Several readers told me they were unable to access my conversation with Todd Scholl of the South Carolina Center for Educatot Wellness and Learning.
We talked about attacks on public schools, standardized testing, and privatization.
Todd sent these links:
The video can be found on the CEWL website at www.cewl.us. A direct link to the video can be found at https://youtu.be/Zm0Vi3S3RLM.
Thom Hartmann says the Supreme Court is wimping out in the Colorado case. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment was written to protect us from fascist thugs. And Florida is passing legislation to teach kindergartners about the dangers of Communism. I’m all in favor of teaching about the dangers of both Communism and fascism (Florida left out that danger). Both Stalin and Hitler were deadly enemies of freedom and democracy. But leave the kindergartners alone. Let them play.
He wrote:
— The Supreme Court has wimped out on Trump. The 14th Amendment was passed to prevent the very scenario we’re now facing: a fascist insurrectionist seeking political office to end American democracy and replace it with a strongman authoritarian like the men who ran the Confederacy. One of the most absurd moments was when Kagan and Roberts both suggested that “one state shouldn’t determine the outcome of a presidential election,” as if they’d never, ever even heard of Bush v Gorewhen Jeb Bush and Kathrine Harris threw out over 30,000 “spoiled” ballots where people in Black communities with defective voting machines both punched the “Al Gore” hole and wrote “Al Gore” on the ballot. Florida, and Florida alone, determined the outcome of the 2000 election. One state. Bottom line: this is now up to us. Nobody is coming to the rescue of American democracy. We must turn out the vote this fall in overwhelming numbers…
— Trump steals classified documents, the ones about US spies in Russia are missing (and our spies are dying), and Biden wrote a letter to Obama when he was VP that he kept, and now the media and this idiot special counsel and lifelong Republican hack Robert Hur are doing their best to conflate the two. That pretty much sums it up. Like the Dean Scream and Comey’s press conference to complain about Hillary’s emails, it looks like our mainstream press and the GOP are working together to get a Republican back into the White House. Again, we have to turn out this fall in overwhelming numbers…
— Pink triangles come to Kansas? Republicans in the Kansas legislature are pushing a new law that would require trans people to be identified as such on their birth certificates. Never forget that the first group Hitler went after — literally weeks after he took power — were trans people. When fascists want a minority group to beat up on for political gain, this is the smallest minority out there, smaller than any racial or religious group, and thus the most defenseless. These Republicans in Kansas are bullies and thugs.
— Smartmatic is suing OAN, and they busted the CEO! Voting machine manufacturer Smartmatic is in the discovery phase of their multiple lawsuits against rightwing hate outlets for defamation, and, boy howdy, they have pulled in a big fish. It appears from press reports that the CEO of One America News, the rightwing TV channel, allegedly obtained hacked passwords to Smartmatic machines and passed them along to pillow guy Mike Lindell and Trump loony lawyer Sidney Powell. Get out the popcorn: this is going to get interesting (and expensive!)…
— Crazy Alert! Republicans want Florida schools to teach kindergartners all about the “threat of communism.” Soon, five year olds in Florida may be watching newsreels of mass murders in Stalinist Russia and learning how Social Security and Medicare are “socialism.” These are the same idiots who keep railing against “liberal elites indoctrinating our kids.” Right…
At a campaign rally in Conway, South Carolina, Donald Trump said that he met with “the president of a big country,” who asked him, “Well sir, if we don’t pay, and we’re attacked by Russia – will you protect us?”
Trump said he responded:.
“I said: ‘You didn’t pay? You’re delinquent?’ He said: ‘Yes, let’s say that happened.’ No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them (Russia) to do whatever the hell they want. You gotta pay.”
European leaders were shocked by Trump’s casual dismissal of Article 5 of NATO, which binds every member nation to defend any other nation that is attacked. Since NATO was created in 1949, in response to the Soviet threat, Article 5 has been invoked only once, in aid of the United States on September 11, 2001. NATO has kept the peace, as it was meant to do. The USSR has never invaded a NATO nation, which may explain why so many former Soviet satellites weee eager to join NATO.
Thirty-one nations now belong to NATO.
Trump doesn’t understand how it works, so The Washington Post tried to explain it, in hopes that he reads it.
NATO member nations all make payments to cover the operating expenses of the organization, which was founded in the aftermath of World War II to help Western Europe counter the Soviet Union with help from Canada and the United States. But they don’t pay membership fees to remain in the alliance, so there’s no delinquency to speak of.
Countries do, however, commit to spending at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP) on defense each year, with the goal of ensuring the alliance’s military readiness and deterring any potential attacks. The commitment is a guideline, not a requirement, that has been in place for nearly two decades.
Last year, 11 countries met or exceeded that target, according to NATO statistics. The rest spent smaller portions of their GDP on defense. (Iceland, the only member state with no armed forces, is omitted from the data set.)
The nation that spent the most on military readiness was Poland, perhaps because of the years it was subjugated by the USSR.
Second was the United States.
The other nine that met the goal of at least 2% were: Greece, Estonia, Lithuania, Finland, Romania, Latvia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, Slovakia.
The nations that Trump is offering up to Putin as targets for invasion are: France, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Albania, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Czech Republic, Portugal, Italy, Canada, Slovenia, Turkey, Spain, Belgium and Luxembourg. None of these countries met their 2% of GDP goal for military spending.
If you have been thinking of vacationing in any of the unprotected nations, like France, Germany, or Spain, it would be best to plan your trip in 2024. Should Trump be elected, those nations might be battlefields or Russian satellites.
A friend sent me this editorial from The Irish Times to show how our Presidential campaign is viewed in a normal country.
The Irish Times titled it:
The point: the media is treating Trump with kid gloves because he’s good for their bottom line. Biden is boring.
Way back in 2016 TV network chiefs knew the destruction they were wreaking with their 24/7 razzle-dazzle Trump coverage. “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS,” said the network’s chairman Les Moonves. “The money’s rolling in and this is fun . . .Bring it on, Donald.”
Now we know that Trump was gifted around $2 billion in free media plus substantially more coverage than his opponents.
Fast forward to 2021, a few months after president Joe Biden was sworn in. US journalist and author Julie Ioffe asked some reporters how life had been since the Trump circus left town.
“Trump has been good for many journalists professionally, myself included,” said one.
“I mean, it wasn’t just the fact that Trump was a gravy train,” said another. “It’s also juxtaposed (against) the most boring administration in modern history. You go from a circus with flaming chainsaws to… what? An old man watching his dog?”
That “old man” was just a year older than Trump is now.
Since then the old man’s economy has added a record number of jobs and sees stocks – a Trump fixation during his presidency – at a record high.
Trump, meanwhile, is facing 91 criminal indictments, some relating to attempts to overthrow the government. In October alone he said that shoplifters should be shot and suggested an army general should be executed for treason. He promises a mass deportation programme with internment camps near the border, and plans to use the military to crush street protests via the Insurrection Act, while being a dictator on day one. At a global level he is happy to throw small sovereign countries like Estonia under Putin’s tanks.
Yet this man, with all the mental acuity of a howling dog, is ahead in the polls. The flaming chainsaw circus act is back with a vengeance, and for some in the media so is that sweet gravy train.
Might the two be linked?
The ceaseless drumbeat about Biden’s age and decline – reminiscent of the saturation 2016 coverage of Hillary Clinton’s emails – is once again enabling the candidate with openly violent dictatorship ambitions to campaign as a normal politician, as if this was the Kentucky Derby.
