the parent who no longer has access to before- and after-school childcare. Most students will stay in their neighborhood public school because a private school education is still out of reach.
Those who can scrape together the additional money to add to the government assistance will have to navigate the complicated world of evaluating private schools. These schools do not have to meet the same education standards as our public schools and are not legally required to provide accommodations to students with special needs.
In South Carolina, the money to pay for the tax credit comes directly from the budget of the public school the student would have attended. Tax money collected for public schools which are supposed to benefit the entire community will instead benefit individual students and private businesses. This weakens our public schools, and it does not guarantee individual students will have access to a better education.
Since 2008, South Carolina House members have not fully funded the Base Student Cost. They use a loophole in the law to avoid appropriating the actual cost of providing every student with even a minimally-adequate education. If the voucher/choice legislation that has been proposed passes, the state legislature will take even more money away from our cash-strapped public schools and jeopardize the education system responsible for over 90 percent of our students.
Do you know what would make education choices easier for parents? Public schools that deliver more than a minimally-adequate education for every student.
Let’s try that first
The Washington Post published a story about the millions of students who are effectively denied an education during the pandemic because their family can’t afford to pay for access to the Internet.
The Post called the situation “a national crisis.” It is.
The Internet has become as essential as free water and air. Why isn’t it a public utility, regulated by the FCC and free to all?
When you turn on a radio, you get free access to AM and FM stations. Why not free access to the Internet? There may be a good reason, but I haven’t heard it.
Here is the story:
‘A national crisis’: As coronavirus forces many schools online this fall, millions of disconnected students are being left behind
Before the pandemic, it was called “the homework gap,” because of the growing number of teachers who assigned homework that required Internet access. Now, as the pandemic forces many schools to switch to remote learning, disconnected students will miss more than homework. They’ll miss all of school.
For all the talk of Generation Z’s Internet savvy, a stunning number of young people are locked out of virtual classes because they lack high-speed Internet service at home. In 2018, nearly 17 million children lived in homes without high-speed Internet, and more than 7 million did not have computers at home, according to a report prepared by a coalition of civil rights and education groups that analyzed census data for that year.
The issue affects a disproportionately high percentage of Black, Latino and Native American households — with nearly one-third of students lacking high-speed Internet at home. Students in Southern states and in rural communities also were particularly overrepresented. In Mississippi and Arkansas, about 40 percent of students lacked high-speed Internet.
After the closures prompted by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, school systems rushed to buy and distribute laptops and WiFi hot spots to students, and service providers offered discounts to low-income families, efforts that made a dent in the numbers.
Education advocates say Congress could deliver an easy fix as part of a coronavirus relief package by expanding an existing program that helps schools and libraries get Internet service. But those hopes collapsed alongside talks between Congress and the White House on a new relief package. With talks deadlocked, President Trump issued an executive order for coronavirus relief. It provides nothing for K-12 public schools. The consequences of the gap between those who have access to virtual learning and those who do not could be felt for years to come.
“It’s dire,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.), who has pushed to increase funding that subsidizes the cost of Internet service for schools and libraries. Her district contains parts of rural Virginia that are not served by Internet service providers. “We are generationally committing to significant divides in our communities over what kind of education our children are getting.”
Internet access is so central to children’s education that allowing students to go without it is like sending them to classrooms without textbooks, said Jordana Barton, who studies the digital divide in Texas as a community development adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. So many students being without Internet service is “a travesty,” she said.
“Before the pandemic, I thought that the homework gap was so serious that Internet should be provided by the schools,” she said.
America is about to start online learning, Round 2. For millions of students, it won’t be any better.
Educators have long seen access to high-speed Internet as essential — not optional — for students. Now, the pandemic has forced many schools to start classes remotely, and the problem has taken on new urgency. Because the Internet is essential to gaining access to virtual instruction, a failure to provide the service to students is akin to barring them from school altogether.
