Katherine Marsh is an award-winning novelist who writes for children in grades fifth-through-eighth. At that age in the 1980s, she remembers falling in love with books. But she knows that children today are not reading for fun as much as they used to. NAEP data say so; parents as well. She knows that the ubiquity of cell phones, the Internet, abd television explain some of that decline in reading.
But she believes there is a problem with the way children are taught reading. No, she’s not talking about phonics and how children learn to read. She refers to the pedagogical approach that is required by the Common Core. children in school are taught to analyze what they read. This technical mindset, she believes, kills the joy of reading.
What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.
This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educatorexperienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.
For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.
But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.
Under the duress of Commin Core, students are analyzing passages without reading the whole book. They are getting read to do the same on the tests. This is a sure fire way to make reading a chore, not a pleasure.
The architect of the Common Core standards, David Coleman, used to claim all sorts of miraculous things that would happen, if everyone taught the way he wanted. Test scores would rise, achievement gaps would close, etc. in the decade after Commin Core was introduced in 2010, none of those miracles came to pass.
Coleman believed that children needed to interpret what was put in front of them, without context. Understand the four corners of the text in front of them. This may make sense for a test, where the only thing in front of the student is a short passage, but it’s no way to read for pleasure.
Worse, this approach is a sure fire way to turn reading into a dull exegesis of language, not into a source of joy.
Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”
At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.
Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.
All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax?
The university is now moving closer to answering just that question. After long resisting the call of students, the dean of the law school, Theodore W. Ruger, has taken a rare step: He has filed a complaint and requested a faculty hearing to consider imposing a “major sanction” on the professor…
For years, Mr. Ruger wrote in his 12-page complaint, Professor Wax has shown “callous and flagrant disregard” for students, faculty and staff, subjecting them to “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic actions and statements.”
The complaint said she has violated the university’s nondiscrimination policies and “standards of professional competence.”
The article goes on to cite the many times that Professor Wax has offended women, Blacks, gays, foreign students, or anyone else who does not agree with her idyllic view of the culture of the 1950s. Implicitly she means an era when Blacks were subservient, women were compliant wives, gays were in the closet, and foreigners were tourists.
What should the university do?
…many free speech groups, including the Academic Freedom Alliance, PEN America and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, have criticized the dean and said that Professor Wax should not be fired because of her public statements.
My view: She should not be fired. Perhaps she should be admonished for behavior that is insulting to students, but her academic freedom and tenure protect her job.
Academic freedom protects not just the views that one likes, not just the views of the majority, but the views you hate. I might wish that Professor Wax were open-minded and wish that she had a keener sense of humanity, but I defend her right to be offensive, inconsiderate, and obnoxious. Students are not required to take her courses. Those who take her courses should challenge her views if they disagree.
But academic freedom must prevail.
Voltaire: “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Julie Vassilatos, a parent activist and blogger in Chicago, writes here about the case for Brandon Johnson. She and others have written passionately against Paul Vallas, but here she explains why Brandon Johnson is well prepared to serve as Mayor. Because of his knowledge and experience, he not only knows the city’s budgetary issues well, but he is able to address the root causes of crime and the real needs of students.
She writes:
Friends, so many of us have been carrying on about the dangers of Paul Vallas so incessantly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he’s running for mayor of Chicago unopposed.
But Vallas does have an opponent—one who is talented, thoughtful, experienced, and a real true Chicagoan raising his family on the west side: Brandon Johnson.
Johnson is getting a lot of heat from Vallas and his supporters right now. No lesser a personage than Darren Bailey, defeated far-right candidate for IL governor and unofficial endorser of Vallas, has announced that if Johnson is elected, it will be a “dark day” for Chicago. Yes. A dark day indeed. Get it?
I’m pretty sure Darren Bailey fans get it.
Then there’s FOP president/disgraced cop John Catanzara, who foresees that 1000 cops will walk off the job if Johnson wins, and there will be blood in the streets.
Truth to tell, at the outset of the race I was slow to warm up to Johnson the candidate. But then I remembered that he was at the front lines of a struggle I will never forget—the 2013 mass school closures. So many folks did all we could do to try and stop that, well, generationally damaging policy. And those who led the way in that effort? I’d probably follow them into a fire.
But what about Brandon Johnson now? What are his credentials? Haven’t you, like me, read all that stuff about how he has no experience? How he’s never managed a budget? How he seems (unfathomably) to like crime and together with CTU wants our city to be unsafe, because….because….well, because reasons?
