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The Nation: Linda McMahon’s Very Important Rightwing Think Tank

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2025 //
2

Trump selected Linda McMahon to be the next Secretary of Education. She is well known for making it rich in the world of wrestling entertainment, in partnership with her husband. Less well known is her role as Chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI). Trump is close to AFPI, which promotes school choice and the “parental rights” movement, which promotes censorship of books and curriculum about racism and LGBT topics. They oppose any teaching that might make students “uncomfortable,” like learning about the history of racism, or that might teach students that LGBT exist.

The Nation published an article by Christopher Lewis and Jacob Plaza. The article tells the story of the think tank McMahon leads. It was launched after Trump’s loss in 2020 and its policy agenda defines Trump’s plans. To understand what Trump intends to do, learn more about AFPI.

Lewis and Plaza write:

Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)

Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affair

As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.

McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.

Following the lead of billionaire right-wing donors, AFPI enthusiastically champions the charter-schools movement, while seeking to undermine the government’s role in providing quality public education. McMahon’s think tank has erected a whole policy infrastructure to promote charter schools, including direct public subsidies to them, the creation of education saving accounts (ESAs) for parents to enroll kids in charters, and proposals to weaken teachers’ unions in conjunction with the rise of open-shop charters. This agenda does more than harness the long-standing animus to government-backed education on the right—it advances the creation of a parallel education system for right-wing partisans. In this regard, as well as in its aggressive model of privatized education funding, the AFPI plan recalls the original role that neoliberal economics played in supporting the new ad hoc network of “segregation academies” launched in the American South after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling to desegregate the nation’s schools. The same basic dictum holds for today’s American right as it did then: If you can’t segregate with law, segregate with economics.

AFPI claims that charter school students have higher scores on standardized tests. In reality, the findings here follow what holds for better-funded public schools: namely, that well-funded charter schools tend to produce better test scores, while less well-off charters fare a bit worse, with some regional variations. Students in the competitive DC charter school system’s Opportunity Scholarships program, often cited as the gold standard by charter school advocates, actually performed worse on reading tests than those who did not attend the program.

School choice and voucher programs are a drain on the public’s coffers. For hard-right ideologues like the advisers at AFPI, that’s the whole point. Privatized education is part of the broader right-wing campaign to block the public sector’s ability to finance anything, especially if it would further racial equality. The National Education Association notes that voucher programs redirect scarce public funds toward unaccountable private school programs, and found zero evidence that these programs—which increase school segregation—improve students’ performance. In some cases, there are negative impacts.

What’s more, private management naturally leads to a focus on profit, financial self-sustainability, and expansion—mandates that typically lead to steep budget cuts in the schools, even if students suffer. According to the Network for Public Education, for-profit management companies run nearly one in seven charter schools.

AFPI has also endorsed federal legislation to create national education savings accounts. Like charter schools, ESAs seek to redirect public resources to market-driven gimmicks under the broad rubric of consumer choice. When parents open an ESA, they withdraw their children from the school district and receive a deposit of public funds in a savings account authorized by the government. Parents are then allowed to spend from that account on a range of educational expenses, including tutoring, therapy, or school supplies.

ESA plans create an obvious bind by forcing parents to navigate the education industry all on their own. The ESA scheme affords no safeguards for students whose parents made poor spending choices with the funds in their account. A report in Forbes recounted the story of a family using up its entire account before paying for a single English or math class. And like the broader charter model it upholds, the savings-account system reinforces, rather than weakens, the core inequalities of the US education system; it ensures that wealthier parents will be able to afford to send their children to the best schools.

For a bracing illustration of how charter and for-profit education schemes pillage publicly funded schools, consider Chicago’s experience. In 2013, the city closed 48 public schools to cover widening budget shortfalls. And Chicago’s public schools were going broke in no small part due to the rapid expansion of a parallel charter systemcaptained by ardent school privatizers. Since the insurgent charter schools operated outside traditional governance and accountability, they accumulated millions in debt while draining desperately needed funding away from public schools. Ultimately, 17,000 students were displaced, and Chicago was left with a more unequal and racially segmented school system than it had at the outset of the city’s charter-school fiasco.

