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Justice Amy Coney Barrett Gets $2 Million Book Deal

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2022 //
40

Blogger Robert Hubbell reports that Justice Any Coney Barrett has won a $2 million advance on a book that explains how her personal views don’t affect her judicial decisions. Tell me another. Must be a very short book.

Hubbell writes:

Why does this feel like a “reward” for overruling Roe v. Wade?

Justice Amy Coney Barret has secured a $2 million advance from Penguin Random House for a book that will reportedly discuss “how judges are not supposed to bring their personal feelings into how they rule.” Given the dissonance between the proposed topic and Justice Barrett’s religiously motivated ruling in Dobbs, it is possible that the book is intended to be satirical, but there is little evidence that Barrett has a sense of humor.

So, the most reasonable explanations are that Justice Barrett (a) lacks self-awareness and any sense of shame, and (b) the shocking advance is an indirect “reward” for being the final vote necessary to overrule Roe v. Wade. To be fair, Barrett secured the $2 million advance for a book that can be summarized in a sentence fragment before she overruled Roe. To be fairer, there is little evidence that the German conglomerate that owns Penguin Random House has any interest in US politics—apart from monetizing controversy. A group of publishing professionals is calling on Penguin Random House to reconsider its deal with Barrett.

I, for one, cannot wait not to read Justice Barrett’s explanation of how her deeply held faith did not influence her vote to impose Catholic dogma on 320 million Americans. Perhaps future confirmation hearings can ask nominees for the Supreme Court if they intend to accept an obscene advance for writing a book of judicial fairy tales. That will give nominees something else to lie about besides their respect for precedent.

If you read Hubbell’s post, be sure to see his critique of the blunders of the Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, which released a statement calling on Biden to negotiate with Putin about ending the war in Ukraine, then withdrawing their statement as a mistake. I agree with Hubbell. Any negotiation that doesn’t include Ukraine is ridiculous. Any negotiation that rewards Putin with Ukrainian territory for his aggression encourages more aggression. I fully support the heroism and courage of the Ukrainian people in resisting Putin’s naked aggression.

Categories Ethics, Hypocrisy, Lies, Religion

New York: Hasidic School Will Pay $8 Million After Admitting Fraud

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2022 //
19

The New York Times reported that the largest private Hasidic Jewish school in the state of New York—the Central United Talmudical Academy— admitted in federal court that it had stolen millions of dollars from government programs. The school enrolls 2,000 boys and is located in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The leaders of the school acknowledged that they had taken money intended for “school lunches, technology and child care” They created no-show jobs for some employees and paid others in cash, so they could receive welfare. The school will pay $5 million in fines in addition to more than $3 million that it has paid for restitution. .

State law requires all private schools to provide an education comparable to what is in public schools. In 2015, New York City’s education department said it would investigate complaints about the quality of secular education in schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.

The school will be overseen by an independent monitor for the next three years.

The Central United Talmudical Academy, an all-boys private religious school, factored prominently in a New York Times investigation last month that found that Hasidic boys’ schools across the state had received hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while denying their students a basic secular education.

The Williamsburg school received about $10 million in government funding in the year before the pandemic, according to a Times analysis. Its leaders, who are affiliated with the Satmar group of Hasidic Judaism, also operate several other schools in the state.

There are more than 100 Hasidic boys’ schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, and they have received a total of more than $1 billion in taxpayer money over the past four years, The Times found. They focus on providing religious instruction, with most offering little instruction in English reading and math and almost no classes in history, science or civics.

In general, many Hasidic boys’ schools score lower on state standardized tests than any other schools in the state, public or private.

In 2019, The Times reported, the Central United Talmudical Academy agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every one of them failed.

Categories Ethics, Fraud, New York, New York City, Religion

Florida: Did DeSantis Break the Law When He Took Contol of Redistricting the State?

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2022 //
11

ProPublica, the journalistic voice of integrity, suggests that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may have broken the law when he took personal control of redistricting the state’s Congressional seats. The Miami Herald reported the story.

“May have broken the law” is an understatement.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was incensed. Late last year, the state’s Republican Legislature had drawn congressional maps that largely kept districts intact, leaving the GOP with only a modest electoral advantage. DeSantis threw out the Legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled Legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.

