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Secretary Cardona Was a Huge Disappointment

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2024 //
30

Before the election of 2020, Joe Biden made some exciting promises to educators. He said publicly at a televised event in Pittsburgh that he would get rid of the onerous federal testing mandate. And he pledged to stop funding charter schools. The U.S. Department of Education hands out $440 million every year to create new charter schools or to expand existing charter schools. The Network for Public Education has published studies that document the wastefulness of the federal Charter Schools Program’s’ extravant funding but it survives nonetheless, because of Democratic choice fans like Speaker Hakeem Jeffries, Senator Michael Bennett, and Senator Corey Booker.

President Biden did not keep his promises. He didn’t even try.

He could have chosen a leader for the U.S. Department of Education who would fight to fulfill his promises. He didn’t.

Cardona did not take aim at the onerous federal testing program that is a remnant of George W. Bush’s failed No Child Left Behind law. NCLB was enacted in 2002. Twenty-two years ago. Does anyone believe that “no child was left behind”? Did the billions of dollars spent on annual testing of every single student in grades 3-8 has lift achievement to new heights and close achievement gaps? No. Dr

Instead, he chose Miguel Cardona, the State Commissioner of Connecticut, an amiable man who never says or does anything controversial. He did not repeat any of Biden’s promises.

Did Secretary Cardona propose any revision of the law? True, it went from NCLB to the equally ludicrous “Every Student Succeeds Act” in 2015. But has every student succeeded just because the law got a new name? No. What did Secretary Cardona propose? Nothing.

During Secretary Cardona’s tenure, there was an explosion in manufactured hostility towards public schools and their teachers, led by rightwing groups like “Moms for Liberty.” And these groups loudly demanded censorship of books in school libraries. Under the guise of “parental rights,” small numbers of very aggressive people made absurd claims about public schools: that teachers were “grooming” children to be gay or transgender; that school nurses were performing surgery in their offices to change boys into girls; that schools kept litter boxes for students who identified as cats; that public schools were “indoctrinating” students into radical views about race, gender, and American history. Teachers were fired for daring to teach “banned books” or accurate history about racism.

All of this was crazy stuff, spun out of whole cloth. Just plain nuts.

While our public schools were reeling from the barrage of lies about them, who were their defenders? The unions, for sure. PEN International. The American Library Association. Publishers. But where was the U.S. Department of Education? I honestly don’t know. It was a time when a strong and forceful voice was needed to stand up to the censors and bullies. I didn’t hear it. Did anyone else?

President Biden pledged to support public schools and to end federal favoritism for privately-managed charter schools. That didn’t happen. Rather than challenging the powerful charter school lobby, Secretary Cardona accepted its invitation to be the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the National Association of Public Charter Schools in 2021.

The federal Charter Schools Program gets $440 million every year to open new charter schools or to fund the expansion of charter chains. The Biden administration didn’t try to kill the appropriation, but it did enact regulations for CSP, a striking achievement. But it then ignored its own regulations, funding segregated charter schools that the regulations forbade.

Probably the worst example of a charter school that received a large federal grant despite its failure to comply with the Department’s regulations was the Cincinnati Classical Academy.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education gave $2 million to the Cincinnati Classical Academy, a charter school created by Hillsdale College, the far-right institution closely aligned with former (and future) President Trump. The school claimed in its application that it intended to provide quality education for needy minority students, but in fact the school serves an overwhelmingly white, affluent population.

The Network for Public Education was all over this $2 million grant because it was such a flagrant violation of the Department’s own regulations.

Carol Burris, the executive director of NPE, wrote a letter that was cosigned by more than a dozen local education and civil rights groups in Cincinnati. The letter was sent a year ago, with hopes that the Departnent would recall the grant because of false and misleading information in its grant application.

The Department did nothing. No action was taken.

Please read the letter:

December 4, 2023

The Honorable Miguel Cardona Secretary

U.S. Department of Education 400 Maryland Avenue, SW Washington, D.C. 20202

Dear Secretary Cardona:

We write to express our deep concern regarding the two Charter School Programs awards given to Cincinnati Classical Academy (CCA), a Hillsdale member charter school. CCA received a $100,000 planning grant from Ohio’s State Entities grant in 2021-2022, and in 2023, a Developer grant directly from your Department in the amount of $1,991,846. This letter provides evidence that the application submitted to your Department contained false and misleading information on which the award was based.

Further, after reading the three application reviewers’ notes, it is apparent that no attempt was made to fact check the application. Instead, the reviewers ignored what should have been obvious redflags, as we explain below.

 A detailed summary of the false and misleading information presented in the application is also provided. We ask you to investigate the awardee Cincinnati Classical Academy’s application and claims and terminate the grant based on that review.

 Evidence of the Intent to Mislead the Department Regarding the Purpose of the Grant

 Throughout the application, the charter school repeats that it is worthy of the grant because CCA exists to provide a high-quality alternative for disadvantaged students in Cincinnati’s public schools. The first two objectives, as stated in the application, are as follows: (1) help to close the achievement gap for economically disadvantaged students in southwestern Ohio; (2) continue to provide a proven and tuition- free charter school option to underserved children and families in an area where limited options for quality schools exist.

To make its case, the application cites demographic information for the city of Cincinnati, which, according to the application, is 41.37% African American/Black, 53.3% white, and has a high poverty rate. Helping students escape poverty and serving underserved students continue as themes throughout the application, justifying the grant.

 However, as the table below shows, the school is not serving the underserved students of the area but rather a population that is dramatically whiter and wealthier than not only the city of Cincinnati but the entire County of Hamilton.

 The table below provides the 2022-2023 school year demographic distribution of students in the Cincinnati School District public schools, all Hamilton County Schools, all charter schools in Hamilton County, and the applicant—Cincinnati Classical Academy. School enrollment was 452. The demographics of CCA do not reflect either Cincinnati School District public schools or the schools of Hamilton County, which the charter school purports to serve.