To finish reading the article, open the link.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: Voucher Leader in Ohio Legislature Says Public Schools Cost Too Much

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
9

Jan Resseger writes today about Matt Huffman, Speaker of the House in Ohio and his determination to undermine the funding of the state’s public schools. If you read the previous post about the voucher movement in Ohio, you will recall that Huffman led the battle to enact vouchers for all families, including affluent families.

He is Catholic, he graduated from Catholic schools, and he has long been determined to get public funds to subsidize religious school tuition.

After the state was ordered to enact a plan to fund its schools fairly, relying less on property taxes, the legislature enacted the Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan in 2021, which was supposed to be phased in over six years. Huffman recently declared that the plan was “unsustainable.”

Ohio has 1.75 million students in public schools. There are 173,156 students in the state’s non-public schools.

Using public dollars to pay the tuition of rich students who were already enrolled in private and religious schools is “sustainable” for the religious zealots in the legislature.

Ohio’s commitment to fair funding for public schools has been undermined by two Republican priorities:

  1. The universal voucher program now costs $1 billion a year.
  2. Republicans are determined to cut taxes and to reduce funding for public schools.

Those are Matt Huffman’s priorities, not adequate and fair funding for public schools.

Categories Accountability, Catholic Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

ProPublica: Secret Papers Reveal How Ohio Politicians Worked with Religious Allies to Get Vouchers for All

By dianeravitch
January 14, 2025 //
10

Alec MacGillis wrote a story for ProPublica titled “On a Mission from God: Inside the Movement to Redirect Billions of Taxpayer Dollars to Private Religious Schools.”

ProPublica gained access to a large trove of communications among the Governor of Ohio, George Voinovich, and prominent religious figures, planning how to pass legislation to send public money to religious schools. This, despite explicit language in the Ohio state constitution prohibiting state payments to religious schools.

Here is ProPublica’s overview of the article:

Reporting Highlights

  • The Ohio Model: Rarely seen letters show how the voucher movement started in the 1990s as a concealed effort to finance urban parochial schools and expanded to a much broader push.
  • Helping the Affluent: An initiative promoted as a civil rights cause — helping poor kids — is increasingly funneling money to families who already easily afford private school tuition.
  • The Voucher Deficit: Expanding programs threaten funding for public schools and put pressure on state budgets, as many religious-based schools enjoy new largesse.

The article begins thus:

On a Thursday morning last May, about a hundred people gathered in the atrium of the Ohio Capitol building to join in Christian worship. The “Prayer at the Statehouse” was organized by an advocacy group called the Center for Christian Virtue, whose growing influence was symbolized by its new headquarters, directly across from the capitol. It was also manifest in the officials who came to take part in the event: three state legislators and the ambitious lieutenant governor, Jon Husted.

After some prayer and singing, the center’s Christian Engagement Ambassador introduced Husted, asking him to “share with us about faith and intersecting faith with government.” Husted, a youthful 57-year-old, spoke intently about the prayer meetings that he leads in the governor’s office each month. “We bring appointed officials and elected officials together to talk about our faith in our work, in our service, and how it can strengthen us and make us better,” he said. The power of prayer, Husted suggested, could even supply political victories: “When we do that, great things happen — like advancing school choice so that every child in Ohio has a chance to go to the school of their choice.” The audience started applauding before he finished his sentence.

The center had played a key role in bringing about one of the most dramatic expansions of private school vouchers in the country, making it possible for all Ohio families — even the richest among them — to receive public money to pay for their children’s tuition. In the mid-1990s, Ohio became the second state to offer vouchers, but in those days they were available only in Cleveland and were billed as a way for disadvantaged children to escape struggling schools. Now the benefits extend to more than 150,000 students across the state, costing taxpayers nearly $1 billion, the vast majority of which goes to the Catholic and evangelical institutions that dominate the private school landscape there.