DeSantis’ office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map. A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state Legislature and may also have violated Florida law. DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.

Florida’s Constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics. Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.” “If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.

A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting. A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map.

No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.

One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of North Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district….

Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.

The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district.

If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts. “To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.” Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.

Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article267118181.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Corruption, DeSantis, Elections, Ethics, Florida, Fraud, Racism

Bob Shepherd: Why Extremists Fund Christian Madrassas

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
77

In response to a post about the generous public funding of yeshivas that fail to teach English, science, mathematics, or history, our resident polymath Bob Shepherd compared these schools to Islamic madrassas.

Well, traditionally, in the Arab world, young men interested in following a religious vocation would go to one of the schools attached to a mosque, a madrassa, to study. These madrassas were Islamic seminaries. During the Russo-Afghan War, powerful, wealthy traditionalists in Saudi Arabia started funding madrassas throughout the Middle East and other parts of the Islamic war to inculcate a new generation of young people, mostly very poor young people, in an extremist version of Sunni Islam that is the de facto official religion in Saudi Arabia, Wahhābīsm. At the time, the U.S. was supporting the Afghan resistance, supplying training and weapons to resistance fighters like the young Osama bin Ladin, who made his name among the resistance fighters when he and others stopped a convoy of Russian tanks with American-supplied Stinger missiles. Well I remember Ronald Reagan speaking of those Afghan “freedom fighters” and saying that they were “Good, God-fearing people, just like us.” Those fighters were the Taliban. Yup. Same Taliban. Now, bin Laden and other young people in that movement were followers of an Egyptian named Sayyed Qutb, who had come to America to study, had been horrified by things like seeing women singing on television, and went back and started writing books about how decadent Western culture was going to inundate and overwhelm Islam and the only way to stop that was to fight back vigorously. To that end, he coopted a word that had referred to spiritual struggle toward enlightenment, jihad. So, the combination of the Saudi-funded fundamentalist madrassas and the work of Qutb helped create a powerful Islamicist movement, with consequences that included the events of 9/11.

Well, flash forward to today. The Extreme Court, formerly the Supreme Court of the United States, has been taken over by a supermajority of religious nutcase Republican appointees, including three appointed by the areligious Donald Trump (his worships only himself and Mammon). That Extreme Court is busily clearing the way for taxpayer funding of religious schools in order to create vehicles for indoctrination of a new generation of kids in fundamentalist, nationalist Christian ideology (see, for example, the Hillsdale 1775 curriculum), just as extremist traditionalists in Saudi Arabia funded the training of extremists in religious schools, madrassas, all over the Middle East and beyond. Why is the Extreme Court doing this? Because educated Republicans can see from polls and from the culture at large that the youth and the cultural avant-garde are against them ON EVERY ISSUE. So, they want to create a mechanism for turning that back, and religious schoolings is such a mechanism. Institutions for indoctrination.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The Pugs HATE Islamic fundamentalist education, but fundamentalist education is precisely what they want the rest of us, here, to pay for.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Education Industry, Ethics, Religion, Separation of church and state

Mississippi Corruption: Funds for the Needy Used for a Volleyball Stadium

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2022 //
18

Investigative journalists Ashton Pittman and William Pittman exposed a major scandal in Mississippi. The governor misappropriated millions of dollars intended for the needy and diverted the money to build a volleyball stadium to please NFL star Brett Favre. They gained access to text messages among the major actors.

They begin:

Between 2016 and 2019, the Mississippi Department of Human Services and nonprofits associated with it allegedly misspent more than tens of millions of dollars in federal Temporary Assistance For Needy Families funds that should have gone to the poorest families in the poorest state. More than $5 million of those funds went toward a volleyball-stadium project at the University of Southern Mississippi favored by retired NFL quarterback Brett Favre and $1.1 million went to Favre himself.

This timeline focuses on that element of the welfare scandal, including text messages with Favre and others revealed in court filings by former Gov. Phil Bryant and by Nancy New’s nonprofit, the Mississippi Community Education Center. The text messages are not a complete record, however; Bryant’s texts include redactions; New’s texts do not indicate redactions, but nevertheless appear to leave out important exchanges. When necessary, text exchanges that were spread across multiple pages in the court filings have been stitched together.

