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Florida: DeSantis Signs Bill to Limit Book Bans and Adds a Sugarplum for Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
April 19, 2024 //
5

Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill limiting the ability of non-parents to initiate book bans. That’s a step forward since any crank was free to challenge any book under previous law. But, the same law made it easier to close public schools and hand them over to the charter industry.

TALLAHASSEE — After more than 1,200 objections were filed to library books and other materials last school year, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday signed a bill to limit challenges by nonparents or guardians.

The wide-ranging bill (HB 1285) also includes changes designed to ease the process of charter schools taking over operations at traditional public schools that are failing.

The part of the measure dealing with book challenges came after the Republican-controlled Legislature and DeSantis approved measures that ramped up scrutiny of library books and classroom materials, leading to highly publicized disputes.

More than half of the 1,218 book objections during the 2022-2023 school year occurred in two counties, Clay and Escambia, according to a Senate staff analysis. The objections resulted in the removal of 186 books in the two counties.

The bill will require that any “resident of the county who is not the parent or guardian of a student with access to school district materials may not object to more than one material per month.”

During an event Monday, DeSantis said that some people who filed mass objections to books made a “mockery” of the process.

“The idea that someone can use the parents’ rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book, to try to make a mockery of this, is wrong. And you had examples where books were put under review that are just normal books that have been in education for many, many years,” DeSantis said.

Meanwhile, parts of the bill related to underperforming public schools would “add some oomph” to the state’s process of allowing charter schools to take over operations, DeSantis said.

Under state law, if a school receives consecutive D or F grades based on various performance criteria, the school is given two years to improve to a C under what’s known as a “turnaround plan.” If the school’s grade doesn’t make such an improvement, one option is for the school to close and reopen as a charter school.

The bill signed Tuesday will speed up converting traditional public schools to charter schools under such circumstances, by giving districts a deadline to execute charter contracts. For schools reopening as charters, districts would have to execute contracts by Oct. 1 of the following school year, and charter organizations would assume “full operational control” by July.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, DeSantis, Education Industry, Florida, For-Profit, Freedom to Read

South Carolina: Charter Fraud and Profits!

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
3

Carol Burris writes here about a charter scandal in South Carolina. Carol is the executive director of the Network for Public Education.

She writes:

Last week, an excellent investigative report on a for-profit-run charter chain appeared in South Carolina’s Post and Courier. Entitled How a Florida principal with a controversial history became a SC charter school kingpin, it was written by Hillary Flynn and Maura Turcotte. These reporters put extraordinary care and diligent research into the piece.  I know because, over the course of a year, Flynn would call me from time to time for insight into the for-profit charter world. There is no transparency in South Carolina. You need FOIAs to determine which schools in the state are even run by for-profits. Here is a summary of what they found. 

 

Pinnacle, a Florida for-profit corporation, has three charter schools in South Carolina. 

Its creator and owner, Michael D’Angelo, is a former Florida charter school principal who was fired from a for-profit chain. He then moved to another charter, where he wrote himself reimbursement checks with no invoices and got fired again.

 

Undeterred by his previous failures, D’Angelo tried to open several charter schools in Florida. Despite being told he did “not have the competency to operate a charter school,” he found an accountant, created a for-profit charter management company, and headed to South Carolina to open Gray Collegiate Academy.

 

When Pinnacle’s school got into trouble with the South Carolina Public Charter School District for noncompliance, Pinnacle went shopping for a new authorizer for its charter school. A Christian college, Erskine College, stepped in. It later accused Pinnacle of fraud. Then, two Pinnacle Schools moved to another Christian College, Limestone College, for authorization. Authorizers receive substantial fees from the schools, a bonanza for cash-strapped colleges. 

 

The process of authorizer shopping, a common practice in states like Ohio and Michigan with large for-profit sectors, is a glaring loophole in the system. The authorizer, who stands to gain substantial fees from the schools, can provide a new lease of life to a shady charter school. A South Carolina Senate bill aims to curb this practice, but it faces fierce opposition from the charter lobby. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools even lobbied to ensure that states with multiple authorizers are privileged when getting big CSP grants, further exacerbating the issue of authorizer shopping.

