Peter Greene reports that a Republican legislative proposal would eliminate public schools, thus wiping out one of our nation’s most democratic institutions.

He begins:

State Senator Del Marsh proposed this week the “ultimate” school choice bill, the “Parents’ Choice Bill,” (SB140) a super-education savings account. But that’s not what it really is.

This is an ESA in its fully realized form— every Alabama family gets every cent the state would have spent on educating their child (about $6,300 last year) and they can use it to pay for educational whatever–public school, home school, private school, tutoring, online classes, whatever.

Marsh is a longtime champion of disinvestment in Alabama public ed, having pushed charters and charter expansion in previous years (he also co-sponsored a bill to make bribery of legislators by lobbyists legal).

This is a big deal, a bill that changes the rules for education in an entire state, but coverage so far has been light (the bill was supposedly going to be filed yesterday) and details.

One early complaint is that the bill would cost the state about $420 billion in education funds. Alabama Education Association executive director Army Marlowe also called out the bill for its lack of transparency and its generosity to private operators:Senator Marsh’s “Parent’s Choice Bill” should be called exactly what it is – “No Vendor Left Behind “ – a shell game of a voucher program to divert money from Alabama’s community schools. There is a complete lack of transparency regarding this egregious bill by rushing it through committee this week. Regardless of whether Senators have been given the opportunity to study the bill, by filing it this week and expecting it to not only be in committee, but to be voted out of a committee is mind blowing. A bill of this magnitude that would result in more than $420 million cut from the Education Trust Fund rushed through committee without the opportunity for at least a week of scrutiny by the public and the media makes you wonder why Sen. Marsh is in such a hurry to move this bill.Yes, this bill would eat a ton of taxpayer dollars, and yes it would gut the public education system in Alabama. There is one other huge effect that comes with voucher-style bills that seems to be rarely discussed–it ends the state’s involvement with and support of its children.

In an online interview, education lab reporter Trish Powell Crain points out that this is bigger than charters or vouchers. “It’s the ultimate ‘here, take the money and parents, you go decide how you want to spend this money to educate your child.'”

Yes. “We’ve given you a check, and we hereby wash our hands of the whole education thing.” The ultimate form of voucher is not about empowering parents. It’s not even about making vendors a bunch of money. It’s about getting the state out of the education business, about cutting parents and children loose. It’s about ending the collective commitment to and responsibility for educating the next generations.

David Corn, the D.C. Bureau Chief for Mother Jones, read the minutes of the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board that banned Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize winning graphic novel, MAUS, and he found the comments even dumber than he expected. The school board members were worried that students in middle schools might hear words like “bitch” and “god damn,” they were upset by nude mice, and some had never read the book (maybe all).

Korn wrote:

One of my favorite books is Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman’s brilliant 1986 graphic novel that recounts his parents’ harrowing experiences during the Holocaust when they were imprisoned in Auschwitz. In the book, Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs. It is a richly and simply drawn blend of history, fiction, and memoir that captures the story of these survivors, their trauma, and the consequences for their son. The book is a complete artistic success, hailed widely as a masterpiece and awarded a Pulitzer, the first ever handed to a graphic novel. Not to overstate Maus’ significance, its publication legitimized this form of storytelling and marked a historic moment in American literature. In 1992, the Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition displaying Spiegelman’s original panels for the work. Two weeks ago, a Tennessee school board voted to ban the book.

The superintendent suggested that it would be possible to redact (delete) eight words and a picture of a woman that board members found objectionable. But that didn’t solve the board’ s revulsion for the book.

Educators defended the use of the book but it was hopeless.

Board member Tony Allman remarked, “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging. It shows them killing kids. Why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy.” Julie Goodin, an instructional supervisor who used to teach history, patiently explained to Allman that “there is nothing pretty about the Holocaust and for me this was a great way to depict a horrific time in history.” Allman wouldn’t relent: “I understand that on TV and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy.” Melasawn Knight, another instructional supervisor, took a stab at it: “People did hang from trees, people did commit suicide, and people were killed, over six million murdered… [Spiegelman] is trying to portray that the best he can with the language that he chooses that would relate to that time…Is the language objectionable? Sure. I think that is how he used that language….”

It’s easy to imagine the frustration of the educators up against this. Knight tried again to reason with the board, pointing out that the numerous books taught in the system contain “foul language,” including Bridge to Terabithia, The Whipping Boy, and To Kill a Mockingbird. That was a no-sale. Board member Mike Cochran piped up: “I went to school here thirteen years…I never had a book with a naked picture in it, never had one with foul language…So this idea that we have to have this kind of material in the class in order to teach history, I don’t buy it.” He groused that the book obliquely refers to Spiegelman’s father losing his virginity and explicitly depicts the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother. “A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father,” he complained, “so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff…We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history… We don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

A board member read out the lyrics of the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” and condemned it for its “sexuality.” He seemed to think that it was a poem, but it is a song.