 Yet, it never provided a demographic breakdown of its students for its first or second year; it only gave a demographic breakdown of the population of Cincinnati. Nor did it acknowledge the under-enrollment of disadvantaged students or put forth a plan to address it. None of its goals and objectives address the lack of diversity and under-enrollment of underserved students. Even more concerning is that the three reviewers never noted the absence of demographic information and instead parroted the application’s assertion that the school was in a high-needs area.

The applicant certainly knew the disproportionate enrollment of wealthier white students in the charter school when it submitted its application in July of 2023. According to the application, 98.2% of the 2022- 23 students were returning in 2023-2024; therefore, the applicant also knew that the school’s demographics would remain stable. It was merely adding a grade level to accommodate its present sixth- grade class.

In summary, although the applicant stated its mission to be closing the achievement gap and serving disadvantaged students, the applicant knew that its student body made the serious fulfillmentof that mission impossible. We also believe this disproportionality in enrollment is by design, as explained below.

 Location of Cincinnati Classical Academy

 The applicant states the following regarding the location of the charter school: “The location within a diverse neighborhood with access to direct route highways to all areas of the city has allowed CCA to provide a high-quality tuition-free classical education model to adiverse student population, including student’s [sic] representative of urban intergenerational poverty and those experiencing social and economic deprivation during childhood and adolescence.”

 Although the school’s mailing address gives the impression that the school is located in Cincinnati, the school is located in Reading, Ohio, a city that is an inner suburb of the Cincinnati metropolitan area.

1 Data can be found here:https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/district/detail/043752

2 Data obtained from the 2022-23 databasehttps://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Data/Frequently-Requested-Data/Enrollment-Data

3 Data obtained from the 2022-23 database charter school tabhttps://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Data/Frequently-Requested-Data/Enrollment-Data

4 Data can be found here:https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/school/detail/019530The number of ELL students was obtained from the Ohio Education Department database which can be found here: https://education.ohio.gov/Topics/Data/Frequently- Requested-Data/Enrollment-Data.

 

According to the latest census, 84.8% of Reading residents are white,7.7% are Black, and 10.6% live in poverty5. The village of Evendale that abuts the school property is also predominantly white and has a poverty rate of 2.8%,6 significantly below the Cincinnati rate of 24.7%7, which is nearly twice the national rate.

 The location of the school was a deliberate choice. According to theschool’s website, the charter school had sought to locate the school in the former Catholic school facility since 2020.

From the website:

The new school has had interest in the property since 2020, but at that time Ohio law allowed public community schools [charter schools] to locate only in“challenged” school districts. That did not include Reading. In a surprise turn of events, Ohio H.B. 110 removed this restriction starting July 1, 2021.

“We were elated. We contacted the parish immediately to explore their interest,” Hartings said. “We were so fortunate to find a community that shares our values and goals, and that embraced the kind of school we are offering. The campus means a lot to the community, which has several generations of memories there.”8

 According to the submitted application, the charter school gives preference to resident children of the Reading Community School District, as required by Ohio State law. Therefore, the placement of the charter school in a “non-challenged “school district would likely result in a student population that was whiter and wealthier than the population described in the application.

 Forward Face of the Cincinnati Classical Charter Academy

 The forward face of a charter school is its website. From a school’s website, parents glean its philosophy and culture. What is featured on CCA’s website provides insight into the families the school wishes to attract. The applicant claims it seeks a “diverse student population,including student’s [sic] representative of urban intergenerational poverty and those experiencing social and economic deprivation during childhood and adolescence.”

 The CCA website, however, describes the school as providing “a tuition-free, classical liberal arts education” in “partnership with Hillsdale College,” a private Christian college, with no forward mention that the school is a charter school. The featured slide deck zooms in on the Christian cross on the school building. Although there is information on the school’s catered lunch program, it does not mention any provision for free or reduced-price lunches. Nowhere on the website does the school provide information in Spanish or other languages or indicate that it is inviting either socio-economically or racially diverse students.

In pictures of classrooms and hallways, the student body shows few students of color and no faculty of color. An image of the gymnasium shows a crucifix displayed on the wall, which we have been advised violates the law and the terms of the grant. A review of the school’svirtual tour features white students and a white faculty and administration.

 Inaccuracies in the Application

 Throughout the application, the applicant touts the first-year achievement results on state tests provided on page 759 of the application in Appendix G15. The applicant claims, “These results were achieved with

5 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/readingcityohio/PST045222

6  https://censusreporter.org/profiles/06000US3906125802-evendale-village-hamilton-county-oh/

The Department reviewers never questioned why the school never included demographic information. Instead, reviewers parroted back what the applicant said as if it were fact. A simple visit to the school website would have revealed the school for what it is. The lack of fact-checking by reviewers solicited from the charter community has been an ongoing concern.

7 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/cincinnaticityohio

 

8  https://www.cincyclassical.org/cincinnati-classical-academy-will-locate-in-reading/

 

a diverse student population that evidences the appeal of the Hillsdale K-12 classical education model to families from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds,” a claim which is clearly an over- exaggeration.

The school’s proficiency rates on page 759 do not match those listedon the state website.9 For example, the Ohio Education Department lists CCA’s 6th grade proficiency for the 2022-23 year as 76.9% and mathematics as 43.4%. These same rates are included in the school’s annual report.

 Yet, the application lists the rates of the same grade level as 92% and70%, respectively. Inflated rates are given in the application for every grade level in the school.

 To further make its case, it compares the school’s ratings to those of what it refers to as underperforming public schools in an underserved target area. It begins with the performance of the Cincinnati Public Schools and continues with schools in a five-mile radius. None of the schools listed in that five-mile radius are part of the Cincinnati Public School system. It should also be noted that the names of the schools it lists for the Reading School District are incorrect, and there are three, not four, schools in that district.

