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Margaret Sullivan on “Sanewashing” Trump

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2024 //
119

Margaret Sullivan is an experienced journalist who previously served as the Public Editor (ombudsman) of The New York Times. She now has a blog, where she writes about the media.

In this post, she explains the phenomenon called “sanewashing.” What is this term? It’s recently invented, presumably in reaction to current events. It refers to framing a news story to describe an incoherent rant as a thoughtful policy discussion.

She writes:

Like whitewashing a fence, sanewashing a speech covers a multitude of problems. The Urban Dictionary definition: Attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public … a portmanteau of “sane” plus “whitewashing.”

Here, as an example, is a Politico news alert that summarizes a recent Trump speech: “Trump laid out a sweeping vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in a speech to top Wall Streets execs today.” As writer Thor Benson quipped on Twitter: “I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not.”

Trump has become more incoherent as he has aged, but you wouldn’t know it from most of the press coverage, which treats his utterances as essentially logical policy statements — a “sweeping vision,” even.

After the intense media focus on Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity, you would think Trump’s apparent decline would be a preoccupation. He is 78, after all, and often incoherent. But with rare exceptions, that hasn’t happened.

I will give the Washington Post some credit here for the way it covered the speech mentioned above, specifically his answer to a question about how he would fund child care.

“Trump offers confusing plan to pay for U.S. child care with foreign tariffs,” the headline said. But many others, including the New York Times, sanewashed what he said, which went like this:

“Well, I would do that and we’re sitting down, you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, who was so impactful on that issue … But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’ve talking about because the childcare is childcare, couldn’t, you know, there’s something you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.”

And then he went on to say that his idea of tariffs on China will take care of the cost of pretty much everything, which might remind you of how he claims deporting immigrants will pay for affordable housing.

Sweeping vision, you say?

But why does the media sanewash Trump? It’s all a part of the false-equivalence I’ve been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

And it’s also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That’s often a good thing; it’s part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Fake, Language, Lies, Trump

Heather Cox Richardson Reviews the Last Night of the Republican Convention

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2024 //
20

Heather Cox Richardson skillfully deconstructs the symbolism and iconography of the last night of the Republican Convention. Her insightful review makes me happy that I didn’t watch. She touches on widespread speculation that Trump was hit at the Pennsylvania rally not by a bullet but by a shattered piece of plastic from the teleprompter.

She writes:

Also making history last night was the final night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the night on which former president Donald J. Trump accepted the party’s presidential nomination. Coming as it did just days after a would-be assassin took a shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, killing one attendee and badly wounding two others, the convention was billed by Republican operatives as a way for Trump to rebrand himself as a candidate of “unity.” 

This was certainly the way many major newspapers billed Trump’s acceptance speech this morning, in stories that, as media journalist Parker Molloy noted, were probably based on prepared remarks delivered to news agencies in advance of the speech. But it was not how the evening played out.

Since Saturday’s shooting, it has been notable that there has not been a medical review of Trump’s injuries, although he has said he was injured by a bullet that ripped through his ear. This matters not only because of the extent of his injuries, but also because Trump has made the story part of his identity without any fact check, and the media appears simply to be letting it go on Trump’s say-so, something that adds to the sense that media outlets are treating Trump and Biden differently.

Last night, Trump perhaps tried to address this lack by recounting last Saturday’s shooting. Interestingly, he did not say he was hit by a bullet, but that when he felt the injury he thought, “it can only be a bullet.” Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo today noted a report from local Pennsylvania television station WPXI that four motorcycle officers standing within feet of Trump suffered minor injuries from flying debris. Trump has likely cut off further discussion of the topic by saying it is too painful to tell the story again. 

With that story behind him, Trump hit the theme of unity, saying he would bring the country together. “The discord and division in our society must be healed, we must heal it quickly. We are bound together by a single fate, a single destiny,” he said. “We rise together. Or we fall apart…. I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America. So tonight, with faith and devotion, I proudly accept your nomination for president of the United States.”

But that was just in the first ten minutes. Then Trump ignored the teleprompter and things veered far off course, reflecting the candidate that has stayed in the safe spaces of Mar-a-Lago and rallies of his loyalists for years. Trump rambled for more than 90 minutes, making it the longest acceptance speech in U.S. history and outlasting the interest of the audience, some of whom fell asleep. 

He went on to recite his usual litany of lies: that Democrats cheated in the 2020 presidential election (they did not), that crime is going up (it’s plummeting), that inflation is the worst we’ve ever had (it’s around 3%; the worst was around 23%), that Democrats want to quadruple people’s taxes (CNN fact checker Daniel Dale calls this “imaginary”), and so on. Dale called it “a remarkably dishonest acceptance speech.” 

Journalist James Fallows posted: “Of the maybe 10,000 political speeches I’ve heard over the years, this was overall the worst.” Statistician Nate Silver’s judgment was harsher, in a way: he began with “It’s a weird but a pretty good speech,” then posted “Semi-retract this tweet, this speech is boring AF, but there are worse things politically speaking than being boring.” Shortly after, came: “Fully RETRACT and RESCIND, sometimes it seems like both parties are trying to throw this election.” 