“It’s going back to the old days where we blocked people from going to schools to be able to learn to read,” said Pedro Martinez, the superintendent of the San Antonio Independent School District in Texas. More than half of families in Martinez’s district do not have high-speed Internet service at home. “It’s like us saying, ‘You can’t come into class. You can’t come to school.’ ”
Maryland resident Haydee Berdejo, 18, does not have high-speed Internet at home in Baltimore and can get online only with a smartphone. When her magnet high school, Baltimore City College, shut down in mid-March, she spent her school days hunched over the phone, where she had difficulty hearing her teachers.
Berdejo, who is from Mexico and still learning English, said the setup made bridging the language gap even more difficult. At times, the screen was fuzzy. And though her classes are mostly taught in English, with the schools closed, she no longer has access to a translator.
She said she is anxious about the coming school year because she has had little opportunity to practice English. “I’m worried I won’t be able to participate in class or answer a question from the teacher, because I won’t know what they’re saying to me,” she said in Spanish.
Even as many students start school without high-speed Internet service at home, Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have done little to help school systems meet that need. Many have given up hope that help is coming and have instead appealed to charities, philanthropists and the Internet service providers themselves, hoping for donations or discounts. Susan Enfield, the superintendent of the Highline Public Schools in Washington state, set up a program to allow more-affluent families to “sponsor” low-income households by paying their Internet bills.
Though some service providers offer discounts to low-income families, service is still out of reach for those who have poor credit or unpaid bills. And even the discounted rate can be too much — especially for families struggling with job losses.
In Baltimore, the school system helped set up 7,000 families with Internet Essentials, a program that provides low-cost Internet service to qualifying households. The first two months of the program were free. But last month, the school system realized that if it didn’t pay the $650,000 bill, many of those families would lose service.
“I was not going to stand by and let 14,000 students not be able to log on because of a bill we knew needed to be paid,” said Baltimore City Public Schools CEO Sonja Santelises. “It’s yet one more thing that, in serving children and families, schools are being asked to do.”
The lack of a national strategy has left superintendents to devise solutions on their own. And that means whether students get connected often depends on the charisma of a superintendent and the generosity of the surrounding community, Santelises said.
“It is the leaders who are trying to do deals, who are trying to negotiate, trying to leverage money here, leverage money there,” Santelises said. “If we are relying on the individual negotiation capacity of Sonja Santelises or any other sitting superintendent to make sure families have WiFi, that is problematic, and it is a split, and it is symptomatic of a much larger issue.”
A long-standing program run by the Federal Communications Commission that subsidizes Internet service for schools and libraries is of little help to students during the pandemic. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told schools they can use the funding only for Internet service at their campuses — even when schools have been shut down. Pai has said that the law does not allow the money to be used for providing domestic Internet service and that he does not have the authority to do otherwise.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the sole Democrat on the panel, disagrees — as do congressional Democrats and school leaders across the country. She accused the commission of failing to act to address what she called “a national crisis.”
“The FCC is sticking its head in the sand or looking the other way and doing everything it can to ignore this,” Rosenworcel said. “This is something we can fix — and we should.”
Schools and students have been left to find solutions on their own. The parking lots of schools, libraries and fast-food restaurants that offer free WiFi have become de facto classrooms for many students. Other school systems equipped buses with WiFi hot spots and parked them in underserved neighborhoods. In some school systems, such as Baltimore, officials just paid the bills of hundreds of families out of their own budgets to keep the households online.
But none of the improvised solutions are sustainable or scalable, and they often rely on the ability of school officials to court philanthropists and negotiate with Internet service providers.
Cleveland public schools CEO Eric Gordon said he hopes the pandemic will force lawmakers to rethink how they view the Internet. He said two-thirds of households in his district can connect to the Internet only by cellphone, which is inadequate for virtual classes.
“It’s just time we recognize that the Internet has become a utility in the same way electricity became a public utility,” Gordon said.
Bryan Akins, the principal of Keota High School in rural southeast Oklahoma, said many of his families do not have a reliable cellular signal — let alone high-speed Internet. Companies see little incentive to lay broadband lines in places where they will not get many customers, or they pass the expense to customers, charging more to those who live in far-flung communities. The school’s switch-over to remote learning in the spring posed “a big problem,” Akins said.