Conclusion

To be blunt, CCA is designed to attract an elite student body whose families seek a private school experience paid for by taxpayers. Its videos, website, and literature, which include showcasing the cross on the top of the building and a crucifix in the gymnasium, are designed to attract white Christian middle- class families from the diverse districts in the area.

 

The application does not report or explain its lack of diversity. Instead, it masquerades as an equity initiative. The application does not present a plan to become more diverse but instead funding to expand a grade level each year.

 While it is true the charter school’s proficiency rates exceed the state, that is hardly surprising given that nearly half of all Ohio publicschool students are economically disadvantaged compared to less than17% of CCA.

 

 

Therefore, we ask that the grant to CCA be terminated and, based on the false and misleading information that the school provided, that allmoney be returned to the Department and no further money bedisbursed.

 

Respectfully submitted,

The Network for Public Education

 With:

Greg Landsman, Ohio Congressional District 1

Catherine Ingram, Ohio Senator District 9

Child Wellness Fund, Inc.

Cleveland Heights Teachers Union

Erase the Space

Public Education Partners- Ohio

Cincinnati Federationof Teachers

Cincinnati Mennonite Fellowship

Bold New Democracy

 Dani Isaacsohn, Ohio State Representative District 24

Cecil Thomas, Ohio Representative District 25

Sedrick Denson, OhioState Representative District 26

Rachel Baker, Ohio State Representative District 27

JessicaMiranda, Ohio State RepresentativeDistrict 28

Ohio PTA

Ohio Education Association

Ohio Federation of Teachers

Cincinnati NAACP

Heights Coalition for Public Education

Honesty for Ohio Education

Northeast Democratic Club

 Northeast Ohio Friends of Public Education

 Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding

Renaissance Services

 Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Cincinnati

TransOhio

 Underworld Black Arts Festival

Categories Biden, Cardona, Miguel, Charter Schools, Cincinnati, Education Industry, Failure

An Infectious Diseases Doctor Assesses Trump’s Public Health Team

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2024 //
7

In Houston, Lisa Gray of the Houston Chronicle interviewed Dr. Peter Hotez, a respected practitioner, about the Trump agenda for public health. This is part two of a two-part post.

Gray writes:

Recently, after outlining five terrifying infectious diseases and potential pandemics looming on the world horizon, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez said that he doesn’t believe that the incoming Trump administration is taking those threats seriously enough.

That alarmed me. I’ve been interviewing Hotez since early 2020, right after COVID infections showed up in the United States. As he’s the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, he follows emerging disease threats closely. And with his team at Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, he develops low-cost vaccines for low-income nations. During the pandemic, he became one of the most recognized medical experts on COVID — and a local hero here in Houston. 

Videographer Sharon Steinmann and I spoke with Hotez in his office at Baylor. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why are you worried that the incoming Trump administration may not be ready for public-health threats on Day 1? Is that based on the people Donald Trump has named to health positions?

A: I’m concerned that the Trump administration is picking individuals based on their ideologies rather than either their subject-matter expertise or their ability to get things done in government.

Q: You’ve been acquainted for years with RFK Jr. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who Trump has nominated to be secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. How did you meet him?

A: I used to call him “Bobby.” I got to know him because in 2017 he indicated that he was going to head a vaccine commission for the new incoming Trump administration.

I was in my office, here where we’re speaking now, and my assistant said, “Hey, Dr. Hotez, I have Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins on the phone. Can you talk to them?”

Q: Whoa! Those are two big names in your field.

A: [Grins.] I said, “Yeah, I guess I’ll take the call.”

They said, “Peter, we’ve got a job for you. If anyone can explain to Kennedy why vaccines don’t cause autism, it’s you.”

They asked because I was a scientist and a pediatrician, and most importantly, I’d written a book, “Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism,” explaining how I can be sure that my daughter’s autism is not linked to vaccines. 

Tim Shriver, a terrific guy who heads the Special Olympics, brokered a meeting for us with RFK Jr. And for months after that, I had a number of long, long phone conversations with Bobby. Sometimes that would be while my wife Ann and I were out for a long walk through Montrose, and she’d listen in.

Q: How did that go? 

A: Our conversations weren’t very productive. It was an exercise in frustration, probably for both of us. He was pretty dug in. Either he didn’t understand the science or he didn’t have a lot of interest in it.

For instance, I would point out to Bobby that autism is a neurodevelopmental condition that starts early in pregnancy. We know this from multiple neurodevelopmental studies. So autism is well in motion before kids ever even see their first vaccine.

In addition to that, the Broad Institute, at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had also identified at least a hundred autism genes. Many of them are a type of gene called the neuronal cytoskeleton gene, which is involved in neuronal connections. (My wife Ann and I actually did a whole-genome sequencing on Rachel. We found that Rachel’s autism gene is different from the ones published by the Broad Institute, but it’s similar — it’s a neuronal cytoskeleton gene.)

Sergiu Pasca and his associates at Stanford University Medical School have also looked at what they call brain organoids. They can put neurons together in a petri dish and basically assemble them as mini-brains. This has been done now with neurons that have autism genes, and so the aberrant neuronal patterns really tell the complete story now.

It was frustrating to me that Bobby didn’t pay attention to the science and instead spouted dogma.

A: I got to know her during the COVID pandemic. She was a Fox News talking head, and I was going on Fox News pretty regularly in the evenings until I wouldn’t go along with the hydroxychloroquinine nonsense.

At the time, we talking heads on the various news channels would talk to each other. That was helpful because we were learning from each other. We all brought different expertise to the table.

Dr. Nesheiwat had a lot of humility. She wanted to know my opinion on COVID vaccines, how they worked and what were the different technologies. She was inquisitive and delightful to talk with. So I’m excited about her role as surgeon general. That’s at least one silver lining.

Q: Are there other silver linings?

A: Yeah. The other person that I got to know during the pandemic was Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz, because he had a show with wide reach. I would go on his show and talk about COVID vaccines.