What happened in Ohio was a stark illustration of a development that has often gone unnoticed, perhaps because it is largely taking place away from blue state media hubs. In the past few years, school vouchers have become universal in a dozen states, including Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Proponents are pushing to add Texas, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and others — and, with Donald Trump returning to the White House, they will likely have federal support.

The risks of universal vouchers are quickly coming to light. An initiative that was promoted for years as a civil ­rights cause — helping poor kids in troubled schools — is threatening to become a nationwide money grab. Many private schools are raising tuition rates to take advantage of the new funding, and new schools are being founded to capitalize on it. With private schools urging all their students’ families to apply, the money is flowing mostly to parents who are already able to afford tuition and to kids who are already enrolled in private schools. When vouchers do draw students away from public districts, they threaten to exacerbate declining enrollment, forcing underpopulated schools to close. More immediately, the cost of the programs is soaring, putting pressure on public school finances even as private schools prosper. In Arizona, voucher expenditures are hundreds of millions of dollars more than predicted, leaving an enormous shortfall in the state budget. States that provide funds to families for homeschooling or education-related expenses are contending with reports that the money is being used to cover such unusual purchases as kayaks, video game consoles and horseback-­riding lessons.

The voucher movement has been aided by a handful of billionaire advocates; it was also enabled, during the pandemic, by the backlash to extended school closures. (Private schools often reopened considerably faster than public schools.) Yet much of the public, even in conservative states, remains ambivalent about vouchers: Voters in Nebraska and Kentucky just rejected them in ballot referendums.

How, then, has the movement managed to triumph? The campaign in Ohio provides an object lesson — a model that voucher advocates have deployed elsewhere. Its details are recorded in a trove of private correspondence, much of it previously unpublished, that the movement’s leaders in Ohio sent to one another. The letters reveal a strategy to start with targeted programs that placed needy kids in parochial schools, then fight to expand the benefits to far richer families — a decadeslong effort by a network of politicians, church officials and activists, all united by a conviction that the separation of church and state is illegitimate. As one of the movement’s progenitors put it, “Government does a lousy job of substituting for religion.”

Please open the link to read this important article.

Thanks to ProPublica for its excellent reporting about the effort to privatize and defund American schools.

Categories Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Ohio, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Jennifer Rubin: Why We Started The Contrarian

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
26

Jennifer Rubin posted her first editorial as editor-in-chief of The Contrarian.

The Contrarian will be a central hub for unvarnished, unbowed, and uncompromising reported opinion and analysis that exists in opposition to the authoritarian threat. Our pre-election warnings that Donald Trump posed an unprecedented threat to our democracy were often treated as alarmist. However, the election of an openly authoritarian figure who traffics in conspiracies, lies, unconstitutional schemes and un-American notions, has moved the United States to an inflection point. The future of our democracy, and what Lincoln called “the last best hope of earth” hangs in the balance. And yet corporate and billionaire media and too many in the political establishment persist in downplaying the threat and seeking to accommodate Trump and his radical agenda. We refuse to follow the herd.

Unlike most corporate or billionaire media, The Contrarian will not offer Trump the benefit of the doubt. We will not normalize him. We will not engage in false equivalence. We will not excuse enablers in the media, government or business. We will not infantilize his supporters nor treat them as victims; we will confront them with the consequences of their presidential pick.

Trump is no ordinary politician and will be no ordinary president so the response must be extraordinary. His insane pronouncements—be it a premature and utterly false declaration that the New Orleans terrorist had just come over the border or a threat to annex the Panama Canal and Greenland—cannot be ignored or treated as hyperbole. They reveal a warped mind and dangerous agenda that would take America down the road of other authoritarian states such as Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.

We will not be distracted by shiny objects or phony scandals. Instead, we will call out Trump and his fellow bad actors’ dangerous, unconstitutional and immoral actions and vile rhetoric. We will put them in the context of American history and international authoritarian movements. We will call on a range of experts from psychology, sociology, political science, international relations and other fields to inform the discussion and analysis.