 

Meanwhile, Pinnacle plans to open two more schools, serving as additional cash cows for D’Angelo and his friends.

 

You can read the excellent investigative reporting on Pinnacle here. While you must register with the paper to see it, it is not behind a paywall. Kudos to Flynn and Turcotte. 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Scandal, South Carolina

Investors in Trump Stock Blame Its Decline on Libs

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
18

Drew Harrell of The Washington Post published a sad article about the Trump devotees who have put their life savings into his DJT stock offering and have no concerns about its value or its future. They are so certain that he is a financial genius that they expect the stock to soar, once the “liberals” stop depressing its market price.

Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.

That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.

“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”

For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.


Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.

As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.

And in two years, Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”

But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign….

Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past couple of weeks.

“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth $3.7 million…

One investor said “the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down…”

After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.

Soon after it was launched March 26 on NASDAQ, the stock reached $79. By last Monday, it had fallen to $26.61, after news broke that DJT intends to issue millions of additional shares, which would dilute the value of the original shares.

Bibles, sneakers, perfume, wine, steaks, now stocks. Trump will keep selling, and his cult will keep buying.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Hoax, Trump

Michigan: State Board Passes Resolution to Put Charter Schools Under Same Rules as Public Schools

By dianeravitch
April 11, 2024 //
16

Michigan, under Republican control for years, has given free rein to charter schools and has long been overrun with unaccountable for-profit schools. But the Governor, Gretchen Whitney, is now a Democrat, and the elected State Board of Education is no longer controlled by Republicans. The State Board took a shocking step this week. It resolved that charter schools should be held to the same rules as public schools.

The State Board of Education approved a resolution during its meeting today calling for legislation to open charter schools to be treated more like public schools in the state of Michigan.

Mitchell ROBINSON’s resolution made the agenda and asked the state Legislature to create and pass laws that would put charter schools under the approval of the Michigan Department of Education and make them more transparent by opening them up to the Freedom of Information Act and Open Meetings Act.

The resolution also asked for legislation that would require charter schools to follow many of the same requirements as public schools, such as bidding for vendors, requirements that no child be excluded from enrolling, not refusing transfer students if space is open, require teachers and administrators to hold certificates, and mandate contracts for management organizations be published online.

“So charter schools are technically public schools, so they should be expected to follow regulations regarding transparency, as all publicly funded schools are,” Robinson said.

However, he said many charter schools are dominated by politically-motivated special interest groups, those looking to be education reformers, and “predatory for-profit organizations.”

He said he’s looked at the charter school system in Michigan and found that they make up one-third of all the local education agencies in the state and are not accountable to the communities.

“I see no evidence of innovation in this service sector,” he said.

He said the public school system struggles to adequately fund itself, not even adding the charter system that also pulls funding for the 363 schools across 285 districts.

“This is financially irresponsible,” he said.

The sole no vote against the resolution came from Tom McMILLIN, a Republican board member. 

He argued that charter schools fill in gaps in education and were already fully transparent with the public funding they received. 

“These charter schools give parents choices. They fill up for a reason,” McMillin said.

He said the teachers and administrators were already required to be certified.

“What this would do is simply force charter schools to not open, which is what some people want,” McMillin said.

Marshall BULLOCK II pointed to troubles with charter schools in the Detroit area closing without warning or opening in a struggling district that could have the “unintended consequence” of splitting a neighborhood.

“That is how you destroy a neighborhood,” Bullock said.

McMillin called it “perverse” to not give parents a choice and “force them, based on their zip code, to a failing school.” He placed the problem at the feet of the state superintendent.

Tiffany TILLEY asked that the board hear a presentation to look at what other states are doing in terms of charter schools.

“Michigan has become kind of like the Wild Wild West when it comes to charter schools,” Tilley said.

She said you can’t have “thousands” of charter schools with no transparency and continue to maintain a well-funded system, but putting a limit on the number of charters schools could help.