Though New, former MDHS Director John Davis, and four others have faced criminal charges, prosecutors have not accused Favre nor Bryant of a crime.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Mississippi

Should Admission to Middle Schools Be Competitive?

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2022 //
12

New York City has long had a significant means of sorting and labeling students. When Michael Bloomberg became mayor, he expanded the number of selective middle schools. It’s not clear whether he was trying to lure white parents to stay in the city or whether he was a dyed-in-the-wool believer in test-based meritocracy.

Whatever the case, New York City has large numbers of selective middle schools. The New York City Bar Association, through its Civil Rights and Education and Law committees, issued a call to eliminate selective admissions in middle schools.

For what it’s worth, when I attended public schools in Houston, Texas, many years ago, there were no selective schools. I attended my neighborhood elementary school, junior high school, and high school.

Things have changed. For better or worse?

Contact: Eric Friedman

efriedman@nycbar.org

Eli Cohen

Eecohen@nycbar.org


PERMANENTLY ELIMINATE COMPETITIVE ADMISSIONS TO NEW YORK CITY MIDDLE-SCHOOLS

Chancellor Banks and the New York City Department of Education Should Not Reinstate Screens

New York, September 19, 2022 – The New York City Bar Association (City Bar), through its Civil Rights and Education and the Law Committees,[1] renews its calls for the New York City Department of Education (DOE) to eliminate competitive admissions to the City’s public middle schools. We are concerned by reports that DOE is considering reinstating the screens for middle school students and we urge that this practice not be restored.

 

The City Bar first called for the elimination of competitive admissions for the City’s public elementary and middle schools during the de Blasio Administration, arguing that the policy unnecessarily segregates our students, schools and educational programs, leaving some students without the opportunity for enriched learning that all of our children deserve.[2] In support of those conclusions, our letters noted that:

 

 

  • Measures of young children’s ability and behavior through competitive admission screening and testing are unreliable and racially biased.

 

  • Competitive admissions for very young children are pedagogically unsound because research demonstrates that all children derive educational and social benefits from diverse classrooms with students of differing races, economic backgrounds and learning abilities.

 

  • The practice of excluding the majority of certain socioeconomic and racial groups of young children from a large percentage of public institutions, through the use of middle school screens was inequitable, conducive to racial hierarchy and inconsistent with our democratic ideals.[3]

 

It would be deeply problematic to reinstate middle school screens and allow public schools and programs within schools that opt for that process to effectively close their doors to the majority of students. Student-assignment methods for middle school should take into account the characteristics of individual students only for the purpose of achieving balanced and equitable access for all students – not for the disproportionate exclusion of historically disadvantaged groups.

 

For all the reasons outlined in our previous letters, and as was most recently argued in the New York Appleseed’s September 16 letter,[4] the City Bar calls on Schools Chancellor David Banks and DOE to permanently end the use of middle school screens.

 

[1] The Civil Rights Committee addresses issues affecting the civil rights of New Yorkers, especially the rights of marginalized communities. The Education and the Law Committee addresses K-12 and higher education, and legal and policy education issues affecting the city, state, and nation. Both Committees’ memberships include attorneys from state and local government agencies, law firms, not-for-profit organizations, and law-school faculty. Education and the Law members also include K-12 educators and education consultants. Committee members are acting in their respective individual capacities as members of the City Bar, not in their professional or academic roles.

2 “Eliminate Competitive Admissions to NYC Public Elementary & Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, May 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/eliminate-competitive-admissions-to-nyc-public-elementary-and-middle-schools; see also “Letter in Support of Eliminating Competitive Admissions in NYC’s Public Elementary and Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/letter-in-support-of-eliminating-competitive-admissions-in-nycs-public-elementary-and-middle-schools.

3 Please note that we do not include in these recommendations programs or schools in which facility with a certain language or demonstrated capability in the Arts is a prerequisite.

4 Letter to Chancellor David C. Banks, NYC. Dept. of Education, “Call to Permanently End Middle-School Screens,” NY Appleseed, Sept. 16, 2022, https://www.nyappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/LetterToChancellorBanks_-End-MS-Screens-Permanently_Sept22.pdf.

