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Aaron Rupar: What’s Behind Project 2025?

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2024 //
21

Blogger Aaron Rupar, writing at “Public Notice,” sums up the goal of Project 2025, which is a lengthy tome describing the plans of the next Trump administration. The main goal, Rupar writes, is to abolish the 22nd Amendment—the one that sets limits for Presidents at two terms. Their hope: Trump for life. In recent days, Trump insisted that he knows nothing about Project 2025 or those who wrote it. That’s hard to believe since the authors served in his administration, and the project was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. There’s a photo of Trump shaking hands with Kevin Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, on the Heritage Twitter feed. Trump must have forgotten that he knows him.

Rupar writes:

Project 2025, the Republican plan to functionally annihilate not just the federal government but democracy as well if Trump wins in November, is an unceasing parade of horrors. 

Banning the abortion pill nationwide? Check. Rolling back protections for LGBTQ people? Check. Deporting literally millions of undocumented immigrants? Check. But amid each objectively horrible aim is an even more more insidious one: abolishing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. It’s an unvarnished, right-out-in-the-open plan to keep Trump in office well past 2028. 

It’s not as if this is genuinely unexpected. By July 2019, Trump had “joked” at least six times about being president for life. Floating that as a possibility, as Peter Tonguette did last week over at The American Conservative, is a great opportunity to show fealty to a candidate who values loyalty over all else. 

The American Conservative is a “partner” of Project 2025, along with such luminaries as Stephen Miller’s America First Legal law firm (currently suing everyone over the mildest of diversity efforts) and the Claremont Institute, which gave us Christopher Rufo and Moms for Liberty.

As Media Matters notes, the reasoning in Tonguette’s piece is dubious at best, but that doesn’t really matter. Project 2025 doesn’t rest on solid law, respect for democracy, or an understanding of history. It rests only on the notion that Trump should be allowed to exhibit raw, vicious, and unchecked power. 

Tonguette’s piece doesn’t even bother with the pretense that getting rid of the 22nd Amendment would strengthen democracy overall. Instead, the piece is predicated on the utterly unfounded notion that when the amendment was passed, no one could have foreseen that a president would be elected to nonconsecutive terms.

While Tonguette does mention Grover Cleveland, who every schoolchild learns did indeed serve two nonconsecutive terms, he seems to think that people were perhaps unaware of him when the 22nd Amendment was passed in 1951. Tonguette handwaves away the existence of Cleveland by simply writing, “In modern times, it is virtually inconceivable that any of the ousted one-term presidents would have seriously thought of running anew against the same opponent (now the occupant of the White House) who had bested them four years earlier.” 

It’s also inconceivable that millions of Americans would line up for a candidate who incited an insurrection, is facing 91 criminal charges, was found liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, and was just recently rich-guy panhandling to pay his massive bond to appeal his civil fraud penalty in a different case, but here we are. 

Embracing autocracy … for this guy?

Like many other projects of the modern Republican Party, a newfound loathing of the 22nd Amendment is wildly hypocritical. 

Though there were multiple unsuccessful pushes for presidential term limits before the passage of the 22nd amendment, the GOP House majority prioritized the issue after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in 1945. No Republicans broke the party line during key congressional votes on the amendment, but they were helped along by southern Democrats who were mad that President Harry Truman continued FDR’s liberal economic policies.

To be fair, vaguely kicking around the idea of a third term has been standard procedure for a lot of two-term presidents, with President Barack Obama saying he thought he would likely have won a third election and President Bill Clinton saying he would probably have run for a third term if possible. However, the only serious push for a third term came from President Ronald Reagan, who said in 1987 that he “would like to start a movement” to repeal the amendment because it interfered with the right to “vote for someone as often as they want to do.” Reagan said he didn’t want this for himself but would press for it going forward, but like many things he said, that was somewhat less than truthful, as Republicans fundraised off the possibility of a Reagan third term starting in 1986.

Returning to Tonguette’s argument, it rests largely on his assertion that Trump is incredibly, historically popular, so he should get a third term. This, of course, ignores the fact that Trump is not actually that popular. He lost the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020. In 2016, Hillary Clinton trounced him by 2.87 million votes, while in 2020, Biden bested him by over 7 million.

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Project 2025 is about enshrining minority rule

Much of the post-2020 discussion from Republicans — the parts not about unhinged conspiracy theories — has centered around outrage that anyone could disregard Trump’s 74 million votes. It’s unclear what conservatives mean by that, save for that even when they have less support and don’t win elections, they should still run things. 

And that’s what Project 2025 is all about. Republicans want to permanently enshrine their minority policies into law despite the fact that what they want is broadly unpopular. Fifty-nine percent of Americans want abortion to be legal. Over half of registered and likely voters do not want to vote for someone who makes robbing transgender youth of health care their core issue. Nearly three-quarters of American adults want the government to take bold steps to fight climate change. 

Project 2025 is all about enacting minority rule in America immediately upon Trump’s election. To do so, Trump would first need to gut civil serviceprotections, which ensure that federal workers don’t have to adhere to the politics of any given president.

Trump tried this at the end of his term, issuing an executive order that would have made thousands of federal civil servants at-will employees. When he didn’t win a second term, he didn’t have time to implement it. Those apolitical employees — as many as 50,000 people — would be replaced with Trump loyalists. Power would be wholly consolidated in the executive branch. 

Of course, Republicans hate that the executive branch, currently led by a Democratic president, wields any power and have been engaged in a decades-long project to dismantle the administrative state. Conservatives on the Supreme Court are helping along nicely with this project. But that pendulum would swing the other way fast if Trump retakes power, at which point conservatives will again love consolidating all power in the executive branch because the administrative state will be completely beholden to Trump. 

Comparisons to historic fascist leaders once felt overblown, but with Trump declaring he’d be a dictator on day one of his presidency, those comparisons no longer seem so hyperbolic. However, Trump has much more modern analogs. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has thrashed that country’s nascent attempts at democracy, amending the constitution twice to allow him to stay in power as long as he wants. With his most recent victory last month in an election that was really no election at all thanks to widespread coercion and censorship, Putin may end up being ruler for life.

Then there’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. In the summer of 2023, he forced a vote to curtail the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, a project his conservative government had been pursuing for months because the court doesn’t vote in lockstep with his goals. There’s also the fact that Netanyahu, like Trump, faces corruption charges and needs to be sure the courts can’t take action against him.

And finally, there’s Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Orbán has been the king of the culture wars in a way that Republicans can’t get enough of. In 2022, he gave a speech joking about gas chambers and warning against Europeans becoming “peoples of mixed race.” Unsurprisingly, this did not result in him getting disinvited to the Conservative Political Action Conference a short while later. Instead, Republicans loved his nationalist rhetoric so much that there is now a CPAC Hungary, where in 2023, Orbán complained about “the woke movement and gender ideology.” 

If you want a preview of what would happen in a second Trump term, look to Hungary, which now bans anything with LGBTQ content whatsoever being shared with minors, and where the constitution was amended in 2020 to define “family” only as “based on marriage and the parent-child relation. The mother is a woman, the father a man.” Orbán also hates migrants and refugees, saying that people fleeing from war in places like Syria are a threat to Christianity. He has said he will defend Hungary against “tens of millions” of immigrants. 