In a speech to the National Rifle Association last Friday, Trump lied dozens of times, slurred his words and confused basic facts, according to a furious Biden campaign adviser. “But you won’t hear about any of it if you watch cable news, read this weekend’s papers, or watch the Sunday shows,” raged TJ Ducklo, accusing beltway reporters of being numb to Trump’s horrifying candidacy. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Yet in the weekend’s New York Times Biden’s age and memory were addressed negatively by no fewer than three prominent columnists plus the paper’s editorial board, along with multiple news stories. On a Sunday current affairs show a CNN chyron asked, “Is Biden’s age now a bigger problem than Trump’s indictments?” It was the classic circular question which could have begun with the media itself asking about its own role in the growing “problem”.
An outlier was a Washington Post feature describing Biden’s work schedule around the special counsel interviews he sat down for on the two days following the appalling October 7th Hamas atrocity. He was brain-shifting between calls with world leaders about a threatened Middle East conflagration and 2½-hour sessions of questions about decades-old events.
Given that Biden was exonerated on several counts while others were deemed no longer sensitive or not provable, the special counsel’s scathing commentary on his memory was remarkable in terms of timing.
Trump was back again in a federal courthouse in a criminal case involving classified documents and obstruction of FBI efforts. “I’m in court. Again!” boasted his campaign message.
Still, the growing consensus is that Biden is the one with the problem and must bow out.
There are reasons why this is barely feasible, a big one being that the deadline for candidates’ primary ballot submissions, involving a hefty fee and many thousands of voter signatures, has already passed in most states. If, having won enough delegates to be unsurpassable, Biden then withdraws, the nomination could be decided on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in August, where delegates could choose a saviour candidate instead. Not many ambitious big names, timing their run, want to pit themselves against a sitting president. Plus Biden has the funds and has already proven himself against Trump.
So the more pressing question is how a responsible media weighs up the declining memory of a mostly successful pro-democracy incumbent versus the threat of a vile, vengeful, authoritarian alternative.
Most people have no idea how dangerously deranged an unfiltered Trump looks on his own platform. So there is a balance to be struck: how to cover Trump as a candidate while printing the unvarnished truth of what he actually says. What most people see instead is the text-heavy, sanitised, balanced – as opposed to objective – headlines of the mainstream media and/or the polarised call-and-response of a social media that rewards hate and ignorance.
Maybe the mainstream solution involves in-your-face tactics such as replacing the big front page images several times a day with unfiltered Trump social statements in a size and font readable at 50m….
Imagine bold-faced headlines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, USA Today, the Miami Herald, etc., stating “TRUMP LIES AGAIN ABOUT…..”
That would mean reporting facts, not “what he said.”
Politico reported recently that Mayor Eric Adams is pulling out all the stops in his campaign to persuade the legislature to extend mayoral control of New York Ciry’s public schools.
That’s understandable. Every mayor wants as much power as he can gather. Guiliani wanted mayoral control. The legislature turned him down. Michael Bloomberg got it after he won the mayoralty in 2001, pledging to make the schools run efficiently and successfully after years of political squabbling and disappointing academic results.
A historical note: the last time that the independent Board of Education was abolished was in 1871, when Boss Tweed pushed through state legislation to create a Department of Education, in charge of the schools. The new Department immediately banned purchase of any textbooks published by Harper Bros., to retaliate for the publication of Thomas Nast cartoons ridiculing the Tweed Ring in Harper’s magazine. The new Department steered lucrative contracts to Tweed cronies, for furniture and all supplies for the schools.
Two years later, the corruption of the Tweed Ring was exposed, and criminal prosecutions ensued. In short order, the Department of Education was dissolved and the independent Board of Education was revived.
In the 2001 race for Mayor, billionaire Mike Bloomberg campaigned on promises to rebuild the city’s economy after the devastating attacks of 9/11/2001. He also promised to take over the school system, make it more efficient, improve student performance, and able to live within its budget of $12 billion plus. He won, and many people were excited by the prospect of a successful businessman taking over the city and the schools.
In 2002, the State Legislature gave Mayor Bloomberg control of the schools in New York City. It replaced the independent Board of Education, whose seven members were appointed by the five borough presidents and the mayor. Bloomberg had complete control of the school system, with its more than 1,000 schools and more than one million students. The new law allowed him to appoint the majority of “the Panel on Education Policy,” a sham substitute for the old Board of Education.
The new law still referred to “the Board of Education,” but the new PEP was a shell of its former self. It was toothless, as Bloomberg wanted. He picked the Chancellor, and he had the policymaking powers. Early on, in 2004, he decided that third graders should be held back based on their reading scores. Some of his appointees on the PEP opposed the idea and he fired them before the vote was taken. He wanted all his appointees to know that he appointed them to carry out his decisions, not to question them. The retention policy was later expanded through eighth grade but quietly abandoned in 2014 because it failed.
I won’t go into all the missteps of the Bloomberg regime, which lasted 12 years, but will offer a few generalizations:
1. The mayor should not control the schools because they will never be his first priority. The mayor juggles a large portfolio: public safety, the economy, transportation, infrastructure, public health, sanitation, and much more. On any given day, he/she might have 30 minutes to think about the schools; more some days, none at all on others.
2. Mayoral control concentrates too much power in the hands of one person. One person, especially a non-educator, gets an idea into his head and imposes it, no need to talk to experienced educators or review research.
3. Mayoral control marginalizes parents and community members, whose concerns deserve to be heard. At public hearings of the PEP, parents testified but rightly thought that no one listened to them. In the “bad old days,” they could speak to someone in their borough president’s office; now the borough presidents have no power. No one does, Except the mayor.
4. The Mayor picked three non-educators as Chancellor. Joel Klein disdained educators and public schools, even though he was a graduate of the NYC public schools. He created a “Leadership Academy” to train non-educators and teachers to bypass the usual path to becoming a principal by serving for years as an assistant principal. Klein surrounded himself with B-school graduates and looked to Eli Broad, Bill Gates, and Jack Welch for advice. Large numbers of experienced teachers and principals retired.
5. Bloomberg loved churn and disruption. He closed scores of schools and replaced them with many more small schools. Some high schools that had programs for ELLs, special education, career paths for different fields, were closed and replaced by schools for 300/400 students, too small to offer specialized programs or advanced classes.
6. New initiatives were announced with great fanfare (like merit pay), thanks to a vastly enlarged public relations staff, then quietly collapsed and disappeared.
7. Bloomberg and Klein imposed a new choice system. But all high schools and middle schools became schools of choice. A dozen students of the age living in the same building might attend a dozen different schools, some distant from their homes. One retired executive told me that this dispersal was intended to obstruct the creation of grassroots uprisings against the new dictates.
8. Bloomberg and Klein favored charter schools. In short order, more than 100 opened. The charters were supported financially and politically by some of the wealthiest Wall Street titans. When there was any threat to charters, their wealthy patrons quickly assembled multi-millions dollar TV campaigns to defend them. Because of the deep pockets of the charter patrons, the charter lobby gave generous contributions to legislators in Albany. The legislature passed laws favoring the charters, including one that required the public schools to provide free space for them or, if no suitable space was available, to pay their rent in private facilities.
9. Bloomberg and Klein made testing, accountability and choice the central themes of their reforms. Their approach mirrored President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which began at the same time. Raising test scores became the goal of the school system. Schools were graded A-F, depending primarily on their ability to raise test scores. Eventually, teachers were graded by the rise or fall of their students’ scores. NYC faithfully mirrored the tenets of the national corporate reform movement.
10. NYC test scores improved on NAEP during the Bloomberg years, but not as much as in other cities that did not have mayoral control.