“My teachers can teach virtually, but my students can’t access it virtually,” Akins said. Instead, staffers in the high-poverty district delivered homework along with weekly grocery packages. “Now you’re relying on the parent to help teach, or the student to teach themselves.”
But although connectivity challenges are often viewed as a rural problem, many students in urban districts also lack high-speed Internet service at home. In some cases, this is because they live in neighborhoods that — like many rural communities — do not have the infrastructure. In many others, the barrier is the expense, even though many service providers offer low-income families steeply discounted Internet service. Families that are facing financial turmoil in the recession may opt to drop the Internet.
Jaclyn Trapp, who is to start 10th grade at MC2STEM High School in Cleveland, shares a Chromebook with a little brother and with three stepsiblings who visit on weekends. When the pandemic hit, her mother and stepfather, both interior house painters, took a huge hit financially as work dried up. So they canceled their home Internet service, which had cost around $60 a month.
Jaclyn began using her phone as a hot spot — but soon she was out of data. Finally, the family struck a deal with an upstairs neighbor who agreed to allow the family to use his WiFi if they split the bill. But the signal, which has to travel to their downstairs apartment, is slow and unreliable.
“Without the Internet and not going to school, it’s really hard to do schoolwork,” Jaclyn said.
Moriah Balingit is an education reporter for The Washington Post, where she has worked since 2014. She previously covered crime, city hall and crime in city hall at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Whether Trump wins or loses in November, it will take months or years to repair the damage he is inflicting on the United States Postal Service. Read about “Trump’s War on Christmas.”
Ty Burr, reviewer for the Boston Globe,loved the TV “Hamilton.” I’m happy to learn that it was not “adapted” for the screen. It’s the Broadway show in full, gloriously produced. It was filmed in July 2016, a hopeful time. It was impossible to buy tickets. They were being scalped for hundreds of dollars a seat. Lin-Manuel Miranda set aside multiple free performances for high school students. Ordinary folks couldn’t buy them at any price.
Here is the review:
“Hamilton” arrives on TV — specifically on the Disney+ streaming platform, which costs $6.99 a month — as both a long-awaited event and an almost painful jolt of pre-Trump nostalgia. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash about Alexander Hamilton, one of the men who fashioned a country by the people and for the people, became famously hard for the people to actually see, with sold-out shows and ticket prices running to four figures. What might have been a theatrical release in the time of pandemic comes to the home screen, which, honestly, is where it belongs. As history — as a grounding in and reminder of where this whole thing started — “Hamilton” is facile yet irresistible. As soul-affirming entertainment, it is overwhelming.
(Short answer for anyone left still wondering if this show lives up to the hype: goodness, yes. On the most basic musical-theater level, you’ll have the earworms of songs like “My Shot,” “Helpless,” “Washington on Your Side,” and many others stuck in your head for days.)
The production, a filming of a June 2016 performance at New York’s Richard Rodgers Theatre, has been brought to the screen with intelligence and craft, eight cameras pulling us “into” the show without sacrificing the sense of spectacle. (There are a few choice Busby Berkeley-style shots from overhead, just for fun.) Taking place from 1776 to 1804, “Hamilton” is constantly in motion, with the large cast of characters and ensemble players whirling through Miranda’s songs and Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography. Thomas Kail directs the filming as fluidly he did the original show but with judiciously edited close-ups that preserve the visual flow while heightening the dramatic conflicts. More than ever, Leslie Odom Jr.‘s Aaron Burr is revealed as the shadow star of “Hamilton,” rendered nearly Shakespearean by his lust for power and inability to stand for anything.