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes watched the unhinged speech and concluded: “This is not a colossus, this is not the big bad wolf, this is not a vigorous and incredibly deft political communicator. This is an old man in decline who’s been doing the same schtick for a very long time and it’s really wearing thin.”

The point, though, as Trump meandered through attacks on immigrants and a diatribe about the fictional character cannibal Hannibal Lecter—who he might think was real—as it always has been, was to present a picture of the U.S. under siege by enemies who are persecuting him because he represents true Americans and that he must be returned to office because only he can vanquish those enemies. Greg Sargent of The New Republic noted that Trump cannot offer a “unity” message because “Trump himself knows the MAGA masses will not be satiated without expansive displays of rage, cruelty and sadism directed at hated out groups and designated enemies of MAGA.”

For years, observers have noted that Trump’s approach to politics is patterned on the “kayfabe” at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal. According to journalist Abraham Josephine Reisman, in old-school kayfabe the actors never let their masks slip, and while the audience knew what they were seeing must be fake, they played along with the illusion.

But in the 1990s, the barrier between reality and illusion blurred as wrestlers and promoters tried to increase the viability of the fading industry by tossing reality into the performances: real-life insults—the more outrageous the better—and real-life events. Decoding what was real and what was not drove engagement until in 1999, an estimated 18% of Americans, about 50 million people, called themselves fans. This “neokayfabe,” Reisman wrote in the New York Times in 2023, “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.” 

Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, “turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul.”

Trump participated in a storyline in this neokayfabe with World Wrestling Entertainment owner Vince McMahon in 2007, in part billed as a battle over hair. Eventually he was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, and many observers have made the link between neokayfabe and his approach to politics. Indeed, he even blended the two explicitly when he chose McMahon’s wife, Linda, to head the U.S. Small Business Administration during his presidency.  

Neokayfabe and politics came together again last night at the Republican National Convention, as Linda McMahon, wrestler Hulk Hogan, and musician Kid Rock, whose music has been featured at wrestling events and who is also a member of the WWE Hall of Fame, all participated. 

“So all you criminals, all you lowlifes, all you scumbags…. Whatcha gonna do when Donald Trump and all the Trumpamaniacs run wild on you, brother?!” Hogan yelled to wild applause after ripping off his shirt to show a Trump-Vance shirt. Like the other performers at the convention, he painted a portrait of Trump’s presidency, and of the United States since Trump left office, that was a fantasy of good and evil. Hogan reinforced that there was no way Trump was going to reach toward unity in Milwaukee. His approach to the world cannot be moderated. It depends on the idea that there are two teams in the performance and one must vanquish the other.

Part of that storyline requires rewriting not just the recent past, but our history. At the convention last night, Donald Trump Jr.’s fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said: “It is no wonder that the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy and faced down communism sadly say they don’t recognize our country anymore.” But the Allied soldiers in World War II were not fighting communism. They were fighting fascism. The three great Allied powers were Great Britain, the United States, and the communist Soviet Union. 

It might be that Guilfoyle misspoke, or that she doesn’t know even the most basic facts of our history. Or it might be that by rewriting that history to put America on the side of the fascists, people like Guilfoyle hope to make that alliance more palatable to MAGA followers today.

********************************

If, like me, you were puzzled by the term “kayfabe,” you will enjoy this article written by Abraham Josephine Reisman, which appeared in the New York Times (no paywall).

Categories Elections, Fake, Trump

My Twitter Account Has Been Hacked and Suspended: Please Complain to X on My Behalf

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
43

My Twitter name is @DianeRavitch. I have about 146,000 followers. My account is instantly recognizable because it has my photo and a few symbolic emojis.

In late 2022, someone created a Twitter account called @Ravitch_Diane. It has no emojis, no photo and 81 followers.

The fake account has now taken control of my Twitter account. Anything I post goes to the fake Twitter account.

I tried to fill out the form to complain about the impersonation, sent my ID and photo, got verified, but failed to submit because the last instruction said, “Open your email account” before submitting. Each time I followed instructions but was unable to submit. The last hurdle made no sense.

Meanwhile I went to the fake account and saw that it was registered to an unfamiliar email. I couldn’t delete it or change it but I could change my birthdate and the handle. My birthdate is July 1, 1938. I changed it to another year, I forget which, but probably 2012. I was immediately locked out of Twitter because I’m too young! (Oh, to be 12 again!)

Not only was the fake account locked but so was my genuine account. This demonstrates that the two were interlocked. The hacker and I.

This is not the biggest problem in the world these days, but I would be grateful for your help.

Please contact X and ask them to ban the hacker, eliminate the fake account, and restore my real account.

When I changed the handle on the fake account, I made it now @goToMyRealAcct

I am now completely locked out and you alone can save me!

Needless to say, there is no customer service to whom one may speak. Like, a human being.

Categories Accountability, Fake, Fraud

Help! My Twitter Account Has Been Hacked!

