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President Biden: The U.S. Will Not Retreat in the Fights Against Putin and Hamas

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2023 //
26

President Biden published an opinion article in The Washington Post today, explaining his administration’s policies in confronting Putin and Hamas. His statement shows that he has a long-term vision to end the cycle of violence in the Mideast. I applaud his wisdom and experience.

He wrote:

Today, the world faces an inflection point, where the choices we make — including in the crises in Europe and the Middle East — will determine the direction of our future for generations to come.
What will our world look like on the other side of these conflicts?


Will we deny Hamas the ability to carry out pure, unadulterated evil? Will Israelis and Palestinians one day live side by side in peace, with two states for two peoples?


Will we hold Vladimir Putin accountable for his aggression, so the people of Ukraine can live free and Europe remains an anchor for global peace and security?


And the overarching question: Will we relentlessly pursue our positive vision for the future, or will we allow those who do not share our values to drag the world to a more dangerous and divided place?

Both Putin and Hamas are fighting to wipe a neighboring democracy off the map. And both Putin and Hamas hope to collapse broader regional stability and integration and take advantage of the ensuing disorder. America cannot, and will not, let that happen. For our own national security interests — and for the good of the entire world.


The United States is the essential nation. We rally allies and partners to stand up to aggressors and make progress toward a brighter, more peaceful future. The world looks to us to solve the problems of our time. That is the duty of leadership, and America will lead. For if we walk away from the challenges of today, the risk of conflict could spread, and the costs to address them will only rise. We will not let that happen.

That conviction is at the root of my approach to supporting the people of Ukraine as they continue to defend their freedom against Putin’s brutal war.
We know from two world wars in the past century that when aggression in Europe goes unanswered, the crisis does not burn itself out. It draws America in directly. That’s why our commitment to Ukraine today is an investment in our own security. It prevents a broader conflict tomorrow.


We are keeping American troops out of this war by supporting the brave Ukrainians defending their freedom and homeland. We are providing them with weapons and economic assistance to stop Putin’s drive for conquest, before the conflict spreads farther.


The United States is not doing this alone. More than 50 nations have joined us to ensure that Ukraine has what it needs to defend itself. Our partners are shouldering much of the economic responsibility for supporting Ukraine. We have also built a stronger and more united NATO, which enhances our security through the strength of our allies, while making clear that we will defend every inch of NATO territory to deter further Russian aggression. Our allies in Asia are standing with us as well to support Ukraine and hold Putin accountable, because they understand that stability in Europe and in the Indo-Pacific are inherently connected.


We have also seen throughout history how conflicts in the Middle East can unleash consequences around the globe.


We stand firmly with the Israeli people as they defend themselves against the murderous nihilism of Hamas. On Oct. 7, Hamas slaughtered 1,200 people, including 35 American citizens, in the worst atrocity committed against the Jewish people in a single day since the Holocaust. Infants and toddlers, mothers and fathers, grandparents, people with disabilities, even Holocaust survivors were maimed and murdered. Entire families were massacred in their homes. Young people were gunned down at a music festival. Bodies riddled with bullets and burned beyond recognition. And for over a month, the families of more than 200 hostages taken by Hamas, including babies and Americans, have been living in hell, anxiously waiting to discover whether their loved ones are alive or dead. At the time of this writing, my team and I are working hour by hour, doing everything we can to get the hostages released.

And while Israelis are still in shock and suffering the trauma of this attack, Hamas has promised that it will relentlessly try to repeat Oct. 7. It has said very clearly that it will not stop.


The Palestinian people deserve a state of their own and a future free from Hamas. I, too, am heartbroken by the images out of Gaza and the deaths of many thousands of civilians, including children. Palestinian children are crying for lost parents. Parents are writing their child’s name on their hand or leg so they can be identified if the worst happens. Palestinian nurses and doctors are trying desperately to save every precious life they possibly can, with little to no resources. Every innocent Palestinian life lost is a tragedy that rips apart families and communities.


Our goal should not be simply to stop the war for today — it should be to end the war forever, break the cycle of unceasing violence, and build something stronger in Gaza and across the Middle East so that history does not keep repeating itself.

Just weeks before Oct. 7, I met in New York with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The main subject of that conversation was a set of substantial commitments that would help both Israel and the Palestinian territories better integrate into the broader Middle East. That is also the idea behind the innovative economic corridor that will connect India to Europe through the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Israel, which I announced together with partners at the Group of 20 summit in India in early September. Stronger integration between countries creates predictable markets and draws greater investment. Better regional connection — including physical and economic infrastructure — supports higher employment and more opportunities for young people. That’s what we have been working to realize in the Middle East. It is a future that has no place for Hamas’s violence and hate, and I believe that attempting to destroy the hope for that future is one reason that Hamas instigated this crisis.

This much is clear: A two-state solution is the only way to ensure the long-term security of both the Israeli and Palestinian people. Though right now it may seem like that future has never been further away, this crisis has made it more imperative than ever.


A two-state solution — two peoples living side by side with equal measures of freedom, opportunity and dignity — is where the road to peace must lead. Reaching it will take commitments from Israelis and Palestinians, as well as from the United States and our allies and partners. That work must start now.


To that end, the United States has proposed basic principles for how to move forward from this crisis, to give the world a foundation on which to build.


To start, Gaza must never again be used as a platform for terrorism. There must be no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, no reoccupation, no siege or blockade, and no reduction in territory. And after this war is over, the voices of Palestinian people and their aspirations must be at the center of post-crisis governance in Gaza.


As we strive for peace, Gaza and the West Bank should be reunited under a single governance structure, ultimately under a revitalized Palestinian Authority, as we all work toward a two-state solution. I have been emphatic with Israel’s leaders that extremist violence against Palestinians in the West Bank must stop and that those committing the violence must be held accountable. The United States is prepared to take our own steps, including issuing visa bans against extremists attacking civilians in the West Bank.

The international community must commit resources to support the people of Gaza in the immediate aftermath of this crisis, including interim security measures, and establish a reconstruction mechanism to sustainably meet Gaza’s long-term needs. And it is imperative that no terrorist threats ever again emanate from Gaza or the West Bank.


If we can agree on these first steps, and take them together, we can begin to imagine a different future. In the months ahead, the United States will redouble our efforts to establish a more peaceful, integrated and prosperous Middle East — a region where a day like Oct. 7 is unthinkable.


In the meantime, we will continue working to prevent this conflict from spreading and escalating further. I ordered two U.S. carrier groups to the region to enhance deterrence. We are going after Hamas and those who finance and facilitate its terrorism, levying multiple rounds of sanctions to degrade Hamas’s financial structure, cutting it off from outside funding and blocking access to new funding channels, including via social media. I have also been clear that the United States will do what is necessary to defend U.S. troops and personnel stationed across the Middle East — and we have responded multiple times to the strikes against us.