Trump’s vision for America is impossibly grim. It’s fueled by hate and disrespect for democracy, and the only way it can be stopped is at the ballot box in 2024, so that Project 2025 never comes to fruition.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Religion, Trump, Vouchers

July 4, 2024: Democracy on the Brink

By dianeravitch
July 4, 2024 //
45

I was born in 1938 in Houston. I’m five years older than Joe Biden. I grew up during World War II, which is sometimes called “the last good war.” I remember the air raid sirens, the blackouts (everyone turned off the lights and pulled down the shades in case there was an attack by enemy aircraft), saving scraps of metal to be recycled into bullets. The oldest family photograph I have shows me, my older brother and older sister earnestly waving American flags. I was immersed in patriotism and love of country. My mother was an immigrant from Bessarabia who would not tolerate a bad word against the country that took in her family.

Patriotism is in my blood.

In my school days, we learned only the positive spin on American history. All the bad stuff was left out. As a college student and a graduate student and an adult, I learned about the dark side of our nation’s history. I learned about race massacres, lynchings, the brutal treatment of indigenous people, and the misuse of military power.

Yet, still I am a patriot. Still I believe in the promise of America and the importance of democracy. I know the disappointments and betrayals of the American Dream, yet still I am devoted to it.

That’s why it is so sickening to see Donald Trump, a man without principle, character or ethics, running for President. It is sickening to see a man so selfish and narcissistic wrap himself in the American flag. It is sickening to see a man who professes admiration, even love, for the world’s worst tyrants, running for President as his best hope for avoiding prison. And it is even more sickening to know that millions of people believe his lies.

In addition, there is the threat posed by a rogue Supreme Court. Six radical Republicans are making mincemeat of our Constitution. In their confirmation hearings, they pledged to uphold precedent and stare decisisis, but now in lifetime positions, they shred women’s rights, limit the power of government to protect public safety, and eviscerate the basic principle of the Constitution that “no one is above the law.” It turns out that the Presdent is above the law. According to the six radical Justices, he may imprison or assassinate his political rivals as part of his “official duties.” It can’t happen here, we like to think, but we are on the cusp of losing what we treasure.

This is not a happy Fourth of July. The threats to democracy are clear, present and ominous. It’s up to us to save it by voting and getting our family, friends, and neighbors to vote in November.

Here’s hoping we can celebrate a new burst of freedom and the rule of law in 2025.

Categories Character, Civics, Civil Rights, Education Reform

Thom Hartmann: We Need Protection from Religious Zealotry

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2024 //
13

Thom Hartmann warns that the growing power of religious extremists threatens democracy. The Founders knew the danger of organized religion and inserted guardrails against its zealotry in the Constitution

He wrote:

Twenty-eight states, nearly all Republican-controlled, are now spending billions of taxpayer dollars to support indoctrinating children in religion through voucher programs that can be used for mostly Christian schools. Five Republican-controlled states are in the process of letting vouchers ghettoize their entire public-school systems.

As The Washington Post noted yesterday:

“Billions in taxpayer dollars are being used to pay tuition at religious schools throughout the country, as state voucher programs expand dramatically and the line separating public education and religion fades.”

Meanwhile, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, flies an “Appeal to Heaven” flag outside his official congressional office that, since 2013, has been the semi-official logo of a militant arm of charismatic Christianity involved with January 6th. Supreme Court Justice Sam Alito flew a similar flag outside his summer home.

Another man flying that flag is outspoken Catholic evangelist Leonard Leo, who now controls over a billion dollars and helped run the process that selected Trump’s picks for the Supreme Court as well as hundreds of federal bench nominees. As ProPublica pointed out in a story about “the man that remade the American judicial system”:

“Leo is a major supporter of the [Catholic Information Center], and its unabashed projection of political power aligns with the central role of religion in Leo’s political project.”

Proselytizers for evangelical Christianity believe they are on the verge of taking over our country, from our schools to our courts to Congress itself. History warns us — as did the Founders and Framers of the Constitution — that, if successful, this will be deadly to American democracy.

Religious evangelism can be a deadly thought virus. It explicitly posits that, “There is only one right way to live and we know what it is” along with, “There is only one true god and he is the one we worship — and now you must, too….”

But now America finds itself under assault by a new, zealously evangelical movement called the New Apostolic Reformation (among other names) that seeks to use the force of law and the power of billions in untaxable dollars to create a new, two-tiered society in America.

At the top of this new America are the Catholic conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Speaker Mike Johnson and his followers in Congress, and an army of televangelists who claim moral superiority by virtue of their religion. They’re backed up by a small army of fundamentalist billionaires and politicians like Donald Trump who are willing to give them power and wealth in exchange for support at the ballot box.

Under them are the rest of us Untermenschen, whose opinions are tolerated so long as we don’t take away their nonprofit tax status (ensuring we must continue subsidizing them), stop their takeover of our schools, or correctly point out that the Founders were horrified at the prospect of America ever becoming a “Christian nation.”

But that is exactly what the majority of this nation’s Founders feared. It’s why they wrote a Constitution that forbids a religious test to hold office and put into the First Amendment “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”

It’s why George Washington refused to say publicly whether he was a Christian or not, and authored the Treaty of Tripoli that begins with, “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion…”

It’s why Ben Franklin fled Massachusetts as a teenager to avoid mandatory church attendance and wrote, “I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.”

It’s why James Madison, one of the few actual Christians among that core group of Founders and the “Father of the Constitution,” made his first veto as president in 1811 against a bill that would have given government money to a Washington, DC church to run a poorhouse. It would, he said, “be a precedent for giving to religious societies, as such, a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

Madison added, in a July 10, 1822 letter to his old friend Edward Livingston:

“We are teaching the world the great truth, that Governments do better without kings and nobles than with them. The merit will be doubled by the other lesson: that Religion flourishes in greater purity without, than with the aid of Government.”

It’s why Jefferson took a razor blade to the Gospels and cut out all of the stories of miracles, producing The Jefferson Bible that presents Jesus as a wise philosopher instead of a god. The book is still in print and, to this day, a best-seller.

The cancer of evangelicalism now has its sights on literally every aspect of American society with its “Seven Mountain Mandate,” which argues that evangelical Christians must assert control over every other religion, every family in America, the US government itself, all public and private education, the arts and entertainment, all American media, and ultimately regulate all commercial business in our nation.

And they’re succeeding in every realm, even commerce. Recently, Southwest Airlines fired a flight attending for spamming their internal message boards with hostile anti-abortion messages and calling the company’s CEO “a murderer” because he supported women’s abortion rights. A Trump-appointed judge ruled in the flight attendant’s favor and required the company’s senior executives to take “religious liberty training” from an evangelical rightwing anti-abortion group. 

Once today’s Christian Taliban made common cause with the 1980 Reagan campaign, the first great mission they undertook was seizing control of the rest of the Republican Party. Now that that has been accomplished, they’re coming for the rest of us.

As the tribal people who first occupied this land would tell you, this is the Great Sin. It turns religion from a spiritual exercise into a social, cultural, and political cancer that continually grows while devouring everything in its path. 

Like biological cancer, it ultimately kills its host — as America’s founders knew well from the experience of Cromwell in England and seventeenth-century Salem here.

And now it’s made an unholy alliance with the billionaires behind Project 2025 and our rapist-in-chief, Donald Trump, the modern incarnations of the Roman empire and Prefect Pilate, who ordered Jesus crucified.

G-d help us all if they succeed.

.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Education Reform, Religion, Separation of church and state

UFT President Drops Effort to Force Retirees into For-Profit Medicare Advantage Plan

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
6

There’s an old saying that “you can’t fight City Hall.” Public service retirees in New York City just proved that you can fight City Hall and win. You can fight City Hall and your own union and win. With a passionate leader and small donations from retirees (mostly teachers), the retirees prevailed because they had the law on their side and they never gave up.