“We do need to change the laws and this has gone on for a very long time,” she said.

Now if only the Michigan legislature would ban for-profit charters! No public school operates for profit. The “profit” is inevitably taken from students and teachers. It’s wrong.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Michigan

The Big Business of Denying Health Care

By dianeravitch
April 6, 2024 //
33

Insurance companies have figured out that they can make big profits by denying surgeries and other care that doctors recommend for their patients. This happens under Medicare Advantage, programs where private insurance companies offer care that replaces Medicare. The CEOs of this industry are paid multiple millions.

The New York Times produced a video about this.

Should your insurance company be allowed to stop you from getting a treatment — even if your doctor says it’s necessary?

Doctors are often required to get insurance permission before providing medical care. This process is called prior authorization and it can be used by profit-seeking insurance companies to create intentional barriers between patients and the health care they need.

At best, it’s just a minor bureaucratic headache. At worst, people have died.

Prior authorization has been around for decades, but doctors say its use has increased in recent years and now rank it as one of the top issues in health care.

To produce the Opinion Video above, we spoke to more than 50 doctors and patients. They shared horror stories about a seemingly trivial process that inflicts enormous pain, on a daily basis. The video also explains how a process that is supposed to save money actually inflates U.S. health care costs while enriching insurance companies.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Health

Michael Tomasky: Trump is the P.T. Barnum of Our Times

By dianeravitch
April 5, 2024 //
26

If you look back at old photos and videos of Trump, you are likely to see one of two scenarios. Either Trump with a beautiful babe on his arm, entering a restaurant or nightclub, or Trump selling something to the naive, whether it’s his “university” (where you will learn Trump’s secrets to getting rich), his wines, his steaks, or now his gold sneakers or his Trump-branded USA Bible. It must have been Trump-lovers who rushed to invest in the new DJT stock, because no one understands how a company could be valued at $8 billion when it reported $3.3 million in revenue in the first nine months of 2023 and a loss of $49 million. The stock opened at $70.90 a share, rose to $79.38, and settled two days later at $61.96. USA Today quoted a stock observer who predicted that the vanity stock might sink to $2 a share or less.

Michael Tomasky of The New Republic is betting that the people who buy Trump schlock are wising up to the con and realizing that they have been conned and should stop sending money to help a billionaire.

Tomasky writes:

The standard commentary on Donald Trump’s “God Bless the USA Bible” is that while of course it’s cynical and twisted and borderline sacrilegious, there’s also no doubt that his people are going to buy it by the carload, because these people would buy a bag of Trump Dogshit from the guy (“from the bowels of the best dogs, everybody says so”). Some people are just that, well, let us say easily taken in. 

Trump’s dark penchant for hucksterism is endless, and P.T. Barnum’s dictum is as true today as it was when he said it.* You could take slips of paper on which you write the names of 25 things these Americans like, pull out three or four, conjure up some physical manifestation of it, and Trump would sell it: NASCAR-Branson’s Famous Baldknobbers Beer, in limited-edition cans that show Trump as Rambo.

It’s endless. Or is it? Trump’s fundraising has taken a nosedive. His small-donor numbers are below where they once were. NBC News recently reported that donations to Trump of $200 or less are down 62.5 percent against 2019. He’s still raised a lot; I don’t want to mislead you here. The New York Times recently reported that Trump has more small donors than Joe Biden in some key swing states. But Biden has raised more from small donors overall, according to OpenSecrets. And in the most recent Federal Election Commission filings, Trump had $33.5 million cash on hand and Biden reported having $71 million. That was March 20, before Thursday night’s Radio City Music Hall event with Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, where Biden raked in $26 million.

All this is a shock to no one because, as we all know, Trump is spending a good chunk of his donations on his legal bills. The Times ran an amazing report about this on Wednesday. Of nearly $85 million in donations, almost a third, $27 million, has gone to legal bills. Hey, at least this time around, he’s apparently actually paying them.

Trump will have money. There’s no use pretending he won’t. But $400 sneakers and $60 Bibles are not signs of strength. They’re signs of weakness. Panic. Desperation. A guy who’ll sell anything that isn’t nailed to the floor.