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2024 //
30

About 18 months ago, I discovered that someone had set up a Twitter account pretending to be me.

My Twitter “handle” is @DianeRavitch.

The fake account is @Ravitch_Diane. I tried to find someone at Twitter to take it down but had no luck. I posted on it that it’s a fake.

I decided to ignore it because it had so few followers. As of now, it has 81 followers, while my real account has over 145,000.

But in the last 24 hours, something changed. Whenever I post a tweet, it goes to the fake account. Whatever I post or repost, it won’t come up on my real account but only on the fake. My real account has been silenced.

I’ve reached out to X, but I can communicate only with AI. I can’t deactivate the fake account unless I have the email for whoever opened it. Nor do I have the password.

So unless someone has a solution, I now have a parasite sucking away my tweets and reposts to a fake account with only 81 followers.

If you have any ideas about how to get X to shut down the fake account, please let me know.

Categories Fake, Fraud, Media

Ohio: The Corrupt GOP Politicians Defunding Public Schools and Their Students

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2024 //
6

Marilou Johanek is a veteran journalist in Ohio. She writes here about the Republican politicians who used their power to impose universal vouchers on the state. The main beneficiaries are children of the affluent who are already enrolled in private and religious schools and who can already afford the tuition. The losers are the vast majority of public school students, whose schools are underfunded.

What does the future hold for states that skimp on the education of the next generation while lavishing billion-dollar subsidies on the families of the well-off?

Johanek writes:

My way or the highway may be your boss’s motto and your cross to bear. But if that is the mantra of publicly elected officials in a representative government — as it sure seems to be in Ohio — all of us have a problem. A big one. 

The political bosses in Ohio conduct the people’s business with take-it-or-leave-it ultimatums. They’re not running a democracy; they’re dictating decisions made. They do not entertain questions about their extremist agenda to ban invented threats, ignore real ones, claw back rights, reduce women to breeders, welcome polluters to state parks, or defund public education to pay for private schools. 

When challenged over their arguably lawless mandates, Ohio Republican leaders mount a full court press to dismiss, disparage, intimidate, and circumvent countervailing forces that dare confront absolute power. Consider the all-out effort of GOP chieftains to scuttle a statewide lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Republican fetish to fund private schools with hundreds of millions of apparently unlimited public tax dollars.

The partisans sprang into action to protect the $1-billion-dollar-and-counting boondoggle they created last year with universal vouchers that pay private school tuition for the affluent few at the expense of the many — a majority of Ohio students who attend traditional public-school districts. Ever since GOP lawmakers — led by Ohio Senate President and go-to financier of diocesan schools Matt Huffman — opened the government dole to any private school student with their voucher change slipped into the state budget, unaccountable public spending on private schools has exploded.

The amount of tax dollars going to students already attending private, mostly religious schools tripled the first school year uncapped voucher money was there for the taking. Many of the private school families sweeping up the easy cash earn north of $250,000 annually. The initial Republican rationale for diverting state educational funding from public to parochial schools was that the public handouts offered low-income families in failing school districts access to better school options. 

But that excuse was a ruse to subsidize religious education with taxpayer money and gradually starve public education of critical financial support. The flood of public funds to prop up Catholic schools came from the same general revenue pool that was supposed to keep public school districts afloat not be shortchanged by private education giveaways.  

The fallback for fiscally depleted districts is school levies that fail more often than not. Which, as every public school parent knows, means likely cuts to staff, extracurricular programs, student support services, and capital improvements, decades overdue, shelved again.

Little wonder that more than 200 school districts across Ohio have joined a growing coalition contesting the unprecedented release of public funds to every private school family — regardless of income or quality of home district — in a lawsuit bound for trial. 

They argue the private school “EdChoice” voucher expansion breaking the public education budget violates the state constitution by creating a separate, unequal and segregated school system of privatized education bankrolled with money the state is constitutionally obligated to spend on public education alone. Meanwhile public school students go to class in crappy buildings erected in the 1950s (because there’s no money to build a new ones) and enjoy fewer, if any, electives in music and art, or reading tutors, or enough counselors, AP course offerings, gifted services, or small class sizes, etc. 

The billion-dollar windfall to offset private school tuition many families can afford would be a godsend to public schools making do with less. God bless those who choose to send their students to expensive parochial institutions. But none of us agreed to collectively finance your private school choice that, frankly, serves a private interest, not a public one.

We agreed instead to fund what serves the greater good, not what satisfies individual preference. We do the same with other public services (besides free public education) when our taxes support local law enforcement, fire protection, mental health resources, metro park amenities and other community systems that benefit everybody. The lawsuit to strike down Ohio’s harmful universal vouchers recently added the Upper Arlington school district, in a suburb of Columbus, to its ballooning list of participants.

Ohio’s Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted personally pressured the district to pass on the legal fight before the school board voted to join it. Ohio’s Republican Attorney General Dave Yost tried and failed to get a Franklin County court to dismiss the voucher lawsuit altogether. Huffman, the architect of the school privatization scheme in the legislature, refused to sit for a lawsuit deposition. 