Well, maybe we need to look a little deeper than the media/social media blah blah blah.
The Cook County Board of Commissioners oversees County operations and approves the budget of elected County officials including the Assessor, Board of Review Commissioners, County Clerk, Clerk of the Circuit Court, Recorder of Deeds, Sheriff, States Attorney and Treasurer.
The Commissioners also serve as the Board of the Cook County Forest Preserve District, a special purpose taxing district. The Board also sets policy, levies taxes, passes ordinances, approves all county purchases over $10,000, and adopts the annual budget for the entire county government.
The Civic Federation supports the Cook County FY2023 Executive Budget Recommendation of $8.75 billion because it reflects strong financial management and puts the County in a good position moving forward post-pandemic. The County’s FY2023 proposed budget includes a strong level of reserves and positive revenue projections, without any increases in taxes or fees.
The budget gap is smaller than it’s been in years, supplemental payments to the pension fund have been made for the eighth year in a row, and the County’s fiscal position is “strong…following robust revenue performance and built-up reserves.” And observe that there are in this budget, no tax increases. (Here I note we can be grateful to Board President Toni Preckwinkle who has shepherded this budget for 13 years. And I note further, she has endorsed Johnson.)
Now let’s review the budgets Vallas has overseen.
In Philadelphia, Vallas managed a $2B budget and left a surprise $73M deficit on his way out the door. In the Louisiana Recovery District his budget was $176M. He got an extra $1.8B to work with from FEMA, and before he was done with the NOLA job he wandered repeatedly over to Haiti, missing weeks at a time of work in New Orleans (that’s beside the point, but I just thought you should know). And in Bridgeport CT, his budget was $232M. Of course he was pushed out of that job before he could really do much financial damage there.
For those of you keeping score, Vallas hasn’t ever drafted, managed, or implemented a budget even close to the size that Brandon Johnson has worked with as a member of the Cook County Board.
Before his County Board days, Johnson was a teacher. He taught middle school social studies at Jenner from 2007 to 2010 (years when most of his students were able to watch, right from school windows, wrecking balls demolishing their homes as the city brought down public housing), and then at Westinghouse for a year. He then became a CTU organizer and the leader of its Black Caucus. In those years he had a front row view on lots of turmoil in the district: school closures and turnarounds via the failed Renaissance 2010 initiative, the loss of Black teachers in the classroom as a result of closures and CPS policy choices, the 2012 teacher strike, the 2013 mass school closures, a churn of district CEOs, some of whom ended up in prison, illegal special education cuts, and rapid charter expansion.
While Johnson was organizing teachers and collaborating with parents in response to district policies that were crushing schools and services (and I do mean that literally, with at least one occasion of bulldozers bringing down a school library on a day when parents were instead expecting a meeting), he lived the experience of the folks who’ve been at the mercy of “education reform” for decades. He saw first hand what disinvestment has done to CPS students—resulting in teacher cuts, special ed cuts, after-school cuts, nursing cuts, and the whittling away of libraries, down to only 90 remaining in a total of 513 schools. He’s seen the violent legacy of closing the community anchor that is a public school. He’s watched, along with all of us, poor choices at the top—everything from grifting, self-dealing, and bribery, to no-bid contracts and cronyism—and how those things bust budgets and destroy trust. He stood with community members on a hunger strike to save a school, then joined in it himself. He’s seen the negative academic and social impacts of excessive testing, privatization, and vouchers. He’s seen these things from the perspective of 25,000 teachers and hundreds of thousands of public school families.
Vallas, meanwhile, has been the man who set those policies. He set them in motion right here in Chicago in 1995, and traveled the country and globe continuing to implement them from then until now.
Brandon Johnson has large scale urban management experience with a Board that’s closing budget gaps and overseeing a vast array of county services. He manages a bigger budget right now than Vallas ever has. And Johnson has face-to-face, personal experience with the folks who live and work and raise their children in Chicago. His years as a teacher and with CTU have given him the perspective of individuals and families on a hyper-local basis. His work has encompassed both the broad span of countywide planning and management, and the particular lens on particular people and particular struggles.
Brandon Johnson is obviously qualified for the job.
You can check out how his qualifications and vision work themselves into a platform on his website. It’s practical and passionate and outlines a vision for the city that benefits everyone, even those struggling folks who never seem to catch a break from city leaders.