And: He damn well should be panicked. Liberals and Democrats always impute to Republicans and right-wingers a strength they neither have nor deserve. Just because Trump tries to act like a tough guy and appeals to tough guys, liberals tend to concede he’s a tough guy. Nonsense. He’s a very weak and insecure man, as Mary Trump is always pointing out. 

Physically, he’s horribly out of shape: probably couldn’t climb a 20-step flight of stairs without stopping halfway up and, Rambo iconography notwithstanding, couldn’t throw a punch that would crush a grape. A few months ago, I saw a photo of Biden biking around Rehoboth Beach, and it struck me: Has Trump even ever been on a bicycle in his life? I’d be shocked. Biden may be older, but really, who’s the more likely stroke victim here, the guy who still rides the occasional bike or the guy who eats well-done steaks and whose four major food groups are McDonald’s, KFC, pizza, and Diet Coke?

Psychically, he’s in far, far worse shape. He knows very well in some corner of his brain that he’s guilty of everything he’s accused of. He knows that if he doesn’t win the presidency, there’s a very serious chance that he ends up convicted of one of those crimes and in prison. It won’t be Angola Penitentiary, but there won’t be chandeliers in the bathroom or an 18-hole golf course for him to win phony championships on, either. 

He would never admit any of this publicly, but privately Trump is surely terrified of this possible future. He knows that if he loses, the cases go forward, and he’s going to have to fight them as long as he possibly can, and it’s going to cost untold millions. Hence the sneakers and the Bible. And there’s surely more in store.

Some people will buy these things, there’s no question of that. But I’ll bet you that if we look hard six months from now, we’ll see that sales did not meet expectations. Of course, we’ll never know that because Trump will have full control of that narrative, and he’ll insist that sales were off the charts, and the press will print it. But we’ve seen this movie and heard this b.s. Trump Steaks were moving faster than they could cut them. Trump University was making millionaires out of many, many people. Right.

So let’s avert our gaze from the people who’d walk across hot coals for Donald Trump (while he stood off to the side, pleading bone spurs) and think instead about the ones who are slowly peeling off. They’re out there too. And they’re starting to see what you and I have so obviously seen for years: a twisted, desperate huckster who’s never cracked a Bible in his life and whose only religion is hustling the suckers who are born every minute.

*Apparently Barnum never said that famous oft-quoted line about a sucker born every minute, but he did believe in selling frauds to the gullible. https://www.thedailybeast.com/pt-barnum-makes-trump-look-like-a-clown

Categories Elections, Ethics, For-Profit, Fraud, Trump

Dana Milbank: Trump Forgot But We Should Not

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2024 //
16

Dana Milbank, columnist for The Washington Post, wrote that Trump is counting on voters to forget how chaotic it was when he was President. Even now, we are daily inundated with the chaos that, as Nikki Haley said, always follows in Trump’s wake.

Milbank reminds us of the character of the man who would be President again or dictator for a day:

The Very Stable Genius is glitching again.
This week, he announced that he is not — repeat, NOT — planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act. He apparently forgot that he had vowed over and over again to do exactly that, saying as recently as a few months ago that Republicans “should never give up” on efforts to “terminate” Obamacare.

“I’m not running to terminate the ACA, AS CROOKED JOE BUDEN DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES ALL THE TIME,” the Republican nominee wrote this week on his Truth Social platform. Rather, he said, he wants to make Obamacare better for “OUR GREST AMERICAN CITIZENS.”

Joe Buden disinformates and misinformates? For a guy trying to make an issue of his opponent’s mental acuity, this was not, shall we say, a grest look.

The previous day, Trump held a news conference where he nailed some equally puzzling planks onto his platform.

“We’ll bring crime back to law and order,” he announced.

Also: “We just had Super Tuesday, and we had a Tuesday after a Tuesday already.”

And, most peculiar of all: “You can’t have an election in the middle of a political season.”

