Archives for category: Gender
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Trump Demands Apology from Bishop Who Asked Him to Emulate Jesus

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2025 //
76

Imagine this: The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C. spoke directly to Trump and his family at the National Prayer Service and called on him to be more like Jesus. Trump found this admonition very insulting and called on her to apologize. Maybe he will sign an executive order commanding her apology.

He will have to find a different church, one where hatred, vengeance, and cruelty are celebrated.

This is a corker of a post. It was written by Evan Hurst at Wonkette.

Donald Trump had a bad, failed day yesterday, which is too bad for him because you never get back the second day of your second term in office. Poof, gone. Only 1459 to go! Will they be failures too? Probably.

There was a prayer service at the National Cathedral on Tuesday, and Trump and Melania attended (this time not dressed as the Babadook), along with JD and Usha Vance and members of the Trump crime family and all kinds of others. And one of America’s greatest heroes, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopalian bishop for Washington DC, decided to speak truth to power, softly and carrying a big stick, and that stick was J-E-S-U-S. 

(That’s right, go with it, Jesus was a stick. “Go find the Lord!” you could say if you threw it for your dog. “Where did he go? Go get him!”)

Silliness aside, what Budde did was use her homily to ask this man, this vile, foul man, this Stupid Hitler of a man, this 34-times-convicted felon of a man, this pathetic grievance monkey child of a man, this amoral clown, to have mercy on the vulnerable. 

You know, like Jesus would.

Here is some video:

Mediaite provides this long block quote:

Let me make one final plea. Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogue, wadara and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our god teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger. For we were all once strangers in this land. May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God, for the good of all people, good of all people in this nation and the world. Amen.

Oh man, she really stepped in it, didn’t she? She showed Jesus to those Nazis and asked them to have mercy on people who are scared. 

Nazis hate it when you show them Jesus. 

Trump is DEMANDING an apology. Can you believe the nerve of that insolent woke bitch bishop exhorting him to love his neighbor? 

The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart. She failed to mention the large number of illegal migrants that came into our Country and killed people. Many were deposited from jails and mental institutions. It is a giant crime wave that is taking place in the USA. Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job! She and her church owe the public an apology! t

“Nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.” “A very boring and uninspiring” service! Yeah, we bet there were some tiny-handed little tyrants in first-century Nazareth who sounded like that too. Wonder what they were convicted of 34 times….

In response, Sean Hannity had this little tantrum about it last night:

“Despite a landslide victory in the fall for Donald Trump, the left is still vowing to resist the president with the same level of drama, hysteria that we’ve all come to expect. This morning, a so-called bishop politicizing an inaugural prayer service. Instead of offering a benediction for our country, for our president, she goes on the far-left, woke tirade in front of Donald Trump and JD Vance, their families, their young children. She made the service about her very own deranged political beliefs with a disgraceful prayer full of fearmongering and division.”

Oh no, won’t somebody think of JD Vance’s children, hearing stories about Jesus, and probably being like “Wow, that sure doesn’t sound like my dad!” 

Also bless Hannity’s heart, jerking himself and his president off by calling it a “landslide.” We all know the truth. (Almost nobody watched the inauguration by the way, 27 percent fewer than Joe Biden’s.)

You can hear the sermon here.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Ethics, Gender, Immigration, Religion, Trump

AP: Senior Taliban Official Calls for Removing Ban on Women’s Education

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2025 //
6

The AP reported on a promising development. A Taliban leader says that girls and women should be allowed to get an education. But don’t celebrate until there is an actual policy change.

A senior Taliban figure has urged the group’s leader to scrap education bans on Afghan women and girls, saying there is no excuse for them, in a rare public rebuke of government policy. 

Sher Abbas Stanikzai, political deputy at the Foreign Ministry, made the remarks in a speech on Saturday in southeastern Khost province. 

He told an audience at a religious school ceremony there was no reason to deny education to women and girls, “just as there was no justification for it in the past and there shouldn’t be one at all.”

The government has barred females from education after sixth grade. Last September, there were reports authorities had also stopped medical training and courses for women.

In Afghanistan, women and girls can only be treated by female doctors and health professionals. Authorities have yet to confirm the medical training ban.

“We call on the leadership again to open the doors of education,” said Stanikzai in a video shared by his official account on the social platform X. “We are committing an injustice against 20 million people out of a population of 40 million, depriving them of all their rights. This is not in Islamic law, but our personal choice or nature.” 

Stanikzai was once the head of the Taliban team in talks that led to the complete withdrawal of foreign troops from Afghanistan. 

It is not the first time he has said that women and girls deserve to have an education. He made similar remarks in September 2022, a year after schools closed for girls and months and before the introduction of a university ban.