 

About the Association

The mission of the New York City Bar Association, which was founded in 1870 and has over 23,000 members, is to equip and mobilize a diverse legal profession to practice with excellence, promote reform of the law, and uphold the rule of law and access to justice in support of a fair society and the public interest in our community, our nation, and throughout the world. www.nycbar.org

[1] The Civil Rights Committee addresses issues affecting the civil rights of New Yorkers, especially the rights of marginalized communities. The Education and the Law Committee addresses K-12 and higher education, and legal and policy education issues affecting the city, state, and nation. Both Committees’ memberships include attorneys from state and local government agencies, law firms, not-for-profit organizations, and law-school faculty. Education and the Law members also include K-12 educators and education consultants. Committee members are acting in their respective individual capacities as members of the City Bar, not in their professional or academic roles.

[2] “Eliminate Competitive Admissions to NYC Public Elementary & Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, May 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/eliminate-competitive-admissions-to-nyc-public-elementary-and-middle-schools; see also “Letter in Support of Eliminating Competitive Admissions in NYC’s Public Elementary and Middle Schools,” New York City Bar Association, Nov. 1, 2019, https://www.nycbar.org/member-and-career-services/committees/reports-listing/reports/detail/letter-in-support-of-eliminating-competitive-admissions-in-nycs-public-elementary-and-middle-schools.

[3] Please note that we do not include in these recommendations programs or schools in which facility with a certain language or demonstrated capability in the Arts is a prerequisite.

[4] Letter to Chancellor David C. Banks, NYC. Dept. of Education, “Call to Permanently End Middle-School Screens,” NY Appleseed, Sept. 16, 2022, https://www.nyappleseed.org/wp-content/uploads/LetterToChancellorBanks_-End-MS-Screens-Permanently_Sept22.pdf.

_._,_._,_

Categories Competition, Education Reform, Ethics, Inequity, Injustice, New York City

New York: Hasidic Private Schools Are Failing But Flush with Public Funds

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2022 //
33

The New York Times conducted an investigation of Hasidic religious schools and reported that they are failing schools but have received more than $1 Billion in government funds in public funds in the past four years.

The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring.

But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students.

Every one of them failed.

Students at nearly a dozen other schools run by the Hasidic community recorded similarly dismal outcomes that year, a pattern that under ordinary circumstances would signal an education system in crisis. But where other schools might be struggling because of underfunding or mismanagement, these schools are different. They are failing by design.

The leaders of New York’s Hasidic community have built scores of private schools to educate children in Jewish law, prayer and tradition — and to wall them off from the secular world. Offering little English and math, and virtually no science or history, they drill students relentlessly, sometimes brutally, during hours of religious lessons conducted in Yiddish.

The result, a New York Times investigation has found, is that generations of children have been systematically denied a basic education, trapping many of them in a cycle of joblessness and dependency.

Segregated by gender, the Hasidic system fails most starkly in its more than 100 schools for boys. Spread across Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, the schools turn out thousands of students each year who are unprepared to navigate the outside world, helping to push poverty rates in Hasidic neighborhoods to some of the highest in New York.

The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.

City and state offficials have failed to enforce laws requiring religious schools to offer a curriculum that is substantially equivalent to those in public schools. The politicians defer to Hasidim because they vote as a bloc.

Their graduates are ill-prepared to enter society. Their knowledge of math, science, history, and basic grammar is meager.

The students in the boys’ schools are not simply falling behind. They are suffering from levels of educational deprivation not seen anywhere else in New York, The Times found. Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, Funding, Religion, Separation of church and state

Why Did Trump Take Top Secret Documents to Mar-A-Lago? My Hunch

By dianeravitch
September 6, 2022 //
59

We may never know the real answer to this question unless someone very close to Trump spills the beans. I have read many times or seen on TV interviews with Trump White House staff who said that Trump was not interested in intelligence briefings, that he seldom read the reports or the daily briefings, that he frequently ripped up important documents. Yet he took many boxes of documents with him when he left.

Some of the documents in the boxes that were retrieved in January and in August were classified as top secret. Some were marked HCS, meaning “Human Intelligence Control System.” Such documents identify sources who are our agents in other countries. Some folders marked”Classified” or “Top secret” were empty. Where were the contents?

The New York Times reported:

(https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/27/us/politics/trump-documents-security-assessment-affidavit.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare)

Mr. Trump and his defenders have claimed he declassified the material he took to Mar-a-Lago. But documents retrieved from him in January included some marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System. Such documents have material that could possibly identify C.I.A. informants, meaning a general, sweeping declassification of them would have been, at best, misguided.