I also immediately traveled to Israel — the first American president to do so during wartime — to show solidarity with the Israeli people and reaffirm to the world that the United States has Israel’s back. Israel must defend itself. That is its right. And while in Tel Aviv, I also counseled Israelis against letting their hurt and rage mislead them into making mistakes we ourselves have made in the past.

From the very beginning, my administration has called for respecting international humanitarian law, minimizing the loss of innocent lives and prioritizing the protection of civilians. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel, aid to Gaza was cut off, and food, water and medicine reserves dwindled rapidly. As part of my travel to Israel, I worked closely with the leaders of Israel and Egypt to reach an agreement to restart the delivery of essential humanitarian assistance to Gazans. Within days, trucks with supplies again began to cross the border. Today, nearly 100 aid trucks enter Gaza from Egypt each day, and we continue working to increase the flow of assistance manyfold. I’ve also advocated for humanitarian pauses in the conflict to permit civilians to depart areas of active fighting and to help ensure that aid reaches those in need. Israel took the additional step to create two humanitarian corridors and implement daily four-hour pauses in the fighting in northern Gaza to allow Palestinian civilians to flee to safer areas in the south.


This stands in stark opposition to Hamas’s terrorist strategy: hide among Palestinian civilians. Use children and innocents as human shields. Position terrorist tunnels beneath hospitals, schools, mosques and residential buildings. Maximize the death and suffering of innocent people — Israeli and Palestinian. If Hamas cared at all for Palestinian lives, it would release all the hostages, give up arms, and surrender the leaders and those responsible for Oct. 7.


As long as Hamas clings to its ideology of destruction, a cease-fire is not peace. To Hamas’s members, every cease-fire is time they exploit to rebuild their stockpile of rockets, reposition fighters and restart the killing by attacking innocents again. An outcome that leaves Hamas in control of Gaza would once more perpetuate its hate and deny Palestinian civilians the chance to build something better for themselves.


And here at home, in moments when fear and suspicion, anger and rage run hard, we have to work even harder to hold on to the values that make us who we are. We’re a nation of religious freedom and freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree and peacefully protest, but without fear of being targeted at schools or workplaces or elsewhere in our communities.

In recent years, too much hate has been given too much oxygen, fueling racism and an alarming rise in antisemitism in America. That has intensified in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks. Jewish families worry about being targeted in school, while wearing symbols of their faith on the street or otherwise going about their daily lives. At the same time, too many Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and Palestinian Americans, and so many other communities, are outraged and hurting, fearing the resurgence of the Islamophobia and distrust we saw after 9/11.


We can’t stand by when hate rears its head. We must, without equivocation, denounce antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate and bias. We must renounce violence and vitriol and see each other not as enemies but as fellow Americans.


In a moment of so much violence and suffering — in Ukraine, Israel, Gaza and so many other places — it can be difficult to imagine that something different is possible. But we must never forget the lesson learned time and again throughout our history: Out of great tragedy and upheaval, enormous progress can come. More hope. More freedom. Less rage. Less grievance. Less war. We must not lose our resolve to pursue those goals, because now is when clear vision, big ideas and political courage are needed most. That is the strategy that my administration will continue to lead — in the Middle East, Europe and around the globe. Every step we take toward that future is progress that makes the world safer and the United States of America more secure.

Categories Biden, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Freedom, International

Swedish Expert: The Market System Is a Disaster for Students and for Sweden

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2023 //
19

Over the years, I have made friends on Twitter with educators and scholars in Sweden, who have generously provided me with analyses of Sweden’s free market of schooling. My friends, not surprisingly, agree that the introduction of “choice” and for-profit providers has been a disaster for schooling in Sweden. The outcome has been more socioeconomic segregation and an impoverishment of public schools. The following post was written by Linnea Lindquist, experienced educator and journalist.

THE SWEDISH SCHOOL SYSTEM

By Linnea Lindquist


I believe many in Sweden choked on their coffee when Lotta Edholm, the school minister from the Liberal Party, critically spoke about the school system in an interview with The Guardian. She stated, “It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything.”

I have been a part of the school debate for several years and there has been a change in how politicians talk about the school system itself. I will return to this later in the text.

Sweden has one of the most extreme school systems in the world. Whether schools are run by municipalities, the state, or as independent entities, they are funded entirely by taxpayer money. It is the combination of per-student funding, free school choice, and unlimited profit extraction that makes Sweden’s school system unique (in a bad way) in the world. However, this is not enough. We also have free establishment rights for independent schools, meaning that anyone can apply to start a school. The state School Inspection Authority grants permission, but it is the municipalities that finance the schools. This means that municipalities have no control over the number of schools in their area. As a result, municipalities are forced to maintain many empty school places, diverting funds that could have been used for teaching to finance these empty spots. The problem is not that the municipalities have empty classrooms, the problem is a few empty chairs in each classroom.

Sweden has significant performance disparities between schools. While parents in neighboring Finland feel confident that the nearest school is among the world’s best, Swedish parents lie awake at night wondering which school to choose for their children. When students fail in school, the blame is placed on parents for making the wrong school choice.

Sweden has major problems with its school system, and in this text, I will try to explain the reasons for these issues and what needs to be done to solve them. Let’s start with how the school system is structured.

Market-Driven Schools


In most of Sweden’s 290 municipalities, schools are financed with a per-student funding model. This funding is not the student’s money to shop for education; it is merely a model for distributing money between schools. Legislation states that the funding should be equal for municipal and private schools. Private schools in Sweden are free of charge as they are financed by taxes. This means that if a municipality compensates its own schools with 100,000 SEK per student, it should also compensate independent schools with the same amount per student. One might think this is reasonable since all schools provide education.

However, in Sweden, we have a supply responsibility. What is the problem with that? I’ll try to explain.

We have compulsory schooling, meaning all students in primary education (ages 6-16) must attend school. The state has given municipalities the responsibility to ensure that all students have a school placement. This is known as supply responsibility. In turn, this means that municipalities must always be prepared to accommodate students who do not wish to continue studying in independent schools or if the independent school decides to cease operations. Independent schools are businesses and can shut down whenever they want. Municipalities must also have schools in all geographical areas since all citizens of a municipality do not live in the same geographical location. All this costs money, and since we have a principle of equal treatment, the municipalities receive zero compensation for these additional costs.