11. To get a great overview of “The Failure of Mayoral Control in New York City,” read this great summary by Leonie Haimson, which includes links to other sources. See, especially, the recent article in Education Week on the decline of mayoral control. Chicago had mayoral control similar to that in New York City, which allowed Mayor Rahm Emanuel to close 50 schools in black and brown communities in one day, completely ignoring the views of parents. It was an ignominious example of the danger of one-man control.
12. There is no perfect mechanism to govern schools, but any kind of oversight should allow parent voices to count. 95% of the nation’s school districts have elected school boards. Sometimes a small faction gains control and does damage. That’s the risk of democracy. Whatever the mechanism, there must be an opportunity for the public, especially parents, to make their voices heard and to have a role. The mayor controls the budget: that’s as much power as he should have.
History is an excellent overview of New York City school governance—history and myths. Again, by Leonie Haimson. (Note: her history leaves out the two years of mayoral control from 1871-1873.)
By a vote of 4-3, the Los Angeles Unified Schiol District Board adopted a policy barring charter schools from co-locating in public schools with high-needs students. The charter lobby immediately threatened to sue the district. Currently one of every five students in the LAUSD district attends a charter school. For years, billionaires such as Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Bill Bloomfield, the Walton family, and Michael Bloomberg have poured millions into school board races on behalf of privatization. But for the moment, the anti-privatization supporters of public schools have a slim majority.
The seats of two of the four-person majority—Scott Schmerelson and George McKenna—are up for election next month. Both are veteran educators and pro-public schools. Schmerelson is running for re-election; McKenna is retiring and has endorsed veteran educator Sherlett Hendy Newbill. I endorsed both Scott Schmerelson and Sherlett Hendy Newbill.
The new policy could be ditched by pro-charter replacements or by a legal challenge from the charter lobby.
Howard Blume wrote in the Los Angeles Times:
The struggle between traditional and charter schools intensified Tuesday when a narrow Los Angeles school board majority passed a sweeping policy that will limit when charters can operate on district-owned campuses.
Access to public school campuses for charter schools is guaranteed under state law — and charter advocates immediately threatened to sue over the new restrictions.
The policy, passed 4 to 3, prohibits the new location of charters at an unspecified number of campuses with special space needs or programs. One early staff estimate put the number close to 350, but there’s uncertainty over how the policy will be interpreted. The school system has about 850 campuses, but advocates are concerned that charters could be pushed out of areas where they currently operate, making it difficult for them to remain viable.
Under the policy, district-operated campuses are exempt from new space-sharing arrangements when a school has a designatedprogram to help Black students or when a school is among the most “fragile” because of low student achievement. Also exempt would be community schools — which incorporate services for the broader health, counseling and other needs of students and their families.
The district argued these programs need space beyond the normal allotments for classrooms, counselors, health staff and administrators — for example, rooms for tutoring, enrichment or parent centers. Such spaces had frequently been tabulated as unused or underutilized — and then made available to charters…
In the current school year 52 independent charters operate on 50 campuses, according to L.A. Unified. The number is expected to be smaller for next year and down significantly from a peak of more than 100. But even 50 schools would make for one of the larger school systems in California.
In all, there are 221 district-authorized charters and 25 other local charters approved by the county or state, serving about 1 in 5 public school students within the boundaries of L.A. Unified — about 535,000 students total. Most charters operate in their own or leased private buildings.
The L.A. school system has more charters than any other district in the nation. Most were approved under charter-friendly school boards and under state laws — since changed — that made it difficult for school districts to reject charters.
Heather Cox Richardson writes about the supine behavior of Republicans in the House of Representatives, as they worship at the shrine of Trump. The Senate passed a bipartisan bill to fund Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel: 22 Republican Senators voted for it, openly defying the Orange Menace. But in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t allow the bill to come to a vote because it is likely to pass. Johnson is collaborating with Trump who is collaborating with the enemies of freedom (aka Putin).
She writes:
History is watching,” President Joe Biden said this afternoon. He warned “Republicans in Congress who think they can oppose funding for Ukraine and not be held accountable” that “[f]ailure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will never be forgotten.”
At about 5:00 this morning, the Senate passed a $95 billion national security supplemental bill, providing funding for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. Most of the money in the measure will stay in the United States, paying defense contractors to restock the matériel the U.S. sends to Ukraine.
The vote was 70–29 and was strongly bipartisan. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats in support of the bill, overcoming the opposition of far-right Republicans.
The measure went to the House of Representatives, where House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he will not take it up, even though his far-right supporters acknowledged that a majority of the representatives supported it and that if it did come to the floor, it would pass.
Yesterday, House Intelligence Committee chair Mike Turner (R-OH)—who had just returned from his third trip to Ukraine, where he told President Volodymyr Zelensky that reinforcements were coming—told Politico’sRachel Bade: “We have to get this done…. This is no longer an issue of, ‘When do we support Ukraine?’ If we do not move, this will be abandoning Ukraine.”
“The speaker will need to bring it to the floor,” Turner said. “You’re either for or against the authoritarian governments invading democratic countries.… You’re either for or against the killing of innocent civilians. You’re either for or against Russia reconstituting the Soviet Union.”
Today, Biden spoke to the press to “call on the Speaker to let the full House speak its mind and not allow a minority of the most extreme voices in the House to block this bill even from being voted on—even from being voted on. This is a critical act for the House to move. It needs to move.”
Bipartisan support for Ukraine “sends a clear message to Ukrainians and to our partners and to our allies around the world: America can be trusted, America can be relied upon, and America stands up for freedom,” he said. “We stand strong for our allies. We never bow down to anyone, and certainly not to Vladimir Putin.”
“Supporting this bill is standing up to Putin. Opposing it is playing into Putin’s hands.”
“The stakes were already high for American security before this bill was passed in the Senate last night,” Biden said. “But in recent days, those stakes have risen. And that’s because the former President has sent a dangerous and shockingly, frankly, un-American signal to the world” Biden said, referring to Trump’s statement on Saturday night that he would “encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—the 75-year-old collective security organization that spans North America and Europe—but are not devoting 2% of the gross domestic product to their militaries.
Trump’s invitation to Putin to invade our NATO allies was “dumb,…shameful,…dangerous, [and] un-American,” Biden said. “When America gives its word, it means something. When we make a commitment, we keep it. And NATO is a sacred commitment.” NATO, Biden said, is “the alliance that protects America and the world.”
“[O]ur adversaries have long sought to create cracks in the Alliance. The greatest hope of all those who wish America harm is for NATO to fall apart. And you can be sure that they all cheered when they heard [what] Donald Trump…said.”
“Our nation stands at…an inflection point in history…where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of our future for decades to come. This is one of those moments.
And I say to the House members, House Republicans: You’ve got to decide. Are you going to stand up for freedom, or are you going to side with terror and tyranny? Are you going to stand with Ukraine, or are you going to stand with Putin? Will we stand with America or…with Trump?”
“Republicans and Democrats in the Senate came together to send a message of unity to the world. It’s time for the House Republicans to do the same thing: to pass this bill immediately, to stand for decency, stand for democracy, to stand up to a so-called leader hellbent on weakening American security,” Biden said.
“And I mean this sincerely: History is watching. History is watching.”
But instead of taking up the supplemental national security bill tonight, House speaker Johnson took advantage of the fact that Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA) has returned to Washington after a stem cell transplant to battle his multiple myeloma and that Judy Chu (D-CA) is absent because she has Covid to make a second attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for “high crimes and misdemeanors” for his oversight of the southern border of the United States.