If he can’t recall that elections frequently do overlap with political seasons, then he surely can’t be expected to remember what was happening at this point in 2020. “ARE YOU BETTER OFF THAN YOU WERE FOUR YEARS AGO?” he asked last week. The poor fellow must have forgotten all about the economic collapse and his administration’s catastrophic bungling of the pandemic.

Or maybe he didn’t forget. Maybe he’s just hoping the rest of us will forget. In a sense, Trump’s prospects for 2024 rely on Americans experiencing mass memory loss: Will we forget just how crazy things were when he was in the White House? And will we forget about the even crazier things he has said he would do if he gets back there?

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments from antiabortion forces who want to ban mifepristone, the pill used in about 60 percent of abortions. But just as the justices were taking up the case, Trump’s own proposal to ban the abortion pill vanished.

The Heritage Foundation-run Project 2025, to which Trump has unofficially outsourced policymaking for a second term, said that a “glitch” had caused its policies — including those embracing a mifepristone ban — to disappear from its website. The Biden campaign said it was “calling BS on Trump and his allies’ shameless attempt to hide their agenda,” and the missing documents returned — including the language calling abortion pills “the single greatest threat to unborn children” and vowing to withdraw regulatory approval for the drugs.

About seven in 10 Americans believe the abortion pill should be legal. So it’s easy to see why Trump might wish to erase his plan to ban the pill — just as he would like to erase his calls for the repeal of Obamacare, which has the support of 6 in 10 Americans.

The extremism isn’t just at Project 2025, stocked with former Trump advisers. The House Republican Study Committee, which counts 80 percent of House Republicans as members, put out a budget last week that would rescind approval of mifepristone, dismantle the “failed Obamacare experiment” and embrace a nationwide abortion ban from the moment of conception.

Trump and some vulnerable congressional Republicans might wish that Americans will forget such things by November. But it’s all there in black and white.

Trump is a man of greatness. So says Trump. “It is my great honor to be at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach tonight, AWARDS NIGHT, to receive the CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY & THE SENIOR CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP TROPHY,” he proclaimed over the weekend. “I WON BOTH!

So much winning. “Congratulations, Donald,” President Biden tweeted. “Quite the accomplishment.”

Trump won a more significant victory on Monday, when an appellate panel reduced the bond he needs to post as he appeals a fraud verdict against him to $175 million from $454 million. Trump didn’t have enough cash to secure the larger bond. But at a news conference he assured reporters that he was still really, really rich: “I have a lot of money … I don’t need to borrow money. I have a lot of money. … I have a lot of cash. … I have a lot of cash and a great company. … I have very low debt. … I built a phenomenal company that’s very low leverage, unbelievably low leverage with a lot of cash, a lot of everything else.”

Give that man another trophy.

Trump seemed particularly hurt that the judge in the fraud case valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million, he said, when “half of the living room is worth more than that. So it’s worth anywhere from 50 to 100 times that amount.”

Give that man $1.8 billion for Mar-a-Lago, and another trophy.

Actually, Trump’s supporters have already given him about $5 billion this week — at least on paper — for doing nothing at all. His Truth Social went public, and even though it had a loss of $49 million in the first nine months of 2023 on revenue of just $3.4 million, it was valued at more than $8 billion. That’s because Trump’s fans, wanting a piece of the action, bid up the price. The stock in the company will almost certainly collapse. The only question is whether Trump can unload his shares before then (he’s supposed to keep them for six months) and leave his supporters once again holding the bag.

Trump uses Truth Social to post doctored articles about him that omit negative details, and now he’s making up stuff about Truth Social. He said he didn’t list the company on the New York Stock Exchange because it would be “treated too badly in New York” by Democratic officeholders. So he instead listed the company on Nasdaq, which is based in … New York. Trump said the “top person” at the NYSE “is mortified. … He said, ‘I’m losing business.’ ” As CNN pointed out, neither the president nor the chair of the exchange is a “he.”

Trump must not have a lot of faith that he’ll make off with his billions before the Truth Social bubble bursts, because he’s actively seeking other ways to grift. This week he started hawking bibles.