Think about it: in Afghanistan, women can be treated only by female doctors, but women are not permitted to study beyond sixth grade. How can women get any healthcare if women are not allowed to study and become doctors?

Don’t the Taliban care about the well-being of their mothers, their sisters, their daughters?

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, International

Ohio Passes Its Own “Don’t Say Gay” Law

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2025 //
5

Governor Mike DeWine of Ohio signed a “Don’t Say Gay” law, which goes into effect in 90 days.

The blog Wonkette reported:

Ohio is one of the most gerrymandered states in the nation. Oh, wait. We’ve said that before. And before that. But the point here is that gerrymanders — like fair elections — have consequences, and this week we saw some of the worst. Governor Mike DeWine, famous here at Wonkette for giving trans kids a brief reprievefrom the worst impulses of Ohio’s GOP legislative supermajority, has spent the last year hurting trans folks over and over to make up for that one act of kindness. This week’s example goes extra further to attack all the QTs and their alphabet friends by signing Ohio’s very first “Don’t Say Gay!” bill, HB 8. The bill is now a law and goes into effect 90 days from Thursday.

The bill is modeled after Florida’s, of course, thus the identical nickname even if it’s officially known as the Parents’ Bill of Rights. From The Advocate:

H.B. 8 prohibits educators from discussing “sexuality content” in grades K-3, and mandates that instruction at other levels be “age appropriate.” The bill defines “sexuality content” as “oral or written instruction, presentation, image or description of sexual concepts or gender ideology.” It does not define “sexual concepts,” [or] “gender ideology[.]”

Of course it doesn’t. You define those things specifically if you want to be really certain you get rid of exactly the content that’s causing a problem. You don’t define things specifically if your goal is to create a climate of self-censorship, where teachers are constantly afraid that a truly innocent bit of information will get them fired if their principal or a student’s parent interprets “gender ideology” a little more conservatively than the teacher herself. Is telling a first grader that it’s okay for boys to cook and do dishes and maybe even their own laundry “gender ideology”? Could be!

“Sexuality content” now can’t be taught without advance notice to parents (who have a right to opt their kids out). Thinking about telling Tim and Tina that they can’t bully Terri for having two dads? That might be acceptable under the “incidental” exception in paragraph G(5)(b), but it also might not. Better get a permission slip first!

The entire bill is so full of insane bureaucratic requirements that the Don’t Say Gay! label really sells the crazy short. Before each student starts classes each year, and again if a child transfers schools, every parent must be notified of all medical services available at or through the schools, as well as any “facilitated” by the school. What constitutes “facilitation”? Unclear! But we know that any time a student starts or stops receiving school counseling another notice must be sent.

Read the bill and it requires notice after notice after notice. If the child might be trans, definitely send a notice, but it’s not just that! Parents are now entitled to a letter from the school about any number of possible teaching topics, as well as any changes in “Student’s mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being.” The bill spells out that this includes “Any request by a student to identify as a gender that does not align with the student’s biological sex,” but it doesn’t stop there. Injuries, a change in academic performance, psychological trauma all have to be reported.

Meanwhile, parents can remove their children from school for hours per day for “religious instruction” without those kids being considered absent so long as they don’t miss “core curriculum subjects.” Religious instruction had previously been available subject to district discretion, conditions and limits, but no more. Now districts must release students for religious education, with no maximum number of hours away from the classroom.

As a whole, the bill goes somewhat farther than Florida’s law, and it’s unlikely to be interpreted leniently if legislators have anything to say about it. A year ago one of the sponsors and advocates for HB 8, state Rep. Beth Lear, actually said opponents of an anti-trans bathroom bill (now law) were better off dead:

“In Luke 17, Jesus says that if you cause one of these little ones of mine to stumble, it would be better for you to have a millstone hung around your neck and be thrown into the deepest sea,” state Rep. Beth Lear said while defending House Bill 183 in a committee hearing.

Lear also compared transgender people to animals in her defense of the discriminatory bill, continuing: “If I had a child who thought he was a bird, am I going to take him to a doctor who tells him the best thing to do is to let him explore being a bird? And oh, by the way, there’s a five-story building next door — why don’t you jump off and see if you can fly?”

She seems nice! 

With bathroom bills, sports bills, anti-trans regulations on health care meant to be onerous enough to make care impossible without attracting the negative attention of a ban, and now HB 8, Ohio’s trans kids have suffered a horrifying wave of attacks for twelve months now, and with the GOP defeating a bill that could have ended their gerrymanders, nothing is getting better any time soon.