Johnson understands we cannot solve violence without dealing with its root causes; more policing, surveilling, and arresting alone won’t do the trick. We can’t fix the schools without listening to communities, parents, and educators; we must reject the failed status quo of Vallas’s “education reform.” And we can’t expect our teachers and police to solve poverty and homelessness all on their own.
The choice we have before us, it seems to me, is whether we’re going to listen to the incessant hype about a “fix-it man”—who has never fixed anything. Or dig a little deeper ourselves and see that the mayor we need has been here all along, working to make our city better for his entire career, with poise and passion.
Are we going to listen to voices that allude to “dark days” and blood baths in the streets? Or are we going to listen to a man who has a vision for his city rooted in love and practical experience?
Similarly, MAGA Republicans are competing to denounce corporations that are committed to socially responsible policies regarding ESG (environmental, social, and corporate governance). Corporations don’t usually like government interfering in their internal policy making, especially those attempting to present a public face of social responsibility.
Thompson writes:
Monday marked the beginning of the second half of the Oklahoma legislative session. The first half was largely dominated by the MAGAs rhetoric, and led by Gov. Kevin Stitt, Secretary of Education Ryan Walters, and the House leader Charles McCall, as they tried to be tougher than Ron DeSantis and the other extremists. But the top headlines, recently, have shifted to the state’s failure to persuade Panasonic and Volkswagen to make major investments in Oklahoma.
On National Public Radio, Sen. Pro Temp Greg Treat sounded like a timid version of old school, adult Republicans. Treat seemed to be pushing back on the $300 million House voucher bill (called a tax credit), saying we need to protect funding for the 90% of students who will remain in public schools. But, the House bill then advanced in the Senate Education Committee with 100% of Republican votes. Perhaps the timid nature of Treat’s comments about pushing back on the House’s demands foreshadowed the Senate increase in the size of tax credits (vouchers) by 50% per student.
Although the Senate committee increased the size of the teacher pay raise, it also provided steps towards Ryan Walters’ merit pay for 10% of educators, which would promote even more of a reward and punish school culture.
Democrat Sen. Julia Kirt explained that the private school tax credit cap is $250,000 which is almost ten times as great as the average Oklahoma wage. Only 3% of taxpayers would hit that limit, so “almost any Oklahoman could claim $7,500 tax credit for private school.”
Moreover, education supporter Greg Jennings gave examples of two private religious schools that are being constructed which could undermine the survival of two rural districts (serving 3,800 students combined). Even when the goal was $5,000 vouchers, these religious schools showed how private schools could be replicated, with serious negative consequences, in rural areas. The plan is to expand from pre-k to 8th grade by 2024. Students would be taught a “Christian Based Education.”
In other words, the MAGA culture wars may have undermined corporate investments seeking to create good-paying, 21st century jobs, but vouchers could spark a boom in Christian Nationalism.
Then, Treat addressed the loss of the Volkswagen plant to Canada and called for a study as to why it happened. He compared it to the bipartisan study which launched Oklahoma City’s growth in the 1990s after United Airlines rejected the city’s bid because of our lack of social, cultural and educational institutions. As the Oklahoman’s Ben Felder reported, despite a $700 million incentive, Volkswagen chose to invest in Canada with its “strong ESG practices,” rather than the mindset expressed by Jonathan Small, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs’president:
Not only do ESG policies penalize energy production to prop up “green’ companies, but they also pressure businesses to take stances on non-economic issues such as redefining gender, promoting Critical Race Theory, and abortion tourism.
Surely, even the most extreme MAGAs know that those beliefs would make investors cautious about coming to Oklahoma after the state’s “Legislature and governor banned state investment funds from working with companies that utilize ESG policies.” After all, Stitt had said, “don’t expect support from us unless you reject ESG.”
Neither would investors be encouraged by State Treasurer Todd Russ, who “issued letters to more than 160 companies giving them an April 1 deadline to confirm they don’t ‘boycott energy companies.’” Russ further explained:
I took office on January 9 and began compiling a list of companies, banks, and other entities that act against Oklahoma’s interests because of their ESG stance. … It is my responsibility to ensure Oklahomans’ tax dollars will not be used to enrich organizations that act counter to our taxpayers’ interests and our values.