Republicans voted to impeach Mayorkas by a vote of 214 to 213. The vote catered to far-right Republicans, but impeachment will go nowhere in the Senate.
“History will not look kindly on House Republicans for their blatant act of unconstitutional partisanship that has targeted an honorable public servant in order to play petty political games,” Biden said in a statement. He called on the House to pass the border security measure Republicans killed last week on Trump’s orders, and to pass the national security supplemental bill.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has said he will use every possible tool to force a vote on the national security supplemental bill. In contrast, as Biden noted, House Republicans are taking their cue from former president Trump, who does not want aid to Ukraine to pass and who last night demonstrated that he is trying to consolidate his power over the party by installing hand-picked loyalists, including his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is married to his son Eric, at the head of the Republican National Committee (RNC).
This move is likely due in part to outgoing RNC chair Ronna McDaniel’s having said the RNC could not pay Trump’s legal bills once he declared himself a presidential candidate. After his political action committees dropped $50 million on legal fees last year, he could likely use another pipeline, and even closer loyalists might give him one.
In addition, Trump probably recognizes that he might well lose the protective legal bulwark of the Trump Organization when Judge Arthur Engoron hands down his verdict in Trump’s $370 million civil fraud trial. New York attorney general Letitia James is seeking not only monetary penalties but also a ban on Trump’s ability to conduct business in the New York real estate industry. In that event, the RNC could become a base of operations for Trump if he succeeds in taking it over entirely.
But it is not clear that all Republican lawmakers will follow him into that takeover, as his demands from the party not only put it out of step with the majority of the American people but also now clearly threaten to blow up global security. “Our base cannot possibly know what’s at stake at the level that any well-briefed U.S. senator should know about what’s at stake if Putin wins,” Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) told his colleagues as he urged them to vote for the national security supplemental bill.
Politicians should recognize that Trump’s determination to win doesn’t help them much: it is all about him and does not extend to any down-ballot races.
Indeed, the attempt of a Republican minority to impose its will on the majority of Americans appears to be sparking a backlash. In today’s election in New York’s Third Congressional District to replace indicted serial liar George Santos, a loyal Trump Republican, voters chose Democrat Tom Suozzi by about 8 points. CNN’s Dana Bash tonight said voters had told her they voted against the Republican candidate because Republicans, on Trump’s orders, killed the bipartisan border deal. The shift both cuts down the Republican majority in the House and suggests that going into 2024, suburban swing voters are breaking for Democrats.
As Trump tries to complete his takeover of the formerly grand old Republican Party, its members have to decide whether to capitulate.
History is watching.
Thom Hartmann scores a bulls-eye again with this article.
The American people want the borders to be secure; they want a controlled flow of legal immigrants. It’s up to Congress to establish adequate border security, screening, judges, and border patrol. The Republicans have refused to send additional funds to Ukraine or Israel without a plan for the border. In the Senate, the two parties were close to reaching agreement on a bipartisan deal for the border.
But then, after his victory in New Hampshire, Trump stepped in and told them to kill the almost final agreement. He wants the issue of immigration and border security alive and unresolved for his fall campaign. Terrified of the Wrath of Trump, Senate Republicans fell meekly into line.
Hartmann writes here about previous Republican presidential candidates and presidents who have cynically put their political self-interest above the national interest:
Once again, America and the world are watching with horror as a Republican candidate for president — just to win an election — manipulates world affairs in a way that will cause widespread death and destruction while damaging the interests and reputation of America.
There’s a long tradition of Republicans running for president committing what can best called treason, or at least criminal manipulation of international affairs, to advantage themselves and hurt incumbent Democratic presidents.
Yesterday, Mitch McConnell let the proverbial cat out of the bag. A bipartisan group of senators had been working on a bill to provide funding to Ukraine and Israel, with money for the southern border, and when it looked like they were going to produce something that would actually pass the House and Senate, Donald Trump inserted himself, telling the Republicans they should kill the bill.
Trump apparently wants to run on chaos at the border, and solving the problem as this legislation is intended to do would take that issue away from him. But he’s also explicitly opposed to any further US aid to Ukraine. This is a treasonous twofer, putting Trump’s election above the interests of the United States and world peace.
Trump, of course, knows that if it weren’t for Putin’s intervention in the 2016 election, he never would have been president. And he desperately needs a repeat to hold onto his fortune and stay out of jail: he’s in a far greater bind now than when he first ran for president as a hustle to get GE to pay him more for his TV show.
His 2016 Campaign Manager Paul Manafort, after all, admitted that during that election he was handing secret internal campaign polling and strategy information off to Russian intelligence, so they could successfully use it to micro-target vulnerable voters via Facebook, an effort that reached 26 million targeted Americans in 6 swing states.
Now, Trump wants Putin’s help again for 2024. He knows that Putin can do things from overseas, including using deepfakes and posing as Americans to spread explicit lies on social media, that would send people to prison for election interference if done here in the US.
Putin’s number one goal, of course, is to seize control of Ukraine while destabilizing western democracies. So, Trump, wanting Putin’s help, is now trying to deliver Ukraine to Putin by killing US aid.
This pattern of Republican presidential candidates criminally intervening in foreign policy just to win elections started in 1968 and has been a feature — not a bug — of every Republican president who succeeded in taking the White House since: it’s time to seriously discuss the five-decade-long problem we have with treasonous and illegitimate GOP presidents.
It started in 1968, when President Lyndon Johnson was desperately trying to end the Vietnam war. It had turned into both a personal and political nightmare for him, and his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who was running for President in the election that year against a “reinvented” Richard Nixon.
Johnson spent most of late 1967 and early 1968 working back-channels to North and South Vietnam, and by the summer of 1968 had a tentative agreement from both for what promised to be a lasting peace deal they’d both sign that that fall.
But Richard Nixon knew that if he could block that peace deal, it would kill VP Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the 1968 election. So, Nixon sent envoys from his campaign to talk to South Vietnamese leaders to encourage them not to attend upcoming peace talks in Paris.
Nixon promised South Vietnam’s corrupt politicians that he’d give them a personally richer deal when he was President than LBJ could give them then.
The FBI had been wiretapping South Vietnam’s US agents and told LBJ about Nixon’s effort to prolong the Vietnam War. Thus, just three days before the 1968 election, President Johnson phoned the Republican Senate leader, Everett Dirksen, (you can listen to the entire conversation here):
President Johnson: Some of our folks, including some of the old China lobby, are going to the Vietnamese embassy and saying please notify the [South Vietnamese] president that if he’ll hold out ’til November 2nd they could get a better deal. Now, I’m reading their hand. I don’t want to get this in the campaign. And they oughtn’t to be doin’ this, Everett. This is treason.
Sen. Dirksen: I know.
Those tapes were only released by the LBJ library in the past decade, and that’s Richard Nixon who Lyndon Johnson was accusing of treason.
At that point, for President Johnson, it was no longer about getting Humphrey elected. By then Nixon’s plan had already worked and Humphrey was being wiped out in the polls because the war was ongoing.
Instead, Johnson was desperately trying to salvage the peace talks to stop the death and carnage as soon as possible. He literally couldn’t sleep.
In a phone call to Nixon himself just before the election, LBJ begged him to stop sabotaging the peace process, noting that he was almost certainly going to win the election and inherit the war anyway. Instead, Nixon publicly said LBJ’s efforts were “in shambles.”
But South Vietnam had taken Nixon’s deal and boycotted the peace talks, the war continued, and Nixon won the White House thanks to it.
An additional twenty-two thousand American soldiers, and an additional million-plus Vietnamese died because of Nixon’s 1968 treason, and he left it to Jerry Ford to end the war and evacuate American soldiers.