We do not call Trump a dictator—yet. That is because a conscientious pro-democracy movement determined to expose, denounce and counteract Trump’s authoritarian impulses has time to act, to preserve our pluralistic democracy. The Contrarian seeks to be in the vanguard of that effort. To that end, we will summon the opponents of authoritarianism from all walks of life—the media, the arts, government, academia, business, sports, culture, labor and civil society—to join a grand coalition, a national front for freedom, decency, democracy, justice, self-determination, and diversity.

The urgency of the task before us cannot be overstated. We have already entered the era of oligarchy—rule by a narrow clique of powerful men (almost exclusively men). We have little doubt that billionaires will dominate the Trump regime, shape policy, engage in massive self-dealing, and seek to quash dissent and competition in government and the private sector. As believers in free markets subject to reasonable regulation and economic opportunity for all, we recognize this is a threat not only to our democracy but to our dynamic, vibrant economy that remains the envy of the world.

Although the task before us is deadly serious, we emphatically believe that joy, humor, and most of all community are essential to preserving a free people. We will offer all three. We also realize the danger of preaching to the choir and failing to reach outside our bubble. We will offer a platform that includes multi-generational, fresh voices from whatever venue or field who can contribute to our endeavor. We are building a community of passionate defenders of democracy who are fed up with equivocation, timidity, and resignation.

We could not be more excited to begin this journey. Our irreverence, candor and refusal to pull punches may offend establishment politicians, campaign insiders, and complicit media. We hope so. Throughout all our work, we pledge to live up to our credo: Not Owned by Anybody.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Creativity, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Trump

Jeff Tiedrich: Trump Goes Full-MAGA on L.A. Fires

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
21

Jeff Tiedrich is a web designer and graphic artist who has a consistently hilarious and outrageous blog. I can’t redact all the F words, so forgive that. I curse at home, but never in public or in print. Jeff has different rules.

He posted this commentary about Trump politicizing the fires in Los Angeles.

He titled it: Elderly Convict Won’t Stop Running His Ignorant Mouth About L.A. Fires.”

He wrote:

no one has ever accused America’s First Felon of learning. Donny Convict knows what he knows, and he’ll be god-fucking-damned if he’s going to let something stupid like facts change his stubborn mind. 

we saw this during the botched response to Covid, where Donny never stopped insisting that that virus that was killing thousands of people a day was going to magically disappear all on its own, “like a miracle.”

we’re seeing again right now, where, as Southern California burns to the ground, he’s refusing to allow a single fact to penetrate his thick skull.

it’s not like experts haven’t already worn themselves out trying to explain to Donny how climate change will affect California’s ecosystem.

CA official: “if we ignore the science and put our head in the sand … we’re not going to succeed together in protecting Californians.”
Donny: “it’ll start getting cooler. you just watch.”
CA official: “I wish science agreed with you.” 
Donny: “I don’t think science knows, actually.”

that was Donny in 2020, insisting — without any facts or evidence — that “it’ll start getting cooler,” because “science doesn’t actually know.” 

let’s fast forward to right now, and see if Donny was right.

hmm. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure a hurricane made of fucking fire is not a hallmark of lower temperatures in California.

the First Felon continues to flap his gums about California’s water system. he was at it again the other day.

“Governor Gavin Newscum should immediately go to Northern California and open up the water main, and let the water flow into his dry, starving, burning State, instead of having it go out into the Pacific Ocean. It ought to be done right now, NO MORE EXCUSES FROM THIS INCOMPETENT GOVERNOR. IT’S ALREADY FAR TOO LATE!”

oh look — the location of the imaginary building-sized faucet that takes a day to turn has moved from Canada to Northern California. where will it pop up next? maybe right here in the room with us?

praise the lord, someone in the media finally pointed out that most of Los Angeles’ water does not come from Northern California.