The title character’s story is pretty compelling, too, as readers of Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography know. Born illegitimate in the Caribbean, Hamilton bootstrapped himself into the American Revolution as one of its finest minds and most reckless personalities, and “Hamilton” places him in the context of a scrum of strivers: Odom’s Burr, aching to be in “The Room Where It Happens”; the Marquis de Lafayette (Act 1) and Thomas Jefferson (Act 2), both played by the puckish charmer Daveed Diggs; the godlike yet touchingly human George Washington (Christopher Jackson’s performance acquires a powerful graciousness in close-up); the blissfully tyrannical King George III (Jonathan Groff) with his show-stopping patter songs. Slightly off center-stage are the two Schuyler sisters, Eliza (Phillipa Soo), who married Hamilton and put up with his infidelities, and Angelica (Renee Elise Goldsberry), as politically astute as her brother-in-law and less rash. The dramatic themes and recurring musical motifs that define these characters are part of what makes the show so richly satisfying.
These are all powerhouse singers, actors, and dancers, and they capably negotiate Miranda’s lickety-split lyrics, as percussive as hip-hop and as multi-layered as Sondheim. People who dismiss “Hamilton” as “that rap musical” are always shocked by the actual breadth of the show’s sonic palette, which includes pop, R&B, and a full history of show-tunes. But there’s no denying that having our great white founders played by the descendants of slaves — and having them engage and debate each other in the cross-rhythms of the people they enslaved — is a masterstroke that brings everyone into the tent of the American dream, on stage if not outside the theater. (For anyone having trouble following the rapid-fire lyrics, closed captioning will be a boon of this televised version — but even subtitles might have trouble keeping up.)
At the center of “Hamilton” the musical and “Hamilton” the phenomenon is Miranda, who took the project from a ridiculous light bulb over his head as he was beach-reading the Chernow book to 11 Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize. He’s a compact, sad-eyed imp of a performer, and as Hamilton he seems slightly out of his element among his strapping co-stars, most of whom have stronger or more trained voices. I saw the show on Broadway with Javier Munoz, who was Miranda’s alternate and who replaced the star after he moved on; Munoz gave a galvanizing, muscular performance, and yet the essential Hamilton remains Lin-Manuel Miranda, and seeing this filmed version is a reminder why. Especially in the final scenes, after tragedies of his own and others’ making have brought Hamilton crashing to earth, the actor conveys a sorrow that’s beyond bone-deep — that conveys something about the frailties and follies of trying to be a great man or build a great country.
That’s never not relevant, and perhaps now more than ever. What does “Hamilton” even mean in 2020? The America in which the show took Broadway by storm was five years ago, but it feels like a different century. Barack Obama was president and the recasting of the Founding Fathers as people of color, singing history to modern beats, felt absurdly fresh and forward-looking. What one wouldn’t give to get back to that future.
Hey, Big Spender!
The Texas-based IDEA charter chain is best known for lavish spending—on the taxpayers’s dimes and dollars.
IDEA is the corporate charter chain that wanted to lease a private jet for its executives and their families, that bought a private box at pro basketball games, that lavished perks on its top employees.
And now it’s former Chief Financial Officer says IDEA owes him $1 million.
Betsy DeVos has lavished more than $200 million on IDEA, to support its expansion and the grand life style of its executives.
Trump vowed, if re-elected, to kill the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and Medicare. Do most Americans understand what that means to them?
Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times explains the dangers of Trump’s executive orders.
With his four executive orders purportedly aimed at relieving Americans of the burdens of the coronavirus, President Trump spun the theme of his administration — the Art of the Con — up to a higher level.
The orders he signed Saturday include a supposed moratorium on evictions and foreclosures, a deferral of student loan payments and an extension of federal unemployment benefits.
The moratorium is unlikely to stop a single eviction or foreclosure, however. The deferral of student loan payments is short-term and narrower than what Congress put in place in May, and that has expired.
The extension of unemployment benefits reduces the federal share to $300 a week from $600, will last only four to six weeks and imposes insurmountable barriers on states to achieve even that much.
But the most potentially far-reaching order concerns the payroll tax, which funds Social Security and part of Medicare. This order, along with comments Trump made at the signing ceremony, pose a mortal threat to the 64 million Americans who currently receive Social Security benefits and the hundreds of millions more who will receive benefits in coming decades.
If he’s reelected, Trump said, he will “terminate” the payroll tax. Make no mistake: He’s talking about bankrupting Social Security.
It’s rare that a president has made such a compelling case for his own electoral defeat. Yet his campaign was so proud of this threat that it tweeted out Trump’s words within minutes.