Getting back to Monday’s education debate, Democratic Sen. Carri Hicks said, “We’re asking taxpayers to fund a second school system when we haven’t funded the first.” She then explained, “Struggling schools mirror struggling communities. Oklahoma legislature has ignored the urgent need to address the 60 percent of Oklahoma’s children who live in poverty in our public schools.” Then she closed with a message that Treat should understand. “When we are looking at removing additional funding that could be invested in all of our kids’ futures — I think this is a misstep.”
And this brings back Treat’s call for remembering the lessons learned in the 1990s after Oklahoma City lost in the effort to attract 1,000 United Airlines jobs. During the deindustrialization spurred by the Reagan administration’s Supply Side Economics, Oklahoma received national and international attention for scandals ranging from the bank and saving and loans collapses; the Housing and Urban Development and County Commissioners scandals; and corruption in juvenile justice, prison, and county jails. Even the CEO of the Chamber of Commerce acknowledged that Oklahoma City “was a really destitute place to live.”
It took a two-pronged, collective response to turn Oklahoma City around. The first was bipartisan campaigns to raise taxes and rebuild abandoned neighborhoods; invest in parks, libraries, and sports and cultural institutions; and invest in public schools. As Sam Anderson of the New York Times Magazine explained:
After all of that sacrifice — the grind of municipal meetings and penny taxes and planning boards, the dust and noise and uncertainty of construction, the horror of 1995 — the little city in the middle of No Man’s Land has finally arrived on the world stage.
I would add in regard to the horror of the Murrah Building bombing on the second anniversary of the Waco tragedy, with the loss of 86 lives, nobody bought Timothy McVeigh’s justification for terrorism as a response to federal intervention in Waco.
Finally, I guess it’s is too much to ask of Treat et.al, but if we want to thrive in the 21stcentury, don’t we need a bipartisan rejection of Trump’s beginning his presidential campaign on the 30th anniversary of Waco with dog whistle calls for violence? Why can’t Republicans distance themselves from Trump’s supporters like the Proud Boys who cite Waco as justification for more violence? And why do they support a candidate who has “vowed retribution;” proclaimed, “PROTEST, TAKE OUR NATION BACK!;” and warned of “potential death & destruction” if he is prosecuted?
So, when Republican leaders like Treat are reluctant to speak out against ideology-driven policies that they know will fail, the damage from that timidity – though significant – is not the biggest problem. It’s their silence in the face of attacks on our democratic systems that should be the #1 concern.
Drag queens dressed in colorful gowns hold a mock wedding to raise money for a local Black church.
At a Miami club, a popular drag king entertains hordes of people.
Local newspaper editorials call for an end to LGBTQ discrimination.
And queer couples fall in love.
These aren’t stories of Miami today. They’re glimpses of Miami’s Black LGBTQ history dating back to the 1940s.
“Give Them Their Flowers,” a new exhibition at the Little Haiti Cultural Center Art Gallery, displays and celebrates Miami’s under-documented Black LGBTQ community at a time when Florida’s government has become increasingly hostile toward Black and LGBTQ representation.
The project, on view until April 23, is the most relevant exhibition in Miami right now.
“This is a space that celebrates, honors and makes visible what has always been here,” said Nadege Green, the exhibition’s co-curator and founder of historical storytelling platform Black Miami-Dade.
“There’s something that happens, especially around LGBTQ+ folks, where sometimes you feel like you remain invisible, and this fully rejects that.”
Since the show was years in the making, it wasn’t meant to be a response to the current political moment, said Marie Vickles, the curator-in-residence at the Little Haiti Cultural Center who co-curated the show with Green. Still, Vickles said, the show underscores the importance of researching Black, queer Floridian history….
“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re Black in Miami,” she added. “And that is a story worth telling.”
The “public” must be put back into public education in Ohio.
Instead of pushing current legislation like Senate Bill 11 that could take one billion dollars from public schools to fund private and religious school vouchers, Ohio’s lawmakers need uphold Ohio’s constitutional promise to keep public tax dollars out of private schools.
We Ohioans love our public schools.
Most of us attended neighborhood public schools, which continue to be the schools of choice for our children and grandchildren. Our public schools are community hubs that educate over 90% (1.7 million) of Ohio’s children; students come together from all backgrounds to learn and build understanding and acceptance of others.
Public education in Ohio is a 172-year-old promise, created on the constitutional belief that public schools are the fundamental foundation for the public good; a necessary tool to build an educated democracy and sustainable futures for our children in these challenging times.