When independent schools are established in a municipality, it often results in a budget deficit for the municipality as it creates more empty school places. When they have a deficit, they have to spend more money than budgeted for at the beginning of the year. Then the per-student funding increases as independent schools must receive the same funding as the municipality’s schools. This results in what’s called the “independent school penalty.” Municipalities must compensate independent schools with the same amount per student that they have in deficit for all students attending independent schools. This creates new deficits and the negative spiral begins.

It is the principle of equal treatment in the School ordinance that leads to significant problems in the school market. In Sweden, we pay independent schools for a responsibility they do not have. Yes, I know you won’t believe me, but this is the foolish system we have in Sweden.

For an independent school to make a profit, they must operate at a lower cost per student compared to the municipality’s average. How do you cut costs easily? By employing fewer qualified teachers, serving cheaper food, and providing less teaching resources. Most importantly, one must have students that mainly come from academic homes. When you have students from academic homes, you can have larger group sizes and every additional student in a group, compared to the municipality’s average, is pure profit. It costs the same to educate a group of 20 and 25 students. The income is obviously much higher if you have 25 students per teacher as we have per-student funding. The cost of schools is 90 percent fixed since the largest expenses are rent and salaries. However, revenues are 100 percent variable because each student generates a per-student funding for the principal’s annual budget.

The per-student funding that municipalities pay to independent schools is something that a municipality can not control. It is up to the independent school what they use the money for and if it is a private company there is no demand for publicity due to competition legislation. The Swedish school system is entirely unregulated, meaning there are no requirements on the proportion of teachers, size of groups, or whether a school must have a cafeteria, library, or gymnasium.

I wrote initially that we have free establishment rights in Sweden. This means that schools are started even when there is no need for more schools. The state’s School Inspection Authority overrides the municipalities all the time. Municipalities express their views and describe to the School Inspection Authority that granting permission leads to cuts in the municipal education. The municipalities state that there are no needs for more schools and that school segregation will increase. Unfortunately, the state’s extended arm does not listen to those who are close to the schools runned by municipalities. Those who advocate the current school system argue that it is important for freedom of choice that we have free establishment rights. Anyone who knows anything about schools has by now understood that it’s not about freedom of choice. It has never been about freedom of choice.

The free establishment right, and what we will now come to – the free school choice, has never been about freedom of choice. The so-called freedom of choice reforms, implemented in the early 90s, were meant to legitimize school segregation. It’s not about choosing to – it’s about choosing not to. System-savvy and quick-footed parents were given the opportunity to avoid poor schools. Today, school choice is used to avoid schools where students have less-educated parents. Regardless of where in the school system the students are, a significantly higher proportion of students from academic homes attend independent schools. There are no independent schools that have a student base that matches that of the municipalities. I have not found any examples of this, and I have read 1,400 municipal school budgets and reviewed the statistics of hundreds of schools in cities with vulnerable areas.

Opinion


I initially wrote that public opinion has turned when it comes to market-driven schools. When I entered the school debate over five years ago, I was called a free school hater, an opponent of freedom of choice, and a communist every time I wrote about the problems with the school system. Now, politicians on the right side of the political spectrum have started using the words and concepts that I, and other critics of the school system, use when we describe the system’s flaws. It’s not the politicians who have changed the opinion; they have been forced to change their view of the school system due to public opinion. In Sweden, it is now political suicide to defend the current system. However, I don’t believe the politicians have changed their opinions, but they are forced to make changes in the system if they want to be re-elected in the next parliamentary elections in 2026.

Marcus Larsson and Åsa Plesner, who run the think tank Balans, have mapped the prevalence of lobbying in the welfare sector, especially in education. They have shown many examples of politicians being lobbyists in the independent school sector while holding political positions of trust. Sweden stands out when it comes to allowing politicians to sit on double or triple chairs. Several of those who created the market-driven school in the early 90s now own school corporations with high profitability.

If one wonders why the market-driven school remains, despite the majority of the Swedish population wanting change, one should look at the politician’s school-business. When politicians own school corporations and sit on boards for school companies, it is not hard to understand that they want to maintain the system. Lotta Edholm, the schoolminister, sat on the board of a school corporation until the day she took office as a minister. There are many examples of politicians having fingers in several pies.

The freeschool system is a threat to national security


The Swedish Defence Research Agency, FOI has released a report titled “Foreign Investments and Ownership in Swedish Primary and Secondary Schools – A Study of Risks”. It’s authored by Maria Refors Legge, Alma Dahl, Michal Budryk, Helene Lackenbauer, and Jens Lusua. There are numerous ways an antagonist could influence the democratic education and rights of Swedish students, one being the acquisition of existing school authorities. This allows for rapid establishment across the country. If one aims to influence Sweden, reaching a large number of students is easier, but it also increases the risk of detection. The report offers several examples of how foreign owners or Swedish school owners who do not wish to operate schools based on democratic principles can function. They describe how schools can be used to counteract the integration of students and parents in vulnerable areas, maintaining and reproducing norms and values that are anti-democratic.

The report explains how the free choice of teaching materials can influence student values and support school ownership. The risk of being detected is relatively low, and if detected, one can continue operating a school, even if deemed unsuitable, by having all paperwork in order.

The report outlines various risks and our vulnerability in Sweden to foreign influence through our school system. There are risks in the free school system that could be exploited by a foreign owner with antagonistic intentions, such as influence operations undermining democratic values. The authors emphasize that the security risk is not due to foreign ownership of schools but rather how the Swedish free school system is structured.

Since it’s impossible to trace how school funding is used, authorities can’t intervene against an antagonist. School owners can use the school funding as they wish, and thus neither municipalities nor the state can control whether it’s used for anti-democratic purposes. The authors argue that the School Inspectorate and other supervisory authorities lull us into a false sense of security, having few tools to detect antagonists in the school system. This makes Sweden particularly vulnerable.

I shouldn’t say – I told you so, but I’m saying it anyway.

What’s stated in the report should not be news. We’ve known for many years that the school system is open to corruption and to foreign and anti-democratic forces. It’s astonishing that the security risk doesn’t come from foreign ownership of independent schools but from how we’ve structured the Swedish freeschool system. For 30 years, we’ve had an education system structure that’s a potential threat to national security. Swedish politicians should let this sink in.

Every time an antagonist is exposed, politicians scream for a more powerful School Inspectorate. It doesn’t matter how much the School Inspectorate, the Security Police, and other authorities check the independent schools. When we have a free-school system closed to scrutiny yet wide open to corruption, anti-democratic forces will use it for their own gain.

Believing that free school choice and freedom of choice would protect against corruption and anti-democratic school owners is naively lawful. Parents choose schools that match the values and norms they want to pass on to their children. Parents with children in schools run by anti-democrats think it’s good, otherwise, they wouldn’t have placed their children there. Rather, parents uphold and reproduce anti-democratic values through free school choice.