I liked being on his show. He was respectful and thoughtful. He asked good questions and gave me an opportunity to talk to daytime audiences — people I wouldn’t ordinarily reach. I was grateful for that opportunity.

I think that both Dr. Nesheiwat and Dr. Oz are effective communicators. I think President-elect Trump wants to bring on good communicators.

Dr. Oz is heading a very bureaucratic organization, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. I don’t think that’s a perfect fit for him — he’d have been better off as something like surgeon general — but we’ll see.

Lisa Gray is the op-ed editor and a member of the Houston Chronicle editorial board. During the pandemic, she was the Chronicle’s lead COVID reporter.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Health, Science, Trump

Watch as Republicans Grovel Before Elon and Vivek

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2024 //
24

This is a sickening article that appeared in The Irish Times about a meeting on Capitol Hill between Congressional leaders and Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Why is it sickening? It shows our elected Congressional leaders preening and groveling in the presence of the world’s richest man and a man who is only very rich.

Our Leaders? Who elected Elon and Vivek?

Why an article from The Irish Times? My good friend and executive director of the Network for Public Education Carol Burris is spending the holidays there and sent it to me.

As you read the article, you can feel the obsequiousness that these elected officials are expressing as they wait for the phony Department of Government Efficiency to tell them what to cut.

“Elon and Vivek talked about having a naughty list and a nice list for members of Congress and senators and how we vote,” reported Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene who offered a beaming smile that suggested she knew which list she’d be making. “And how we’re spending American people’s money. I think that would be fantastic.”

One wonders what Ted Kennedy or Henry Clay or Lyndon Johnson, during their Senate years, would have made of two billionaires with zero political experience or authority, breezing into the Capitol and explaining to them they had a chance to make the nice list.

Speaker Johnson promised that Thursday’s meetings will be the first of many visits by Musk and Ramaswamy. “We believe it’s a historic moment for the country and these two gentlemen are going to help us navigate through this exciting day. Elon and Vivek don’t need much of an introduction here in Congress for certain and I think most of the public know what they are capable of and have achieved.

“They are innovators and forward thinkers and that’s what we need right now. We are laying the new ground rules for the new Congress in the new year, and we are going to see a lot of change here in Washington of the way things are run. That is what this whole Doge effort is about.”

Should they cut Social Security? Medicare? Veterans’ Healthcare? Grants for higher education? Title 1? Headstart?

Everything is on their chopping block.

How many civil servants will they seek to terminate?

Musk cut 80% of the staff at Twitter. Will he aim to lay off a huge percentage of the people who keep government running?

Musk tweeted a few days ago that government “should be rule by democracy, not rule by bureaucracy.”

How is it democratic to allow two unelected oligarchs to decide which programs should be eliminated? Why do Elon and Vivek–who will never need Medicare or Social Security–get to decide whether the rest of us can keep the programs that we rely on? If they get their way, there will be more people dying of health conditions that could been treated, more seniors eating cat food for dinner.

The politicians eagerly await their marching orders.

Sickening.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Musk, Elon, Politics, Trump

“Democracy”: How Pam Bondi Protected Foreclosure Fraud

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
3

Our reader, self-named “Democracy,” wrote an introduction to an article about Pam Bondi that appeared in The American Prospect. Please read the introduction and the article. We are only now learning about Bondi’s record as Florida Attorney General. Perhaps Trump nominated Matt Gaetz first to enable Bindi to skate through as everyone breathed a sigh of relief that Gaetz was out.

Democracy wrote:

More on Pam Bondi here:

“June Clarkson and Theresa Edwards were attorneys in the Economic Crimes division of the Florida attorney general’s office, based in Fort Lauderdale. They joined the government to prevent companies from ripping off their customers. In 2010, they heard from an oncology nurse named Lisa Epstein, who delivered information about how law firms across the state were using hundreds of thousands of phony documents to foreclose on homeowners. Lisa knew this because the banks tried to do it to her.

A group of foreclosure victims had found documents that were literally signed ‘Bogus Assignee.’ They had documents dated 9/9/9999. They had documents notarized on dates before they were allegedly created. They traced these documents back to Florida’s ‘foreclosure mills,’ law firms that churned out foreclosures the way a factory churns out sweaters. The false documents were necessary because banks and lenders, striving during the housing bubble to sell mortgages and deliver them to investors, securitized the loans without maintaining chain of title, botching the true ownership records. Instead of rectifying the situation, the banks had the foreclosure mills concoct false evidence and present it in courts to dispossess people.

Within months, the attorney general’s office had opened investigations into Lender Processing Services, Florida Default Law Group, the Law Office of David J. Stern, Marshall C. Watson, Shapiro & Fishman, and other components of Florida’s great foreclosure machine. In the course of the investigation, Clarkson and Edwards deposed Tammie Lou Kapusta, a former paralegal with David J. Stern, who testified that the firm employed offshore foreclosure document shops in Guam and the Philippines, receiving fake documents that the paralegals would sign. Notary stamps were sitting around the office, and anyone on the team would use them and forge the signatures of the notaries.

By October 2010, all of the leading banks stopped pursuing foreclosures in Florida and across the country, because they could no longer do it legally. It was an incredible example of citizen activism making a real difference, aided by Clarkson and Edwards, the first two law enforcement officials who were actually willing to investigate the fraud.

The system was working, until Pam Bondi came to town.”

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-11-22-when-pam-bondi-protected-foreclosure-fraudsters/

Categories Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Failure, Florida, Fraud, Trump

Was Today the Worst Day in American History?

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
40

The blog known as “That’s Another Fine Mess” declared November 25 , 2024, the worst day in our history. Read on to know why.

Do you agree?

Donald Trump’s real reason for running for re-election in 2024 was to stay out of prison. He knew that only a return to the White House would prevent him standing trial for initiating the January 6 insurrection, and standing trial for the theft of top secret documents. Conviction in either case would mean he would end his days as a convicted felon, quite possibly dying in prison.


Mission accomplished.