“Happy Holy Week! Let’s Make America Pray Again,” Trump posted. “As we lead into Good Friday and Easter, I encourage you to get a copy of the God Bless the USA Bible.” He directed his supporters to a website selling the Good Book for $59.99 a copy.

The website boasts: “Yes, this is the only Bible endorsed by President Trump!” Read on and you find out that the bible mongers are using Trump’s name and likeness “under paid license from CIC Ventures LLC,” a company owned by Trump.
Trump is getting kickbacks for selling the gospel — marketing God the same way he sold Trump-branded “Never Surrender High-Tops” sneakers last month for $399 a pair and, before that, digital trading cards showing Trump as a superhero.

“All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many. It’s my favorite book,” Trump said in the video promoting his new bible hustle.
Trump has an arms-length relationship with the Bible, which he brandished outside a church near Lafayette Square after protesters were dispersed with tear gas; he once referred to a passage from Second Corinthians as “Two Corinthians” and, at another point, couldn’t come up with a favorite Bible verse.

But the man does have a God complex. His campaign has promoted a video at rallies announcing that “God Gave us Trump.” He has called himself “the chosen one” and has shared a post calling him “the second greatest” after Jesus.

This week, Trump shared another post with a verse from Psalms, topped by a message likening Trump’s suffering in the fraud case to the Crucifixion: “It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you,” the message said, along with Trump’s reply: “Beautiful, thank you!”

A crucial difference, however, is that Jesus was not facing a trial over hush money paid to a porn actress. The judge in that case, Juan Merchan, said the trial will begin on April 15. Trump responded to this news by attacking the judge because his daughter works for a Democratic consulting firm. The judge slapped a gag order on Trump blocking him from harassing jurors and people who work for the judge or for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and their families. Trump responded with another attack on the judge and his daughter (who weren’t included in the gag order). Merchan is “suffering from an acute case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Trump said of the judge, postulating that “maybe the Judge is such a hater because his daughter makes money by working to ‘Get Trump.’”

If there is a trophy for pretrial self-sabotage, Trump wins that one, too.

Trump’s stranglehold on the Republican Party grew yet tighter this week. The Post’s Josh Dawsey reported that those seeking employment at the Republican National Committee have been asked during job interviews whether they believe the 2020 election was stolen. (The correct answer, from the RNC’s perspective, is “Hell yes.”)

Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump, installed as RNC co-chair this month as part of a pro-Trump purge, this week brought Scott Presler to party headquarters. “Exciting things to come!” she promised. No doubt: Presler was on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6, 2021, promotes QAnon conspiracy ideas, planned “stop the steal” events, and organized “March Against Sharia” protests in his work for an anti-Islam group.
As for the Trump effort to win over disenchanted Nikki Haley voters, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman report in the New York Times that he has opted to “bypass any sort of reconciliation” with her. Said former Trump adviser Steve Bannon: “Screw Nikki Haley — we don’t need her endorsement.”

But the MAGA takeover goes far deeper than personnel. Consider the wild conspiracy theories that came from the Trump crowd right after a massive cargo ship lost power and struck Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it. “Is this an intentional attack or an accident?” asked Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), demanding an investigation. Fox’s Maria Bartiromo invited speculation about the “potential for foul play given the wide-open border.” Others blamed racial-diversity policies.
Nothing shows the thoroughness of the MAGA takeover of the GOP as well as the House’s Republican Study Committee budget. The group is the GOP mainstream now, counting some 172 of the 218 House Republicans as members, including many from swing districts and five — Juan Ciscomani and David Schweikert (Ariz.), Mike Garcia (Calif.), Don Bacon (Neb.) and Brandon Williams (N.Y.) from districts Biden won.

Yet here the RSC is, embracing a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions; a ban on the abortion pill, an increase in the retirement age for Social Security; defunding the police (through cuts to the Community Oriented Policing Services program); ending Amtrak funding and selling it off; eliminating broadband provided by the Affordable Connectivity Program; and blocking the “red flag” provisions that keep guns from dangerous people.