We have foreign owners of schools in Sweden that we probably don’t know about. Long chains of ownership, subsidiaries, and funds, combined with a lack of transparency, make us extremely vulnerable.

The worst thing in all this is that we have politicians who on one hand say that they are concerned about the terror threat, and on the other hand, they defend a free-school system which itself is a threat to national security.

In conclusion


When the Education Minister expresses herself in The Guardian with the words – “It’s not just a problem that it is a number of schools, but it becomes a system failure of everything,” it is proof that she has been influenced by public opinion.

I don’t have high hopes for any system changing reforms. The government wants to limit profits, but anyone who knows anything about business economics knows there are many ways to circumvent profit restrictions.

The government wants independent schools to be more tightly controlled. Anyone who knows anything about the school system knows that you can’t control systemic errors. It’s the incentives that must be removed. This means that if we want independent schools to compete with quality, we must stop paying them for a responsibility they don’t have. Municipalities must be allowed to decide how many schools there should be in a municipality.

If we want freedom of choice in the school system, we must have admission rules that are common to all schools, regardless of who runs them. Therefore, the queues for charter schools must be abolished.

If the government wants order in the school system, they must open up those schools for scrutiny under the same principles as municipal schools. They must regulate lobbying and forbid politicians from sitting on multiple chairs at the same time.

I have worked as a principal in Sweden’s toughest areas for the past 12 years. Before that, I was a teacher in a particularly vulnerable area. I see segregation with my own eyes daily.

The consequences of the school market for students is clear.

I have a dream.


A dream that politicians will start making decisions based on what’s best for the children. I wish they would do more of what we expect of them, not the least they can get away with in the next election.

Björn Dahlman, a well-known teacher, author and school debater in Sweden, wrote a wise thing on Twitter, currently X ,a while ago. – “In Sweden, municipalities are punished for educating the students that privately owned schools can not make money on.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

To address the problems in the Swedish school system, we must:
– Rework the school funding system so that municipal schools are compensated for their supply responsibility.
– Abolish the free establishment right.
– Make school choices collectively. No queues.
– We should not allow foreign owners to Swedish schools. 
….to begin with. 

Why should we make these reforms? The answer is: for the sake of the students. It’s also for the sake of national security, future democracy and freedom of speech. If we want an education with high quality for all children and competence provision in the future, we need a school system without principles of market. 

To politicians in other countries, I have one thing to say to you: Don’t copy our school system. It’s a true disaster and a failure for the nation. Don’t go that way, please!

Thank you for reading this far.


Linnea Lindquist

If you want to read more from me, please visit my blog at www.rektorlinnea.com

Linnea Lindquist: @rektor_linnea

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, International, Segregation

Florida: How Koch Industries Closed a Mill, Laid off 500+ Workers, and Got in Line for a Tax Break

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
6

Some stories are too outrageous to be true, and yet they are. This is one of them, as reported by Jason Garcia on his blog “Seeking Rents.”

Koch Industries owns a major pulp mill in Taylor County, Florida, where one of five people lives in poverty. Koch recently announced that it was shutting down the mill and laying off all of its 500+ workers. At the same time, the closed mill might receive a large tax break because some of its machinery was damaged by a hurricane. This is not helpful to the workers who will be unemployed but will be a nice gift to Koch Industries, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Always annoying to see our tax dollars flow to needy billionaires, instead of laid-off workers.

Garcia, a journalist who exposes corporate corruption, writes:

In mid-September, just three weeks after Hurricane Idalia tore through Taylor County in North Florida, the tiny community suffered a second disaster.

The company that operates a large pulp-and-fiber mill in the area — a 69-year-old factory known locally as the “Foley mill” that has long been one of the region’s most important employers — announced that it would shut the facility down and lay off all 500-plus people who work there.

It’s a devastating blow to Taylor County, a timber-dependent community with a shrinking population of fewer than 22,000 people where one-in-five families live in poverty. A report by the University of Florida estimates the Foley mill closure will lead to the loss of approximately 2,000 jobs in total, including the truckers and loggers who supply the mill with slash pine.

And now Florida might hand a farewell tax break to the fleeing company — which is part of Koch Industries, the global conglomerate led by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch.

The potential tax break for Koch Industries is included in a roughly $420 million hurricane aid package that Florida’s Republican-controlled state Legislature is expected to approve this week, during a four-day special session in Tallahassee.

The same tax-break legislation meant to ease the damage wrought by Hurricane Idalia showers benefits on another multi-billionaire.

Garcia writes:

The problem is that most of the timberland in this particular area is owned by one person: Billionaire investor Thomas Peterffy, one of the 100 wealthiest people in the world, according to Forbes.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Peterffy owns Florida’s Big Bend. He purchased more than 500,000 acres in the region about eight years ago — an enormous tract of land that was believed the largest contiguous piece of undeveloped property in private hands east of the Mississippi River.

Property records show that Peterffy owns about 380,000 acres in Taylor County alone, through his company, Four Rivers Land & Timber. That’s more than half the land in the entire county. And virtually all of it is in timber production.

And while there’s little doubt that Peterffy’s timber lands were hit hard by Hurricane Idalia, a land baron worth an estimated $25.3 billion probably doesn’t need help from taxpayers to deal with it.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting that Florida lawmakers drew up these tax breaks specifically to help Koch Industries or Thomas Peterffy — both of whom have been big donors to DeSantis during his time as governor.

But it is reasonable to ask, as Garcia does, why tax breaks are being doled out to billionaires who don’t need the money, while there are so many people in Taylor County who do.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Economy, Education Reform, Ethics, Florida

Nancy Bailey: Don’t Believe the Hype About Grade Retention

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2023 //
27

Regardless of claims to the contrary, holding kids back (flunking them) is a terrible idea. I recall attending a meeting of the National Association of School Psycholfists where the president of the organization said that the three worst fears of children were: 1) the death of their parents; 2) going blind; 3) flunking in school.

The third was deeply humiliating. It meant losing your friends and being branded a dummy. Yet there are states that continue to employ third grade retention, thinking they are helping children and knowing they are boosting fourth grade reading scores.

Nancy Bailey reviews the evidence here. Her inclusion: there are better, more humane strategies than grade retention.

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Failure, Research, Students

Illinois: Gov. Pritzker’s Scary Trick, No Treat

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2023 //
7

Julie Vassilatos, public school parent, is shocked that Governor J.B. Pritzker has reversed course on his campaign pledge to let the state’s voucher program die. Vouchers are a zombie policy. They were sold over the past 30 years as a surefire way to “save poor kids from failing schools,” but poor kids do worse in voucher schools, and the primary beneficiaries are kids who never attended public schools, families who get a break on their private school tuition. Vouchers have failed. They are nothing more than a trick to fund families whose children attend private and religious schools.