Trump appeared to be referring to water imported south from the Bay-Delta, fed by Northern California rivers and snowmelt. But most Los Angeles water does not come from Northern California. It comes via the city’s 112-year-old aqueduct that runs from the Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevada, not the Delta, as well as groundwater. The city also imports water from the Metropolitan Water District, which relays water from the Colorado River and Delta to numerous local agencies. The city was the main motivating force for the building of the Colorado River Aqueduct in the 1930s.

and, of course, we’ve all explained until we were blue in the face that Los Angeles’ hydrant problem stems from having to fight too many fires in too many locations all at once, not because there’s some imaginary faucet that Gavin Newsom won’t turn — but MAGA isn’t listening. they don’t give a fuck about explanations. not when there are political points to be scored.

here’s a thing that happened way back in 2016. the town of Gaitlinburg burned to the ground in what to date has been one of Tennessee’s largest natural disasters.

The 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires, also known as the Gatlinburg wildfires, were a complex of wildfires which began in late November 2016. Some of the towns most impacted were Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, both near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The fires claimed at least 14 lives, injured 190, and is one of the largest natural disasters in the history of Tennessee

as happened this week in Los Angeles, the fires severely overtaxed Gaitlinburg’s infrastructure, to the point where —

Firefighters from across the state flocking to Gatlinburg to battle a growing firestorm couldn’t be sure the fire hydrants they uncapped would provide any water.

And within two hours of the mega wildfire reaching the city on Nov. 28, the hydrants were running dry.

the wingnutsphere must have shit a massive brick, and called for then-Governor Bill Haslam to resign, right? because as we all know from this week’s howls of MAGA outrage, empty fire hydrants are a sure sign of gubernatorial incompetence. 

nope, crickets. there was nary a peep from the Fox News crowd. no one blamed it on DEI, and no one called for witholding aid to Tennesee until they change their conservation policies — which is definitely a thing Republicans are threatening to do right now to California.

let’s see how Loudmouth J. Fuckwad reacted.

“My thoughts and prayers are with the great people of Tennessee during these terrible wildfires. Stay safe!”

oh, huh. no bombast, no accusations, no demands that Governor Haslam travel to god knows where and open some imaginary spigot. nope, just some worthless thinking and praying.

why were Donny and the screech-monkeys of the MAGAverse silent? because Bill Haslam was a Republican, and there were no political points to be scored.

Categories Accountability, California, Character, Cruelty, Environment, Ethics, Extremism, Fake News, Ignorance, Lies, Los Angeles, Shame, Stupid, Trump

Karen Francisco: The Roots of the Charter School Grift in Indiana

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2025 //
8

Karen Francisco retired as editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. She grew up in Muncie and graduated from Ball State University. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. I invited her to write about what happened in Indiana to turn Republicans against public schools.

She wrote this article for the blog.

The corporate-controlled American Legislative Exchange Council in 2011 rolled out a set of model bills designed to weaken one of its primary targets: public schools. “The Indiana Education Reform Package” was patterned after the destructive legislation pushed through by Indiana’s Republican legislative supermajority and then-Gov. Mitch Daniels.

Indiana has been setting the bar for public-school carnage ever since, quietly advancing a near-universal voucher program and advancing education privatization efforts. But the newly introduced House Bill 1136 is designed to serve as a death blow for public education in Indiana. It would immediately dissolve five school districts, including Indianapolis Public Schools, and effectively set every other district in the state on a path to elimination.

The bill requires the dissolution of districts that have lost more than 50% of students within the district’s boundaries to other schools. The districts’ schools would be converted to charter schools by July 1, 2028. The first schools converted would be those with the lowest test scores.

The legislation cleverly builds on those “education reform” measures designed to cripple public school districts. Ever-changing assessment standards kept the schools chasing arbitrary benchmarks. Sky-high income limits allowed wealthy families to abandon neighborhood schools for parochial and private schools. Inadequate funding and legislation favoring charter schools left districts without the resources needed to serve the at-risk students who are not welcome at voucher or charter schools.

Indianapolis Public Schools, in particular, has been hammered by Republican lawmakers and the city’s Democratic mayors. From an enrollment of nearly 40,000 in 2005, IPS now serves only 21,055 students, having lost thousands of students  to voucher schools, charters and poor-performing “innovation schools.”

