Dr. Keith Benson of the Camden (NJ) Education Association. In this essay, he analyzes the rise of Black leaders who represent the privatization movement and compares them to those who continue for a just and equitable public school system.
Whic side are you on?
I have never been without a dog. I love dogs. I miss the ones I have lost. I especially miss Molly, a Tibetan terrier, who was funny and lovable. She died of lymphoma. I miss Lady, a cocker spaniel, who was a rescue. She always curled herself around my feet and slept on the floor next to my bed. Now we have Mitzi, a 92-pound sweetheart, 57 varieties of dog, all wonderful.
Who doesn’t love dogs? Donald Trump.
Molly Roberts wrote in the Washington Post:
“How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?” President Trump asked during his rally in El Paso on Monday night.
The question was rhetorical — part of a meandering monologue that started with a shout-out to German shepherds for their bomb-sniffing skills and ended with an explanation of the president’s petlessness. But there’s an answer, and it offers another window into the Trumpian worldview.
The last time the White House lawn didn’t have a president walking a dog on it was in 1901. That’s nearly 120 years of canine constancy before Trump came along and decided to pass. Maybe these men just liked dogs, or maybe they knew that liking dogs meant their constituents liking them.
Warren G. Harding’s Laddie Boy is widely hailed as the first celebrity presidential dog. The Airedale terrier, an historian told The Post’s Caitlin Gibson, was meant to convey “warmth and approachability” after Woodrow Wilson’s comparative stiffness during his tenure. Richard Nixon, accused of corruption during his campaign for the vice presidency in 1952, famously resurrected Republican support in a speech declaring that one gift he would never return was a black-and-white dog named Checkers.
Other dogs, from Lyndon B. Johnson’s beagles to Bo Obama, have inspired public obsessions and even children’s books. George H.W. Bush’s dog, Millie, even “wrote” her own. There’s a reason Mitt Romney caught so much criticism for strapping his own family pooch to the roof of a car: Americans see a fondness for hounds as a sign of humanity. Our attraction to these loyal and innocent creatures is supposed to be instinctual and almost universal; man loving dogs is part of what makes man man, and if we are alike in nothing else at least we are alike in this.
Trump isn’t interested. He said so himself Monday: Feigning a desire for an animal he doesn’t “have any time” for would feel “phony,” and “that’s not the relationship I have with my people.”
Maybe there’s something admirable in this dedication to genuineness. So what if Trump’s contempt for the four-legged proves that he lacks a heart, soul or any other human-making attribute? But look at Trump’s history of hound-related remarks, and his scorn is more telling than just that.
Trump has talked about dogs before. A lot, in bizarre fashion.
“Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!” he remarked of former adviser Stephen K. Bannon.
“Union Leader” — a newspaper — “refuses to comment as to why they were kicked out of the ABC News debate like a dog,” he barked.
“Good work by General [John F.] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” he exclaimed after Omarosa Manigault Newman’s ignominious departure from the White House.
These misbegotten similes have prompted arunning gag among commentators who wonder, only half ironically, if the president knows what a dog is. The speculation may seem glib, but it speaks to a real disconnect: Trump’s understanding of the dog as something to be fired, dumped and kicked doesn’t jibe with the general view of the meaningful relationship between people and dogs — the same relationship that has led past presidents, and the public, to view dog ownership as so humanizing. To Trump, dogs serve an opposing purpose. He uses them to dehumanize instead.
By comparing people to canines to portray both as pathetic, Trump establishes distance between some men and women and other men and women, instead of commonality. It’s a favorite trick of his. Undocumented immigrants, the president has said, will “infest” the country. They are “animals.” And indeed, Trump’s highest praise for dogs so far seems to have come during this week’s rally with his ode to the German shepherd delivered as part of his case for a wall to keep Mexicans out of the country.
None of this is surprising, but it is clarifying. Trump is right, after all: Appeals to humanity are not the relationship he has with his people. He doesn’t win his supporters, or keep them around, with paeans to what brings us together. On the contrary, the allure of his campaign to white Americans worried about displacement in a browning America was how it defined itself in opposition to the other. There’s no room for softness there. Walking on the White House lawn with a dog would ruin the image. It would look nice, and it would look human, and because of those things it would also look weak.
A fake quotation made the rounds on social media this fall, spreading far enough that fact-checkers had to debunk it: “I never understood why people like dogs. Dogs are disgusting,” it read, with the president’s name falsely appended. “As if we needed another reason . . .” mused the accompanying meme. Trump never said those words, and we don’t need another reason for condemning his agenda. But the words he has said, from firing to dumping to kicking to lawn-walking, remind us of the reasons we already have.