She writes:

Just in time for Halloween, Illinois Gov. Pritzker says he’ll sign whatever “Invest in Kids” legislation crosses his desk. 

Hearing this news gave me a crickly, creepy feeling up the back of my neck. I honestly thought legislators had decided to allow this thing to die its timely death, reach its expected and planned demise. The legislation was originally supposed to sunset in 2023. But it sounds like it’s creeping back from wherever bad policy goes to die. Crawling back from the mostly dead, only to be reanimated, dressed up in a new school uniform, all its awful secrets covered up.

Secrets like: unaccounted-for dollars. Opaque student outcomes. More than $250M in taxes unpaid by the wealthiest Illinoisans. Private schools, with private school rules, getting public money. Discrimination against disabled students, non-religious students, LGBTQ students and families. Expansion of wealth gaps and inequity. Disinvestment of public schools. 

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And worst of all? Tax-credit scholarship programs have demonstrated not just bad, but downright terrifying longterm results. 

Catastrophically bad results. I’m not being hysterical about this, either—these are results drawn from long term research by universities all over the country. Anyone concerned with education outcomes for children—for our most vulnerable children—should care about this data. Because offering children “choice” through vouchers does not help them. It looks like this:

— In Arizona, its recently implemented universal Empowerment Scholarship Accounts divert, on average, $300,000 away from every neighborhood school. The program—granting a $7300 scholarship per child to use for homeschooling or private school—is approaching $1B in cost, funds things like European trips, Disney+, and trampolines,supports “fly-by-night” unaccredited, unlicensed pop-up schools, and may bankrupt the state. Like Illinois’ program, accountability is thin and there is little transparency about the use of tax dollars or the actual results for children. 

— In Milwaukee, one of the longest running voucher programs in the country has failed to yield positive outcomes. “Among black eighth-graders in 13 urban school districts, Milwaukee—where black students make up more than 70 percent of all voucher recipients—ranked last in reading and second-to-last in math.” In 25 years we should be seeing something better than this—especially given the cost of these programs, both in tax dollars and in the financial hit taken by public schools. In 25 years, more importantly, the vulnerable children subjected to these programs should be flourishing, not failing. 

— In Florida, tuition tax credit program students made no gains in reading or math; in Louisiana, a University of Arkansas study found “large negative impacts after 4 years” for participants in the program. 

— Indiana University researchers have found that the larger voucher or tax credit scholarship programs become, the worse the results they generate. Large programs generate negative results that are shockingly bad, equaling or exceeding the impacts of natural disasters and the pandemic. 

Ignoring the damning data, proponents of tax credit scholarships depend on emotional rhetoric to support their cause—who could possibly be against “saving our scholarships”? They also depend on your tax dollars. Up to 5% of donations to the scholarship funds are used for lobbying and marketing purposes. So when you read about busloads and busloads of people wearing matching t-shirts arriving in Springfield, and fancy lobbyists flooding the zone, know that that’s your tax dollars at work. 

Those folks will tell you that “the teacher’s union” is against this good wonderful policy and everyone else supports it. They don’t tell you that 65 organizations are united against this legislation, including Access Living, Illinois PTA, the Network for Public Education, the League of Women Voters, and the American Association of University Women Illinois. 

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People. We have gone over this. This is not confusing, complicated, or even a close call. “Invest in Kids” should be called “Disinvest in Kids,” or, according to the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, “Invest in Inequality.” (I strongly encourage you to click that link and read a short, elegant explanation of how this “peculiar tax policy” works and what its impact is.) 

“Invest in Kids” should not, under any circumstances, be extended past its already-extended expiration date of January 2024. But in Eric Zorn’s recent clear, precise column about the drawbacks of “Invest in Kids,” he notes that Gov. Pritzker has “gone squishy” on this issue, which he opposed in 2018. Squishy, maybe. Scary, certainly. That he’ll sign whatever “Invest in Kids” legislation might come crawling back across his desk should frighten us all.

Tell your legislator you want this program to end here.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Ethics, Fake, Funding, Hypocrisy, Illinois, Vouchers

Texas AFT to Senator Cornyn: Stop the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in the Federal Charter Schools Program

By dianeravitch
October 29, 2023 //
4

The Network for Public Education sent out an alert, warning that several members of the U.S. Senate were proposing a bill to enrich the sponsors of privately-managed charter schools.

The Texas AFT answered that alert with an appeal to Senator Jon Cornyn.

Tell Sen. Cornyn: Do Not Support More Charter School Program Waste, Fraud

Eight U.S. senators (including Texas Sen. John Cornyn) introduced a bill last week that was clearly written with the help of the charter school lobby. The Empower Charter School Educators to Lead Act would allow billionaire-funded nonprofits operating as “state entities” to keep more of a cut when dispersing Charter School Program (CSP) grants. The bill would also allow these “state entities” to award up to $100,000 to would-be charter entrepreneurs, including religious organizations, to pre-plan a charter school before they have even submitted an application to an authorizer.

Our partners at the Network for Public Education (NPE) urge you to send a letter to your senator to oppose the charter lobby’s bill today.

As the NPE has documented, CSP planning grants have led to enormous waste and fraud. Millions of CSP dollars have gone to school entrepreneurs who never opened a school — a fact confirmed by the Department of Education and the Government Accountability Office. That is why the NPE and other public education advocates supported the addition of modest guardrails in 2022 that provided guidance on how and when planning grants could be spent.

Clearly, that did not sit well with the charter lobby, led by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which persuaded these eight senators to make it even easier to get funding to pre-plan a school.

There’s more. This bill would also increase the funding “state entities” can keep for themselves when they disperse grants. That cut is already at 10%, and this bill would raise it to a whopping 15%. Contact Sen. Cornyn today. Stop the charter school lobby’s new attempts to fleece American taxpayers and undermine public schools.

STOP THE SCAM!

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Texas, U.S. Department of Education, Unions

Thom Hartmann: The Real Mike Johnson Is a Dangerous Rightwing Zealot

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
21

Thom Hartmann has checked out the record and public statements of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. He is even more of an extremist than his idol Donald Trump.

Hartmann writes:

The election of Louisiana’s Mike Johnson as House Speaker proves the premise that all the GOP has left are Donald Trump and hate.

As Congressman Jamie Raskin told reporters yesterday:

“Donald Trump has cemented his control over the Republican conference in the House of Representatives. He has a stranglehold on the Republican Party. Even as he faces 91 criminal charges and several of his election lawyers have pleaded guilty now to election-related offenses, one of his enablers on January 6 has just become the speaker of the House Representatives.”