“HCS information is tightly controlled because disclosure could jeopardize the life of the human source,” said John B. Bellinger III, a former legal adviser to the National Security Council in the George W. Bush administration. “It would be reckless to declassify an HCS document without checking with the agency that collected the information to ensure that there would be no damage if the information were disclosed.”

In October 2021, the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence officials sent a cable to all of its overseas agencies warning that an unusually high number of CIA undercover agents had been captured and/or killed in recent years.

Top American counterintelligence officials warned every C.I.A. station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed, people familiar with the matter said.

And Trump took home with him a huge number of highly sensitive documents that included some identifying human sources of information in other countries. Some of the top secret files were empty.

Hmmm. Does 2+2=4?

Why would he want those names? How valuable would they be to his friends in other countries? What were they worth? To whom?

One consistent feature in Trump’s life: it’s always about money.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Trump

“Dear Sweden: Let Me Tell You What a School Is”—It is Not a Business

By dianeravitch
August 25, 2022 //
22

Filippa Mannerheim is a Swedish high school teacher and a critic of Sweden’s experiment in school privatization.

She writes.

Dear Sweden, let me tell you what a school is.

A school educates and dares and can demand effort. Sweden has forgotten what a school is. High school teacher Filippa Mannerheim gives a lesson to a country that has lost its grip.

Dear Sweden, since you seem to have completely lost your composure, here is a short, educational guide to help you along in your confused state.

Sweden, let me tell you what school is: A school is an academic place for knowledge and learning. A school is the nation’s most important educational institution with the aim of equipping the country’s young citizens with knowledge and abilities, so that they can develop into free and independent individuals, protect the country’s democratic foundations and with knowledge and skills contribute to the country’s continued prosperity – in times of peace as well as in troubled times .

A school is not a joint-stock company with profit as the main incentive. A school is a joint community building. A school has educated, subject-knowledgeable, qualified teachers with high status, good working conditions and great professional freedom. These teachers teach the country’s children in the country’s language.

A school has employed – not hired – resource staff: special teachers, school nurse, study and vocational guidance counselors, IT staff, janitors. A school does not have non-qualified persons behind the chair.

A school gives children who are falling behind extra support from trained special teachers. A school does not hand out digital tools or ineffective adaptations as substandard substitutes for extra support, just because it is cheaper.

A school has appropriate premises: adequately sized classrooms, an auditorium, a sports hall, a music hall, a home economics room with a kitchenette, crafts and lab rooms. A school has adequate equipment for theoretical and practical teaching, such as musical instruments, craft tools, laboratory equipment, teaching aids, working IT equipment and large amounts of fiction in class sets.

A school has a school library with trained librarians who keep an eye on the world, buy books, hold book talks and contribute with unique expertise in fiction and non-fiction, information search and source criticism. A school does not have a repository of some randomly selected books donated by parents and call this a “school library”. A school library is not “access to a public library”.

A school has a large school yard where children can jump rope, jump fence, play football, play marbles, play ghost ball, King and run around. A school yard is not a paved patch outside an apartment building.

A school is an architectural building – a proud landmark – adapted to a unique activity, namely teaching the country’s children. A school is not a bicycle cellar or an industrial premises where students get “theoretical skills” or a gym card at Sats, which is called “sports education” because it is cheaper.

A school is not a private playground for calculating corporate groups and corrupt ex-politicians who want to make a career in business. If you think so, you have seriously misunderstood what school is.

A school sells nothing because knowledge cannot be sold or bought. A school has a canteen that serves a well-planned lunch based on the Swedish Food Agency’s guidelines for a good and nutritious meal. A school does not send teenagers out to buy their daily lunch at a hamburger chain using a food stamp.

A school does not compete with other schools for school fees or easily taught students. A school has no incentive to set satisfaction ratings, as rating is a pressure-free exercise of authority – not a means of competition and a way to fish for new school customers.

A school educates and dares and can demand effort. A school is a community foundation, not a sandwich board for demanding parental customers. A school has an obvious consensus on what knowledge is and how it is taught using methods that rest on a scientific basis.