This is what Republicans will do next year if Trump wins the White House and Republicans control Congress. Don’t forget it.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Extremism, For-Profit, Republicans, Stupid, Trump

Trump Is Now Selling $60 Bibles: Make America Pray Again

By dianeravitch
March 31, 2024 //
24

Donald J. Trump never misses an opportunity to make money from his cult followers. A few weeks ago, he introduced a line of Trump gold sneakers, embossed with an American flag. On the web, the gold sneakers are selling for as little as $49 and as much as $5,000.

Now Trump has a new product to sell, just in time for the Easter season: a “God Bless the USA Bible,” available for only $59.99.

Trump is working in partnership with singer Lee Greenwood to promote the USA Bible. Besides a King James Version translation, it includes the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Pledge of Allegiance, as well as a handwritten chorus of the famous Lee Greenwood song.

Trump posted a sales pitch for the patriotic Christian Bible on social media.

In his video on Tuesday, Trump said: “Religion and Christianity are the biggest things missing from this country and I truly believe that we need to bring them back and we have to bring them back fast. I think it’s one of the biggest problems we have. That’s why our country is going haywire. We’ve lost religion in our country. All Americans need a Bible in their home, and I have many.”

His new product will please his evangelical followers. Perhaps it will distract them from his conviction for sexual assault, his trial for paying hush money to a porn star, and his multiple indictments.

Trump holds many firsts: the first President to be impeached twice; the first President to be tried for criminal acts; the first President to monetize his celebrity.

We should not be surprised that Trump has monetized the. Bile, since he has a lifetime of branding stuff and selling it to marks like a carnival conman. Steaks, an airline, a university, wine, casinos, perfume, coins with his face on them, etc.

Trump has also dabbled in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, and last year reported earning between $100,000 and $1 million from a series of digital trading cards that portrayed him in cartoon-like images, including as an astronaut, a cowboy and a superhero.

Categories Elections, For-Profit, Religion, Trump

Oklahoma: EPIC Theft of Public Dollars by For-Profit Online Charter School

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2024 //
4

Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch lays out the details of Oklahoma’s biggest charter scandal. The owners of the for-profit online charter school Epic have been charged with embezzling millions of taxpayer dollars.

The size of the scandal alleged at the state’s largest online school befits the school’s name: epic. 

Investigators say two men at the helm of Epic Charter Schools defrauded taxpayers out of tens of millions of dollars over a decade. Details of the scheme, which the state auditor called the largest abuse of taxpayer dollars in Oklahoma history, will be unveiled in court this week. 

A hearing in the embezzlement case against David Chaney and Ben Harris begins Monday. Oklahoma County District Special Judge Jason Glidewell allotted five days for the preliminary hearing, which is like a mini-trial, with witnesses and evidence and cross-examination. The purpose is for the judge to determine whether there’s enough probable cause to proceed to trial.

Chaney and Harris are each charged with fifteen felonies, including embezzlement, money laundering, computer crimes and conspiracy to defraud the state. They have denied wrongdoing.

Epic’s former chief financial officer, Josh Brock, faces the same felony charges but waived his preliminary hearing. He is expected to be one of several witnesses this week and will likely take a plea deal…

Prosecutors’ review of Epic Youth Services’ bank accounts revealed the company collected more than $69.3 million in management fees between 2013 and 2021, court records show. Of that, the trio split $55 million: Harris received $25 million, Chaney received $23 million and Brock received more than $7 million.  

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Oklahoma, Virtual Charter Schools

The Atlantic: Private Equity Eyes Child-Care Industry as Profit Center

By dianeravitch
March 23, 2024 //
7

As the research has built up on the value of early childhood education, more states are directing money towards expanding access. Wherever money flows, the private equity industry turns its gaze and seeks to do what it does best: privatize and profit. In this age, private equity figures out how to maximize profit from services that used to be public.

The Atlantic has a story about private equity’s interest in childcare.