November 25, 2024, will be remembered in American history as the day the constitutional rule that no individual is above the law was ended.


Whether this leads to the end of the democratic constitutional republic – that has existed because of that rule – being overthrown by Donald J. Trump is unknown at this point, but it is at a minimum a severe blow to the foundation of that republic that will be difficult if not impossible to repair.


This morning, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to drop both cases. This afternoon, that motion was granted in the case of the Seditious Insurrection by Juge Tanya Chutkan. The action was taken “without prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be brought again at some time in the future. Does anyone think that one of the first acts of Attorney General Pam Bondi will not be to drop the cases in such a way that they can never be reinstituted?


This is the worst defeat of the forces of democracy in the history of this country.


Two men are solely responsible for this outcome: President Joseph R. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.


As productive as his presidency has been, Joe Biden suffered from the fatal flaw of being unable to see that his bedrock belief in “go along to get along” congressional bipartisanship had been decisively overthrown over the 20 years before he took office as president – something he hold have learned from his botched handling of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 – and was no longer an operating philosophy that could be successful. His Irish stubbornness led to his inability to see modern Republicans as the deadly enemy of everything he believed in that they were – which he only began to clearly see in the final two years of his presidency, when it was too late – was directly responsible for this defeat. His inability to take the kind of decisive action against that enemy – commencing the investigation and prosecution of the criminal Trump and his fellow conspirators on Day One of his term of office – meant that the enemy would be able to use the rights and privileges of a defendant when the investigation and prosecution was finally authorized too late, and defeat the system by retaking power, using the rules of the system to defeat it.

Biden’s inability to understand the true nature of the threat he faced was compounded by his decision to nominate the exact wrong candidate to be his Attorney General. Merrick Garland did not and does not have the heart of a fighter, which is the quality that was most needed in whoever took that office at that time. His judiciousness would have been excellent had he been able to become the Supreme Court Associate Justice President Obama nominated him to be. It is tragic that neither Garland – the victim of the “conservative movement” that had consumed the GOP – nor then-Vice President Biden who took part in making the nomination and was an eyewitness to the treason of Mitch McConnell as President of the Senate – took the proper understanding from what they had been part of. 

Both men desperately held on to obsolete beliefs with the tenacity of French Generals who stared uncomprehendingly at the German panzers that thoroughly defeated them in 1940. They clung to the idea that they could “look forward” and ignore the Great Crime that had been committed, but this time papering over the recent past only made the defeat inevitable. How thorough this defeat will loom in the history of the United States cannot be known at this time, but it cannot be seen as anything other than the Major Defeat that it is. There is no argument to be made that it is anything other than a disaster.

Those who fail to understand when the knowledge on which they have based their lives becomes obsolete cannot end other than how Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have arrived at the end their careers. This failure will outweigh all their other successes, viewed with the 20-20 hindsight of history.

Joe Biden should have listened to the counsel of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Trump

John Thompson: Steve Brill’s Destructive Attacks on Teachers Did Real Damage

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
8

Retired Oklahoma City teacher John Thompson wrote in The Oklahoman about the early days of the teacher-bashing movement. At its center he found a journalist-entrepreneur named Steve Brill, who wrote a slashing attack on teachers, tenure, and teacher unions in The New Yorker. Even in Oklahoma, Brill’s article was big news, because it identified the scapegoat that legislators wanted: teachers. Brill subsequently wrote a book celebrating charter schools, called Class Warfare. In that book, he falsely claimed that I had been bribed by teachers’ unions to become pro-union and pro-public school. So, as you might imagine, he is not a friend of mine.

John Thompson wrote:

In 2010, I attended an Oklahoma legislative committee meeting where most lawmakers were reading a New Yorker article, Steve Brill’s “The Rubber Room.”  It was full of attacks on teachers. Legislators found his narrative persuasive, and it contributed to the passage of the most destructive education bill I ever witnessed.

I then reached out to Brill, trying to share the social and cognitive science that explained why he was using invalid and unreliable data in support of a blame game that would undermine teaching and learning.

So, I was curious about what he now believes. After all, the subtitle for a recent interview with him was:

New York repealed measures that made it easier to fire ineffective teachers. The veteran journalist wonders if they ever mattered.

But, Brill, a non-educator, still sticks with an anti-teacher ideology, propagated by “astro-turf think tanks” that rejected the scientific method when trying to use venture capitalism procedures for transforming traditional public schools. Even after those reward-and-punish policies demonstrably failed, Brill says, “in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.” 

“The Rubber Room” presented little evidence that teachers were to blame. His sources focused on “the twentieth of one percent of all New York City teachers” who had been removed from the classroom, but not fired. He believed the PR from corporate reformers like The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and the New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein who thought “tenure is ridiculous.” 

Although value-added models (VAMs) were the foundation for holding teachers accountable for test score growth, Brill only used the term “value-added” once, and he didn’t bother to address that statistical model’s flawed methodology for evaluating individual teachers. (Some of those models even held teachers accountable for outcomes of students they never met!)

Brill merely wrote that the “value-added scores” was “a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’ union officials.”

Brill didn’t understand why it was impossible to recruit top teachers to highest-poverty schools using evaluation metrics that were biased against inner city teachers. Neither did he understand why these data-driven evaluations would prioritize “jukin the stats” and drill-and-kill instruction that would undermine holistic and meaningful teaching and learning. Brill certainly didn’t understand that teachers and unions also fought against VAMs in order to protect their students from teach-to-the-test malpractice which they would incentivize.

Brill was also dismissive of peer review, which the teachers union supported, and which was a constructive and efficient method of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. (In my experience, union leaders invested a great deal of political capital in removing ineffective teachers; it was administrators that would lose their nerve and not exit those teachers.)  