A school has teachers who conduct well-planned teaching, not teachers who send students home with work that parents are expected to help with in order for the school’s profit to be greater. A school has teachers who see themselves as academics and public servants, not marketers and influencers who hawk vacuum cleaners with the help of their students via Instagram accounts.

A school is an area where politicians strive for cooperation, long-termism, stability and the best interests of the citizens. A school is not allowed to become a bat in national political debates about cap issues or grades from year 4. The word “school” and “lobbyism” are never used in the same sense. A school system without a market is not a “communist government”.

We live in a country that has lost all understanding of what school is. We live in a country where the politicians have let go of the country’s own school system and are selling it off, piece by piece, to international companies.

We live in a country where students and parents get an image that school can be anything, however, anywhere and an image of themselves as school customers instead of parents and students. This is dangerous for the individual but even more dangerous for the nation at large.

Sweden, now you know what school is. What do you do with that knowledge?

By Filippa Mannerheim

Filippa Mannerheim is a high school teacher in Swedish and history, as well as a school debater. She attracted a lot of attention in the winter of 2020 with her open letter to Sweden’s Riksdag politicians on Expressen’s culture page, “Swedish school is a shame – you politicians have failed”.

Categories Accountability, Citizenship, Community Schools, Competition, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, International, Privatization, School Choice

Frankenstein Lives!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2022 //
60

A recent study by scientists at Yale concluded that it was possible to bring a dead pig back to life by injecting them with a solution soon to be patented. Their goal is to create a source of organs for transplants. The heart valves of pigs, for example, are often used in heart surgery for humans.

If the solution works on pigs, it would probably work on humans. However, the scientists took care not to reactivate the pigs’ brains.

The ethics issues are complex and profound, far above my pay grade. But we all need to think about what could happen next, or after that, or after that.

Science writer Gina Kolata wrote in the New York Times:

The pigs had been lying dead in the lab for an hour — no blood was circulating in their bodies, their hearts were still, their brain waves flat. Then a group of Yale scientists pumped a custom-made solution into the dead pigs’ bodies with a device similar to a heart-lung machine.

What happened next adds questions to what science considers the wall between life and death. Although the pigs were not considered conscious in any way, their seemingly dead cells revived. Their hearts began to beat as the solution, which the scientists called OrganEx, circulated in veins and arteries. Cells in their organs, including the heart, liver, kidneys and brain, were functioning again, and the animals never got stiff like a typical dead pig.

Other pigs, dead for an hour, were treated with ECMO, a machine that pumped blood through their bodies. They became stiff, their organs swelled and became damaged, their blood vessels collapsed, and they had purple spots on their backs where blood pooled.

The group reported its results Wednesday in Nature.

The researchers say their goals are to one day increase the supply of human organs for transplant by allowing doctors to obtain viable organs long after death. And, they say, they hope their technology might also be used to prevent severe damage to hearts after a devastating heart attack or brains after a major stroke….

The work began a few years ago when the group did a similar experiment with brains from dead pigs from a slaughterhouse. Four hours after the pigs died, the group infused a solution similar to OrganEx that they called BrainEx and saw that brain cells that should be dead could be revived.

That led them to ask if they could revive an entire body, said Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja, another member of the Yale team.

The OrganEx solution contained nutrients, anti-inflammatory medications, drugs to prevent cell death, nerve blockers — substances that dampen the activity of neurons and prevented any possibility of the pigs regaining consciousness — and an artificial hemoglobin mixed with each animal’s own blood.

When they treated the dead pigs, the investigators took precautions to make sure the animals did not suffer. The pigs were anesthetized before they were killed by stopping their hearts, and the deep anesthesia continued throughout the experiment. In addition, the nerve blockers in the OrganEx solution stop nerves from firing in order to ensure the brain was not active. The researchers also chilled the animals to slow chemical reactions. Individual brain cells were alive, but there was no indication of any organized global nerve activity in the brain.

There was one startling finding: The pigs treated with OrganEx jerked their heads when the researchers injected an iodine contrast solution for imaging. Dr. Latham emphasized that while the reason for the movement was not known, there was no indication of any involvement of the brain.

The older I get, the more I am inclined towards vegetarianism. Pigs are intelligent creatures. Do they exist only to serve our needs? Can we do as we wish with other creatures?

Categories Ethics, Science
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