He even balked at submitting written answers. Finally, the Lima Republican appealed to the Republican-majority state supreme court (he engineered) to judge him above accountability per the litigation. The GOP my-way-or-the-highway bosses aren’t finished trying to out-maneuver public school advocates fighting for fair and equitable public funding. But their secret is out. 

In the school year that just ended, taxpayers forked over a billion dollars’ worth of tuition payments for a slice of well-off students enrolled in pricey private schools. That’s not okay with public school families eying another school levy or their kids will do without. The state’s autocrats bosses should be on notice; their take-it-or-leave-it dictate on universal vouchers went too far. 

It provoked a public education crusade willing to see you in court, Messrs. Huffman, Yost and Husted. So save the trial date. It’s Nov. 4. 

Categories Budget Cuts, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Funding, Ohio, Privatization, Religion, Separation of church and state, Shame, Vouchers

Scott Maxwell: Why Di$ney and De$antis Are Friends Again

By dianeravitch
June 1, 2024 //
3

Scott Maxwell is one of the most astute and fearless journalists in Florida. He regularly blasts politicians and fat-cat corporations when they collaborate against the public interest. He did it again, in his column in The Orlando Sentinel, calling out Disney and DeSantis for their cynical behavior.

He wrote:

Disney — a company that made national news when it announced it was ending campaign donations in Florida — is back in the political game.

This is about as surprising as when Sleeping Beauty woke up before the movie ended. You know, instead of spending the rest of her life in a coma.

See, despite all its high-minded declarations about removing itself from the dirty world of politics, Disney was always going to jump back in the slop.

Why? Because campaign donations are basically legal bribery. And Disney has long been one of the biggest bribers in the state.

In fact, the main reason Ron DeSantis and other GOP lawmakers revolted against Disney two years ago was because Disney cut off their cash.

Sure, the politicians claimed they were upset about Disney standing up for LGBTQ rights. But DeSantis and legislators didn’t go nuclear on Mickey until the company said it was ending campaign donations. Before that, Disney was one of the Florida GOP’s biggest sugar daddies. And the politicians were Disney’s reliable puppets.

The examples were endless. Disney would request tax breaks, protection from lawsuits and mandatory sick-time regulations, even laws that allowed theme parks to get rid of lost-and-found items faster. And the lawmakers who received Disney dollars happily obliged.

That certainly included Ron DeSantis. When the company wanted to be exempted from the governor’s planned crackdown on social media back in 2021, Disney cut DeSantis a $50,000 check, told his staffers how to write the law and — voila! — it included a special carve out for any company that “owns and operates a theme park.”

Some people believe Disney is a liberal company. But this company will give to anyone in a position to do favors — Republican, Democrat or serial killer.

Some hardcore Disney fans don’t like to hear that. They like to believe Disney has a genuine moral compass. Not when it comes to campaign donations.

Disney gave money to both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump during the same campaign cycle. (You can decide for yourself what kind of ideological value$ that $ugge$t$….)

Now, Disney has definitely given Florida Republicans way more money than Florida Democrats over the last couple of decades — not because Mickey and Minnie are big backers of the NRA, but because Republicans have all the power.

Disney cut the Republican Party of Florida about a dozen checks for as much as $100,000 apiece during the 2022 cycle — and then threw in another $148,000 worth of free resort rooms, theme park tickets and other goodies. Disney gave Florida Democrats less than half that.

Disney also gave a lot of cash directly to some of the most anti-gay politicians in the state. That included every sponsor of the infamous “Don’t Say Gay”/”Parental Rights” law, as well as the attorneys general who tried to keep same-sex couple from marrying one another. When hard-core lawmakers fought to prevent LGBTQ citizens — including some of Disney’s most loyal cast members — from ever adopting children, Disney cut those politicians checks to help them stay in office.

The only reason Disney paused its campaign donations was because this column and newspaper exposed the company’s two-faced political giving — funding anti-gay politicians while flying rainbow flags and promoting equality — which prompted Disney employees and even Abigail Disney to revolt.

But as soon as Disney announced it was cutting off the politicians, the politicians attacked, making it clear that if Disney wouldn’t pay, the politicians weren’t going to play.

Well, Disney is apparently paying again. As the Sentinel reported last week, State Sen. Geraldine Thompson acknowledged Disney was helping sponsor a fundraiser for her re-election campaign.

If Disney was looking to dip its toe back into the donation pool, Thompson seems like a relatively safe way to do so. The Windermere Democrat, after all, is a popular, moderate veteran elected official.

I suppose it’s possible that Disney will be more selective about its future donations and refuse to fund politicians who espouse values that run counter to the ones the company claims to have. But I doubt it. Especially since some of the same GOP politicians who spent the last two years demonizing Disney seem eager to start cashing their checks again.

Florida Politics reported last month that GOP party chairman Evan Powers was ready to move past the anti-Disney ruckus, saying he “always believed that Disney will come back to the table.” And DeSantis recently did Disney a big favor when he decided to put his former staffer — the one who’d worked with Disney lobbyists behind the scenes to do the company favors — in charge of the theme park’s government district.