Nowthat Cory Booker is running for the Democratic nomination for president, expect to hear a Big Liesabout the transformation of the Newark’s hoops when Booker was Mayor.
This study by Bruce Baker and Mark Weber of Rutgers University is a useful antidote.
Jan Resseger explains the power of conventional wisdom, which persists even when its effects are harmful and its premises disproven.
She sees Race to the Top as the quintessential bad idea locked in place in almost every state.
How to restore good sense and expunge bad policies?
She shows how her own state of Ohio has been severely damaged by Duncan’s policies.
The Difficulty of Cleaning Arne Duncan’s Awful Policies Out of the Laws of 50 States
A few months ago, the New York Times published a very credulous article about the “successful” state takeover of Camden, New Jersey. This was surprising because the superintendent who took charge had never run a school or a district before. Age 32, he had worked for Joel Klein.
Jersey Jazzman was doubtful. There has never been a successful state takeover.
So he waited until the state audit was completed. And his doubts were confirmed.
Here is JJ’s post about Camden:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2019/02/the-failure-of-state-control-in-camden.html
The so-called Renaissance schools in Camden were supposed to take all neighborhood kids. They don’t.
He writes:
This is the Times’ article:
A report from the Boston Globe daily news summary:
While you were sleeping: At his El Paso rally, after Trump whipped up the crowd against journalists once again by calling them “dishonest” and “fake news,” one of his supporters physically attacked journalists in the press area, violently shoving several people, especially a BBC cameraman who almost fell off the raised platform and whose camera the attacker tried to smash while shouting “F— the media.” He was restrained by other reporters until security took him out of the arena. And then Trump had the gall to ask the cameraman if he was all right.
Please don’t be surprised; physical attacks on journalists are inevitable in the wake of Trump’s outrageous and dangerous verbal attacks on the media as “enemies of the people.” Trump supporters routinely spit on, swear at, and make obscene gestures to reporters at Trump rallies. The publisher of The New York Times has made two appeals to Trump in person to stop the destructive language, to no avail. It’s inevitable that some of Trump’s mindless minions will believe him and act accordingly.
As for the rest of the taxpayer-funded campaign rally, Trump lied his waythrough his speech once again. He said the arena where he spoke held 8,000 people (it holds 6,500) and that the local fire department had allowed 10,000 people inside (it didn’t, especially since that would be unlawful and pretty stupid). He repeated his falsehood that crime in El Paso had plunged the minute a wall was built on the border (it didn’t; it had been low for many years), that big sections of his wall were already being built (existing fencing is being shored up), that a wall will stop drugs from “pouring” over the border (the vast majority of illegal drugs are smuggled in vehicles at ports of entry), and that a wall will stop MS-13 gang members (most MS-13 members who are arrested are US citizens).
My favorite was his claim that Democrats want to get rid of cows. I got nothin’ here.
Just so you know, he’s quite annoyed that fact checkers keep publishing the truth, so he now has labeled them as “fake news” as well. They had better start watching their back, too.
Gary Rubinstein heard that Teach for America corps members were persuaded not to take part in teachers’ strikes.
But did they stay neutral?
They are scabs if they don’t strike. They risk their Americorps funding if they do.
What do they do?
What do you think?
Questions for Betsy DeVos: What happens if you offer vouchers and there are few takers? Why increase the supply when the demand is small?
The Tea Party Republicans who won control of the North Carolina legislature believed that families across the state were aching to get into a religious school, so they created a voucher program and promised it would grow larger every year to meet the demand that was expected. But the funds are running far ahead of demand, and millions have been appropriated for vouchers that no one wants.
It is encouraging to see that even Republican legislators realize what a stupid thing it is to provide millions that go unspent when the public schools attended by nearly 90% of students are underfunded.
State lawmakers keep adding money for North Carolina’s Opportunity Scholarship program, which sends low-income kids to private schools, even though there aren’t enough takers to spend the money it already has.
With millions going unspent each year, the state budget approved in 2017 guarantees the voucher program will get a $10 million bump each year for the next decade.
That needs to stop, a key Republican lawmaker says.
“We’ve got other needs,” said Rep. Craig Horn of Union County, who chairs the House Education Appropriations Committee. “We need to right-size this thing.
The two-year state budget approved in 2017 cited “the critical need in this State to provide opportunity for school choice for North Carolina students” and spelled out Opportunity Scholarship budgets that would start at $44.8 million in 2017-18 and top out at $144.8 million in 2027-28.