Social Security advocates weren’t nearly so sanguine.
“This is all a very well thought-out campaign to undermine Social Security and Medicare,” Wiliam F. Arnone, chief executive of the National Academy of Social Insurance, told me. The order threatens to “erode the economic security of millions of Americans, without bringing meaningful relief for unemployed workers or employers.”
Rep. John B. Larson (D-Conn.) the sponsor of a proposal to expand Social Security, called the order “the single worst way to get relief to beleaguered Americans … stealing from their retirement to make up for the administration’s failure to contain the virus.”
He’s right. We’ve written before that cutting or deferring the payroll tax does almost nothing for the vast majority of working Americans, not to mention those out of work, would overwhelmingly benefit the rich, and would knock the key source of financing out from under Social Security while opening the door to massive benefit cuts.
Trump’s executive order boasts of its being a “modest, targeted action.” It’s anything but. The order says it will “put money directly in the pockets of American workers … right when the money is needed most.” It won’t do that.
Trump nevertheless has been obsessed with the idea of a payroll tax cut, for reasons that are impossible to apprehend. One might not have thought this possible, but his executive order makes things even worse.
The most incisive line about the order belongs to Nobel economist Paul Krugman, who tweeted that “payroll tax cuts are the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy. They won’t do anything to solve the employment crisis, but will have dangerous side effects.”
Trump has been obsessed with cutting the payroll tax since the dawn of his presidency. But in his latest attack he may be working from a strategy crafted by Stephen Moore, a right-wing economic advisor whose hostility to Social Security is manifest.
Moore laid out the payroll tax plan in an Aug. 2 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Moore said the Treasury should “instruct the Treasury to stop withholding payroll taxes,” though it’s not the Treasury but employers who do the withholding. (More on that below.) But then again, being right isn’t necessarily part of Moore’s credentials.
To better understand the dire implications of Trump’s order, let’s take a closer look.
As a foundation, keep in mind that the payroll tax comes to 12.4% of wage income up to an inflation-adjusted cap — this year, $137,700. The tax is evenly split between employees and employers, who must pay their 6.2% share and also withhold the employee share from their paychecks and pay it over to the Treasury.
Another 2.9% of payroll, uncapped, is also shared between employer and worker to fund part of Medicare.
The centerpiece of the executive order is an interest- and penalty-free deferral of payroll taxes for four months, from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31. This is tantamount to an interest-free loan to workers of up to four months. After that period, the deferred tax will have to be paid.
Social Security experts say deferring the tax payments falls within Trump’s authority. But if he remains president and moves to eliminate the accrued debt, that can’t be done without the assent of Congress.
The terms of the deferral place a huge administrative burden on employers, whether big or small. The order applies only to workers earning less than $104,000 a year, or $4,000 per biweekly pay period. Employers will have to determine which workers fall within that zone, possibly recalculating every two weeks.
How the deferral is supposed to work in practice is murky. Under federal law, employers are required to withhold the payroll tax from paychecks. Nothing in the executive order changes that, despite Moore’s proposal. So several outcomes are possible.
One is that employers will continue to withhold the tax from workers — placing the amount equal to the deferral in escrow or paying it over to the Treasury and claiming a refund to be passed back to employees after Dec. 31.
As Seth Hanlon, a former economist for the Obama administration, observes, in that case the order provides employers with an interest-free loan of up to four months. Meanwhile, workers won’t see a penny more in their paychecks.
Another is that they will cease withholding the tax for those four months. That places a burden, however, on workers, since the tax isn’t eliminated, just deferred. They’d likely have to repay the tax with their annual tax filings next April 15. The risk here is that many workers won’t adjust their spending to cover the obligation.
For a worker earning $60,000 a year, the deferral comes to less than $100 a week. That may help a truly strapped family (though it would be better for that household to receive assistance in a lump sum). But at the end of the year, the family will owe $1,530. That may come as quite the shock.