Johnson’s hate of Democrats is so deep that he led a Trump-backed effort in the House to get Republicans to back a lawsuit by 18 Republican state attorneys general to overturn Biden’s election as president.

Their lawsuit had no merit and no facts — everybody, including the Republicans involved, knew that Biden had won fair-and-square — but Republican hate of Democrats is now so deep that the idea of Democrats legitimately governing after winning an election is repugnant to them. No matter how big the Democrats’ victory (7 million votes in this case) may be.

Johnson went public with his support of Trump’s hateful, poisonous Big Lie just a week after the 2020 election, saying:

 “You know the allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that…They know that in Georgia it really was rigged.”

As The Washington Post noted at the time:

“Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, spearheaded the effort to round up support on Capitol Hill. Johnson emailed all House Republicans on Wednesday to solicit signatures for the long-shot Texas case after Trump called. The congressman told his colleagues that the president ‘will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.’”

Johnson got 106 of the 196 Republicans then in the House to sign on to the effort to force four swing states to throw out Democratic votes and declare Trump emperor for life: he was the legal architect of the argument. It doesn’t get more hateful against our republican form of government than that effort to destroy confidence in the vote at the cornerstone of our democracy.

Johnson’s hate of women having agency over their own bodies and lives is so intense that he has repeatedly championed a nationwide ban on abortion. 

His wife Kelly, a “licensed pastoral counselor” with whom he’s in a “covenant marriage,” makes money from Louisiana Right To Life, and before being elected to the House in 2016 he was an attorney for the far-right-billionaire-supported Alliance Defending Freedom that pushed the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court.

While there, he helped sue New York and New Jersey to force them to allow official state license plates that displayed an anti-woman, anti-abortion message; sued New Orleans to try to block benefits for the partners of queer city employees; and promoted a “National Day of Truth” to encourage homophobic students to hate on their LGBTQ+ peers.

Johnson and the GOP explicitly hate queer people and their allies.

“Radical homosexual advocacy groups” are promoting “the culture’s assault on traditional values,” Johnson wrote in an op-ed for a Louisiana newspaper. That “assault,” of course, was gay marriage, something that horrifies Johnson and his wife. 

He wrote:

“Same-sex ‘marriage’ selfishly and deliberately deprives children of either a mother or a father. Children need both. Homosexual relationships are inherently unnatural and, the studies clearly show, are ultimately harmful and costly for everyone.

“Society cannot give its stamp of approval to such a dangerous lifestyle. If we change marriage for this tiny, modern minority, we will have to do it for every deviant group. Polygamists, polyamorists, pedophiles, and others will be next in line to claim equal protection. They already are. There will be no legal basis to deny a bisexual the right to marry a partner of each sex, or a person to marry his pet.”

Johnson also supports a federal version of DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law that would outlaw any discussion of queer people in any public school classroom in America. In another anti-gay newspaper screed, Johnson wrote:

“Your race, creed and sex are what you are, while homosexuality and cross-dressing are things you do. This is a free country, but we don’t give special protections for every person’s bizarre choices. Where would it end? This is one Pandora’s box we shouldn’t open.”

While Johnson hates queer people, he apparently loves Vladimir Putin, an affection that has earned him the loyalty and help of Donald Trump.

Last month he joined Matt Gaetz and 93 other Republicans in voting to cut off all US military aid to assist Ukraine’s survival in the face of Russia’s ongoing terror campaign.

He’s also a friend to mass shooters and the psychopaths at the NRA. 

Johnson repeatedly voted against gun safety and gun control legislation, and voted against re-authorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Hating on Medicare and Social Security is another specialty of Johnson and the GOP. As Social Security Works Executive Director Alex Lawson noted yesterday:

“Rep. Mike Johnson has a long history of hostility towards Social Security and Medicare. As Chair of the Republican Study Committee from 2019-2021, Johnson released budgets that included $2 trillion in cuts to Medicare and $750 billion in cuts to Social Security, including:
— Raising the retirement age
— Decimating middle class benefits
— Making annual cost-of-living increases smaller
— Moving towards privatization of Social Security and Medicare.”

Johnson also pushed for $3 trillion in cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), saying slashing the entitlement programs should be Congress’ “top priority.” Johnson is also a huge advocate for a Catfood Commission to figure out ways to slash Social Security benefits to seniors (thus forcing them to eat catfood: the White House refers to it as a “death panel for Social Security”).

Like Red state Republican politicians beholden to the tobacco, alcohol, and pharmaceutical industries, Johnson also hates marijuana. He’s repeatedly argued and voted against legalization, as well as helping shoot down a bill that would let legal pot dispensaries use banks to conduct their business.  

Hating on science and our children’s future is a feature, not a bug, of Republican politics, and Mike Johnson fits right in. The largest single group of donors to his political career have been the oil and gas industries, and he happily takes their money and spreads their lies. For example, he argued:

“The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

The League of Conservation Voters gave his environmental record a 0 percent (yes, zero) score for 2022: this guy has burrowed so deeply in Big Oil’s pocket that he’s like a blood-filled tick on a shaggy dog. He’ll never let go.

On voting rights, Johnson hates voters in Blue cities in Red states as much as their own Republican legislatures do. A big fan of voter suppression laws, he argued that making it harder to vote and purging people from voter rolls would help the GOP in the 2022 election:

“They’re making sure that the election results can be counted upon, and that’s a critical thing for us to do.”

That was followed by his voting against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the For The People Act, both of which would have guaranteed Americans’ right to vote regardless of race, religion, or geography. On the other hand, he voted for a Republican bill that would have enshrined GOP voter suppression efforts nationwide. 

Like Rand Paul and Tommy Tuberville, Johnson apparently also hates our men and women serving in the armed forces.

He voted against the Honoring our Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics (PACT) Actthat President Biden was cheerleading because it would aid service members like Biden’s son Beau who became deathly sick because of exposure to open-air burn pits and other toxins.

He also voted against a year-end package of bills to aid service members, including requiring states to honor the professional licenses of military spouses who find themselves stationed in states other than where they were originally certified. And he joined Tuberville in his opposition to the Pentagon paying to fly raped servicewomen stationed in countries or states where abortion is illegal to places where it is available.

Johnson has supported a few Republican military spending bills, but only, as military.comnoted, when they are “packed with GOP policy riders such as provisions to bar abortion services, transgender health care, and LGBTQ+ Pride flags at the VA.”

Johnson, like most Republicans who hate the idea of Brown people entering our country legally, is also a “border hawk,” having visited our southern border with Donald Trump and introduced two pieces of legislation that would restrict immigration and refugee status. Speaking of his desire to “build a wall” and keep would-be refugees out of the US, he said:

“Now, I have no illusions about this. I’m sure that President Biden will veto anything we send him, but it will send a very strong message. If we can’t override a veto, we’ll be ready to run when the next Republican president is elected two years later.”