Why then, are Ohio lawmakers churning out private school voucher legislation that takes hundreds of millions of public-school tax dollars per year from our neighborhood schools to pay for private and religious school education?
School vouchers violate the Ohio Constitution. That is why over 210 public school districts have filed the “Vouchers Hurt Ohio” lawsuit challenging EdChoice Vouchers for their unconstitutional use of state school funds for private school tuition.
Public dollars should not fund private and religious school tuition.
Ohio’s constitution has some of the strongest language in the country specifying that state funds are for public (common) schools only.
“The General Assembly … will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state; but no religious or other sect, or sects, shall ever have any exclusive right to, or control of, any part of the school funds of this state,” Article VI, Section 2 of the Ohio Constitution reads.
Just as Ohio’s founders intended, there is not one single word in the Ohio Constitution that allows the use of state dollars for private and religious school tuition.
Ohio’s first attempt at school vouchers began as a temporary pilot in 2006, and is now a refund and rebate school privatization program that reimburses families who never intended to send their children to public schools.
Runaway train must be stopped
Private school vouchers have ballooned out of control, initially taking away $42 million of public-school funding in 2008 and expanding to $350 million in 2022.
Senate Bill 11 has been introduced to make every child in Ohio eligible for a private EdChoice school voucher, which could immediately take a billion dollars out of the finite supply of state school funds for over 90% of Ohio’s children whose families choose public schools.
When we let vouchers siphon funds from our public schools, our kids do not have the resources they need to succeed, and that hurts us all. EdChoice Vouchers for private schools means more school levies and higher property taxes. State funding for private schools is not only unconstitutional, it is unsustainable for Ohio taxpayers.
This brings us full circle to the crucial choice for the future of public education in Ohio. Public schools open their doors to children of all ability levels; welcoming students from diverse religions, cultures and nationalities.
Overall, Ohio’s public schools continue to outperform private voucher schools.
Public schools mirror the rising challenges of society today. Teachers are not just teaching, but also taking care of rising numbers of children in crises with mental and physical health challenges, which prevent them from learning. Instead of divesting in public education, Ohio needs to re-invest in our public schools.
Let’s face it. The only way to stop this runaway school voucher train is through a lawsuit.
Thousands of Ohio citizens have tried to get legislators to put the brakes on EdChoice vouchers and fulfill their oath to the state’s constitution: state school funding is solely for Ohio’s public-school districts.
The majority of Ohio’s legislators continue to steer our children and families in the wrong direction.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is not known for speaking out forcefully. But in an interview with Politico, he denounced the attacks on public schools and the blatant politicization of local issues. Politico titled the article: “Biden’s Education secretary is done sitting ‘idly’ amid schools fight.” No more sitting idly!
To be clear, Cardona has been missing in action as public schools are under attack by vitriolic privatizers. School boards have been under attack. Teachers have been under attack. The rights of students to learn accurate history have been under attack.
And Cardona has been silent. Why?
He has a voice. Why doesn’t he use it?
CARDONA SPEAKS — President Joe Biden’s education secretary is stepping up his rhetoric against school-centered partisanship, as nearly 30,000 school board seats are on the ballot this year and White House allies plan a counteroffensive to conservative political momentum.
— “When we talk about politicization, when we talk about book banning, when we talk about Black history curriculum being picked apart — I think there are deliberate attempts to make sure that our public schools are not functional so that the private option sounds better,” Miguel Cardona told POLITICO.
— “It just seems like it’s a constant attackon what I know as a dad, and what I know as an educator, is happening in our schools.” Cardona said. “Education being used to divide communities is the challenge that we face now as leaders.”
— Cardona’s newly public exasperation with the conservative political furoraround education comes as the Republican-controlled House approved sweeping “Parents Bill of Rights” legislation and a growing wave of school choice expansion laws takes hold in Republican-led states, including a measure now primed for the signature of Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
— “There are efforts to take dollars, the limited dollars that exist for public education, and provide vouchers to private institutions — weakening the local public school,” Cardona said of recent school choice expansion initiatives.
— “I’m not against choice, I went to a technical high school that wasn’t my local neighborhood high school. … But I don’t want privatization at the expense of the local school. The neighborhood school should be fully funded; it should have great resources so that students who go there have a top-tier education.”