Why is Indiana, known for its conservatism, such fertile ground for radical education policy? Blame it on a perfect storm of anti-democratic forces. Out-of-state billionaires like Netflix founder Reed Hastings and the heirs to the Walmart fortune have poured millions of dollars into the state to destroy teacher unions. Powerful Republican lawmakers have built careers off education privatization. Indiana’s strong evangelical community, including its newly elected lieutenant governor, has recognized the potential of expanding Christian Nationalist  influence with taxpayer-supported schools. 

The bigger mystery is why Indiana voters have allowed the continuing destruction of their public schools, electing and re-electing representatives actively working against the voters’ best interests.

I would like to believe House Bill 1136 is the proverbial bridge too far. But 40 years of newspaper experience in Indiana tells me most Hoosiers will show little interest in the imminent threat to two urban school districts and three small rural school corporations. Sadly, race and class play heavenly into opinions about Indiana public schools, and too many Hoosiers will dismiss the danger as “not my problem.”

Elected school boards are the last piece of control Indiana voters exercise over education. Republican lawmakers eliminated the constitutional position of state superintendent of public instruction, and Indiana has always had an unelected state board of education.

House Bill 1136 starts the process of disbanding locally elected school boards, replacing them with boards filled by the governor, local officials and the director of the partisan Indiana Charter School Board.  It’s only a matter of time before every elected school board in the state is eliminated.

Look for the American Legislative Exchange Council to update its 2011 “Indiana Education Reform Package” with this crowning piece of anti-democratic legislation and for ALEC’s disciples to carry it across the nation.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Funding, Indiana, Indianapolis, Privatization

Just Published: My Review of the Trump Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2025 //
5

This article just appeared on the website of The New York Review of Books.

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/01/11/their-kind-of-indoctrination/

It is my review of Trump’s plans for K-12 education.

NYRB is the most distinguished literary-political journal in the nation. It has a huge readership. It reaches a different audience than education journals.

If you subscribe to NYRB, you can open it in full. If you don’t, it costs $10 for 10 issues. Or, if you wait, I will post it in full in a few weeks.

Categories Accountability, Arizona, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, For-Profit, Freedom to Read, Funding, Gender, History, Ignorance, Inequality, Lies, Privatization, Racism, Religion, Segregation, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

One of America’s Founding Principles at Risk: Freedom of Religion AND Freedom from Religion

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2025 //
12

We now have a U.S. Supreme Court that is hypocritical. On one hand, it claims to interpret cases in alignment with the original language of the Constitution and the original intent of the authors of that document. But it ignores that principle when it conflicts with their personal beliefs. This is certainly true with the Court’s treatment of relations between Church and State. For more than 200 years, the Court respected the separation of Church and State, with only minor exceptions. The present Court, however, has taken a sledgehammer to the “wall of separation,” especially in relation to funding religious schools.

Our reader who uses the name of “Quikwrit” wrote the following:

Freedom FROM Religion

The constitutional principle of a “wall of separation” between government and religion in America goes back even far further than our 1797 Constitution: Already back in 1635, Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island Colony, declared that a “wall of separation” must forever separate American government from any religion. In Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Connecticut Baptist Convention, Jefferson quoted Williams’ “wall of separation” phrase to explain the meaning of The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

Jefferson, author of our Declaration of Independence, also compiled his own version of the Bible, known as The Jefferson Bible, that basically treated Jesus as an admirable philosopher, but not divine. Jefferson’s non-Christian edition of the Bible became widely popular in the new United States, and for decades every new member of Congress was given a copy of The Jefferson Bible when sworn in to Congress.

Our Founding Fathers’ insistence on separating government from any and all religion came about because England had imposed mandatory Anglican church membership in the colonies for anyone who wanted to participate in government; so, although many of our Founding Fathers were Deists, not Christians, they were compelled to join the official British government’s Christian Anglican religion in order to be able to vote or take any part in government.

James Madison, whom we honor with the title “Father of our Constitution” because so many of our Constitution’s key principles are derived from his ideas, wrote that “the purpose of the separation of church and state is to keep forever from our shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries”.