Brill drew upon the anti-union TNTP, which spread inaccurate information on the Toledo Plan, where districts and unions worked together to efficiently remove ineffective teachers. The TNTP claimed that the Toledo peer review program only removed .7% of probationary teachers over a five-year period.  In fact, 12.9% of teachers in the plan were removed from the classroom in 2009. The percentages of 2008 probationary teachers removed from the classroom in Syracuse (9.7%), Rochester (7%), Montgomery County (10.5%), and Minneapolis (37%) were far greater than outcomes that VAMs produced.

And that brings us to today’s attacks on education. After a history of failure, corporate reformers have moved away from teacher evaluation systems that rely on test score growth, even though they still tend to blame teachers and unions. But state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters now represents today’s version of disempowering teachers.

Walters pushed for and succeeded in getting the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke the license of Norman High School’s Summer Boismier, who “covered her bookshelves with red paper, [with] the words ‘books the state doesn’t want you to read,’ and a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library, which offers any student free access to banned books.” 

She has asked an Oklahoma County judge to review and reverse the revocation order, saying it was unlawful, frivilous and without a legitimate cause.

Also, Edmond’s Regan Killackey is fighting against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for a photo showing him playing with his kids at a Halloween supply store in September 2019. His daughter was wearing a mask of Donald Trump and his son held up a plastic sword, and Killackey had a grimaced look on his face.

If teachers lose their due process rights, who will be able to resist Walters’ civics curriculum committee which includes the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, a key sponsor of Project 2025?

Categories Failure, Inequity, Injustice, New York City, Teachers

Peter Greene: Another Charter Miracle School Implodes

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2024 //
7

Perhaps you remember “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” the overhyped documentary from 2010 that made the audacious claim that public schools were failing due to “bad teachers”and that the only sane alternative was charter schools. The documentary was funded by the Gates Foundation, with the obvious purpose of smearing public schools and promoting charter schools. I reviewed the film in the New York review of Books, in a review called “The Myth of Charter Schools.” Among other flaws in the film, I pointed out that it misused and distorted NAEP data to paint a horrifying picture of public schools. I concluded it was dishonest propaganda on behalf of the privatizers.

One of the amazing, miraculous charter schools featured in the film was a residential boarding school in D.C. called SEED.

Peter Greene writes that SEED is in deep trouble and may be shuttered.

The SEED School of Washington, D.C. was in the Washington Post yesterday, accused of inaccurate records and wholesale breezing past laws that are supposed to protect students with disabilities.

If the name of this unusual charter boarding school seems vaguely familiar, that may be because back in 2010, they were one of the charter schools lovingly lionized by the documentary hit piece, “Waiting for Superman.”

“Waiting for Superman” was a big hit, popularizing the neo-liberal narrative that public schools were failing because public school teachers were lazy incompetents. Every damn newspaper in the country jumped on the narrative. Roger Ebert jumped on. Oprah jumped on. NPR wondered why it didn’t get an Oscar (maybe, they posit, it was because one big emotional scene was made up). It helped sustain the celebrity brand of Michelle Rhee (the Kim Kardashian of education, famous despite having not accomplished anything). It was a slanted hatchet job that helped bolster the neoliberal case for Common Core and charter schools and test-centric education and heavy-handed “evaluation” of teachers.

And it boosted the profile of SEED, the DC charter whose secret sauce for student achievement is that it “takes them away from their home environments for five days a week and gives them a host of supporting services.”

Except it turns out that maybe it doesn’t do that after all. 

According to the WaPo piece, reported by Lauren Lumpkin, audits of the school suggest a variety of mistreatment of students with special needs.

SEED underreported the number of students it expelled last year. It couldn’t produce records of services it was supposed to have provided for some students with disabilities (most likely explanation–those services were never provided). Federal law says that before you expel a student with an IEP, you have meetings to decide if the misbehavior is a feature of their disability, or if their misbehavior stems from requirements of the IEP that are not being provided. 

These have the fancy name of “manifestation determination” which just means the school needs to ask– is the student acting out because that’s what her special situation makes her do, or because the Individualized Education Program that’s supposed to help deal with that special situation is not being actually done. For absurd example– is the student repeatedly late to her class on the second floor because she’s in a wheelchair? Does her IEP call for elevator transport to the second floor, and there’s no elevator in the building? Then maybe don’t suspend her for chronic lateness. 

Founded in 1998, SEED enrolls about 250 students, which seems to preclude any sort of “just lost the details in the crowd” defense. But as Lumpkin reports, questions arose.

But after receiving complaints about discipline, understaffing and compliance with federal law, the city’s charter oversight agency started an audit of the school in July. One complaint claimed school officials had manipulated attendance data and were not recording suspensions.

The audit’s findings sparked scathing commentary from charter board members and questions about SEED D.C.’s practices.

“I’m the parent of a special-needs child, and I’ve got to tell you, reading what was happening in these pages, it’s like a parent’s worst nightmare,” charter board member Nick Rodriguez told SEED D.C. leaders. “I sincerely hope that you will take that seriously as you think about what needs to happen going forward.”

Lumpkin reports that this is not their first round of problems. A 2023 audit found a high number of expulsions and suspensions compared to other charters– five times higher. A cynical person might conclude that SEED addressed the problem by just not reporting the full numbers. Inaccurate data, missed deadlines, skipping legal requirements–that’s a multi-year pattern for the school.

The school is now on a “notice of concern,” a step on the road to losing its charter and being closed down (or I suppose they could just switch over to a private voucher-accepting school).

The whole sad story of the many students who have been ill-served by SEED is one more reminder that there are no miracles in education, and no miracle schools, either. 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, District of Columbia, Education Industry, Failure, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates

The New York Times Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2024 //
47

The New York Times editorial board published its endorsement of Kamala Harris on September 30. Its editorial says plainly that Donald Trump is unfit for the presidency. Since the editorial appeared, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post announced that they would not endorse anyone in this crucial election. Thank you to The Times for speaking up against a showman who has promised to destroy our democracy and who has behaved like a carnival barker during the campaign. These are dangerous times. We need a thoughtful intelligent President. We need Kamala Harris.