Republicans like Johnson love to plaster the word “freedom” all over everything they do. But they’re just fine with a for-profit prison industry lobbying for harsher sentences, and to keeping draconian drug laws in place.

When Republicans say “freedom,” it’s a safe bet they mean they want the freedom to hate on minorities, the freedom of rich people and giant corporations to screw average working people, and the freedom of billionaires to continue paying only around 3 percent of their income in income taxes.

In MAGA Mike Johnson (what Trump calls him), Republicans have found the perfect embodiment of their deplorable basket of hatreds. At this point, the only “loves” they have are rightwing billionaires and the fossil fuel industry. And, of course, Trump’s good buddy and fossil fuel oligarch Vladimir Putin.

Thank you for reading The Hartmann Report. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Billionaires, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Politics, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Houston: Principal of a High-Performing School Removed; Parents and Students Baffled

By dianeravitch
October 27, 2023 //
2

The chaos continues in the Houston school district, under the addled leadership of Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent. Another principal was pushed out, along with several staff members. No reason was given. Several hundred teens and parents demonstrated outside the school to protest the sudden dismissals of tested school leaders.

Sam Gonzalez Kelly wrote in The Houston Chronicle:

Families and staff at Eastwood Academy High School were informed Tuesday that their principal and several other staff members were pulled from the East End school after an investigation by the district into “incidents at the campus.”

Principal Ana Aguilar’s removal was announced in an automated phone call from HISD Central Division Superintendent Luz Martinez, who said that the change was being made to “ensure a high-quality education environment.” A district spokesman added in a statement that “HISD takes student safety in our schools very seriously,” and that Aguilar and other staffers were removed “after an investigation into incidents at the campus.”

Ana Aguilar

An assistant principal, a counselor and a librarian were also relieved of their duties, according to one teacher at Eastwood, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. An HISD spokesman declined to elaborate on the “incidents” in question or provide further comment.

The news immediately sent waves of outrage and confusion rippling through the tight-knit Eastwood community, whose members were unaware of any incidents that would spark their principal’s removal. Aguilar did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“It’s very frustrating, Eastwood is a wonderful school,” said Miranda Gonzales, a parent of an Eastwood student. “There’s no reason for the principal to be removed, Eastwood isn’t (in Miles’ New Education System). It’s ridiculous, it’s insanity and none of us know what’s going on.”

Eastwood, a school of fewer than 400 students in Houston’s East End, received an A rating from the Texas Education Agency on its latest evaluations. Aguilar joined the campus in 2022 after spending three years as principal at Robinson Elementary School, where she won a First Year Principal of the Year Award at what was an Achieve 180 campus in the east region of the district.

Aguilar’s removal is the latest in a string of shakeups at HISD schools, where at least nine other principals have been replaced without much in the way of explanation given to families or staff. The principal at Middle College High School at Houston Community College’s Felix Fraga campus, also in HISD’s Central Division, was removed less than a week ago. The principal at Cage Elementary and Project Chrysalis Middle School, many of whose students go on to attend Eastwood Academy, was replaced during the first week of school this year.

Yesterday the new Miles leadership removed the principal of Wisdom High School and most of its top administrators. Wisdom’s students are mostly non-English-speakers.

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, Disruption, Ethics, Houston, State Takeover, Texas

Oklahoma: Founders of Epic Charter Schools Charged with More Crimes

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2023 //
4

Oklahoma has a major charter scandal on its hands, which has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Republican Governor, legislators, and state superintendent for charters and vouchers.

EPIC Charter Schools opened in Oklahoma in 2011. It was the state’s first online school and was hailed for its innovative delivery of education. As early as 2013, authorities suspected financial irregularities. Not until 2019 did the public learned that EPIC was under state investigation for embezzling money and inflating its enrollment. The founders tried to block the investigation by insisting that they were a private business and could not be audited. The company collected tuition from the state and retained 10% of its revenues. The state auditor estimated that EPIC’s founders inappropriately diverted $22 million.

But now the founders face new charges of financial crimes.

Founders of Epic Charter Schools are facing new charges of money laundering and presenting false claims to the state, bringing the total number of charges to 15.

Epic co-founders David Chaney and Ben Harris and Chief Financial Officer Josh Brock, were arrested and charged with a list of felonies in June 2022. Charges included racketeering, embezzlement of state funds, and obtaining money by false pretense.

The amount of diverted money so far totals $30 million. Republicans complain about public schools, but no district superintendent or principal has ever been accused of massive crimes like those of EPIC. Let it be noted that virtual charter schools have been the source of the biggest financial crimes.

In Indiana, state officials sued two defunct virtual charters for defrauding the state of $154 million.

In California, the A3 online charter chain was charged with defrauding the state of $400 million.

Sean McManus of Australia, along with Jason Schrock of Long Beach, led a statewide charter school scheme from 2016 to 2019 in which they used a network of mostly online charter schools to defraud the state of approximately $400 million and used $50 million of that amount for personal use. They did so by falsely enrolling students and manipulating enrollment and attendance reporting across their schools to get more money per student than schools are supposed to, prosecutors said.

In Ohio, the state paid the owner of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) about $1 billion, despite its abysmal graduation rates and scores. When the state auditor demanded repayment of $60 million for phantom students, ECOT declared bankruptcy.

In Pennsylvania, the founder of the Pennsylvania CyberCharter School was sentenced to 20 months in prison for pocketing $8 million.

No matter how many frauds are committed by Cybercharters, they do not lose their luster. Why? Usually, they give generous political contributions.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Justice, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools

Jan Resseger: Education and Democracy Are Entwined

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2023 //
6

Jan Resseger writes brilliantly about the importance of education in a democracy. She reads widely in the work of authors who understand why education should not be privatized and turned into a consumer good. You will enjoy reading this essay.

She writes:

I find myself struggling these days to understand how those of us who prize our U.S. system of public education seem to have lost the narrative. As I listen to the rhetoric of today’s critics of public schooling—people who distrust or disdain the work of school teachers and who believe test scores are the only way to understand education, I worry about the seeming collapse of the values I grew up with as a child in a small Montana town whose citizens paid so much attention to the experiences its public schools offered for the community’s children. The schools in my hometown provided a solid core curriculum plus a strong school music program, ambitious high school drama and speech and debate programs, athletics, a school newspaper, and an American Field Service international student every single year at the high school. While many of us continue to support our public schools, what are the factors that have caused so many to abandon their confidence in public education?