For the past three years, New York City retirees have been fighting a plan hatched by City government and some union leaders to compel retirees to leave Medicare and enroll in a for-profit Medicare Advantage plan. The retirees, led by Marianne Pizzitola, a retired EMT in the NYC Fire Department, have won multiple lawsuits and won control of the UFT Retiree Caucus (the first time in its 64-year-old history that the Unity Caucus that controls the UFT ever lost an internal election.) This story appeared in City & State, a publication about public employees.

Yesterday, UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced that the UFT was dropping out of the effort to push retirees into an MA plan. He blamed the city, not the retirees’ objections to MA.

In a dramatic reversal, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation Teachers, notified the Municipal Labor Committee on Sunday that it was withdrawing its support of a controversial Medicare Advantage plan as well as from “the current healthcare negotiations for in-service and pre-Medicare retirees” with the Adams administration.

The bombshell news came in the form of a letter that Mulgrew sent to Harry Nespoli, the chair of the Municipal Labor Committee and leader of the city’s largest Department of Sanitation union. 

“It has become apparent that this administration is unwilling to continue this work in good faith,” Mulgrew wrote in the letter. “The city has delayed our current in-service and pre-Medicare retiree healthcare negotiations for months, and we no longer feel that it is in the interest of our members to be part of that process. This administration has proven to be more interested in cutting its costs than honestly working with us to provide high-quality healthcare costs to city workers.”

Mulgrew also sent a separate letter to retired UFT members explaining his decision.

“The city’s losses in the courts and the needless anxiety created among retirees has made it clear to us that our support for this initiative cannot continue … You did not deserve the angst and fear you went through as we worked toward our goal of improving our health care in an increasingly difficult national landscape,” he wrote in the letter. “I have heard your voices. And as we have all grown increasingly frustrated with this process, we will use our strength in the MLC to push for a new strategy moving forward.”

Following the news, a spokesperson for the city’s Law Department defended the city’s Medicare Advantage plan.

“We have been clear: the city’s plan, which was negotiated closely with and supported by the Municipal Labor Committee, would improve upon retirees’ current plans and save $600 million annually. This is particularly important at a time when we are already facing significant fiscal and economic challenges,” the spokesperson said.

Going back several years to the de Blasio administration, the Municipal Labor Committee – which includes representatives of every municipal union – had been working collaboratively with the City of New York to try to reduce the city’s health care costs while maintaining the quality of coverage and ensuring that city workers would still not have to pay health insurance premiums.

As part of that grand bargain during the de Blasio era, the Municipal Labor Committee agreed to shift New York City ‘s 250,000 retired civil servants from their current Medicare plans to a Medicare Advantage plan managed by a private, for-profit health insurance company. Boosters of the controversial Medicare Advantage plan that insisted that it would save the city $600 million annually.

Almost instantaneously, a racially and economically diverse coalition led by retired FDNY EMT Marianne Pizzitola formed the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees. With close to 50,000 members, Pizzitola’s organization helped fund a successful legal challenge to the plan that has already won several rounds in the courts. State court judges have consistently ruled in favor of the retirees, finding that under the legal doctrine of promissory estoppel, the city’s past commitments to its retirees as active employees were still binding….

In his letter to the Municipal Labor Committee announcing UFT’s withdrawal from the Medicare Advantage plan, Mulgrew did not mention the recent leadership election for the Retired Teachers chapter – a fact that upset Bennett Fischer, who won that election by running on an anti-Medicare Advantage platform.

“President Mulgrew should have acknowledged that he is changing his position because elections have consequences,” Fischer wrote in a statement. “He could have acknowledged that he is taking these steps because Retiree Advocate wrested control of the 70,000+ Retired Teachers Chapter from his Unity caucus, and because he sees that his control of the UFT is slipping away. … Until now, Michael Mulgrew and Mayor Adams have been on the same page.”

In a free-ranging interview with City & State, Mulgrew said that the decision to pull the plug had been coming long before the recent electoral rebuff by his retirees, though he conceded it was part of his  final calculus.

“About eight weeks ago, I started talking to people at the MLC that this was ridiculous with the courts clearly saying over and over again through all the appeals that this [Medicare Advantage] was not going to work,” Mulgrew said. “And when I read this latest decision out of the Court of Appeals of New York State, half of the decision was about the incompetence of the city’s attorneys.”

Mulgrew continued. “At the same time, we were getting nowhere, I mean nowhere with the negotiations for health care for our in-service active members,” he said, adding that when some of the unions wanted to meet with Mayor Adams to jump start the talks, they were rebuffed by management’s representatives at the table.

“This has got to stop – the members have spoken, the courts have spoken – so why are we continuing to do this?” Mulgrew asked. “Why would the city continue to put its retirees through this process anymore?”…

Pizzitola, the president of the NYC Organization of Public Service Retirees, said that the city should finally give up on its attempt to force retirees to Medicare Advantage plans.

“For three years, an ad-hoc coalition of retirees has been fighting this illegal scheme in the courts and in the City Council,” she wrote in a statement. “And while retirees have been continuously successful – winning 9 victories over three separate lawsuits and thwarting an attempt to change the law  – the City still can’t seem to get the message: enough is enough!”

Pizzitola continued. “It is time for the City to come to its senses and end its senseless, illegal war on retirees. If retirees are forced off of traditional Medicare and into the City’s new Medicare Advantage plan, thousands will be denied access to the doctors they depend on and the medical care they desperately need. And, as the director of the NYC Independent Budget Office testified, City taxpayers will not save a dime.”

Categories Education Reform, Health, Unions

Washington Post Covers the Scandals Associated with Its New Leadership

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2024 //
4

Four reporters collaborated on a long article about the unethical practices of some of the newspaper’s new leaders, chosen by Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post. The Post is known for its fearless and principled journalism. British newspapersce identlybget scoops any way they can, ethics be damned.

They wrote on June 16:

LONDON — The alleged offense was trying to steal a soon-to-be-released copy of former prime minister Tony Blair’s memoir.

The suspect arrested by London police in 2010 was John Ford, a once-aspiring actor who has since admitted to an extensive career using deception and illegal means to obtain confidential information for Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper. Facing potential prosecution, Ford called a journalist he said he had collaborated with repeatedly — and trusted to come to his rescue.

That journalist, according to draft book chapters Ford later wrote recounting his ordeal, was Robert Winnett, a Sunday Times veteran who is set to become editor of The Washington Post later this year.

Winnett moved quickly to connect Ford with a lawyer, discussed obtaining an untraceable phone for future communications and reassured Ford that the “remarkable omerta” of British journalism would ensure his clandestine efforts would never come to light, according to draft chapters Ford wrote in 2017 and 2018 that were shared with The Post.

Winnett moved quickly to connect Ford with a lawyer, discussed obtaining an untraceable phone for future communications and reassured Ford that the “remarkable omerta” of British journalism would ensure his clandestine efforts would never come to light, according to draft chapters Ford wrote in 2017 and 2018 that were shared with The Post.

Winnett, currently a deputy editor of the Telegraph, did not respond to a detailed list of questions. Ford, who previously declined to be interviewed, did not respond to questions about the draft book chapters.
Winnett is now poised to take over the top editorial position in The Post’s core newsroom, scheduled to start after the November U.S. presidential election. He was appointed by Post CEO and Publisher William Lewis, who has mentored Winnett and worked with him at two British papers. Lewis is also mentioned in Ford’s draft chapters.
The drafts are part of a collection of previously unreported materials representing Ford’s recollections of his activities and associations with Winnett, some of which The Post was able to match with published stories and other public documents. The prospective book project never came to fruition.
The claims raise questions about Winnett’s journalistic record months before he is to assume a top position at The Post. His appointment has increased focus on the different ways journalism is practiced in the United States and Britain.