When that plan was approved, the fund had already left a total of $12.6 million on the table during its first three years, numbers provided to The Charlotte Observer show. Even in 2017-18, when a cap on administrative expenses was lifted and that bill more than tripled, the fund used only about $29.5 million of the $34.8 million available.
Any unused money rolls over for use in the voucher program the following year, then reverts to the state’s General Fund if it remains as surplus for a second year, according to the state’s budget legislation….
Charles Jeter, a former state representative who now serves as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools government relations coordinator, says that the history of unspent voucher money gives lawmakers an easy way to free up some money for public education. Based on numbers he had gotten from the Opportunity Scholarship web page, he reported that the program had used only $28 million of $45 million allotted for the 2017-18 school year.
“So why do taxpayers across NC need to increase the funding for these vouchers by another $10 million when we’re only spending about 63% of the money now?” he wrote in his weekly “Jetergram” email.
Valerie Strauss notes on her blog “The Answer Sheet” that charters are losing their luster. With the ascent of Choice Champion Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, Democrats are losing interest in charters.
Almost 90% are non-union, and Democrats are not as keen about charters as they were when Obama was president. DeVos has made clear that her goal is privatization, and charter schools advance her goal. Today, Democrats running for office are backing away from charters.
The number of charters is not growing as it once did.
Most embarrassing are the escalating charter scandals. The public has begun to realize the absurdity of giving out public money without oversight or accountability.
There is most definitely a backlash. The NAACP call for a moratorium was part of the backlash. So was the referendum in Massachusetts in 2016, where voters overwhelmingly rejected an effort to lift the cap on charters.
Part of the backlash stems from the realization that more money for charters means less money for public schools. Another part is the public revulsion against the billionaires behind the charter movement, whether its DeVos or Bill Gates or the Waltons or the Koch brothers.
No matter what lies are spread, most Americans don’t want to abandon their community public schools to entrepreneurs and corporations.
While the state of Virginia is engulfed in a crisis of leadership, friends of public education are pushing to launch a statewide protest on behalf of public education, reports Rachel Levy.
After years of underfunding, grassroots activists have begun their campaign, hoping to ignite a movement that leads to equitable movement. The leadership crisis makes the battle for #Red4Ed even harder in what issuer to be an uphill battle.
Levy writes:
“The #Red4Ed movement has kicked off in Virginia: On January 28, as many as 5,000 public school teachers, educators, workers, parents, students, and other stakeholders marched on the Virginia state capitol in Richmond to demand fully funded public schools. The march and rally, organized by Virginia Educators United, a “grassroots campaign” of teachers, staff members, parents and community members, was one of the largest to descend on the state capitol in the last century.
“The well-organized event was supported by strategic use of social media and a user-friendly website. The group’s demands include restoring funding for education to pre-2008 recession levels, increasing teacher pay to national averages, paying education support professionals competitive wages, recruitment and retention of highly qualified teachers and more teachers of color, more funding for school infrastructure costs, and ensuring sufficient numbers of support staff like counselors and social workers….
“There is broad, bipartisan support for public education in Virginia, despite terrible funding. This support is not a sign that Virginia as a whole is getting “bluer.” In fact, support for school privatization is stronger in places like Richmond with more socially liberal but gentrifying, market-friendly forces. The problem is also that in more conservative, traditionally Republican-voting areas, while support for the institution of public education is strong, support for the policies that will make public schools more equitable, integrated, and better funded is not. And in more conservative areas, there is an inherent discomfort with advocacy and activism—I know from my own research that most people seem to understand advocacy to mean being supportive and uncritical of decision-makers.
“At the rally on January 28, David Jeck, superintendent of Fauquier County public schools, stated that, “the localities are not at fault here.” But such a statement lets wealthier communities off the hook. Local districts in Virginia have also made cuts to education, and did not restore pre-recession funding. And local districts in Virginia are hindered by restrictive proffer policies that make it difficult to collect revenues from developers or otherwise leverage sufficient taxes on businesses and non-personal property. Better-heeled parents support their local public schools not by advocating for more funding, but by funneling donations and in-kind donations directly to their school via parent groups and local businesses and foundations.
”At the state level, the structure of the General Assembly itself poses obstacles. Virginia has a part-time “citizen” legislature. And even though in 2017 a record number of women, people of color, and progressives were elected to the House of Delegates, the capacity of citizens, such as those connected with Virginia Educators United, to engage in advocacy is limited. Participants must be available at any time, including during weekends, holidays, early mornings, and late nights when the General Assembly is in session (for forty-five days and ninety days, alternatively). This means that most such advocacy efforts are left to professional lobbyists, organizations, and associations.”
It will take widespread support to get the attention of the legislature to the state’s crisis of funding.