Keep in mind: DeSantis previously accused Disney of “sexualizing” children and being cozy with the “Communist Party of China.” But now he’s doing the company favors and issuing statements that say he wants to help the company promote “family-friendly tourism.”

Money seems to solve all sorts of relationship problems in politics — which is precisely why we all knew Disney would start dishing it out again. And why I expect to see the company dish a lot more to the powerful pols who want it. Otherwise, the company may find itself being labeled communist pedophiles again.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Fake, Florida, Funding

Steve Suitts: The New Segregation Looks Like the Old Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
3

Steve Suitts wrote an important essay on the continuity between the “school choice” movement of today and its roots in the fight against the Brown decision in the 1950s.

Charter schools and vouchers are not innovative. Their most predictable outcome is not “better education,” but segregated schools.

Suitts’ essay delves into the issue, state by state. I encourage you to open the link and read it in full. I skipped over large and important sections. Read them.

He begins:

Overview

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education—the US Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in the nation’s public schools—Steve Suitts reveals an emerging, seismic shift in how southern states in the United States are leading the nation in adopting universal private school vouchers. Suitts warns that this new “school choice” movement will reestablish a dual school system not unlike the racially separate, unequal schools which segregationists attempted to preserve in the 1960s using vouchers.

INTRODUCTION

On the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in the nation’s public schools, the states of the southern US are pushing to reestablish publicly financed, dual school systems—one primarily for higher-income and white children and the other primarily for lower-income and minority children. This seismic shift in how states fund K–12 education through universal vouchers isn’t confined to the South. But it is centered among the states that once mandated racially separate, unequal schools and where segregationists in the 1960s attempted to use private school vouchers to evade the watershed US Supreme Court decision.

More than thirty-five states have created voucher programs to send public dollars to private schools. At least nineteen, including most in the South, have adopted or are on a path to enact legislation making state-funded “Educational Savings Accounts” (ESAs)—the newest type of voucher approach—available to all or most families who forego public schools. These families can use the funds to send their children to almost any K–12 private school, including home-schooling, or purchase a wide range of educational materials and services, such as tutoring, summer camps, and counseling. 

In recent times, private school vouchers were pitched to the public for the purpose of giving a targeted group of disadvantaged children new educational options, but legislatures are now expanding eligibility and funding for vouchers to include advantaged students. By adopting universal or near universal eligibility for ESAs, states will be obligating tens of billions of tax dollars to finance private schooling while creating a voucher system for use by affluent families with children already attending or planning to attend private school.

States are rushing to enact ESAs while they still have the last of huge federal COVID appropriations to distribute among public schools. This timing allows ESAs’ sponsors—Republican legislative leaders and governors—to entice once-reluctant, rural legislators to support vouchers. It also camouflages the severe fiscal impact this scheme will have on routinely underfunded public schools after the special federal funds run out.

The states adopting ESAs are also structuring this emerging, publicly funded, dual system so that private schools and homeschooling remain free of almost all regulations, academic standards, accountability, and oversight. These sorts of rules and regulations are always imposed by state legislatures on public schools and are understood as essential to protect students and to advance learning. Even as legislatures are adding restrictive laws on how local public schools teach topics involving race, sex, ethnicity, and gender they are providing new state funding for private schools and home-schooling that will enable racist, sexist, and other bigoted teaching.

If state legislatures succeed in establishing and broadening this dual, tax-funded system of schools, the tremors will transform the landscape of US elementary and secondary education for decades to come. Calling for “freedom of choice,” a battle cry first voiced by segregationists who fought to overturn the Brown decision,1 predominantly white Republicans will take states back to a future of separate and unequal education.

THE UNIVERSAL VOUCHER SYSTEM

By the seventieth anniversary of Brown, five states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) have enacted ESA programs that allow all or a vast majority of families with school-age children to send their children to private schools with state funds that equal or closely match the states’ per pupil expenditures for public schools. South Carolina adopted a “pilot” ESA last year, and a bill making its program permanent has already passed one chamber. The lower house of the Louisiana legislature passed a bill for a statewide universal ESA program to start next year, but the state senate is likely to delay adoption for another year to confirm estimated costs. Both states have governors who are likely to push adoption again next year.2

The Tennessee legislature adjourned in April without passing either of two pending universal ESA bills—only because Governor Bill Lee and legislative leaders failed to agree on which voucher bill to enact. They vow to pass legislation next session. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott used campaign funds from a Pennsylvania billionaire in the state’s Republican primary to defeat a handful of legislators who blocked his ESA bill last year. Abbott expects to defeat the two remaining state house members who failed to vote for his legislation—giving him the number he needs to pass his bill, while sending a political message that will keep his supporters in line…3

The historical context is shameful. Five of the southern states that now have universal vouchers also enacted open-ended vouchers in the 1960s—attempting to defeat Brown’s mandate for school desegregation. All but three of the states that have already embraced publicly financed ESAs were the only states authorizing segregated public schools on the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision.9

The fiscal impact of this rush to fund private schooling will be devastating to public schools. In 2018, all fifty states allocated $2.6 billion to finance private school vouchers. In 2021, legislatures increased the total amount to $3.3 billion and more recently to over $6 billion. If the eleven southern states enact the bills currently adopted or pending in their legislatures, their total funding for vouchers will be as much as $6.8 billion in 2025–26 and, according to independent estimates, as much as $20 billion for private schooling in 2030. This sum would equal the total state funds to public schools among six southern states in 2021.10

In 1950, about 400,000 students in the South attended private schools. By 2021-22, the number of private school students was about 1.8 million.