It is in this context that I found myself reading “Education and the Challenges for Democracy,” the introductory essay in the current issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives. In his essay, Fernando M. Reimers, a professor in the graduate school of education at Harvard University, explores the interconnection of public education and democracy itself. Reimers explains, for example, that the expansion of our democracy to include more fully those who have previously been marginalized is likely to impact the public schools in many ways and that these changes in the schools will inspire their own political response:

“(T)he expansion of political rights to groups of the population previously denied rights (e.g. women, members of racial or religious minorities) may lead to increased access for these groups to educational institutions and a curriculum that prepares them for political participation. These changes, in turn, feed back into the political process, fostering increased demands for participation and new forms of representation as a result of the new skills and dispositions these groups gained by educational and political changes. But these increases in representation may activate political backlash from groups who seek to preserve the status quo. These forces may translate into efforts to constrain the manner in which schools prepare new groups for political participation. In this way, the relationship between democratic politics and democratic education is never static, but in perpetual, dynamic, dialectical motion that leads to new structures and processes. The acknowledgement of this relationship as one that requires resolution of tensions and contradictions, of course, does not imply an inevitable cycle of continuous democratic improvement, as there can be setbacks—both in democracy itself, and in education for democracy.”

Reimers continues: “Democracy—a social contract intended to balance freedom and justice—is not only fluid and imperfect but fragile. This fragility has become evident in recent years… In order to challenge the forces undermining democracy, schools and universities need to recognize these challenges and their systemic impact and reimagine what they must do to prepare students to address them.” While Reimers explains that the goal of his article is not only, “to examine how democratic setbacks can lead to setbacks in democratic education, but also how education can resist those challenges to democracy,” he presents no easy solutions. He does, however sort out the issues to which we should all be paying attention—naming five specific challenges for American democracy:

“The five traditional challenges to democracy are corruption, inequality, intolerance, polarization, and populism… The democratic social contract establishes that all persons are fundamentally equal, and therefore have the same right to participate in the political process and demand accountability. Democracy is challenged when those elected to govern abuse the public trust through corruption, or capturing public resources to advance private ends… Democracy is also challenged by social and economic inequality and by the political inequalitythey may engender… One result of political intolerance is political polarization… Political intolerance is augmented by Populism, an ideology which challenges the idea that the interests of ordinary people can be represented by political elites.” (emphasis in the original)

Reimers considers how these threats to democracy endanger our public schools: “The first order of effects of these forces undermining democracy is to constrain the ability of education institutions to educate for democracy. But a second order of effects results from the conflicts and tensions generated by these forces….” As the need for schools and educators to prepare students for democratic citizenship becomes ever more essential, political backlash may threaten schools’ capacity to help students challenge the threats to democracy.

In their 2017 book, These Schools Belong to You and Me, Deborah Meier and Emily Gasoi articulate in concrete terms what Reimers explains abstractly as one of the imperatives that public schools must accomplish today: “(W)e need a means of ensuring that we educate all future citizens, not only to be well versed in the three Rs, and other traditional school subjects, but also to be able to see from multiple perspectives and to be intellectually curious and incisive enough to see through and resist the lure of con artists and autocrats, whether in the voting booth, the marketplace, or in their social dealings.” (These Schools Belong to You and Me, p. 25) Schools imagined as preparing critical thinkers—schools that focus on more than basic drilling in language arts and math—are necessary to combat two of the threats Reimers lists: corruption and populism.

But what about Reimers’ other threats? How can schools, in our current polarized climate, push back against intolerance, inequality, and polarization? Isn’t today’s attack on “diversity, equity and inclusion” in some sense an expression of a widespread desire to give up on our principle of equality of opportunity—to merely accept segregation, inequality and exclusion? This is the old, old struggle Derek Black traces in Schoolhouse Burning—the effort during Reconstruction to develop state constitutions that protect the right to education for all children including the children of slaves—followed by Jim Crow segregation—followed by the Civil Rights Movement and Brown v. Board of Education—followed by myriad efforts since then to keep on segregating schools. Isn’t the attempt to discredit critical race theory really the old fight about whose cultures should be affirmed or hidden at school, and isn’t this fight reminiscent of the struggle to eliminate the American Indian boarding schools whose purpose was extinguishing American Indian children’s languages and cultures altogether? Isn’t the battle over inclusion the same conflict that excluded disabled children from public school services until Congress passed the Individuals with Disability Education Act in 1975? And what about the battle that ended in 1982, when, in Plyler v. Doe, the U.S. Supreme Court protected the right to a free, K-12 public education for children of undocumented immigrants? Our society has continued to struggle to accept the responsibility for protecting the right to equal opportunity. As Reimers explains, action to address inequality has inevitably spawned a reaction.

Educators and political philosophers, however, have persistently reminded us of our obligation to make real the promise of public schooling. In 1899, our most prominent philosopher of education, John Dewey, declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself.” (The School and Society, p. 1)

In 1992, political theorist Benjamin Barber advocated for the very kind of public schooling Reimers would like to see today: “(T)he true democratic premise encompasses… the acquired virtues and skills necessary to living freely, living democratically, and living well. It assumes that every human being, given half a chance, is capable of the self-government that is his or her natural right, and thus capable of acquiring the judgment, foresight, and knowledge that self-government demands.… The fundamental assumption of democratic life is not that we are all automatically capable of living both freely and responsibly, but that we are all potentially susceptible to education for freedom and responsibility. Democracy is less the enabler of education than education is the enabler of democracy.” (An Aristocracy of Everyone, pp. 13-14)

In a 1998 essay, Barber declared: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity. If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness. English will thrive as the first language in America only when those for whom it is a second language feel safe enough in their own language and culture to venture into and participate in the dominant culture. For what we share in common is not some singular ethnic or religious or racial unity but precisely our respect for our differences: that is the secret to our strength as a nation, and is the key to democratic education.” (“Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p. 231)

These same principles are prophetically restated by William Ayers in his final essay in the 2022 book, Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy: “In a free society education must focus on the production—not of things, but—of free people capable of developing minds of their own even as they recognize the importance of learning to live with others. It’s based, then, on a common faith in the incalculable value of every human being, constructed on the principle that the fullest development of all is the condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all… Schools don’t exist outside of history or culture: they are, rather, at the heart of each. Schools serve societies; societies shape schools. Schools, then, are both mirror and window—they tell us who we are and who we want to become, and they show us what we value and what we ignore, what is precious and what is venal.” (Public Education: Defending a Cornerstone of American Democracy, p. 315)

Please open the link to complete the reading.

Categories Citizenship, Civil Rights, Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Equity, Ethics, Freedom, Freedom to Read, History, Real Education
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