In one passage, Ford describes working with Winnett on an array of stories about consumer and business affairs. The collaboration, in his account, was part of a broader arrangement with the Sunday Times in which Ford delivered confidential details about Britain’s rich and powerful by using dishonest means, including changing their bank passwords and adopting false personas in calls to government agencies. A Sunday Times editor later acknowledged some of these practices but said they were deployed to serve the public interest.
Winnett, who went on to become a respected business reporter and editor with a record of scoops, has not publicly spoken about relying on or interacting with Ford, a trained actor with a talent for accents.
But a review by The Post of Winnett’s reporting at the Sunday Times, as well as Ford’s unpublished book chapters and other documents that have since been made public, reveals apparent overlap between Winnett’s stories and individuals or entities that Ford said he was commissioned to target. They include pieces on the fate of the Leeds United Football Club, the finances of former prime minister Blair and the efforts by some of Britain’s wealthiest elites to buy a new vehicle from Mercedes-Benz that cost 250,000 pounds.
At The Post and other major American news organizations, the use of deceptive tactics in pursuit of news stories violates core ethics policies. In Britain, “blagging” — using misrepresentation to dupe others into revealing confidential information — has been a known feature of a certain brand of tabloid journalism, especially before a public reckoning over press ethics began in 2011. Blagging has been less frequently documented in the broadsheet titles where Winnett and Lewis built their careers.

Blagging is illegal under the United Kingdom’s 1998 Data Protection Act, but a defense is available if the acts can be shown to serve the public interest, legal experts said.

Winnett was tapped to lead The Post’s newsroom as part of a Lewis shake-up that led to the abrupt departure this month of Sally Buzbee, the first woman to serve as The Post’s executive editor.
Addressing the Post newsroom this month, Lewis touted Winnett as a “world class” journalist. “He’s a brilliant investigative journalist,” Lewis said. “And he will restore an even greater degree of investigative rigor to our organization.”
Lewis’s own journalistic record also has come under scrutiny.
The New York Times on Saturday reported that Lewis, as an editor at the Sunday Times in 2004, had assigned a reporter to write a story about a prominent businessman that the reporter believed was based on hacked phone records. The Post has reviewed unpublished writing by Ford in which he claims to have changed the password on the bank account of that businessman, Stuart Rose, so as to gain unauthorized access to Rose’s records…

In recent weeks, Lewis has faced accusations of seeking to suppress stories about a long-running civil court battle in London concerning his time as a top executive in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
In January 2011, London police asked Murdoch’s company to turn over evidence of phone hacking by one of its papers, and last month, a judge cleared the way for plaintiffs to air claims that Lewis and others were involved in plans to subsequently delete millions of emails allegedly related to the hacking. Lewis has denied wrongdoing and is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit. He has also denied trying to quash stories on the topic.

Ford’s draft chapters from 2017 and 2018, shared at the time with a cohort of journalists and others, reflect his efforts to blow the whistle on hacking and other illicit newsgathering methods.
Those efforts prompted a 2018 Guardian profile, in which Ford said, “I was nothing more than a common thief.” He counted private investigators among his clients and said he performed most of his work for the Sunday Times, never taking on a formal role or even entering its office, but estimating that he was paid 40,000 pounds a year for his exploits. He said in that profile that he pursued leading politicians, including Blair and another former prime minister, Gordon Brown; celebrities such as Paul McCartney; and a former head of MI6, the secretive foreign intelligence service.

Ford wrote in his draft chapters that he came to know Winnett as a young reporter at the Sunday Times, where Winnett began writing as a student in 1995.
Lewis became business editor of the Sunday Times in 2002. He remained there until 2005, when he became city editor of the Telegraph, a center-right paper identified with Britain’s Conservative Party. He quickly climbed the ranks of that outlet.

Winnett joined Lewis at the Telegraph in 2007, and two years later they worked closely together on an investigation into phony expenses by members of Parliament that rocked the political establishment and forced a wave of resignations.
The stories that the Telegraph published in 2009 arose from data that the paper had acquired as part of a transaction in which they paid about 150,000 pounds to a private investigator seeking to sell the material on behalf of another source, according to an account Lewis later provided as part of a public inquiry into media practices. Lewis has described the Telegraph’s work as a high-water mark for the British press, “one of the most important bits of journalism, if not the most important bit of journalism, in the postwar period.”
Within a year, the British industry’s practices were engulfed in an expanding scandal, fueled by revelations that News of the World, a best-selling tabloid in Murdoch’s media empire, had engaged in widespread hacking of the phones of politicians, celebrities and even victims of violent crimes in the pursuit of salacious stories.
Lewis left the Telegraph in 2010 to join the Murdoch-controlled News International as a senior executive. Within months, he would be charged with helping to manage the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal, a position that involved overseeing the provision of evidence to a Metropolitan Police investigation that swelled to include hundreds of officers.

Categories Accountability, Character, Education Reform, Ethics, Media, Scandals

Chicago: Community Schools Are a Better Strategy than “Education Reform”

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2024 //
31

Jeff Bryant, veteran education journalist, writes here about the success of community schools in Chicago, in contrast to the failed ideas of “education reform.” The latter echoed the failed strategies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top: testing, competition, privatization, firing staff, closing schools, ranking and rating students, teachers, principals and schools based on test scores. So-called “education reform” created massive disruption and led to massive failure.

Bryant describes the evolution of community schools in Chicago, led by grassroots leaders like Jitu Brown, where parents are valued partners.

Bryant writes:

“Until now, we haven’t even tried to make big-city school districts work, especially for children of color,” Jhoanna Maldonado said when Our Schools asked her to describe what Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and his supporters have in mind for the public school system of the nation’s third-largest city.

Johnson scored a surprising win in the 2023 mayoral election against Paul Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), and education was a key issue in the race, according to multiplenewsoutlets. Maldonado is an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which is reported to have “bankrolled” Johnson’s mayoral campaign along with other labor groups, and Johnson is a former middle school teacher and teachers union organizer. What Johnson and his supporters are doing “is transforming our education system,” Maldonado said. There’s evidence the transformation is sorely needed.

For the past two decades, Chicago’s schools experienced a cavalcade of negative stories, including recurring fiscal crisis, financial scandals and mismanagement, a long downward slide in student enrollment, persistent underfunding from the state, the “largest mass closing [of schools] in the nation’s history,” and a seemingly endless conflict between the CPS district administration and CTU.

Yet, there are signs the district may be poised for a rebound.

“The people of Chicago have had enormous patience as they’ve witnessed years of failed school improvement efforts,” Maldonado said. “And it has taken years for the community to realize that no one else—not charter school operators or so-called reformers—can do the transformation. We have to do it ourselves.”

“Doing it ourselves” seems to mean rejecting years of policy and governance ideas that have dominated the district, and is what Johnson and his transition committee call, “an era of school reform focused on accountability, high stakes testing, austere budgets, and zero tolerance policies,” in the report, “A Blueprint for Creating a More Just and Vibrant City for All.”