Categories Extremism, Gender, Ohio

New York Times: Critics Insist that ERA Was NOT Passed

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2025 //
16

Not everyone agrees that the ERA is now official. The New York Times explained why:

President Biden declared on Friday that he believes that the Equal Rights Amendmenthas met the requirements of ratification and therefore is now part of the Constitution, but he declined to order the government to finalize the process by officially publishing it.

“In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified: The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex,” Mr. Biden said in a statement.

Under the Constitution, however, the president has no direct role in approving amendments and his statement has no legal force by itself. The archivist of the United States, a Biden appointee, has refused to formally publish the amendment on the grounds that it has not met the requirements to become part of the Constitution.

Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that Mr. Biden’s announcement amounted to nothing more than his personal beliefs. He noted that Mr. Biden’s Justice Department had defended the archivist in a legal opinion, arguing that no “relevant legal authority” had been identified establishing that the amendment had been adopted past the congressional deadline.

“If he wants to personally believe that, that’s fine, but it has no legal effect whatsoever, and all of the evidence says that he’s wrong,” Mr. Jipping said. “It’s like talking into the air — it has absolutely no effect beyond symbolism.”

Aides said that Mr. Biden was not ordering the archivist, Colleen Shogan, to reverse her position and publish the amendment, as advocates have urged him to do. Asked for comment on Friday, the archivist’s office referred back to previous statements refusing to publish the amendment, indicating that Dr. Shogan would not change her stance.

Even so, advocates maintained that Mr. Biden’s imprimatur gave the amendment additional credibility for any future court battle over whether it actually had the force of law. In effect, Mr. Biden and his allies are daring opponents to go to court to argue that women do not have equal rights.

The amendment would guarantee equality for women in all facets of life, such as pay, and provide a constitutional guarantee against sex discrimination. Congressional Democrats resurrected efforts to add the amendment as a safeguard for women’s rights after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who led the charge for Mr. Biden to unilaterally establish the amendment, said that the president’s declaration superseded the archivist, and that she was “no longer relevant.”

Ms. Gillibrand said Mr. Biden’s declaration obligated states to enforce the amendment and gave people a right to take legal action.

“I’m calling on plaintiffs to please file their lawsuits,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an interview. “I think it’s very important. Win or lose in the Supreme Court, it is essential this moment in time is recorded. This was the archivist’s job. She refused to do it. President Biden has recorded this moment in time.”

Mr. Biden’s decision to weigh in just three days before he leaves office on an issue that has divided the country for generations amounted to a late effort to bring about profound change and shape his own legacy, but without taking actual action.

The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed more than a century ago and has taken a circuitous route to ratification. It easily passed both houses of Congress with the required two-thirds votes in 1972 and over the next few years was ratified by most states. But it fell short of the three-quarters of states required under the Constitution until January 2020, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it.

Opponents have argued that a seven-year deadline imposed by Congress (and later extended by another three years) meant the ratification was not completed in time, while proponents maintain the deadline was invalid. Moreover, several states that originally ratified the amendment have tried to rescind their approval, adding another point of legal uncertainty to the situation.

Mr. Biden said in his statement on Friday that he agreed with legal groups such as the American Bar Association and constitutional scholars who have since determined that the amendment had “cleared all necessary hurdles to be formally added to the Constitution as the 28th Amendment.” During an address to the nation’s mayors on Friday, the president said he had “consulted dozens of constitutional scholars to make sure it was all within the power to do this.”

“It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Mr. Biden said.

The amendment itself, originally written by the women’s rights activist Alice Paul in 1923 and later modified, essentially is a single sentence: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” The rest of the amendment simply says that Congress can pass legislation to enforce it and that it would go into effect two years after ratification.

While the text of the amendment seems relatively straightforward on its face at a time when federal law already prohibits sex discrimination, it in fact has long been an explosive issue. Advocates argue that such a bedrock principle should be explicitly built into the Constitution, not just statutory law, while critics contend it would have far-reaching consequences on everything from abortion rights to a military draft for women.

Democrats have been pressing Mr. Biden to order the archivist to publish the amendment. Last month, Dr. Shogan and her deputy, William J. Bosanko, issued a statement saying the Equal Rights Amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial and procedural decisions.”

Dr. Shogan and Mr. Bosanko cited various court decisions and memos from the Justice Department in concluding that they “cannot legally publish the Equal Rights Amendment.”

But former Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin and the president of the American Constitution Society, a progressive advocacy group, who has been among those pushing for the archivist to publish the amendment, said Mr. Biden’s statement was meaningful even if she does not.

“It’s completely historic to have the president of the United States say it’s already in the Constitution,” Mr. Feingold said in an interview. “I believe and many believe that whether or not the archivist certifies it or not doesn’t matter.”