That bloody “ceaseless strife” of religious war in Europe was well known to Madison and to our nation’s other Founding Fathers because they had recent ancestors who had suffered and been killed because of the endless warfare between Christian religions throughout Europe during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Those centuries of bloodshed and misery followed the Protestant Reformation which led to the establishment of dozens of warring Protestant religions, none of which agreed with each other in their dogma, and all of which disagreed with the Catholic church.

Thousands and countless thousands of people died as each Christian religion tried to force their version of religious beliefs on the others.

George Washington, whom we honor with the title “Father of our Nation”, was in complete agreement with the Establishment Clause and wrote that “the United States government is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” He was compelled to attend Anglican church services but never took Communion because he refused to be hypocritical.

Today, some who argue against the separation of church and state claim that when the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause says that government shall make no law “respecting the establishment of religion” it means only that the government shall not establish a religion and that government is free to provide all manner of support for existing religions. However, in the grammatical syntax of the time in which the First Amendment was written, the phrase “the establishment of religion” refers to “established religions”, not to establishing a government religion. Written in the grammatical syntax of our current times, the First Amendment would state that the government shall make no law “respecting established religions”.

Correctly read, and knowing the intent of Our Founding Fathers which they clearly expressed, the First Amendment provides Americans with freedom FROM religion.

And yet, today, self-righteous religious zealots — some of whom are even on the U.S. Supreme Court — are driving our nation toward a time of bloody religious warfare in America; warfare that will divide and weaken our nation and allow our enemies abroad to destroy us. That destructive division is already on the stage with the demands that The Ten Commandments be posted in schools and public places and that public schools must teach the Bible: The coming conflict looms with the question of whose version of the Ten Commandments will be displayed and whose version of the Bible will be taught.

Protestants and Catholics each have their own version of the Ten Commandments and their own version of the Bible. Whose version of the Commandments and whose version of the Bible would be posted and taught in public schools?

In the Protestant version of the Commandments, the Second Commandment says that it is sinful to make “graven images”, such as statues — the Catholic version of the Commandments says nothing about graven images, so Catholic churches are filled with statues of Mary and the saints. Will Catholic children in public schools be shamed by their classmates as sinful because Catholic churches contain statues of Mary and the saints?

If America doesn’t remain true to the constitutional rule established by Our Founding Fathers that our government must be separated from all religion by a solid wall, bloody conflict will ultimately follow…and a weakened America will then be conquered by its international enemies.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Religion, Separation of church and state, Trump

Biden Protects 1 Million Immigrants by Granting Them Temporary Protected Status

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2025 //
10

President Biden is battening down the hatches before Trump returns to the White House. Today he extended protection to nearly one million immigrants currently in this country.

The New York Times reported:

The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for nearly 1 million immigrants living in the United States, announcing the move days before the start of a possible deportation campaign by the incoming Trump administration.

Immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan who have a form of provision residency known as temporary protected status will be eligible to renew their permits for 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Lawmakers and immigrant advocates had been urging the department to extend the protected designation for these nationalities and others under a 1990 law that shields immigrants from being deported to countries engulfed in conflict or natural disasters.

Angela Kelley, a former Biden official who is now an adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the extension was “right over home plate” because it met DHS’s legal requirement to assess conditions in beneficiaries’ home nations. “These countries merit it,” Kelley said, “and these people are already here.”

Mr. Trump has derided the program and vowed to end it, at least for certain countries. Immigrant advocates had been urging the Biden administration to extend it for many of those countries before he takes office.

In his first term, Mr. Trump terminated the status for about 400,000 people from El Salvador and other countries, and then faced legal challenges.

According to the Congressional Research Service, more than a million migrants from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East had Temporary Protected Status as of 2024.

The move makes it legally difficult for Mr. Trump to roll back the protections for citizens of the four countries, at least until they expire some time in 2026.

“Because President Biden has extended protection for the nationals of all these countries, President Trump will be unable to deport these individuals any time soon, “ said Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

”Trump can’t ignore what Congress wrote into law in 1990,” he said.