After experiencing more than 10 years of enrollment declines between 2012 and 2022, losing more than 81,000 students during this period, and dropping from its status as third-largest school district in the nation to fourth in 2022, CPS reported an enrollment increase for the 2023-2024 school year. Graduation rates hit an all-time high in 2022. The number of students being suspended or arrested on school grounds has also declined significantly. And student scores on reading tests, after a sharp decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, have improved faster than most school districts across the country. Math scores have also rebounded, but are more comparable to other improving districts, according to a 2024 Chalkbeat article.

Johnson and his supporters have been slowly changing the district’s basic policy and governance structures. They are attempting to redefine the daily functions of schools and their relationships with families and their surrounding communities by expanding the number of what they refer to as “sustainable community schools.” The CPS schools that have adopted the community schools idea stand at 20 campuses as of 2024, according to CTU. Johnson and his transition committee’s Blueprint report has called for growing the number of schools using the sustainable community schools approach to 50, with the long-term goal of expanding the number of schools to 200.

The call to have more CPS schools adopt the community schools approach aligns with a national trend where several school districts, including big-city districts such as Los Angeles and New York City, are embracing the idea.

Community schools look different in different places because the needs and interests of communities vary, but the basic idea is that schools should address the fundamental causes of academic problems, including student health and well-being. The approach also requires schools to involve students and their families more deeply in school policies and programs and to tap the assets and resources available in the surrounding community to enrich the school.

In Chicago—where most students are non-white, more than 70 percent are economically disadvantaged, and large percentages need support for English language learning and learning disabilities—addressing root causes for academic problems often means bringing specialized staff and programs into the school to provide more academic and non-academic student and family services, often called wraparound supports. The rationale for this is clear.

“If a student is taken care of and feels safe and heard and has caring adults, that student is much more ready to learn,” Jennifer VanderPloeg the project manager of CPS’s Sustainable Community Schools told Our Schools. “If [a student is] carrying around a load of trauma, having a lot of unmet needs, or other things [they’re] worrying about, then [they] don’t have the brain space freed up for algebra. That’s just science,” she said.

“Also important is for students to see themselves in the curriculum and have Black and brown staff members in the school,” said Autumn Berg, director of CPS’s Community Schools Initiative. “All of that matters in determining how a student perceives their surroundings.”

“Community schools are about creating a culture and climate that is healthy, safe, and loving,” said VanderPloeg. “Sure, it would be ideal if parents would be able to attend to all the unmet needs of our students, but that’s just not the system we live in. And community schools help families access these [unmet] needs too.”

Also, according to VanderPloeg, community schools give extra support to teachers by providing them with assistance in all of the things teachers don’t have time to attend to, like helping families find access to basic services and finding grants to support after-school and extracurricular programs.

But while some Chicago educators see the community schools idea as merely a mechanism to add new programs and services to a school’s agenda, others describe it with far more expansive and sweeping language.

“Community schools are an education model rooted in self-determination and equity for Black and brown people,” Jitu Brown told Our Schools. Brown is the national director of Journey for Justice Alliance, a coalition of Black and brown-led grassroots community, youth, and parent organizations in more than 30 cities.

“In the Black community, we have historically been denied the right to engage in creating what we want for our community,” Brown said.

In Chicago, according to Brown, most of the schools serving Black and brown families are struggling because they’ve been led by people who don’t understand the needs of those families. “Class plays a big role in this too,” he said. “The people in charge of our schools have generally been taught to believe they are smarter than the people in the schools they’re leading.”

But in community schools, Brown sees the opportunity to put different voices in charge of Chicago schools.

“The community schools strategy is not just about asking students, parents, and the community for their input,” he said. “It’s about asking for their guidance and leadership.”

It Started with Saving a Neighborhood

Chicago’s journey of embracing the community schools movement has been long in the making, and Brown gets a lot of credit for bringing the idea to the attention of public school advocates in the city.

He achieved much of this notoriety in 2015 by leading a hunger strike to reopen Walter H. Dyett High School in Chicago’s predominantly African American Bronzeville community. Among the demands of the strikers—Brandon Johnson was a participant in the protest when he was a CTU organizer—was for the school to be reopened as a “hub” of what they called “a sustainable community school village,” according to Democracy Now.

The strike received prominent attention in national news outlets, including the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Brown’s engagement with the community schools approach started before the fight for Dyett, going back almost two decades when he was a resource coordinator at the South Shore High School of Entrepreneurship, a school created in 2001 when historic South Shore International College Preparatory High School was reorganized into three smaller campuses as part of an education reform effort known as small schools.

Brown was responsible for organizing educators and community members to pool resources and involve organizations in the community to strengthen the struggling school. He could see that the school was being “set up,” in his words, for either closure or takeover by charter school operators.

“School privatization in the form of charter schools was coming to our neighborhood,” he said, “and we needed a stronger offer to engage families in rallying to the school and the surrounding community.”

Brown pushed for the adoption of an approach for transforming schools that reflected a model supported by the National Education Association of full-service community schools.

That approach was based on five pillars that included a challenging and culturally relevant curriculum, wraparound services for addressing students’ health and well-being, high-quality teaching, student-centered school climate, and community and parent engagement. A sixth pillar, calling for shared leadership in school governance, was eventually added.

After engaging in “thousands” of conversations in the surrounding historic Kenwood neighborhood, where former President Barack Obama once lived, Brown said that he came to be persuaded that organizing a school around the grassroots desires of students, parents, teachers, and community members was a powerful alternative to school privatization and other top-down reform efforts that undermine teachers and disenfranchise families.

Brown and his collaborators recognized that the community schools idea was what would turn their vision of a school into a connected system of families, educators, and community working together.

Open the link to continue reading this important story.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Community Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Education Reform, Failure, Innovation, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, School Choice, Standardized Testing, Teacher Evaluations, VAM (value-added modeling), Vouchers

Arizona: Universal Vouchers Are a Handout to the Wealthy

By dianeravitch
June 17, 2024 //
6

Three scholars at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington published a study of vouchers in Arizona. They began with no preconceptions. They studied who benefits from vouchers. Is the neediest segment of the student population benefitting? No. The answer: the most privileged sector of the population are the prime recipients of vouchers.

The authors are Jon Valant, Jamie Klinenberg, and Nicholas Zerbino, all Brookings scholars.

Please open the link to read the full report.

They write:

Amid a wave of legislation that created or expanded private-school choice programs across the country, Robert Enlow, the President/CEO of EdChoice, dubbed 2023 as “the year of universal choice.” Enlow wasn’t wrong. Universal eligibility is the defining trend in recent private school choice reforms. For decades, private-school choice programs (like vouchers) provided funds only to certain families—e.g., families with low household income or a child with a disability. Recently, however, Republican lawmakers have created or expanded private-school choice programs to allow nearly all students, regardless of their individual need, access to public funding to attend private schools.

Many of today’s programs take the form of education savings accounts (ESAs). Through an ESA program, families receive deposits of government funds in a restricted-use savings account, which they can spend on private school tuition, fees, and other qualifying expenses. ESA programs, though similar in many ways to voucher programs, are relatively new on the scene and haven’t been widely evaluated. Advocates argue that ESAs allow parents to customize their children’s education and create opportunities for families who otherwise might be unable to afford private schooling or other educational expenses. Critics contend that ESA programs lack protections for students and taxpayers. They also contend that ESAs have little track record of success and siphon off funds that would be better spent on public schools. While ESA programs remain young and confined to certain states, they are beginning to account for a sizable share of school funding in some places.

Here, we’ll examine who is getting public funds through Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, the oldest universal ESA program in the United States. We focus on whether the primary beneficiaries of these programs are families in need—a key question for judging whether universal ESA programs really are addressing inequities in school access.