Nixon was never held to account for that treason, and when the LBJ library released the tapes and documentation long after his and LBJ’s deaths it was barely noticed by the American press.
Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, was never elected to the White House (he was appointed to replace VP Spiro Agnew, after Agnew was indicted for decades of taking bribes), and thus would never have been President had it not been for Richard Nixon’s treason. He pardoned Nixon.
Next up was Ronald Reagan.
During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.
Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President of Iran that summer on the popular position of releasing the hostages:
“I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign…. I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote…. Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it [hostage-taking].”
Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979.
But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 Presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them.
This is the story that was finally confirmed just last year with The New York Times’ reporting that we now know how the deal was conveyed to the Ayatollah and by whom, including the lieutenant governor of Texas.
This was the second modern-day act of treason by a Republican wanting to become president.
The Reagan campaign’s secret negotiations with Khomeini — the so-called “Iran/Contra October Surprise” — sabotaged President Carter’s and Iranian President Bani-Sadr’s attempts to free the hostages.
As President Bani-Sadr told The Christian Science Monitor in March of 2013:
“After arriving in France [in 1981], I told a BBC reporter that I had left Iran to expose the symbiotic relationship between Khomeinism and Reaganism.
“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”
And Reagan’s treason — just like Nixon’s treason — worked perfectly.
The Iran hostage crisis continued and torpedoed Jimmy Carter’s re-election hopes. And the same day Reagan took the oath of office — to the minute, as Reagan put his hand on the bible, by way of Iran’s acknowledging the deal — the American hostages in Iran were released.
Keeping his side of the deal, Reagan began selling the Iranians weapons and spare parts in 1981, and continued until he was busted for it in 1986, producing the so-called “Iran/Contra” scandal.
But, like Nixon, Reagan was never held to account for the criminal and treasonous actions that brought him to office. Which is one reason Bush Jr. and Trump believed they could get away with anything.
After Reagan — Bush senior was elected — but like Jerry Ford — Bush was really only President because he served as Vice President under Reagan. And, of course, the naked racism of his Willie Horton ads helped boost him into office.
The criminal investigation into Iran/Contra came to a head with independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh subpoenaing President George HW Bush after having already obtained convictions for Weinberger, Ollie North and others.
And Walsh was now looking into actual criminal activity by Bush himself in support of the Iran/Contra October Surprise.
Bush’s attorney general, Bill Barr, suggested he pardon them all to kill the investigation and protect himself, which Bush did.
The screaming headline across the New York Times front page on December 25, 1992, said it all: “BUSH PARDONS 6 IN IRAN AFFAIR, AVERTING A WEINBERGER TRIAL; PROSECUTOR ASSAILS ‘COVER-UP’”
And if the October Surprise hadn’t hoodwinked voters in 1980, you can bet Bush senior would never have been elected in 1988. That’s four illegitimate Republican presidents.
Which brings us to George W. Bush, the man who was given the White House by five right-wing justices on the Supreme Court.
In the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000 that stopped the Florida recount — and thus handed George W. Bush the presidency — Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his opinion:
“The counting of votes … does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he [Bush] claims to be the legitimacy of his election.”
Apparently, denying the presidency to Al Gore, the guy who actually won the most votes in Florida and won the popular vote nationwide by over a half-million, did not constitute “irreparable harm” to Scalia or the media.
And apparently it wasn’t important that Scalia’s son worked for a law firm that was defending George W. Bush before the high court (with no Scalia recusal).
Just like it wasn’t important to mention that Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife worked on the Bush transition team — before the Supreme Court shut down the recount in Florida — and was busily accepting resumes from people who would serve in the Bush White House if her husband stopped the recount in Florida…which he did. (No Thomas recusal, either.)
More than a year after the election a consortium of newspapers including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and USA Today did their own recount of the vote in Florida — manually counting every vote in a process that took almost a year — and concluded that Al Gore did indeed win the presidency in 2000.
As the November 12th, 2001 article in The New York Times read:
“If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won.”
That little bit of info was slipped into the seventeenth paragraph of the Times story so that it would attract as little attention as possible because the 9/11 attacks had happened just weeks earlier and journalists feared that burdening Americans with the plain truth that George W. Bush actually lost the election would further hurt a nation already in crisis.
To compound the crime, Bush could only have gotten as close to Gore in the election as he did because his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, had ordered his Secretary of State, Kathrine Harris, to purge at least 57,000 mostly-Black voters from the state’s voter rolls just before the election. Thousands of African Americans showed up to vote and were turned away from the polls in that election in Florida that Bush “won” by fewer than 600 votes.
The simple reality is that Al Gore won Florida in 2000, won the national popular vote by a half-million, and five Republicans on the Supreme Court denied him the presidency.
Florida Governor and George W. Bush’s brother Jeb had his Secretary of State, Kathryn Harris, throw thousands of African Americans off the voting rolls just before the election but then — when the votes had come in and it was clear former Vice President Al Gore had still won — she invented a brand new category of ballots for the 2000 election: “Spoiled.”
As The New York Times reported a year after the 2000 election when the consortium of newspapers they were part of finally recounted all the ballots:
“While 35,176 voters wrote in Bush’s name after punching the hole for him, 80,775 wrote in Gore’s name while punching the hole for Gore. [Florida Secretary of State] Katherine Harris decided that these were ‘spoiled’ ballots because they were both punched and written upon and ordered that none of them should be counted.
“Many were from African American districts, where older and often broken machines were distributed, causing voters to write onto their ballots so their intent would be unambiguous.”
George W. Bush “won” the election by 537 votes in Florida, because the statewide recount — which would have revealed Harris’s crime and counted the “spoiled” ballots, handing the election to Gore (who’d won the popular vote by over a half-million nationwide) — was stopped when George HW Bush appointee Clarence Thomas became the deciding vote on the Supreme Court to block the recount order from the Florida Supreme Court.
Harris’ decision to not count the 45,599 more votes for Gore than Bush was completely arbitrary: there was no legal category and no legal precedent, outside of the old Confederate states simply refusing to count the votes of Black people, to justify it.
The intent of the voters was unambiguous. And the 5 Republicans on the Supreme Court jumped in to block the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court (in violation of the 10th Amendment) just in time to prevent those “spoiled” votes from being counted, cementing Bush’s illegitimate presidency.
So, for the third time in 4 decades, Republicans took the White House under illegitimate electoral circumstances. Even President Carter was shocked by the brazenness of that one. And Jeb Bush and the GOP were never held to account for that crime against democracy.
To get re-elected in 2004, Bush used an old trick: become a “wartime president.” In 1999, when George W. Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his parents hired Mickey Herskowitz to write the first draft of Bush’s autobiography, A Charge To Keep.
Although Bush had gone AWOL for about a year during the Vietnam war and was thus apparently no fan of combat, he’d concluded (from watching his father’s “little 3-day war” with Iraq) that being a “wartime president” was the most consistently surefire way to get reelected and have a two-term presidency.
“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004.
“One of the things [Bush] said to me,” Herskowitz said, “is: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“[Bush] said, ‘If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.’”
Bush lying us into that war was an act of treason against America that cost 900,000 Iraqi lives, over 7,000 American lives (on the battlefield: veterans are still committing suicide daily), and over $8 trillion added to the national debt.
But it did what it was supposed to do: it got Bush re-elected in 2004.
Which brings us to this year’s election.
In 2016, Trump ally Kris Kobach and Republican Secretaries of State across the nation used Interstate Crosscheck to purge millions of legitimate voters — most people of color — from the voting rolls just in time for the Clinton/Trump election.