About 600,000 Venezuelans who currently have the protection will be allowed to renew and remain in the United States until October 2026, and approximately 232,000 immigrants from El Salvador will be able to do so. More than 100,000 Ukrainians will be able to remain in the United States until August 2026. Some 1,900 people from Sudan will also be allowed to renew their status.

The program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to ensure that foreign citizens already in the United States can remain in the country if it is not safe for them to return to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict or other upheaval.

Categories Biden, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Immigration, Trump

The GOP Won the House Thanks to Gerrymandering

By dianeravitch
January 10, 2025 //
5

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center for Justice demonstrates that Republicans won control of the House thanks to gerrymandering. Legislatures in red states drew districts that were designed to favor members of their party.

In other words, they rigged the elections.

Democrats have also gerrymandered districts to win seats, but never as methodically or as systematically as Republicans.

He wrote:

Many things propelled Donald Trump’s election victory. Inflation. A worldwide anti-incumbent backlash. Anger at institutions. A swing to the right among working-class voters of all racial backgrounds. And more. Analysts are still chewing on all the data (and Democrats are chewing on each other).

As we sift through the results and look forward, Republican control of the House of Representatives will matter greatly. That control is very, very narrow. And it turns out to rest on a shaky foundation of gerrymandering and manipulated maps, all encouraged by the Supreme Court.

The last time a new president took office without a “trifecta” of House and Senate control was 35 years ago. But this will be the slimmest House majority on record. With yesterday’s announcement by Indiana Rep. Victoria Spartz that she will not participate in the Republican caucus, control may effectively come down to one vote.

And according to my colleague Michael Li in a new analysis, Republicans won a net 16-seat advantage due to manipulated maps drawn for party advantage. (Democrats garnered an edge in 7 seats through gerrymandering, but the GOP gained a total of 23 seats that way — hence, 16 seats.)

How did this skew happen? Simply, Republican legislators control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats do. In some states, nonpartisan commissions or state courts have actually produced fairer maps. But in most places, politicians are free to press for partisan advantage.

North Carolina is split relatively evenly between Republican and Democratic voters. This year, Trump won the state even as Democrat Josh Stein swept into the governor’s mansion. However, the heavily gerrymandered legislature drew congressional maps that produced 10 seats for Republicans and only 4 for Democrats. The state high court had blocked the gerrymander, a move upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Moore v. Harper. But then a judicial election shifted partisan control of the North Carolina court, which abruptly blessed the gerrymander it had previously banned. That judicial reversal alone gave the GOP an extra 3 seats in Washington — enough to control the House.

Today Republicans are strutting, but that swagger may not last long. Speaker Mike Johnson will have to manage a fractious majority that could be defeated by one or two defections. Individual members will be empowered to extort policy concessions, no matter how extreme.

In fact, what may matter even more than the gerrymandered seats is the collapse of electoral competition. Only 27 districts nationwide saw margins of less than 5 percent. Lawmakers will look more nervously at the prospect of primary challenges than at the risk of alienating the broad mass of persuadable voters.

It did not have to be this way. In 2013, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, which had prevented the most egregious gerrymanders along racial lines. Then in 2019, John Roberts led the justices to rule that federal courts could not police partisan gerrymandering at all.

Congress has the power to act, and in 2022 it tried — coming within two Senate votes of passing the Freedom to Vote Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which together would have barred gerrymandering for congressional seats nationwide. Both parties would have been forced to compete on a level field. (This legislation would also have undone other damage wrought by rulings such as Citizens United, which legalized the campaign system that saw Elon Musk spend a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump.)

All this is a reminder that the rules of American politics, often arcane, often hidden, bear tremendous weight. It should caution us from drawing too many conclusions about any recent victor’s supposed “mandate.”

Voters are mad as hell about a government they feel does not deliver for them. Rigged rules are a big part of why Washington too frequently does not work. Partisans must do more than battle for inches of advantage. To truly reconnect the seats of power to a sullen electorate, real reform and real competition must be part of the answer.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Republicans
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