Corn writes:

I don’t know if the educators present kept a straight face. Cochran was quoting not a poem but the lyrics of the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which was written by Eubie Blake in 1921. Judy Garland had a hit with the tune in 1939. And in 1948, President Harry S. Truman adopted the number as his campaign theme song. Yet for Cochran this 100-year-old song was too racy for a middle schooler. It was obvious how he would be voting.

All 10 board members voted to ban MAUS.

Peter Greene explains how the Koch machine is creating new brands to hide its identity from the unsuspecting. The billionaires Charles and his late brother David were infamous for funneling Dark Money through front groups whose names sounded innocuous or inspiring. Now Charles Koch is reaching out to a new generation, attempting to pour his rancid wine into new bottles. One of the most insidious aspects of “reform” is the way it steals sweet-sounding names and attaches them to its odious goal of privatization. To understand the sham of “reform,” you need to understand that the words usually mean the opposite. “Reform” has nothing to do with reform; it is a cover for disruption and privatization.

Greene writes:

Remember when Charles Koch wrote that he had done an oopsie by being so partisan and dividing the country? That was back in late 2020, and it was followed by the rise of a new Koch Brand–Stand Together–which in turn spawned a new substack about fixing education called “Learning Everywhere.” It turns out that the Koch metamorphosis was not done yet.

“Learning Together” was co-hosted by Lisa Snell, director of K-12 education policy for Stand Together, aka the Charles Koch Institute. Previously she spent 23 years as Director of Education at the Reason Foundation. Her co-host is Adam Peshek, who is part of the same Kochtopus, having arrived Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd (formerly FEE). Peshek also works at Yes, Every Kid, a rebranding of some standard reform ideas.
The substack started out playing the reformy hits (did you know schools are built on the factory model? well, they weren’t, but did you think so anyway? Snell and Peshek would like you to think so).
So, Charles Koch Institute is now Stand Together Trust, an organization that now has a hip young vide. Check out the website– “We help you tackle the roots of America’s biggest problems” in bold print over dynamic vides. Hugging! Clapping! Black people! “Everyone is tired of all the fighting over problems with very little focus on real solutions.”
Among the issues they want to address is education, and their dynamic new solutions are…well, the same old ones. They insist that education is currently one-size-fits-all (news to teachers in public schools), and they have the same old right-tilted complaints– we spent more money but test scores didn’t go up! Families give education a C (but we’re not going to point out that they give far higher grades to the local schools they know). Individualized education is where it’s at. 

There’s a video in which Sal Khan, promoter of an educational program that involves students sitting and passively watching a video, complains that education involves students sitting passively while listening to a teacher. Other “leaders” they bring up are Diane Tavenner, head of Summit Schools (a school-in-a-box not-great tech product). There are lots of pictures of exciting active learning, all of which could have come from a public school. Aaron Frumin, founder of unCommon Construction, who talks about how frustrated he became “as a teacher” which he was for the two whole years he spent with Teach for America. His program uses students as laborers to build houses, an innovative program pretty much like the one the vocational technical school in my county has had for sixty years. Here’s Todd Rose “By any measure, the system doesn’t work.” Rose was a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and founder of the Center for Individual Opportunity and he runs the think tank Populace. And he has a Story, in which he dropped out of high school (“The system failed me.”) There’s some more talk about believing in students (which, again, is not unheard of in public schools). “Success doesn’t have to mean one thing. We need our education system to have a much broader view of success.”

That’s the pitch. Well, actually, the pitch is use your money to invest in these people doing this stuff. But also, we got 11 major education bills passed in 8 states in 2021, and somehow we don’t talk about what those bills did, like pushing privatization of education or gagging of teachers. There are case studies of success, like Cadence Learning, one more cyber-school venture, this one launched by Chris Cerf, Ian Rowe and Steven Wilson–all god privatization champions.

Meanwhile, the known recipients of ST grants are not so much education revolutionaries as the same old Koch style conservative crews. Americans for Prosperity, Bill of Rights Institute, Bellwether Education, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Texas Public Policy Foundation, Vela Education Fund. 

The substack has now transformed into a new title– Permissionless Education. That term has cropped up several places lately, and it really captures the Libertarian mindset of not wanting to have to ask for anyone’s permission to do anything ever, a mindset I can recognize immediately because I live with a pair of four-year-old toddlers. 

Open the link and read on to understand what the Kochtopus is really aiming for with all these new names and old faces.

Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian who teaches at Boston College. She writes a blog called “Letters from an American,” in which she brings historical perspective to current events. She posted this column yesterday about Joe Biden’s first year as President.