Meanwhile, Russian oligarchs and the Russian state, and possibly pro-Trump groups or nations in the Middle East, are alleged to have funded a widespread program to flood social media with pro-Trump, anti-Clinton messages from accounts posing as Americans, as documented by Robert Mueller’s investigation.
It was so blatant that it provoked the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of their similar actions during the 2020 election (done while Trump was still president but released in March, 2021) pretty much declaring Trump a “Russian asset.”
It was a repeat, in many ways (albeit unsuccessful this time) of the Russian efforts in 2016. Then, as mentioned, Republican campaign data on the 2016 election, including which states needed a little help via phony influencers on Facebook and other social media, was not only given to Konstantin Kilimnik by Paul Manafort, but Kilimnik transferred it to Russian intelligence.
And now Trump is trying to exacerbate a crisis on our southern border and screw Ukraine in a way that will lead to mass causalities and disrupt the international order — all to give Putin what he wants — the same way Nixon used Vietnam, Reagan used Iran, and Bush used Iraq, just to win a damn election.
While we can’t rewrite history, at least we can try to prevent it from being repeated. Call your members of Congress — your representative and both your senators — and let them know if you agree that Ukraine aid and resolving the issue at the southern border shouldn’t be held hostage to Trump’s need for Putin’s help and approval.
The number for the congressional switchboard is: 202-224-3121.
It’s way past time that America ceased to be the dog wagged by the tail of corrupt Republicans who want to be president.
This report was written by Tanisha Pruitt, Ph.D., for Policy Matters Ohio in April 2023. It provides a comprehensive review of the funding of K-12 education in the state. The state has 1.6 million students. The state Constitution says (Article 6, section 2):
The General Assembly shall make such provisions, by taxation, or otherwise, as, with the income arising from the school trust fund, 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.
The legislature and governor of Ohio apparently believe that the state Constitution does not mean what it says. The Republican leadership has steadily increased the funding of charter schools (which are not “common schools,” but are privately managed schools, some for-profit) and vouchers, which go primarily up religious schools.
The report was written before the legislature lifted income caps on vouchers, agreeing to subsidize the tuition of all students regardless of family income.
Please open the link to see the graphs.
The Policy Matters Ohio report begins:
School is a place where childhood happens. Ohio’s public educators teach children of all races and backgrounds basic skills, but also challenge and inspire them to follow their dreams. For many students, school is a safe place to learn, develop and grow.
Ohio currently educates 1.6 million children attending school in our cities, suburbs and small towns. For years, almost no one was happy about how the state of Ohio funded public schools. The system pitted communities against each other and private and charter schools against public schools. We were living in the K-12 version of the “Hunger Games”: The wealthier your district, the stronger your chances of success.
Most state lawmakers signed off on a system that relied too heavily on local property taxes,[1] so communities where many residents have low incomes struggled to pay for the basics like updated resources and teaching materials. The state capped the funding it sent to some districts, often leaving those districts feeling cheated. In others, state funding failed to keep up with changing costs and student needs. Since 2005, lawmakers have been systematically sending more resources to the wealthiest Ohioans by cutting the state income tax, which accounts for nearly one-third of the state’s spending on schools. Meanwhile, lawmakers have diverted almost $1 billion a year from local levies to private and charter schools.[2]
These policy choices have taken a toll on Ohio’s educational outcomes. Education Week ranks Ohio 46th in the nation for equitable distribution of funding.[3] The performance metrics included: (1) state spending by examining per-pupil expenditures adjusted for regional cost differences, the percent of students in districts with per-pupil spending at or above the national average, spending index, and percent of total taxable resources spent on education and (2) Equity, by examining the degree to which education funding is equitably distributed across the districts within the state.[4]
The pandemic has contributed to a decline in test scores, which could have an impact on our overall ranking, if we do not get students caught up.[5] Over nearly two decades, we can draw a straight line between the racial and economic achievement gaps and the lack of funding to provide Black, brown, economically disadvantaged students[6] and students with disabilities what they need to succeed in school.
Ohio’s schools are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse; the Hispanic[7]population (a close proxy for Latinx) alone has more than doubled over the last 10 years.[8] Student poverty is also on the rise with 51% of students considered economically disadvantaged and the homeless student population doubling over the last decade.[9]
COVID-19 created unstable and even chaotic learning environments across Ohio. The elevated stress and social isolation caused by the move to virtual learning[10]exacerbated students’ need for mental health services.[11] The pandemic continues to take a toll on educators as well. COVID and other outbreaks are making educators sick. Moreover, increased stress and low pay cause many educators to leave the profession. Districts across the state have grappled with unprecedented staff shortages. For example, Columbus City Schools (CCS) had 800 employees absent every day during the height of the pandemic.[12] Hamilton City School officials were forced to cancel classes when 170 staff members were out due to illness.[13]
COVID has especially hammered school districts in communities that can’t raise enough money through local property taxes — especially in big cities, where Black, brown and economically disadvantaged students are more likely to live.[14] Schools in these communities often have fewer resources for COVID mitigation efforts like improving ventilation.[15]
Long before COVID, many policymakers neglected public schools, siphoning away their funding for tax giveaways[16] to corporations and undercutting them with schemes that send public money to charters and private schools. Combined with the effects of COVID, Ohio’s legacy of inadequate and inequitable funding has weakened the role school plays as a foundational public service for families and communities. For our state to be a vibrant place where people want to live, we need fully and fairly funded schools in all districts, no matter what students look like, or how much money their families have.
This report describes how the state funds public K-12 education and some key investments proposed in the 2024-25 Executive Budget, the legacy of unconstitutional funding, the role private school vouchers play in harming public schools, and how the Fair School Funding Plan — when fully funded and fully implemented, including weights and cost corrections — can provide districts with more resources to prepare Ohio’s children to succeed.
A brief history of Ohio school funding
The framers of Ohio’s constitution obligated the state to provide a “thorough and efficient system of common schools” for all students.[17] In 1991, the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding, representing more than 500 school districts in Ohio, filed suit in the Perry County courts against the State of Ohio for failing to uphold this constitutional requirement.[18] In DeRolph vs. The State of Ohio — named for Perry County school district student Nathan DeRolph — plaintiffs argued the state was failing to live up to its obligation due to over-reliance on local property taxes for school funding: In wealthy communities, high property values generated revenues needed to provide students with more resources for cutting-edge technology, advanced classes, and extracurricular activities; the opposite was true in poor communities. This left schools in cities, rural areas and many low-income communities severely under-resourced, significantly harming outcomes for their students.
The litigation dragged on until 1994 when Perry County Court Judge Linton Lewis, Jr. ruled that “public education is a fundamental right in the state of Ohio” and that the state legislature must provide a better and more equitable means of financing education.
The DeRolph case was the start of a foundational shift in the school funding system in Ohio, but the fight for constitutional and equitable funding continued for decades following the ruling. By failing to keep up with inflation and by diverting public funds to charter schools[19] and vouchers (i.e., scholarships to private schools), lawmakers in fact cut state aid to traditional public schools over time.[20] As a result, public schools have increasingly relied even more on local resources, which exacerbates the problem of unequal funding and quality across districts,[21] a problem that persists today….
Public dollars, private benefits
Two smaller education systems run alongside Ohio’s traditional public schools: charters and private schools. When legislators redirect funding from traditional public schools to pay for charters and vouchers (which pass public dollars through parents and into private schools), the vast majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public schools have to make do with less.