In 2021-22, 38.9% of white students attended public schools, and 63% enrolled in private schools.

AS VOUCHERS SPREAD, BROWN’S PROMISE DIES

During the last seventy years, the nation’s public schools have struggled in meeting the promise of Brown, despite clear proof that racially integrated, well-funded schools improve outcomes for Black children.39 This promise has been especially important to the South, where the states’ first education laws prohibited Black persons from being taught to read or write; where racially segregated schools offered children of color an inferior education across more than a half century. Due to stubborn, racially defined housing patterns, increasing class disparities, adverse, even hostile Supreme Court decisions, a lack of local, interracial community support, and, as recent research confirms, the growth of school choice, public schools continue to face far too many hurdles in providing all children with a good education.40

Mural by Michael Young celebrating the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court decision, in the Kansas State Capitol, Topeka, Kansa, May 23, 2019. Photograph by Flickr user Joe Shlabotnik. Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

The South’s new dual school system renounces and annuls the mandates and hopes of Brown v. Board of Education. As universal vouchers spread, Brown’s promise dies. By their design, vouchers are an abandonment of Brown’s goal of equality of educational opportunity.

Reestablishing a dual school system will damage the prospects of a good education for all who attend public schools—not just low-income and minority children. The southern states were not able to finance two separate school systems during the era of segregation, even though Black students received a pittance of funding. Today that inability remains. The South continues to be far behind the rest of the nation in state and local funding of public schools. The new schemes of universal Education Savings Account vouchers will exacerbate the lack of sufficient funds for all except those higher-income families whose school-age children can attend private schools or home-schools and enjoy the enhancements and enriching experience that vouchers will subsidize.

Parents, grandparents, and others who support public schools and the democratic promise of public education must raise our voices against this reactionary movement and in furtherance of the importance of public schools. Like democracy itself, public schools may be the worst system for delivering all children an equal opportunity for a good education—except for all the others. We must not betray or abandon public education if we are committed to the democratic goal of a more perfect union and a good society for all. 

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Democracy, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Fraud, Funding, Racism, Segregation, Separation of church and state

Forced Birth Laws Are Religious and Thus Violate the Constitution

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2024 //
10

Florida’s six-week ban on abortion went into effect today.

A reader who calls him/herself Quickwrit posted the following excellent thoughts about anti-abortion laws:

THE NINTH AMENDMENT that gives Clarence Thomas the constitutional right to live in an interracial marriage also gives women the constitutional right to abortion: The 9th Amendment says that rights, like the right to interracial marriage and the right to abortion, do not have to be stated in the Constitution in order to be constitutional rights because The Ninth Amendment says: “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The current Supreme Court ruling on abortion not only violates the 9th Amendment, it violates the religious rights of many citizens. The ruling is supportive of the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church to which the six majority Justices belong.

The Bible gives commandments on a very, very long list of more than 600 laws on everything from divorce to gluttony or stealing — yet the Bible says nothing about abortion. Why is that? If abortion was even as important as gluttony and stealing, it would have been mentioned in the Bible.

Out of more than 600 laws of Moses, which includes the 10 Commandments, NONE — not one — comments on abortion. In fact, the Mosaic law in Exodus 21:22-25 clearly shows that causing the abortion of a fetus is NOT MURDER. Exodus 21:22-25 says that if a woman has a miscarriage as the result of an altercation with a man, the man who caused miscarriage should only pay a fine that is to be determined by the woman’s husband, but if the woman dies, the man is to be executed: “If a man strives with a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet there is no harm to the woman, he shall be punished according to what the woman’s husband determines and he shall pay as the judges determine.” So, the miscarriage is treated like the destruction of property, not murder.

There are Christian denominations that allow abortion in most instances; these Christian denominations include the United Church of Christ and the Presbyterian Church USA. The United Methodist Church and Episcopal churches allow abortion in cases of medical necessity, and the United Universalist Association also allows abortion.

Most of the opposition to abortion comes from fundamentalist and evangelical Christians who believe that a full-fledged human being is created at the instant of conception. But that is a religious BELIEF and religious beliefs cannot be recognized by the government under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of our Constitution. Moreover, the belief that a fetus is a human person, complete with a soul, is a Christian interpretation of the Jewish Bible — the Old Testament. But, Jewish scholars whose ancestors wrote the Old Testament and who know best what the words mean say that is a wrong interpretation of their writings.