Last June, years of organizing in Vermont paid off when the state’s House and Senate passed landmark legislation—overriding a governor’s earlier veto—that invests $125 million a year into its child-care system. The bill expanded eligibility for state assistance to 575 percent of the federal poverty level, meaning that more than 7,000 new families are expected to receive money for child-care expenses. Funding will also become available to help day-care centers recruit and retain teachers and expand capacity; centers will also receive additional money for providing nonstandard hours of care.

But now advocates are worried that the wrong people stand to benefit from the program’s generosity. Any time there is a windfall of public money, with few strings attached, unintended consequences are nearly certain to follow. Thanks to the new law, more Vermont families will have more to spend on child care, and centers will receive additional money without explicit rules around how to spend it. Both of those facts will make child care an attractive target for private-equity groups looking for an industry with lots of incoming revenue.

Private equity’s interest in child care has been growing in recent years. “While there has been corporate for-profit child care since the 1970s, private equity only got in starting in the early 2000s,” Elliot Haspel, a senior fellow who studies early childhood education at the nonpartisan think tank Capita, told me. Now four of the top five for-profit child-care chains—KinderCare, Learning Care Group, the Goddard School, and Primrose Schools—are controlled by private-equity funds, and private-equity-backed centers represent 10 to 12 percent of the market.

Private investors are intrigued by child care for the same reasons they became interested in nursing homes and other health-care services: intense demand, government money, and relatively low start-up costs. “Their goal is not long-term sustainability; their goal is to try to turn a profit,” Haspel said.

Private equity’s foray into child care could go a number of ways, but its introduction has largely not worked out well for other sectors—and certainly not for many people who rely on those sectors’ services. In his book, Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, Brendan Ballou, who investigated private-equity firms at the Department of Justice, posits that the private-equity business model has three basic problems. First, these firms buy a business with the intention of flipping it for a profit, not long-term sustainability, meaning that they are trying to maximize value in the short term and are less likely to invest in staff or facilities. Second, they tend to load businesses up with debt and extract a lot of fees, such as charging child-care providers for the privilege of being managed by the firm. And perhaps most important, their business structure insulates firms from liability.

In 2009, Annie Salley, a resident of a nursing-home chain purchased by the private-equity group Carlyle, died after an injury she sustained while going to the bathroom. Her family sued Carlyle, but a judge dismissed the case after the firm argued that it didn’t own the chain—instead, it said it advised a series of investment funds, such as Carlyle Partners V MC, L.P., that were the lone shareholders in the chain. Children get hurt in child care; children occasionally go missing from a care facility; every year, some children die in day cares. If private-equity firms can structure their relationship to day-care centers as they have nursing homes, families may have little recourse should they encounter a serious problem.

Though private-equity-backed child-care providers can—and often do—offer good services to families, their business model can also prove ruinous. In other sectors, private-equity groups have been notorious for extracting exorbitant fees from businesses they’ve acquired in leveraged buyouts; when they’ve had a chance to raise wages for workers or pay down their private-equity debts, they’ve regularly opted for the latter. Although Vermont’s bill sought to improve the wages of educators, it does not include a salary floor—which means that money that flows into centers may not necessarily go directly to staff—and without such a safeguard, what is stopping outside firms from taking the first, significant cut?

Miriam Calderón, the chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a nonprofit focused on babies, toddlers, and their families, hopes federal lawmakers consider these concerns as they begin to reimagine the federal footprint in child care. Calderón worked in the Biden administration during its first year and helped conceive the early-childhood-education components of the Build Back Better Act, which would have established a child-care entitlement program for a majority of families. Congress isn’t moving on the issue now, but Calderón and advocates told me it would be foolish to wait until Congress was working again to think about protections around public dollars. Private-equity-backed chains will likely continue to grow as a share of the market, and if they gain too much of it, they would have the power to fight back against policies that ensure that staff are fairly compensated and families aren’t paying even more exorbitant fees than they already are. “The work now is to really think through the right guardrails and the right policies so when we get to a moment, again, we’re ready,” Calderón said.

Open the link to finish the article. Or subscribe to The Atlantic.

Categories Childhood, Pre-K, K, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit
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