The evolution of ESAs in Arizona

Arizona was an early adopter of both an education savings account program and, ultimately, a universal education savings account program. In 2011, Arizona launched the Empowerment Scholarship Account program, which allowed qualifying families to obtain the equivalent of 90% of per-pupil funding in an ESA. (Today, most scholarships provide $7,000 to $8,000 annually.) Initially, the program was restricted to students with disabilities and, through legislative action in 2013, capped at a small number of recipients. Over time, eligibility expanded slightly until, in 2022, Arizona lawmakers opened the program to all students, including those already attending private schools. EdChoice touts the current iteration of the program as the “first to offer full universal funded eligibility with broad-use flexibility for parents.”

The point about broad-use flexibility is important. The list of allowable expenses for Arizona’s ESA program is long. It includes everything from tuition and fees to backpacks, printers, and bookshelves. Overall, about 63% of state funds are being spent on tuition, textbooks, and fees at a qualifying school, with “curricula and supplementary materials” (12%) being the next largest expense.

Researchers, state officials, and advocacy groups have raised concerns about the program’s expansion. Some have pointed to wasteful spending from the lightly regulated program, while others have emphasized exploding costsand their potential impacts on public schools. An early report indicated that a disproportionate share of program beneficiaries appeared to be affluent.

A closer look at who is getting ESA funds in Arizona

We looked to publicly available data on Empowerment Scholarship Account recipients to get a clearer picture of who is receiving ESA funds. If, in fact, affluent families are securing the lion’s share of ESA funding, that would raise obvious questions about whether these programs are exacerbating rather than mitigating inequities in school access.

To begin, we took the most recent executive and legislative quarterly report for the program (the 2024 Q2 report). That report lists the number of students enrolled in the program by the recipients’ home ZIP code. We converted those ZIP codes to ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs), which allows us to describe the communities where ESA enrollees reside using U.S. Census Bureau data.1

In the analyses that follow, we compare ESA participation rates by the socioeconomic status (SES) of Arizona communities. We use three measures of SES: poverty rates, median household income, and educational attainment. This allows us to see, for example, whether wealthier or poorer neighborhoods (ZCTAs) tend to receive a disproportionate share of scholarships.

First, we examine ESA participation based on a measure of local poverty: the share of residents receiving public assistance income or SNAP/Food Stamps. For this chart (and others that follow), we divide the Arizona population into deciles, with each bar representing roughly 10% of the state population under the age of 18. In Figure 1, each bar shows the number of ESA recipients per 1,000 people under 18 years old. The leftmost bar represents the parts of the state with the lowest poverty rate (based on ZCTAs); the rightmost bar represents the decile with the highest poverty rate.

We see a clear trend on this measure. As poverty rates increase from left to right, the share of children receiving ESA funding decreases. The highest ESA participation rate—75 ESA recipients per 1,000 children under 18—is for the population decile with the lowest poverty rate. The lowest ESA participation rate—14 ESA recipients per 1,000 children—is for the population decile with the highest poverty rate. (Statewide, we find an average of 45 ESA recipients per 1,000 children.)

Next, we run a parallel analysis based on median household income. This allows us to examine the highest-income areas in ways that a chart based on poverty rates might obscure.

Here, too, the results are clear. As seen in Figure 2, the lowest decile in median income has the lowest rate of ESA participation (20 recipients per 1,000 children), while the highest decile in median income has the highest rate of ESA participation (74 participants per 1,000 children).

When we disaggregate by educational attainment, we see a similar story. Figure 3 shows rates of ESA participation disaggregated by the share of local residents who attended at least some college. ESA receipt is lowest where the fewest people have attended college (14 recipients per 1,000 children). It is highest where the most people have attended college (76 recipients per 1,000 children).

In other words, regardless of the SES measure used (poverty rate, median income, or educational attainment), we see similar patterns in who is obtaining ESA funding. More advantaged communities are securing a highly disproportionate share of these scholarships.

Please open the link to read this short report in full.

Categories Education Reform

Texas: Yes, There Are Huge Differences Between Democrats and the GOP!

By dianeravitch
June 15, 2024 //
28

Michelle Davis writes a blog called Lone Star Left, where she opines on the struggle to reverse the hold of fascists on the state of Texas. She previously reported on the state convention of the Texas GOP, which cherishes the “right to life” for fetuses but wants to impose the death penalty on women who seek or obtain an abortion. Women who want an abortion apparently have NO right to life.

In this post, Davis reports on the Texas Democratic Party platform, which is the polar opposite of the GOP. She loves it!

She writes:

Okay, we’re finally to it. The Texas Democratic Party Platform and the proposed changes went through the Platform Committee. The Texas Democratic Party (TDP) platform is a critical document that outlines the party’s values, principles, and policy goals. It serves as a roadmap for Democratic candidates and elected officials, providing a clear vision for the future of Texas. The platform reflects the collective voice of party members and sets the agenda for the party’s legislative priorities.

The platform also plays a significant role in mobilizing voters. It provides a comprehensive guide to what the Democratic Party stands for, making it easier for voters to understand its positions on critical issues. (Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work.)

If you missed the previous articles about the TDP’s updated rules and resolutions: 

Personally, I love the Texas Democratic Party Platform and have kept up with its evolution over the years. The previous platform is online, which you can see here: 

Loving a party platform? That’s weird. 

Earlier this week, I was mindlessly scrolling on TikTok, and I came across some dipshit from Los Angeles who has several hundred thousand followers; her video was all about how “both parties are the same,” and she was discouraging people from voting. The privileged position of living in a blue state, right?

People like this piss me off because NO Democrats and Republicans are not the same. 

While the Republican Party of Texas debated giving women who have abortions the death penalty, this week, the Texas Democratic Party added a platform plank that says, “Restore the right of all Texans to make personal and responsible decisions about reproductive health.”

Republicans want unfettered end-stage capitalism with no healthcare, no public education, no Social Security, no Medicaid, and vast wealth inequality. Democrats want universal healthcare, well-funded public education, robust social safety nets, and economic equality.

The Texas Democratic Party platform is a testament to our commitment to creating a fairer, more just society for all Texans. Seeing such misinformation spread online is frustrating, especially when it can lead to voter apathy. However, our platform represents a clear and progressive vision for the future.

It’s a comprehensive document outlining our priorities for a better Texas. We must continue to show these differences between the blue and the red to counteract the cynicism and misinformation that is prevalent today.

What are some of the positive highlights? 

Education:

The platform changes maintained the emphasis on protecting and improving Texas public education. They also retained strong language prohibiting school choice scams, such as using vouchers, including special education vouchers, and opposed these programs. The platform kept the requirement that every class have a teacher certified to teach that subject. It clarified that teachers should not be expected to provide financial support through classroom supplies and other essentials at their own expense.

Some of the planks I thought were good: 

  • Oppose discriminatory policies affecting special education funding. (It’s an ongoing problem in the Republican-led legislature.)
  • Offer dual credit and early college programs that draw at-risk students into vocational, technical, and collegiate careers.
  • Ensure all public school children are provided free school meals.

Higher education:

The TDP platform includes several favorable planks in higher education to make college more accessible and affordable. These include advocating for student loan debt relief, providing free college tuition for low-income qualified students, and offering paid internships and debt-free apprenticeship programs. Additionally, the platform supports eliminating standardized testing requirements like the SAT and ACT for college admissions.

Voting and elections:

The platform supports electronic voting systems that utilize paper backups and an auditable paper trail, ensuring election integrity. This particular plank led to some debate. While some supported it for ensuring election integrity, others were wary of potential vulnerabilities and preferred more traditional voting methods. Ultimately, it passed. 