For Cardona, this is as close to a forceful statement as we are likely to see. Even more forceful would be a flat-out expose of vouchers as a cruel hoax that helps no one but the rich families who are getting a rebate on their private school tuition.
Under its current reactionary Republican leadership, Florida will bow out of Medicaid. At the same time, North Carolina just agreed to opt in to Medicaid, adding coverage for 600,000 people.
The Miami Herald reports:
Florida is unlikely to expand Medicaid this year, as North Carolina and other Republican states have done recently, but lawmakers are pushing measuresthey say will expand healthcare for more children from low-income families.
About $76 million has been set aside in the House’s proposed budget to incentivize more pediatricians to treat children on Medicaid. And a bill progressing through the Legislature will expand the number of families eligible for subsidized child health insurance programs.
But the measures fall short of what healthcare advocates warn is needed as Florida next month begins to purge its Medicaid rolls, which swelled by 1.8 million people during the pandemic when additional federal money was given to states to keep people insured. At least 900,000 Floridians, including many children, covered by the program could lose medical coverage, according to state data.
Advocates would rather see Florida emulate North Carolina where Gov. Roy Cooper on Monday signed legislation expanding Medicaid coverage to an estimated 600,000 residents. The bill was passed by the Republican-controlled state Legislature, reversing years of opposition to expanding the federal program.
“Those North Carolina legislators really did the brave and correct and right thing,” said Holly Bullard, chief strategy and development officer at the nonpartisan nonprofit Florida Policy Institute. “There’s no reason why Florida can’t, too.”
Florida’s answer: Bring down costs
Florida lawmakers say they don’t want to increase dependence on benefit programs.
“The better way to go is to try to bring down the cost of care, private insurance and other insurance to increase access while still maintaining quality,” House Speaker Paul Renner said during a news conference on Friday when asked about Medicaid expansion.
A study conducted by Yale researchers found a significant partisan divide in COVID death rates after vaccines became available.
A team of Yale researchers has found that Republican voters in two U.S. states had more excess deaths than Democratic voters after vaccines for COVID-19 became widely available to counter the disease. The discrepancy didn’t exist prior to the vaccines.
Jacob Wallace, assistant professor of public health (health policy); Jason L. Schwartz, associate professor of public health (health policy); and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, assistant professor at the Yale School of Management conducted the research using a novel linkage of political party affiliation and mortality data to assess whether there were differences in COVID-19 excess death rates between Republican and Democratic voters. The authors estimated excess death rates as the percentage increase in deaths above expected deaths due to seasonality, geographic location, party affiliation, and age.
The study found that overall, the excess death rate for Republican voters was 5.4 percentage points, or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democratic voters. After COVID-19 vaccines became widely available, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 percentage points to 10.4 percentage points.
“The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available,” the authors said in the study.
The study’s findings were recently released as a working paper by the researchers in collaboration with the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings have been reported extensively in national media including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News.
Schwartz said the findings amplify the critical importance of vaccines.
Helen Gym is running to be the Mayor of Philadelphia. She is the only progressive in the race. Helen is a friend of mine. I love her courage, her convictions, and her tenacity. She fights for the underdog. She knows that the state of Pennsylvania has shortchanged the students and public schools of Philadelphia for years. She knows the bleak conditions of the public schools. She has tirelessly fought for students, parents, teachers, and communities. She has stood strong against privatization of the schools. She has made enemies in the Establishment, which stood by as the city’s once-proud public schools were allowed to crumble and were closed to make way for charter chains.
The primary elections are May 16.
Helen Gym is my candidate. I have donated to her campaign. I hope you will help her with a contribution of any size—$10, $20, $30, $50, $100 or more. She needs our help!
The story below raises the question of whether Philadelphia can tolerate a mayor who fights for the weakest, most marginalized members of society, or whether it prefers someone as mayor who doesn’t take sides.
It was June 2021 and the Philadelphia City Council member was blocking the doors of the Pennsylvania state Senate alongside activists demanding more funding for public schools.
“Shame on the unjust funding of our school kids!” Gym shouted as police handcuffed her. She was issued a citation, then released.
The day encapsulates the duality of Philadelphians’ impression of Gym. Her supporters saw a champion — a longtime schools advocate who would stop at nothing to call attention to injustice, and someone who has backed up her rhetoric with tangible action.