Christians largely base their view that a fetus is a complete human being and that abortion is murder on the Jewish Bible’s Psalm 139: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb…You watched me as I was being formed in utter seclusion as I was woven together in the dark of the womb. You saw me before I was born.”

But who better to translate the accurate meaning of Psalm 139 than the Jews who wrote it? And Jewish scholars point out that Psalm 139 merely describes the development of a fetus and does not mean that the fetus has a soul and is a person. In fact, the Jewish Talmud explains that for the first 40 days of a woman’s pregnancy, the fetus is considered “mere fluid” and is just part of the mother’s body, like an appendix or liver. Only after the fetus’s head emerges from the womb at birth is the baby considered a “nefesh” – Hebrew for “soul” or “spirit” – a human person.

The idea that full-fledged human life begins at conception is a sectarian religious belief that isn’t held by the majority of religions, including a number of mainstream Christian religions.

Therefore, any local, state, or federal law that holds that full-fledged human life begins at conception is unconstitutional because such laws are made in recognition of an establishment of religion and violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

THE COURT BENDS THE FACTS: The University of London scientist whose research is cited by the Supreme Court in its ruling to take away abortion rights says that his research has been misinterpreted by Justice Alito and the Supreme Court’s activist conservative majority. Neuroscientist Dr. Giandomenico Iannetti says that the Court is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to say that his research shows that a fetus can feel pain when it is less than 24 weeks of development. “My results by no means imply that,” Dr. Iannetti declares. “I feel they were used in a clever way to make a point.” And Dr. John Wood, molecular neurobiologist at the University, points out that all serious scientists agree that a fetus can NOT feel pain until at least 24 weeks “and perhaps not even then.” Dr. Vania Apkarian, head of the Center for Transitional Pain Research at Chicago’s Feinberg School of Medicine, says that the medical evidence on a fetus not feeling pain before 24 weeks or longer has not changed in 50 years and remains “irrefutable”.

LIFE OF WOE: In its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling upholding abortion rights, the Supreme Court set “viability” — the point at which a fetus can survive outside of the womb — as the dividing line after which some restrictions can be imposed on abortion rights. The pending ruling by current activist conservative majority on the Court will do away with the concept of viability, yet even with all of today’s medical miracles to keep a prematurely born or aborted fetus alive, of all the tens of thousands of cases, 90% OF FETUSES BORN AT 22 WEEKS DO NOT SURVIVE, and data shows that the majority of those that manage to be kept alive live the rest of their lives with a combination of BIRTH DEFECTS that include mental impairment, cerebral palsy, breathing problems, blindness, deafness, and other disorders that often require frequent hospitalizations during their lifetimes.

Categories Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Gender, Religion

Georgia: 50CAN Targets Atlanta’s Public Schools for Privatization

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2024 //
16

Ed Johnson is a systems thinker and consultant in Atlanta. He cares passionately about the public schools of his city and keeps watch over the actions of the Atlanta Public School Board. Johnson is an adherent of the work of W. Edwards Deming; he believes in thinking of about how to change systems, not in quick fixes or the panacea of the day. In this letter to the Atlanta Public School Board, he takes them to task for their commitment to 50CAN, a school privatization group that was started in Connecticut as ConnCAN and funded largely by the Sackler family.

Ed Johnson writes:

“Join GeorgiaCAN for an informative session on the vision of Atlanta Public Schools!  Gain insights from APS Board member [Dr.] Ken Zeff as he shares his perspective and engages in a parent discussion regarding APS’s vision.  Let’s unite as a community to ensure that our children and the APS community have the resources and support necessary to pave the way for a brighter future.”

—GeorgiaCAN

 We now know GeorgiaCAN is a state-level affiliate of 50CAN, do we not?

 We now know 50CAN stands for 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, do we not?

 We now know GeorgiaCAN, as a 50CAN affiliate, pushes destroying public education and public schools with school choice, charter schools, and vouchers, do we not?

 We now know, in December 2019, we had AJC parroting and giving prominent voice to GeorgiaCAN spouting free market school choice ideology, do we not?

 We now know, in August 2023, we had Atlanta school board members Katie Howard, District 1, and Erika Mitchell, District 5 and current school board chair, involved with GeorgiaCAN, do we not?

 And we now know, in September 2023, we had The King Center giving the 50CAN CEO a platform for some inscrutable reason, do we not?

 So, let’s consider Ken Zeff in the way The King Center was considered last September:

 50CAN evolved from ConnCAN (Connecticut CAN).  ConnCAN was funded pretty much wholly by Sackler Family fortunes earned as ill-gotten profits from over-prescribed sales of Oxycontin by the family’s Purdue Pharma.  Because of such greed for profits, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and worldwide have died, and continue to die, from opioid addiction.

 As with similar other organizations and their local operatives—for example, The City Fund and its local operatives, Ed Chang leading reformED Atlanta—it is fairly well-known that 50CAN and its state-level operatives aim to dismantle hence destroy public education as the common good that is foundational to sustaining democracy, so as to transform destroyed public schools into privatized and commodified schools composing competitive education marketplaces.  Think Milton Friedman and the “invisible hand of the market.”