Another fundamental plank supported the establishment of a limit on campaign donations in Texas elections to ensure fairness and transparency. We badly need campaign finance reform in Texas. Democrats see this need and are taking it seriously. 

They also supported establishing a code of judicial ethics for the Supreme Court of the United States and efforts to recalibrate the court by tying the number of justices to the number of federal circuit courts (13).

The Case For Expanding The Supreme Court

The Case For Expanding The Supreme Court

MICHELLE H. DAVIS

·FEB 14 Read full story

Healthcare:

If you missed my previous article, the Texas Democratic Party Resolution supports universal healthcare. This has also been part of their platform for several years. Unfortunately, we’re still fighting for basic healthcare access in Texas, so it’s a part of the Texas Democratic Party platform that doesn’t get enough attention. 

Here are some (not all) other interesting planks added this year: 

  • Protect doctors and hospitals from politically motivated attacks that hinder them from providing the best care possible.
  • Legalize and expand access to harm reduction supports such as fentanyl testing strips, Narcan, and safe syringe programs.
  • Support policies that reduce pollution and protect clean air and water.
  • Ensure that veterans have access to high-quality mental health services and support for substance use disorders.

Reproductive healthcare:

We all know what the GOP is doing. Besides restoring the right of Texans to make personal and responsible decisions about reproductive health, other new TDP platform planks include: 

  • Protect the right to access in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment.
  • Uphold the right to travel to another state for legal medical services.
  • Offer comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education.
  • Hold medical providers accountable for withholding information about a pregnancy based on their presumption that the pregnancy would be terminated.
  • Safeguard reproductive health and gender-based care patient privacy, including protection from law enforcement.

The environment and climate. 

Sometimes, I wonder if we spend enough time talking about this issue. It’s terrible right now, and the next several months could bring devastating weather.

Issues regarding the environment and climate change are life-threatening, and with Texas being the number one producer of greenhouse emissions in America, it’s an issue that Texans should take very seriously. 

The new planks, which add to the TDP’s previous commitments to clean energy, address many of these concerns. Including supporting policies that develop clean energy resources, promoting alternative fuel vehicles, promoting more energy-efficient buildings and appliances, streamlining the permitting process for building new electric transmission lines, and adding charging stations for electric cars at all state highway rest stops.

Dawn Buckingham, the Texas Land Commissioner, and oil and gas shill has promised to fight the federal administration from connecting offshore windmills to Texas. However, the TDP platform supports federal legislation to share offshore wind lease and production revenues with Texas and other states, incentivizing state and local governments to facilitate successful siting processes and funding coastal infrastructure and flood resiliency projects.

They also emphasized creating and enforcing stringent state and federal regulations on oil and gas operations, including methane release monitoring and enforcement without exceptions.

All of these planks are fantastic, and maybe by the time the 2026 Convention rolls around, we’ll be ready to add support for legislation that holds fossil fuel companies responsible for climate change. 

Criminal justice reform.

The TDP platform includes significant changes in the criminal justice reform plank, stressing a more humane approach to law enforcement. The platform proposes raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 13 years, ending the prosecution of juveniles in adult courts, and closing the remaining youth prison facilities while investing in community infrastructure to support children. Additionally, it aims to enforce the constitutional mandate against imprisoning individuals for debt, promote alternatives to incarceration for non-threatening offenses, and eliminate mandatory minimum sentences to allow for judicial discretion—notably, the platform advocates for abolishing the death penalty and instituting a moratorium on executions.

There is more. Open the link to finish her post.

What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas. It spreads to other GOP extremists. Stay informed.

Categories Civil Rights, Democracy, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Funding, Gender, Health, Justice, Supporting public schools, Texas

Tom Ultican: The Failure of the Nation’s Only All-Charter District, New Orleans

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2024 //
13

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and mathematics, writes here about the recent decision by local officials to open a PUBLIC SCHOOL in New Orleans. This is a symptom of the failure of the “all-charter” idea.

He writes:

New Orleans Public Schools, aka Orleans Parish School District (OPSD), became America’s first and only all charter school district in 2017. After hurricane Katrina, the state took over all but five schools in the city. When management was transferred to charter organizations in 2017, OPSD officially became an all charter district. This August, the city will open district-operated Leah Chase K-8 School, ending the all charter legacy.

According to Superintendent Avis Williams, the infrastructure required for the district to run Leah Chase will make it easier to open future district-run schools. OPSD will become both a charter school authorizer and regular school district. There is hope that New Orleans, Louisiana (NOLA) is pulling out of an abyss and tending towards a healthy public school system….

All-Charter NOLA Doomed from the Beginning

Public investment in education is widely viewed as the key to America’s success. Since the 19thcentury, communities have developed around local public schools. This opportunity was taken from NOLA neighborhoods…

Louisiana’s state takeover law required schools scoring below average to be closed. If this were real, half of the schools in the state would be closed every year. Instead, arbitrary state performance scores based on testing data, attendance, dropout rates and graduation rates were established. Similar ratings are used to evaluate NOLA charter schools. The nature of privatized schools and testing results led to almost half of the charter schools created being closed.

The NOLA school enrollment system allows parents to research the 100 schools and apply for up to eight of them. The algorithm selects the school from one of the eight if space is available. It is not uncommon for students to ride a bus past schools within walking distance of their homes. This complicated system is driving segregation.

For many education professionals, this system looked like a sure failure from the beginning. Communities could not develop around their schools and the schools would not be stable; important aspects of quality public education….

The All Charter District is a Failure

In 2021, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona visited OPSD. He heard first-hand the growing disillusionment with the all charter system. Four of the six parents told him they wanted to go back to neighborhood schools. Parents complained about Teach for America, placing unqualified teachers in schools and the One App process for not offering school choice.

Senator Bouie wrote a two-page paper, “A Moral Imperative and Case For Action”, stating: “After spending 6 Billion dollars of tax payers’ money to become the only all-Charter system in the State, a staggering 73% of our children are not functioning at grade level, compared to 63% in 2005, when the State took control of over 100 of our schools.”

He also shared:

“In other words, fellow citizens, this 15-year flawed experiment has yielded no best practices identified to improve student and school performance, no State protocol for Charter Law Compliance, and no student performance improvement. It has, however, yielded other devastating consequences for our children and our community.”

He mentioned the 26,000 students between the ages of 16 and 24 who went missing. The privatized charter school system was unable to account for them which is expected and natural for a public school district.

Bouieu “They are transported past a neighborhood school to attend a failing school across town” and eliminating the ineffective One App central enrollment system claiming, “It has created inequities by Race and Class and admissions by chance (lottery) and not choice.”

Raynard Sanders who has over forty years of experience in teaching, education administration and community development, said the charter experiment has “been a total disaster in every area.”He asserted NOLA had “the worst test scores since 2006, the lowest ACT scores, and the lowest NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores.”

Based on a 2015 study by the Center for Popular Democracy, Sanders declared, “Charter schools have no accountability and, fiscally, charter schools in New Orleans have more fraud than existed in the OPSD (Orleans Parish School District).” The fraud claim was used by the state in 2003 against OPSD to begin taking schools.

Loyola University Law Professor Bill Quigley stated, “NOLA reforms have created a set of schools that are highly stratified by race, class, and educational advantage; this impacts the assignment to schools and discipline in the schools to which students are assigned.”