But her critics saw a performance — a moment ripe to be used in a future campaign. They describe her as a populist, and someone who speaks the language of social justice but hasn’t always lived up to it.
Through three decades in Philadelphia, Gym has evolved from a teacher into a leader of the city’s social justice movement and now a mayoral candidate running as a “tough Philly mom.” The question is whether she’d be a mayor with the elbows-out posture of a longtime activist — and if that’s what the city wants in its next chief executive.
Gym has become a polarizing political figure, in part because she occupies a clear lane as a progressive in the mayoral field. It could also be because she has so often described herself in fighting terms. And fighters have opponents.
She fought the state takeover of Philly schools and fought against planned school closures. As a legislator, she fought for a defense fund for immigrants, fought for legislation to benefit hourly workers, fought for novel legal protections for people facing eviction.
In many cases, her approach worked. She won concessions as an advocate, and while she ruffled plenty of feathers in City Hall, she was a productive lawmaker for seven years on Council.
Asked if her style translates to the Mayor’s office, where she’d lead a workforce and be responsible for keeping a bevy of department heads happy, Gym rejected the notion, saying her vision for the city is larger than keeping people comfortable.
“I’m trying to lead us on a common mission,” she said, “to transform people’s lives.”
Lessons learned, from Ohio to Philly
Gym, 55, lives in Philadelphia’s upscale Logan Square section today, but she grew up in a suburb outside Columbus, Ohio. The daughter of Korean immigrants, Gym was a bookish teenager with little interest in politics.
She studied history and economics at the University of Pennsylvania, but she likes to say she graduated from The Daily Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper. Her first job was at a tiny paper in Mansfield, Ohio, a manufacturing town.
There, she interviewed a steel worker who’d lost his legs in an accident, and she assured him he could “probably find another job.” He explained that he had an eighth-grade education and couldn’t find work that would pay what he and his family were worth.
Gym was mortified.
“I never forgot what he said,” she recalled, “and I never forgot how I felt.”
She returned to Philadelphia in the early 1990s and took a job at a community center in Olney, then became a teacher at James R. Lowell Elementary School in the neighborhood.
Gym felt there was pent-up energy to improve schools in underserved neighborhoods, but not many solutions coming from institutions. She cofounded a news organization to cover education, and after leaving her district job in 1997, fell deeper into community-based work.
She fought against a baseball stadium in Chinatown in 2000 (she’s said she is “skeptical” of the proposal for a Sixers arena in Center City). And as she was raising her children, Gym cofounded Parents United for Public Education, fighting the state’s takeover of Philadelphia schools and advocating against the expansion of for-profit charters.
For years, she lobbied Council, spoke at school board meetings, and took the mayor to task for what she saw as a divestment of public education.
“Our society sometimes is not that patient to young people,” Wei Chen, one of the students, said recently. “They always see the young people as troublemakers. But Helen Gym doesn’t feel that.”
In 2013, when the state-controlled School Reform Commission voted to close some two-dozen schools, Gym rallied hard against it.
“You want Helen to be in the trenches with you when you’re in a fight,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, who was arrested protesting that plan. “And that’s the kind of mayor you want: Somebody willing to be in the trenches, somebody who can walk the walk with parents and with workers and with kids.”
Gym became one of the district’s staunchest critics — earning her new scrutiny amid the reform movement. Charter school advocates questioned her motives, pointing out that her children attended a charter that Gym cofounded in the early aughts. The school, the Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures charter, was established in Chinatown after the stadium battle and when the district was under state control.
The school wasn’t intended to be “in lieu of public education,” Gym says, but a “supplement.”
“It felt really important to prove that we could build a school that would lift our values,” she said. “Many charter operators open schools they would never imagine sending their own kids to.”
Her critics say her advocacy against expanding the charter-school footprint rang hollow.
David Hardy, the cofounder of Boys’ Latin Charter School who has long opposed Gym’s education positions, said she presents as a “feisty fighter” for families, but has hampered their ability to choose a charter over traditional school.
“She’s created this character, and a lot of people in this town buy into that nonsense,” he said. “They make it seem like they’re for public education, but you don’t see a whole lot of success for poor children in this city.”
‘She will not let up’
With the backing of the city’s teacher’s union, Gym came in fifth in the 2015 Democratic primary for an at-large Council seat — only the top five vote-getters continue on — and became the first Asian American woman on Council.