In Ohio charter schools have been branded “community schools” and are considered “public” because they cannot charge tuition and they are supposed to accept all students. However, charter schools do not necessarily serve the public good. Charter school sponsors may contract with for-profit companies to operate the schools. In 2020, Ohio had 313 charter schools serving 102,645 students and 178 (57%) of them were operated by for-profit entities.[48]These “operators” have been the source of much scandal in Ohio. Simply put: The charter system in Ohio has lots of loopholes for private, profit-seeking companies to siphon off public dollars.
In FY 2022 the state sent $1.45 billion to charter schools — up from nearly $620 million in 2007.[49] During that time, Ohio’s legislators earned our state a reputation as “the wild west of charter schools” by failing to hold charters and their operators accountable.[50] Problems with Ohio’s charter school system came to a head with the ECOT scandal: A for-profit online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow squandered millions in public money by inflating enrollment numbers.[51] Other charter scandals have prompted rounds of legislative reform to reduce self-dealing, prevent the state from paying for students who were not actually attending school, and stop attempts at double-dipping by selling state-purchased materials back to the state for even more public dollars.[52]
The Ohio Charter School Accountability Project, a joint effort of the Ohio Education Association (OEA) and Innovation Ohio, using data primarily from the Ohio Department of Education (ODE), created a tool to help Ohioans know the state of publicly funded charters and private schools that accept public vouchers, and how they compare to traditional school districts. Analysis includes state report card rankings, classroom expenditures, and state aid deductions to charter schools. This system is intended to provide transparency so that parents, teachers, students and advocates can hold charter schools accountable.[53]
Based on the recent Annual Community Schools report conducted by the Ohio Department of Education (ODE),[54]community schools in Ohio are receiving more funding through the Quality Community School Support Grant (QCSS). Eligibility requirements for these grants are based on performance standards and overall academic achievement. In the current budget lawmakers increased funding to QCSS to $54 million for FY 2022, a $24 million increase from 2021. This increase includes a per-pupil increase of $1,750 for economically disadvantaged students and a $1,000 per-pupil increase for all other students.[55]
Vouchers eat up state funding for K-12 schools
As problematic as under-regulated charter schools can be, the proliferation of private school vouchers has had the most serious consequences for public schools and the vast majority of Ohio students who attend them. Since the Cleveland Voucher Program for low-income students in Cleveland City Schools launched in 1996, policymakers have expanded voucher programs across the state. Ohio currently has four main school voucher programs: the Educational Choice (EdChoice) Scholarship Program, the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Program (CSTP), the Autism Scholarship Program, and the Jon Peterson Special Needs (JPSN) Scholarship Program. The EdChoice program is split into two types: the Traditional EdChoice Scholarship, also known as performance-based EdChoice, and the EdChoice Expansion Scholarship, also known as income-based EdChoice.
Policymakers introduced the Traditional EdChoice scholarship program in 2005 and continue to expand it. The EdChoice Expansion program was introduced in 2014 and has also expanded in scope. The performance-based EdChoice program is available to students in underperforming school districts, while the income-based EdChoice program is available to low-income students. The Cleveland Scholarship is for all K-12 students in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The other two scholarships, Autism and JPSN, are for autistic students and students with any disability, respectively.
What started as a program to provide alternative education options for students in what the state perceived to be underachieving schools has now expanded to include students from public schools with high achievement grades. According to a brief by the Northwest Local School District, 47.7% of the buildings on the current list of Ohio schools eligible for vouchers have overall grades of “A,” “B,” or “C” under the state’s report card system. The number of eligible schools has also grown rapidly. During the 2018-19 school year Ohio had fewer than 300 school buildings that were considered eligible; by 2020-21, 1,200 school buildings were eligible: a 300% increase in just two years.[56] Similarly, income-based vouchers are now being proposed for families earning up to 400% of the federal poverty level. This expansion would be a costly and needless expansion, subsidizing private education for families that need no help. A family of four could earn up to $120,000 and be considered income eligible. This expansion will make vouchers nearly universal, by providing an additional handout to upper-middle-class families at the expense of public schools.
Vouchers in the state budget
After years of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations that have drained resources from public schools, and as COVID has created new pressures, the state further undercuts public schools by pumping hundreds of millions of public dollars into private schools.[57]
The 2022-23 biennial budget expanded funding of private schools, especially through EdChoice and other voucher programs. Traditional, performance-based EdChoice received $212.5 million, and the income-based EdChoice Expansion program received close to $103 million, a combined 61.4% of voucher payments statewide in FY 2022. The Autism and JPSN scholarships received $116.5 million and $76.6 million, respectively, making up 17% and 12.4% of distributed scholarship funds. The Cleveland Scholarship program received $46 million and only makes up 9.1% of distributed scholarship funds.[58]
Legislators have increased voucher payments from state funds since 2014, as illustrated in Figure 6.[59]
Figure 6
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/7sKMh/2/
The FSFP funds vouchers directly instead of allowing them siphon away districts’ state funding. Lawmakers increased total voucher allocations from $395.4 million in FY 2020 to $635.1 million in FY 2022.[60]They also increased direct state aid to private schools, though not as dramatically. Policymakers increased funding for “auxiliary services” to private schools from $149.9 million in FY 2021 to $154.1 in FY 2022 and just under $156 million in FY 2023. Meanwhile, “nonpublic administrative cost reimbursement” aid — which reimburses charter schools for the cost of mandated administrative and clerical activities such as preparation, filing and records keeping[61] — increased from $68.9 in FY 2021 to $70.8 in FY 2022 and $71.6 in FY 2023.[62]
Lawmakers have increased spending on vouchers by increasing the amount families can receive. For income-based EdChoice Expansion vouchers for FY 2022-23 the state now awards qualifying K-8 students $5,500 per year and high school students $7,500 per year for tuition at non-public schools, up from previous award amounts in FY 2020-21 which provided $4,650 for K-8 students and $6,000 for students grades 9-12.[63]….
Voucher expansion threatens our public schools
Because of the General Assembly’s continued expansion of voucher programs, more Ohio families are enrolling in them — up from 52,000 in 2019 to 69,991 in 2021. Even accounting for this growth, most voucher students were already attending private school before receiving vouchers.[64] Further, the number of vouchers is a fraction of the number of students served in public schools. When students use state-funded vouchers to attend private schools, even if they were never enrolled in traditional school districts, it means less money in the state budget that could otherwise be spent creating great public schools, which must serve all students.
The Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, a coalition of over 100 school district and 20 education and community groups, took the state of Ohio to court, claiming that EdChoice Expansion violates the constitutional requirement that the state provide a “thorough and efficient system of common schools.” Coalition advocates believe that state lawmakers’ growing investment in vouchers could lead to a school funding system that privileges private education even more in years to come.[65]
Many proponents of voucher expansion have painted it as the state simply supporting parents’ right to choose where their child will be educated, but choice is not the problem, priorities are. The state has not fulfilled its constitutionally mandated responsibility to fairly fund public schools. Key components of the FSFP are still outstanding. Allocating close to $1 billion in public funds for students to take vouchers to private schools is a huge disservice to the 90% of students who attend our public schools.
Ultimately, the way the executive budget proposes to distribute foundation aid over FY 2024-25 will further erode the share going to traditional public schools by allocating a greater share to charters. The proposed budget would send 77.9% of foundation funds to traditional schools, compared to 79.1% in the last budget. Charters would take 10.8%, up from 9.9%. Voucher programs stay at 7.1%, and joint vocational school districts increase to 4.2% from 3.8%.
Ohio has underfunded public schools and other essential public services for years.[66] Ohio lawmakers have cut state income taxes since 2005, reducing our ability to provide an equitable education system for all our students, and giving huge windfalls to the wealthiest Ohioans and little or no benefit to people with middle or low incomes.