Then there’s the cutoff of deferrals for anyone earning $104,000 or more. Those whose employers have ceased withholding face a sheer cliff in take-home pay: Earn $103,999, you get the deferral — in effect, a temporary, repayable 7.65% bump in the paycheck. Earn a dollar more, you don’t.
Trump plainly sees this stunt as a way to blame Democrats for that tax bill, not to mention the apparent tax increase when the deferral ends and payroll taxes revert to their full level. Democrats “will have the option of raising everybody’s taxes and taking this away,” he said at the signing ceremony.
In other words, he’s offering voters a bribe — in effect, “elect them and you’ll have to pay what you owe; elect me and you’ll get a pass.” This raises cynicism to an electoral principle, but it’s fair to wonder if the American voter is dumb enough to fall for it.
The most frightening aspect of the payroll tax order is its impact on Social Security itself. The payroll tax is the program’s single largest revenue source. It’s been tampered with before, notably when congressional Republicans forced Obama to accept a temporary cut of two percentage points in the payroll tax as a stimulus measure. As we’ve reported, that wasn’t a great idea, but the administration was backed into a wall by a GOP majority.
But even then, the cut was accompanied by an explicit arrangement to make up the revenue loss to Social Security from the general fund. The Treasury made good on that promise, paying more than $225 billion into Social Security from 2010 through 2015.
But there’s no such backstop in Trump’s executive order. By my calculations, based on the system’s 2019 revenue and income for 2020 as projected by the Social Security trustees, the four-month deferral will deprive the system of nearly $333 billion in real-time income. Even if the money is ultimately repaid, Social Security will have lost an estimated $9 billion in interest on that revenue, permanently.
More permanent would be the impact on the system if Trump is reelected and eliminates the payroll tax. In that case, says Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, the Social Security trust fund, which currently holds $2.9 trillion in assets, would be completely depleted within four years.
“There would be no contributions coming in and no interest on the trust fund because it would have been drawn down. There would be no money to pay benefits. The whole program would just shut down.”
No one need guess what would happen to Social Security if it’s transformed from a program with its own independent revenue sources into one dependent on appropriations by Congress.
The evidence from other such programs — food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and, indeed, unemployment benefits — is in front of our eyes: Benefits can be slashed by congressional whim and the programs disemboweled.
This is all the consequence of having “a completely lawless, corrupt president in the White House, and Republicans not checking him,” Altman said. Indeed, in a statement about the executive orders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he was “glad that President Trump is proving that while Democrats use laid-off workers as political pawns, Republicans will actually look out for them.”
Has he even read the executive orders? And if so, how could he make such an absurd statement? Or is he just falling for the con?
Mercedes Schneider teaches high school in Louisiana. She is supposed to resume full-time, in person instruction in a few weeks, although her state has a 14% positivity rate for COVID.
She describes how she will rearrange her classroom and how she will teach, in detail.
I am the teacher, and I am supposed to limit my movement in my own classroom. Is every conversation with a student to be said loud enough for all to hear? Am I to teach without being able to walk up to my students or have them walk up to me? Apparently that is the expectation. But let’s not pretend that what I will be able to do for my students in my COVID-era classroom is remotely on par with normal teacher-student and student-student interaction.
In short, what I will be offering in my room is a form of distance learning to students who happen to be seated in a space in which they can see me and I can see them.
In another post, Mercedes explained that she bought two HEPA filters for her classroom. It has windows, but they don’t open. It has air-conditioners but they don’t filter the air. She is doing what she can to protect her students and herself.
Thomas Ultican continues his investigation of the tentacles of billionaire reformers, this time focusing on the tumultuous career of John Deasy, who resigned as superintendent of the Stockton, California, school district.
Ultican shows how Deasy rose to become superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, how Justin tenure there was marked by controversy as he walked in lockstep with the Eli Broad-Bill Gates agenda of charter school expansion, high-stakes testing, and huge investments in technology. His controversial decision to spend $1.3 billion on iPads and tech curriculum led to the end of his tenure in L.A.
On to Stockton, where the Mayor and three school board members were closely allied with the billionaire agenda.
A sad and cautionary tale about the destructive billionaire-funded movement to gut public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 