The editorial is titled “The Only Patriotic Choice for President”: :

It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump. He has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest. He has proved himself temperamentally unfit for a role that requires the very qualities — wisdom, honesty, empathy, courage, restraint, humility, discipline — that he most lacks.

Those disqualifying characteristics are compounded by everything else that limits his ability to fulfill the duties of the president: his many criminal charges, his advancing age, his fundamental lack of interest in policy and his increasingly bizarre cast of associates.

This unequivocal, dispiriting truth — Donald Trump is not fit to be president — should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.

For this reason, regardless of any political disagreements voters might have with her, Kamala Harris is the only patriotic choice for president.

Most presidential elections are, at their core, about two different visions of America that emerge from competing policies and principles. This one is about something more foundational. It is about whether we invite into the highest office in the land a man who has revealed, unmistakably, that he will degrade the values, defy the norms and dismantle the institutions that have made our country strong.

As a dedicated public servant who has demonstrated care, competence and an unwavering commitment to the Constitution, Ms. Harris stands alone in this race. She may not be the perfect candidate for every voter, especially those who are frustrated and angry about our government’s failures to fix what’s broken — from our immigration system to public schools to housing costs to gun violence. Yet we urge Americans to contrast Ms. Harris’s record with her opponent’s.

Ms. Harris is more than a necessary alternative. There is also an optimistic case for elevating her, one that is rooted in her policies and borne out by her experience as vice president, a senator and a state attorney general.

Over the past 10 weeks, Ms. Harris has offered a shared future for all citizens, beyond hate and division. She has begun to describe a set of thoughtful plans to help American families.

While character is enormously important — in this election, pre-eminently so — policies matter. Many Americans remain deeply concerned about their prospects and their children’s in an unstable and unforgiving world. For them, Ms. Harris is clearly the better choice. She has committed to using the power of her office to help Americans better afford the things they need, to make it easier to own a home, to support small businesses and to help workers. Mr. Trump’s economic priorities are more tax cuts, which would benefit mostly the wealthy, and more tariffs, which will make prices even more unmanageable for the poor and middle class.

Beyond the economy, Ms. Harris promises to continue working to expand access to health care and reduce its cost. She has a long record of fighting to protect women’s health and reproductive freedom. Mr. Trump spent years trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and boasts of picking the Supreme Court justices who ended the constitutional right to an abortion.

Globally, Ms. Harris would work to maintain and strengthen the alliances with like-minded nations that have long advanced American interests abroad and maintained the nation’s security. Mr. Trump — who has long praised autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and Kim Jong-un — has threatened to blow those democratic alliances apart. Ms. Harris recognizes the need for global solutions to the global problem of climate change and would continue President Biden’s major investments in the industries and technologies necessary to achieve that goal. Mr. Trump rejects the accepted science, and his contempt for low-carbon energy solutions is matched only by his trollish fealty to fossil fuels.

As for immigration, a huge and largely unsolved issue, the former president continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants, while Ms. Harris at least offers hope for a compromise, long denied by Congress, to secure the borders and return the nation to a sane immigration system.

Many voters have said they want more details about the vice president’s plans, as well as more unscripted encounters in which she explains her vision and policies. They are right to ask. Given the stakes of this election, Ms. Harris may think that she is running a campaign designed to minimize the risks of an unforced error — answering journalists’ questions and offering greater policy detail could court controversy, after all — under the belief that being the only viable alternative to Mr. Trump may be enough to bring her to victory. That strategy may ultimately prove winning, but it’s a disservice to the American people and to her own record. And leaving the public with a sense that she is being shielded from tough questions, as Mr. Biden has been, could backfire by undermining her core argument that a capable new generation stands ready to take the reins of power.

Ms. Harris is not wrong, however, on the clear dangers of returning Mr. Trump to office. He has promised to be a different kind of president this time, one who is unrestrained by checks on power built into the American political system. His pledge to be “a dictator” on “Day 1” might have indeed been a joke — but his undisguised fondness for dictatorships and the strongmen who run them is anything but.

Most notably, he systematically undermined public confidence in the result of the 2020 election and then attempted to overturn it — an effort that culminated in an insurrection at the Capitol to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power and resulted in him and some of his most prominent supporters being charged with crimes. He has not committed to honoring the result of this election and continues to insist, as he did at the debatewith Ms. Harris on Sept. 10, that he won in 2020. He has apparently made a willingness to support his lies a litmus test for those in his orbit, starting with JD Vance, who would be his vice president.

His disdain for the rule of law goes beyond his efforts to obtain power; it is also central to how he plans to use it. Mr. Trump and his supporters have described a 2025 agenda that would give him the power to carry out the most extreme of his promises and threats. He vows, for instance, to turn the federal bureaucracy and even the Justice Department into weapons of his will to hurt his political enemies. In at least 10 instancesduring his presidency, he did exactly that, pressuring federal agencies and prosecutors to punish people he felt had wronged him, with little or no legal basis for prosecution.

Some of the people Mr. Trump appointed in his last term saved America from his most dangerous impulses. They refused to break laws on his behalf and spoke up when he put his own interests above his country’s. As a result, the former president intends, if re-elected, to surround himself with people who are unwilling to defy his demands. Today’s version of Mr. Trump — the twice-impeached version that faces a barrage of criminal charges — may prove to be the restrained version.

Unless American voters stand up to him, Mr. Trump will have the power to do profound and lasting harm to our democracy.

That is not simply an opinion of Mr. Trump’s character by his critics; it is a judgment of his presidency from those who know it best — the very people he appointed to serve in the most important positions of his White House. It is telling that among those who fear a second Trump presidency are people who worked for him and saw him at close range.

Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s vice president, has repudiated him. No other vice president in modern history has done this. “I believe that anyone who puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Mr. Pence has said. “And anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.”