Joe Biden’s presidency is just over a year old.

Biden has embraced the old idea, established by the Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, that in a democracy, the federal government has a responsibility to keep the playing field level for all. It must regulate business to maintain competition and prevent corporations from abusing their employees, protect civil rights, provide a basic social safety net, and promote infrastructure.

Our forty-sixth president came into office in the midst of crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had killed more than 407,000 Americans, and the previous president’s quest to radicalize voters in spring 2020 had led to angry mobs rejecting the preventive measures other countries took. The economy was bottoming out as the pandemic killed workers, discombobulated workplaces, and disrupted supply chains. And the previous president was so determined not to give up power that he had incited his followers to attack Congress and the U.S. Capitol during the formal ceremony acknowledging Biden’s victory.

Even after the horrors of that day, 147 members of the Republican Party doubled down on the lie that Trump had really won the election. And when the Democratic House impeached Trump for inciting the insurrection, ending our country’s 224-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power, Republican senators acquitted him.

Republican lawmakers’ support for the Big Lie indicated how they would approach Biden’s presidency. They stand diametrically opposed to Biden, rejecting Democrats’ vision of the federal government. They are eager to return power to the states to do as they will, recognizing that the end of federal regulation will give far more freedom to people of wealth and that the end of federal protection of civil rights will, in certain states, permit white evangelical Christians to reclaim the “traditional” society they crave.

Biden set out to use government to make people’s lives better and, apparently, believed that successful policies would bring enough Republicans behind his program to ease the country’s extreme partisanship.

He fought the pandemic by invoking the Defense Production Act, buying more vaccines, working with states to establish vaccine sites and transportation to them, and establishing vaccine centers in pharmacies across the country. Vaccinations took off, and he vowed to make sure that 70% of the U.S. adult population would have one vaccine shot and 160 million U.S. adults would be fully vaccinated by July 4th.

At the same time, Democrats passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to jump-start the economy by putting money into the pockets of ordinary Americans.The new law cut child poverty in half by putting $66 billion into 36 million households. It expanded access to the Affordable Care Act, enabling more than 4.6 million Americans who were not previously insured to get healthcare coverage and bringing the total covered to a record 13.6 million.

Money from those programs bolstered household savings and fired up consumer spending. By the end of the year, U.S. companies were showing 15% profit margins, higher than they have been since 1950. Companies reduced their debt, which translated to a strong stock market. In February, Biden’s first month in office, the jobless rate was 6.2%; by December it had dropped to 4.2%. This means that 4.1 million jobs were created in the Biden administration’s first year, more than were created in the 12 years of the Trump and George W. Bush administrations combined.

Then, in November, Congress passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that will repair bridges and roads and get broadband to places that still don’t have it.

U.S. economic output jumped more than 7% in the last three months of 2021. Overall growth for 2021 should be about 6%, and economists predict growth of around 4% in 2022—the highest numbers the U.S. has seen in decades, and higher than any other country in the world. Despite the increased spending, the federal budget deficit in the first quarter of fiscal year 2022 dropped 33% from that of 2021. The downside of this growth was inflation of up to 7%, but this is a global problem and exactly why it’s happening is unclear—increased spending has created pent-up demand, and prices have been unstable because of the pandemic.

Biden reoriented U.S. foreign policy to defend democracy. He immediately took steps to rejoin the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Accords, and he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken worked hard to rebuild the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to replace our outdated focus on combating terrorism on the ground with combating it by defunding terrorists. Biden ended the unpopular 20-year war in Afghanistan and negotiated the exit of U.S. combat troops from Iraq, where we had been for more than 18 years. About 2500 U.S. personnel remain alongside their Iraqi counterparts to hold back remaining ISIS terrorists.

The end of those wars has also given Biden the room virtually to eliminate the U.S. use of drone strikes and airstrikes. In Trump’s first 11 months he authorized more than 1600 airstrikes; Biden has significantly tightened the process of authorization and has authorized 4.

Instead of focusing on soldiers, Biden dramatically increased the use of economic sanctions on international criminals and prosecutions for international criminal behavior to stop the flow of money to terrorists. Biden’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, also helped to hammer out an international minimum tax that will help to close foreign tax shelters.

Biden is turning to these financial tools and the strength of NATO to try to stop another Russian incursion into Ukraine. He has warned Russian president Vladimir Putin that military aggression into a sovereign country will lead to crippling economic backlash, and U.S. ally Germany has put off approval of the valuable Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline Russia has constructed to Europe, worth tens of billions of dollars.

By any historical measure, Biden’s first year has been a roaring success, proving that democracy can, in fact, provide better lives for its people and can protect the rule of law internationally. And yet Biden’s popularity hovers in the low 40s.