Gym learned to legislate through the lens of a broader progressive movement, said Wilson Goode Jr., a former Council member and son of the former mayor. He handpicked Gym to succeed him on the board of Local Progress, a national organization for local officials.
He said her leadership flourished after Donald Trump was elected president. Gym rallied thousands at the airport in 2017 to protest his travel ban.
“[Trump’s election] changed the way we view politics, and I think changed people’s expectations of Council people,” Goode said. “She performed well in Council in terms of crafting a legislative agenda, but at the same time rose to a different level of leadership.”
But she turned off some Council colleagues, who have said publicly and privately that Gym could be rigid during negotiations.
William K. Greenlee, a former Democratic Councilmember who served with Gym, described her as rarely veering from her positions, but also capable of compromise.
Greenlee, who is backing Cherelle Parker in the mayor’s race, recalled that Gym revised her 2018 Fair Workweek legislation — which requires predictive scheduling for workers — after business community opposition threatened its passage. It was a sign she could make an agreement.
Where Greenlee said he takes issue with Gym’s campaign is posturing — which he said is espoused mostly by her supporters — that she’s “above the fray.”
“We’re politicians, and I’m sure Helen made agreements on things, or to get things, that’s what we all did,” Greenlee said. “My only problem with that is that I admit that.”
Gym says she worked to win over colleagues of different political persuasions. She said the issues she took on, like unsafe drinking water in schools, may seem popular — but solutions were rarely simple.
“The status quo for Philly politics is that people acknowledge that there are really important issues and they’re popular, and yet nothing ever gets done,” Gym said. “I never accept half-assed ideas to solve really big problems. And if that rubs somebody the wrong way, I think that reflects more on them.”
When Gym ran for reelection in 2019, she proved to be one of the city’s most popular politicians, winning more primary votes than any Council candidate in decades.
That year, she angered Democratic party leadership when she endorsed Kendra Brooks, who ran for Council as a member of the liberal Working Families Party. Gym tweeted that “in a time of corporate Dem shills and keyboard warriors acting as pseudo progressives, Kendra has walked the walk.”
Brooks won, as did Democrat Jamie Gauthier, who beat a West Philadelphia incumbent. The three made up a progressive bloc on Council that was far from a majority, but wielded real influence. They pushed for a program to cut evictions by diverting landlords and tenants to mediation, and advocated for behavioral health providers to respond to mental health calls instead of police.
Toni Damon, the ex-principal at Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School in North Philly, said Gym’s work went beyond legislation. When Damon had one counselor and one assistant principal serving 500 students, Gym advocated to secure one more of each.
“She came when we needed her,” Damon said. “People say the squeaky wheel gets the oil. She doesn’t back down. She’s persistent. And she will not let up.”
What comes next
On Jan. 30, Gym stood at City Hall and accepted the endorsement of the Working Families Party, saying that together, they’d lift up the people ignored by “career politicians, austerity bureaucrats, and too much of the wealthy and privileged in Philadelphia.”
She wrapped up the news conference, hopped on her bicycle, and rode away.
Hours later, she visited the Union League, the ritzy private club she’d denounced days earlier because it honored Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. She made the stop in the midst of a well-publicized campaign against the club that was led by Black clergy and officials.
Her attendance at the event, hosted by the General Building Contractors’ Association, drew criticism and questions about authenticity. A group of Black ward leaders said “her blatant hypocrisy draws significant concern.”
She apologized. But some remain deeply bothered. Blondell Reynolds Brown, a former Democratic Council member, said recently it was a poor show of character.
“When people like Helen Gym show you who they are, believe them,” she said.
Gym’s campaign has said it’s “moving forward.” They say she should be evaluated based on her track record and her plans to improve public safety, education, and economic opportunity.
Helen Gym, Mayoral candidate, is walking around Clark Park getting signatures for her petition to be on the ballot in Philadelphia last month.Read moreTyger Williams / Staff Photographer
Her biggest advantage may be that her supporters are loyal. After the Union League flap, there was little sign of a crack in her base. She continued to win endorsements from well-organized groups that say she’d be one of the nation’smost progressive big-city mayors.
And she was defended by the teachers’ union, which sees an opportunity to elect a close ally. They’ve backed winners before — but this would feel like one of them.
Damon said Gym’s critics have overblown the Union League visit, saying: “People who know her know the work that she’s done.”
“You can’t take center stage,” Damon said, “if you weren’t there from the beginning.”
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