 It is also fairly well-known that 50CAN, like similar other organizations, has advanced its aim to destroy public education by expressly targeting and catalyzing Black communities to demand school choice and charter schools that will magically deliver “achievement now.”

 In effect, 50CAN and such others “politrick” Black communities into facilitating their own destruction and that of their own children.  Again, while “It takes a village to raise a child,” it also takes a village to destroy a child.

 The usual assumption is that charter schools transformed from destroyed public schools are inherently better than “failing public schools.”  This is a lie, plain and simple.  It is impossible for charter schools to be inherently better or worse than “failing public schools.”  Because entropy is a fact of life, our public schools need improvement, have always needed improvement, and always will need improvement.  Reality offers charter schools no grace from the entropy fact of life.

 To assert that charter schools are inherently better than “failing public schools” is like asserting members of a certain group of human beings are inherently superior to members of other groups of human beings, based solely on expressions of variation in some few arbitrarily-chosen human physical features said to signify “race,” which is another lie.

 Charter schools do, however, appeal to certain retributive justice, behaviorally emulative, and selfish consumerist mindsets for which improvement-thinking has always been meaningless, at worst, and theoretical, at best.  50CAN knows this, and so uses it to catalyze Black communities to demand “achievement now.”  “Instant pudding,” the late, great systems thinker W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) might say.

 Consequently, “Our children can’t wait!” has been a decades-long handy refrain that has always begged easy, quick, learningless change but never improvement with knowledge, which requires learning and unlearning.

 Unfortunately, systems thinking teaches through a nonviolence lens that the more often easy, quick, learningless change happens, the less improvement becomes possible; then, the less improvement becomes possible, the less sustainable democracy becomes; then, the less sustainable democracy becomes, the more societal dysfunctions develop and emerge, after a time, in Black communities and elsewhere; then, the more societal dysfunctions show up, the more the refrain, “Our children can’t wait!”

 It is all a destructively vicious, self-reinforcing feedback loop that 50CAN and similar other destroyers of public education are happy to catalyze in Black communities, in particular, and to support its playing out, if only continually, but continuously, ideally.

 With systems thinking, it really is not hard to understand why some out-of-control-for-the-worse aspects of violent crime in City of Atlanta involving ever more “Black” teenaged children and younger other persons in Black communities has become such a challenge.

 Currently, Atlanta’s culture predictably produces a homicide every 2.3 +/- 4.0 days, while predictably producing an aggravated assault every 3.7 +/- 10.7 hours.

 These are realities Atlanta Police Department data reveal when viewed through a Deming kind of systems thinking lens instead of through a financial accounting-style lens that invariably creates an incomplete or false narrative that the media and others then report as fact.

 Although some are quite capable to look below the performative surface, or show stage, of the proverbial iceberg and down into its greater depths to see and know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also a profound systems thinker, systems thinking seems generally absent in Black culture; certainly, children labeled “Black” seem never to learn about this deeper and critically important aspect of Dr. King.

 All too often the children learn to conserve racism and so-called white supremacy rather than learn to help humanity relieve itself of these scourges.  The children learn and internalize racial categorization, the false narrative at the heart of racial violence.  It seems the children never learn to internalize an understanding of human variation, the truth at the heart of nonracial nonviolence.

 It is quite puzzling that some fight and rail against racism, all the while conserving it and the “race” lie racism needs in order to exist, in truth.

 Therefore, a question for The King Center must be, why is The King Center giving a platform to 50CAN?

 50CAN and GeorgiaCAN, private organizations known to be about making “Beloved Community” a virtual impossibility, in all respects.

 Given this, we now know Dr. Ken Zeff lied when he swore, in taking the Oath of Office the Charter of the Atlanta Independent School System requires, “I will be governed by the public good and the interests of said school system,” do we not?

 Being involved with GeorgiaCAN necessarily and unavoidably means Dr. Ken Zeff exercises, well, the “choice” to be governed by a private goodand the interests of GeorgiaCAN, hence 50CAN.

 In a discussion during this month’s regularly scheduled school board meeting, Dr. Ken Zeff voluntarily professed quite enthusiastically to being a school choice proponent.

 Well, he was at least honest about it—something we might appreciate, when some other Atlanta Board of Education members have shown they are not so honest about their being in the school choice camp.

 

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

Categories Atlanta, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Fake, Georgia, Privatization

RFK Jr’s Running Mate Shares His Skepticism Towards Vaccines

By dianeravitch
April 14, 2024 //
4

Nicole Shanahan, the billionaire selected by Robert Kennedy Jr. as his running mate, suspects that childhood vaccines may have caused her daughter’s autism. Glenn Kessler, the Fact Checker for the Washington Post, asked for the reactions of several autism experts, who disagreed with Shanahan. Kessler gives her four Pinnochios, the highest ranking for falsehood.

Categories Elections, Fake, Health, Science
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