Biden’s worldview demands that government accomplish things; the Republicans simply have to say no. They have focused on stopping Biden and the success of his view of government, and because it is only the Democrats who are in the arena, as President Theodore Roosevelt put it, Democrats are bearing the weight of popular discontent.

When the withdrawal from Afghanistan initially produced chaos as the Afghan government collapsed, Republicans hammered on the idea that Biden—and by extension a Democratic government—was incompetent. His numbers began to plummet, and the subsequent success of the largest human airlift in history did not change that narrative.

If Afghanistan happened organically, criticism of government could also be manufactured. In July, as the vaccination program appeared to be meeting Biden’s goals, Republicans began to insist that government vaccine outreach was government tyranny. Vaccination rates began to drop off just as the contagious Delta variant began to rage. When Biden tried to address the falling vaccination rates by requiring that federal workers and contractors, health care workers, and workers at businesses with more than 100 employees be vaccinated or frequently tested, Republicans railed that he was destroying American freedom.

Their argument took hold: by early December, 40% of Republican adults were unvaccinated, compared with fewer than 10% of adult Democrats, making Republicans three times more likely than Democrats to die of Covid. Rather than ending and giving Biden a historical success, the pandemic has continued on, weakening the economy and sparking chaos over masks and school reopenings as Republicans radicalize. Just last week, a woman in Virginia threatened to come to her child’s school with “every single gun loaded and ready” if the school board required masks.

That radicalization, stoked by Republican leaders, is at the point of destroying, once and for all, the idea of a government that works for the people. Republican leaders have stood by as Trump and his lackeys goaded followers into believing that Democratic governance is illegitimate and that Democrats must be kept from power. Following a playbook Republicans have used since 1994, Trump and his loyalists insisted—and continue to insist—on ongoing “audits” of the 2020 vote, knowing that seeing such “investigations” in the news would convince many voters that there must be something there, just as the 2016 ruckus over Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails convinced many Americans that she had done something illegal.

It has worked. Although there is zero evidence of significant voter fraud, so far, 19 Republican-dominated states have passed 33 laws to make it harder for Democrats to vote, or to turn over the counting of votes to partisan Republicans. When Democrats tried to stop such a takeover of our democracy, all 50 Republicans in the Senate opposed federal protection of the right to vote. (Two Democrats joined them in refusing to overrule the filibuster, thus dooming the law to fail.) Now Republicans in three states have proposed election police forces to stop what they continue to insist—without evidence—are voting crimes.

And so, at the end of Biden’s first year—a year that by any standard must be called a success—Republicans are at the verge of achieving, at least for now, the end of the liberal democracy Americans have enjoyed since FDR and the Democrats embraced it in the 1930s, instead eroding the federal government and turning power over to the states.

In a two-hour press conference at the end of his first year, Biden said he did not anticipate the degree of obstruction he would face, and he expressed regret that he hadn’t “been able to…get my Republican friends to get in the game of making things better in this country….” “Think about this,” he said, “What are Republicans for? What are they for? Name me one thing they’re for.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that Senate Republicans will offer no legislative agenda before the 2022 elections and that he is “100 percent” focused “on stopping” Biden.

From the other side, Biden’s inaugural committee is celebrating the president’s first year in office with a video narrated by actor Tom Hanks in which ordinary Americans try to reclaim an older vision of an America in which we worked together for the good of all. They talk about how in the past year more than 200 million Americans have been vaccinated, how we have created more jobs in 2021 than in any year in the previous 80, how we lifted children out of poverty and are rebuilding roads and bridges, and how, historically, America is strong, courageous, resilient, and optimistic and can do anything, if only we will work together.

—

Notes:

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57667

https://www.axios.com/biden-one-year-inaugural-committee-ad-3c7597b5-490c-4f23-b919-5b97e10785db.html

https://www.wabe.org/kemp-says-3b-budget-boost-will-bring-a-lot-of-good-things/

https://theweek.com/foreign-policy/1007579/biden-nearly-ended-the-drone-war-and-nobody-noticed

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/01/21/dozens-of-democrats-call-out-biden-over-drone-strikes-kill-civilians.html

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/26/biden-kadhimi-seal-agreement-to-end-us-combat-mission-in-iraq

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/nord-stream-2-is-a-major-item-of-leverage-against-russia-ex-german-ambassador.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/07/republicans-big-lie-trump/

https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/1208/Why-GOP-is-stepping-up-fight-against-vaccine-mandates

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/mcconnell-says-he-s-100-percent-focused-stopping-biden-s-n1266443

https://www.axios.com/mcconnell-no-agenda-midterms-91c73112-0a2e-441b-b713-7e8aa2dad6bf.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/19/biden-asks-what-are-republicans-republicans-have-already-chosen-not-answer/

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-sorbonne-paris-france-citizenship-republic