Policymakers have a constitutional duty to protect public schools. Ensuring a thorough and efficient system of common schools means correcting disparities generated from over-reliance on property taxes by fully implementing the FSFP, with accurate estimates of how much it really costs to educate our kids.
Lawmakers in Ohio need to invest in developing an educator workforce of qualified teachers who are paid fairly for their essential work and strongly supported while doing it. Other pressing issues include a bussing crisis,[67] fewer 5-year-olds prepared for kindergarten,[68]lowered reading and math proficiency scores,[69] chronic absenteeism,[70] and a persistent digital divide.[71]
The state has sufficient revenue to meet these challenges, so long as legislators make public schools and kids a priority. Ohio has the money to fully commit to the FSFP in this budget. Instead of phasing in funding piece by piece, year after year, lawmakers should fully fund it right now. Ohioans must come together to demand lawmakers live up to the promise of the FSFP in the next biennium and beyond.
Republicans in the Ohio legislature love vouchers. They don’t love public schools. First, they created vouchers for Cleveland in 1995 as part of a budget bill. The ACLU challenged the program, and the Supreme Court upheld it in a 5-4 decision called Zelman Vs. Simmons-Harris.
Here is a summary at Case Western Reserve University’s website:
On June 27, 2002, the court ruled 5-4 in favor of vouchers, with Justices Sandra Day OConnor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas joining Chief Justice William Rehnquist in delivering the majority opinion. Rehnquist argued that the program is “entirely neutral with respect to religion.” He explained, “It permits genuine choice among options public and private, secular and religious. The program is therefore a program of true private choice.” Justice David H. Souter offered a harsh dissent, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer. Souter called the ruling “potentially tragic” as a “major devaluation of the establishment clause.”
Souter was right. Cleveland has had its voucher program in place since 1996. Almost 30 years later, it’s clear that it did not improve academic achievement. Cleveland has participated in the NAEP testing since 2003. It is one of the nation’s lowest scoring urban districts, outperforming only Detroit (a city with many charter schools). Vouchers didn’t make education better in Cleveland and may have made it worse by reducing civic investment in the public schools.
Lots of choices—public, charter, and vouchers—no improvements.
Despite the clear evidence of failure in Cleveland, the Ohio legislature created multiple statewide voucher programs. Initially, they were targeted towards specific high-needs groups, including low-income children.
Now, however, the legislature has raised the income cap again. Students are eligible if their family income is 450% of the federal poverty level.. Enrollment more than tripled, from 24,000 to 82,000, and costs are ballooning. But that won’t slow down the rush to universal vouchers, where the state gives a voucher to every student regardless of family income.
The only statewide evaluation of Ohio vouchers was released in 2016. It was sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a rightwing think tank that supports school choice The findings were negative. Vouchers depressed achievement. But no one cared.
Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com reported:
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The number of applications for Ohio-funded scholarships for private schools has more than tripled this school year over the last after the state legislature increased both the cash amount of the vouchers and family income eligibility, according to new figures.
So far, the state has paid out $166.9 million for private school tuition this year in one of the voucher programs that the legislature expanded.
But that amount will continue to rise. Most private schools collect tuition on a monthly basis, and not all applications to the program have been granted or even submitted. Parents have until the end of the June to submit voucher applications…
According to the latest figures from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, the state’s new K-12 agency:
– Thus far in the 2023-2024 school year, 82,610 students have been awarded scholarships to private schools in the one of the five voucher programs that the legislature expanded. In the 2022-2023 school year, families of 24,320 kids received vouchers.
-An additional 8,582 applications had been received as of Jan. 25 but were in need of a correction or were otherwise incomplete.
DEW has changed the way it’s reporting the dollar amount, as reporters have published dozens of stories about the controversial growth in private school vouchers this year. Previously, it reported how much money the state had committed to private school vouchers in the 2023-2024 school year, based on approved student applications.
For instance, in late October, it had committed $239.8 million for 41,120 students whose applications had been approved at the time. That figure raised eyebrows because it suggested the state could go well over the $397.8 million the General Assembly had budgeted for vouchers this school year.
Since then, the number of applications approved has more than doubled, but the state agency is reporting only how much it has paid out rather than its total commitments to date. Calculating that number is difficult without detailed data because the state awards scholarships based on a sliding income scale.
That means the state spend reported now is about $73 million lower than what the state said in October. However, by the end of June, the amount of state money spent is almost guaranteed to be higher.
In the two-year state budget bill passed over the summer, lawmakers expanded voucher eligibility to all families. Among the changes:
-The General Assembly raised the full voucher award from $5,500 to $6,165 this school year for students in K-8 and from $7,500 to $8,407 in 9-12.
-For the full voucher, lawmakers expanded family income eligibility to 450% of the federal poverty level, or $135,000 for a family of four, from the previous 250% of the federal poverty level, or $75,000 for a family of four.
-Lawmakers removed income caps for all families this year, meaning high-income families also can receive scholarships, but the award decreases the wealthier a family is. For instance, families at 451% to 500% of the poverty level are eligible for $5,200 for K-8 and $7,050 for 9-12.
The state has five private school voucher programs. Some are for children with special needs or for families who live in the boundaries of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. The program with explosive growth this year is Education Choice, which is based on income eligibility. (That is different from an EdChoice program for families who live in the boundaries of low-performing public schools.)
So far this school year, 146,544 Ohio students are receiving a scholarship for one of the five voucher programs, costing the state $428.5 million to date.
A Wednesday report about Ohio’s private school vouchers by ProPublica found that parents with kids in private schools were being pressured to apply for vouchers, even if they were against it on principle. Schools pressured lower-income parents to obtain the scholarships first before asking for financial aid. Some schools appeared prepare to raise tuition, because the increase could be absorbed by parents, now that the state was paying a large chunk of their tuition, the reporting found.
What is more, Ohio’s voucher program enables the revival of discrimination that federal law forbids.
Journalist Marylou Johanek writes:
Public financing of parochial school prejudice is the law in Ohio. Take a minute to process, I’ll wait. The state has opened its coffers to Catholic schools that discriminate. The overwhelming amount of Ohio’s voucher money — free taxpayer money to offset private and religious school tuition — goes to Catholic schools.
The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland receives a ton of voucher funding. It just announced a new anti-LGBTQ+ policy in its 84 private religious schools that is blatantly discriminatory. Your tax dollars at work. Against the LGBTQ+ community. Against highly vulnerable LGBTQ+ youth.
Turns out the Church’s “all are welcome” spin is a conditional precept based on strict adherence to unchristian bigotry. Church leaders in Cleveland put their flock on notice that the universal invitation of acceptance may be rescinded to those who “openly express disagreement with Church teaching on matters of sex, sexuality, and/or gender in an inappropriate or scandalous way.”
The way Jesus turned nonconformists away.
From here on out, Catholic policy in Cleveland elementary and high schools — that rake in millions in taxpayer-funded vouchers — states that every person is expected “to present and conduct themselves in a manner consistent with their God-given biological sex” or face disciplinary action. Apparently, inclusive, affirming, nonjudgmental love is overrated.
The Catholic Diocese of Cleveland aligned itself with “culture war” extremists attacking people who can’t fight back. When an institution as influential as the Cleveland diocese rolled out sweeping prohibitions on LGBTQ+ expression and support in its diocesan-run and parish schools, it effectively blessed the record wave of hateful anti-LGBTQ+ bills being introduced by right-wing politicians in Ohio and Republican statehouses across the country (500 and counting).
Open the link and read it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 