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has raised similar concerns about his fundamental unfitness. And his chief of staff. And his defense secretary. And his national security advisers. And his education secretary. And on and on — a record of denunciation without precedent in the nation’s long history.

That’s not to say Mr. Trump did not add to the public conversation. In particular, he broke decades of Washington consensus and led both parties to wrestle with the downsides of globalization, unrestrained trade and China’s rise. His criminal-justice reform efforts were well placed, his focus on Covid vaccine development paid off, and his decision to use an emergency public health measure to turn away migrants at the border was the right call at the start of the pandemic. Yet even when the former president’s overall aim may have had merit, his operational incompetence, his mercurial temperament and his outright recklessness often led to bad outcomes. Mr. Trump’s tariffs cost Americans billions of dollars. His attacks on China have ratcheted up military tensions with America’s strongest rival and a nuclear superpower. His handling of the Covid crisis contributed to historic declines in confidence in public health, and to the loss of many lives. His overreach on immigration policies, such as his executive order on family separation, was widely denounced as inhumane and often ineffective.

And those were his wins. His tax plan added $2 trillion to the national debt; his promised extension of them would add $5.8 trillion over the next decade. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal destabilized the Middle East. His support for antidemocratic strongmen like Mr. Putin emboldened human rights abusers all over the world. He instigated the longest government shutdown ever. His sympathetic comments toward the Proud Boys expanded the influence of domestic right-wing extremist groups.

In the years since he left office, Mr. Trump was convicted on felony charges of falsifying business records, was found liable in civil court for sexual abuse and faces two, possibly three, other criminal cases. He has continued to stoke chaos and encourage violence and lawlessness whenever it suits his political aims, most recently promoting vicious lies against Haitian immigrants. He recognizes that ordinary people — voters, jurors, journalists, election officials, law enforcement officers and many others who are willing to do their duty as citizens and public servants — have the power to hold him to account, so he has spent the past three and a half years trying to undermine them and sow distrust in anyone or any institution that might stand in his way.

Most dangerous for American democracy, Mr. Trump has transformed the Republican Party — an institution that once prided itself on principle and honored its obligations to the law and the Constitution — into little more than an instrument of his quest to regain power. The Republicans who support Ms. Harris recognize that this election is about something more fundamental than narrow partisan interest. It is about principles that go beyond party.

In 2020 this board made the strongest case it could against the re-election of Mr. Trump. Four years later, many Americans have put his excesses out of their minds. We urge them and those who may look back at that period with nostalgia or feel that their lives are not much better now than they were three years ago to recognize that his first term was a warning and that a second Trump term would be much more damaging and divisive than the first.

Kamala Harris is the only choice.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Harris, Kamala, Trump

Jonathan V. Last: Oligarchy is on the Rise

By dianeravitch
October 31, 2024 //
7

Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the always interesting gathering spot for Never Trumpers. He wrote that he has been stewing about the intervention of Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, to stop the editorial board from endorsing Kamala. after Bezos locked the editorial, three of the 10-member editorial board stepped down.

He wrote:

ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.

Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.

This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.

When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.

Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.

Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.

So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.

What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.

But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.

The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.

My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runs the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed,

America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here.

Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative.

The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.

And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.

So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.

Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.

Yesterday, Timothy Snyder issued a call to Americans to not obey in advance. He is correct, of course. We should continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.

If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.

But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.

The hour is later than we think.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Fascism, Freedom of the Press, Trump

How Is It Possible that Trump and Harris Are Statistically Tied?

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2024 //
71

I have been puzzling over this question since the Democratic National Convention.

Like most people, I didn’t know much about Kamala Harris when she became Vice President. Now that I have seen her speak, now that I saw her debate Trump, I feel very energized to support her campaign for the Presidency.

She is smart, well informed, experienced, committed to the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law. She is thoughtful and composed. She laughs, she smiles, she seems like a kind and thoughtful person. She is well prepared for the presidency, having won election as the District Attorney of San Francisco, as Attorney General of the State of California, as U.S. Senator from California, and as Vice-President of the United States since Joe Biden and she were elected in 2020.

Her opponent is a bundle of equal parts narcissism and hatred. He likes men. He likes white men. He likes to play tough guy. He looks on women as sex objects and feather heads. He doesn’t respect women.

He is crude, vulgar, without a shred of the dignity we expect from a president. The language he uses to ridicule and insult others is vile.

He is a racist, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a Christian nationalist (without being a practicing Christian).

He is a sexual predator. He is known for not paying people to whom he owes money for services rendered. He has gone through six bankruptcies.

He is ignorant. His former aides say he has never read the Constitution. He is driven by his massive ego. He wants everyone to say he’s the best, the greatest, and there’s never been anyone as great as him.

He is a convicted felon, convicted on 34 counts of business fraud in New York. He was found guilty by a jury in New York of defaming E. Jean Carroll, who accused him of sexually assaulting her many years ago. He was ordered to pay her more than $90 million for continuing to defame her. That judgment is on appeal.

Other trials are pending.

When he lost the 2020 election, he refused to accept his defeat. He schemed to overturn the election by various ploys. He summoned a mob of his fans to Washington on January 6, 2021, the day that Congress gathered for the ceremonial certification of the election. Trump encouraged them to march on the U.S. Capitol, “peaceably….(but) fight like hell.” They did fight like hell. They battered their way into the Capitol, smashing windows and doors, beating law officers, vandalizing the building and its offices, while hunting for Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The outnumbered law officers held them off to protect the members of Congress. Many of them were brutally beaten. Some later died. What if the mob had reached the members of Congress? What if they had captured Pence and Pelosi?

It was the most shameful day of our national history. A President encouraging a mob to sack the Capitol and overturn the Constitution.

Ever since that disgraceful day, Trump has reiterated that the election was stolen from him, even though it wasn’t close. He has undermined faith in the electoral process, faith in the judiciary, faith in the law.

These are the two candidates: Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.

Why is this election close?

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fascism, Fraud, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Kentucky, Nebraska, Racism, Trump
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