He contended, “There is also growing evidence that the reforms have come at the expense of the city’s most disadvantaged children, who often disappear from school entirely and, thus, are no longer included in the data.”

Professor of Economics, Doug Harris, and his team at Tulane University are contracted to study school performance in New Orleans. Harris claims schools have improved since Hurricane Katrina. However Professor Bruce Baker of Rutgers University disagrees. He noted that the school system is not only smaller but less impoverished. Many of the poorest families left and never returned. So the slightly improved testing results are not real evidence of school improvement.

The latest testing data from 2023 saw NOLA public schools receive failing grades but based on Louisiana’s new progress indicator, the district received a C, meaning an F for assessments and an A in growth.

In a letter to the editor, former OPSD superintendent, Barbara Ferguson, stated:

“The state took over 107 of New Orleans’ 120 public schools and turned them into charter schools. Last year, 56 of New Orleans’ 68 public schools had scores below the state average. Thus, after nearly 20 years, over 80% of New Orleans schools remain below the state average. This charter school experiment has been a failure.”

Final Words

In 2006, with the school board out of the road and RSD in charge, philanthropists Bill Gates, Eli Broad and others were ready to help.

Naomi Klein’s 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, labeled these school reforms, a prime example of “disaster capitalism”, which she described as “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities.” She also observed, “In sharp contrast to the glacial pace with which the levees were repaired and the electricity grid brought back online, the auctioning-off of New Orleans’ school system took place with military speed and precision.”

Desires of New Orleans residents were ignored. Neoliberal billionaires were in charge. In all the excitement, few noticed that these oligarchs had no understanding of how public education functions. They threw away 200 years of public school development and replaced it with an experiment. The mostly black residents in the city were stripped of their rights.

Thousands of experienced black educators were fired and replaced by mostly white Teach For America teachers with 5 weeks of training. Instead of stable public schools, people were forced into unstable charter schools. Instead of professional administration, market forces drove the bus!

Clearly, the all charter school system is a failure.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Louisiana, New Orleans

Alaska: A Teacher Critiques the Harvard Charter School Study

By dianeravitch
June 10, 2024 //
23

Researcher Beth Zirbes, a teacher of advanced mathematics, used her skills to dissect a charter school study produced at Harvard. The study was reported by Paul Peterson in The Journal of School Choice; Peterson, like the Journal, is an outspoken advocate for charters and vouchers. The study claimed that charter schools outperform public schools, and that the charter schools in Alaska were best among all states.

The governor of Alaska cited the study as a reason to increase the number of charter schools.

Zirbes doubted that this was true and decided to do her own analysis. What she found, amazingly, was that the Harvard study ignored vital demographic factors.

She wrote:

When I first saw the results of the Harvard study concerning charter schools I was simultaneously unsurprised and skeptical. I was unsurprised as I have seen many very bright young students in my AP classes come from charter schools. I was skeptical as I suspected much of this performance could be attributed to the type of student who attends Alaska’s charter schools. As a comparative analysis of Alaska’s charter schools and neighborhood schools had not been done, I set out to do one myself.

To determine whether charter schools outperform neighborhood schools I looked at the performance of all schools on the 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA (English Language Arts) assessment from the Alaska Department of Early Childhood Education and Development’s (DEED) report card to the public, as this year was within the same time frame as the data from the Harvard study. The performance of each school is given under the “2018-2019 Performance Evaluation for Alaska’s Schools (PEAKS)” tab. I used the data on this page for every school in the state which allowed me to analyze test scores and demographic characteristics such as the proportion of the school who are economically disadvantaged, English language learners (ELL), and special education (SPED). Demographic characteristics are only given for the set of test-takers and thus all summaries and analyses are for students in grades 3-9 during the 2018-2019 school year. I also removed all correspondence schools from my dataset as these students were not included in the Harvard study, do not take NAEPs tests, and have very low participation rates on state tests. For my analysis on performance, I also restricted my dataset to include schools only in districts where charters are an option to ensure that the student populations were as similar as possible.

At first glance, it appears that charter schools are more successful than neighborhood schools. At charter schools 52.5% (1,866 out of 3,554) of students were proficient on the ELA assessment versus 40.1% (18,655 out of 46,574) of students at neighborhood schools. However, these differences could be explained by the differences in demographics of the student bodies at these schools. To rule this out as a potential issue, statisticians control for these variables in their mathematical models. We can then ask, do the charter schools outperform neighborhood schools that have similar characteristics? Or do charter schools do any better than we would expect, given their student populations? In short, the answer is no, they do not. When I fit a model which controlled for socioeconomic status alone, the type of school (charter versus neighborhood) was not significant. (For anyone who knows statistics, the p-value associated with type of school was 0.57. It wasn’t even close.) In summary, there is no evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools in terms of ELA proficiency once we consider their socioeconomic make-up.

During my data exploration, I discovered that charter schools, on average, have very different student bodies than neighborhood schools. Charter schools have far fewer economically disadvantaged students, far fewer ELL students, and are comparable to neighborhood schools in terms of SPED populations. Here is a summary of how these populations differ for all Alaskan students in the relevant grades in all of Alaska’s brick and mortar schools for the 2018-2019 school year:

  •  Neighborhood schools were 52.2% economically disadvantaged (30,780 out of 58,929 students) compared to 31.3% in charter schools (1,219 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 15.5% ELL (9,150 out of 58,929 students) compared to 9.3% in charter schools (363 out of 3895 students).
  • Neighborhood schools were 16.3% SPED (9,162 out of 58,929 students) compared to 13.7% in charter schools (532 out of 3895 students).

However, these summaries are highly influenced by a few outliers and obscure some large discrepancies, especially in terms of the economically disadvantaged and ELL students.

  • Of the charter schools, 46.4% (13 out of 28) have economically disadvantaged rates below 20%, compared to just 3.5% of neighborhood schools (15 out of 426).
  • Only 10.7% of charter schools (3 out of 28) have ELL percentages above 10%, compared to 36.9% of neighborhood schools (157 out of 426).

Even if we did a comparison of charter schools and neighborhood schools and found that charter schools did better, we still cannot conclude charter schools are causing the performance difference we observe. A comparative study like this is an example of an observational study and because it is impossible to control for all confounding factors, such as parental involvement, we can’t conclude success is caused by the school type. To definitively conclude that charter schools were causing the observed difference in success compared to neighborhood schools we would have to randomly assign some students to go to a charter school and some students to go to neighborhood schools. After some time, we would then compare the results. Obviously, this is impractical as many charter schools do not have busing, require volunteer hours, can remove students for poor attendance, and some do not even have lunch services.

Before the state uses the results of the Harvard study to change the approval process for charter schools we need to understand if charters are better and, if so, why. So far, I have not seen convincing evidence that charter schools outperform neighborhood schools when we control for various student characteristics. I have an idea for further study which I believe should be completed before any changes to policy are made. We can examine the performance of students who got admitted to charter schools via the lottery to those who applied but did not get in and attended their neighborhood schools instead. The group who was admitted is likely similar to those who applied but were not. This would be as close to a randomized experiment as one could hope to have. From this one could determine whether various factors were causing differences in performance, such as class size and teaching methodology. Additionally, we could use results of such a study to determine which factors correlate with success and apply these strategies in all our schools. As more than 90% of the students at our in-person schools are in neighborhood schools, such reforms will be more wide-reaching than simply adding a few more charter schools.

 2018-2019 PEAKS ELA, Beth Zirbes, economically disadvantaged, ELL, Guest Column, Harvard Charter School Study, NAEP, SPED

Categories Alaska, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Research
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