That represents a turnabout more than two years after saying it did matter and advancing the strategy of pressing the archivist to publish it as a way to finally declare the amendment part of the Constitution. Now, Mr. Feingold said, the archivist’s role is “merely ministerial” and the president’s opinion is more meaningful.

“For the president to recognize it as a matter of law is something we’ve been working on for years,” he said. “It is a significant moment after 100 years.”

Back when I was a conservative, I opposed the ERA because I believed that women–as Americans–had equal rights. Now, I admit that I’m happy to see, or hope, that it was ratified. The ERA became a symbolic statement about whether one thought that women should have equal rights. Of course, we should!

And it will be interesting to see the court cases. Who will argue that women do not have equal rights?

Do we have equal rights? The U.S. Supreme Court stripped away a right we had had for 50 years. Dobbs. Shameful.

Categories Biden, Gender

Biden Makes the Equal Rights Amendment Official!

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2025 //
3

Laurence Tribe and Kathleen Sullivan report in The Contrarian on a momentous event that was ignored by the media: The U.S. Constitution has a new amendment. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden made the Equal Rughts Amendment official.

Critics claimed that the time limit for the ERA had passed, but Tribe and Sullivan explain why the critics were wrong.

With three days left in his presidency, Joseph R. Biden ensured that the United States Constitution, the oldest on earth, would finally include an explicit guarantee of sex equality. In truth, the Equal Rights Amendment should have been recognized as part of our Constitution nearly half a dozen years ago, when Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it on January 27, 2020.

By proclaiming, in effect, “Yes, Virginia, you have made history by repairing a glaring omission in our most fundamental law,” President Biden made official a reality that many Americans failed to recognize at the time: that Article V of the Constitution expressly makes any proposed Amendment to that document “Part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.” Nothing in Article V makes the Constitution’s binding contents depend on any further official action by any branch of the federal government, whether Congress or the Judiciary or indeed the Executive.

What makes this action controversial is, of course, the decades that have elapsed since Congress saw fit to propose the ERA to the states for ratification in 1972. But there is no legal basis for treating the ERA as having expired when the arbitrary time limits of 7 and then 10 years set by the House and Senate for the ratification process had run out. The Constitution’s arduous process for amending the document makes it the hardest in the world to revise, with the result that an 18th and 19th century sensibility casts too long a shadow There is no justification for making a uniquely difficult amendment process more difficult by grafting onto it a requirement that amendments must be ratified speedily, a requirement nowhere to be found in the Constitution’s text .

Nor can any such requirement be extrapolated from the history of the amendment process as we have employed it over the years. The most recently ratified amendment, the 27th, was finally approved by the Legislature of Michigan in May 1992, more than two centuries after it was proposed by the First Congress in September 1789. But because its text – unlike that of the 18th, 20th, 21st, and 22nd Amendments – contained no language making it “inoperative unless ratified” by enough states “within seven years of its submission” or indeed within any specified time, that long percolation period made no difference.

So too with the ERA. Congress knew by the date of its submission to the States, March 22, 1972, precisely how to include a shelf date in the text of the amendment , but instead included a time limit only in the advisory resolution . That makes all the difference, because such a resolution is not a binding law, and is not a part of the amendment the States vote whether or not to ratify. Congress recognized as much when it extended that limit by three years in 1982 through a resolution of the two houses.

The Supreme Court, in a case that one of us (Tribe) presented to that court over four decades ago, National Organization For Women v. Idaho, similarly treated the time limit in the resolution as non-binding. And, although five states – Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee – attempted to rescind their state legislatures’ earlier ratifications of the ERA between 1972 and 1982, nothing in the Constitution provides for any such turnabout nor tolerates the chaotic and unpredictable legal situation that would be created by permitting states to reverse course as the process proceeds. Ratification is rightly understood as a one-way ratchet.

After careful consideration and consultation with constitutional experts, President Biden – like the American Bar Association last year – concluded that the ERA had met all the requirements for inclusion in the Constitution. He decided that the Oath of Office he took upon assuming the presidency – the Oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” – meant that he should formally announce that conclusion to the world.

We welcome debate on the political and moral pros and cons of keeping the ERA alive rather than letting it fade from memory until Congress is again willing to propose similar language for the states to consider – a wait that could be many decades long. And others can debate the implications for the Biden legacy and even the eventual outcome of the multifaceted litigation likely to ensue. Faithful to his Oath and to his duty to execute the laws, this president did not flinch from acting in accord with simple, straightforward, legally impeccable principle.

For that, he deserves our undying gratitude.
It is not necessary for the National Archivist to publish the ERA in order for it to be adopted according to the provisions of the Constitution. The President avoided triggering a clash with the Archivist, who recently announced her intention to defy her statutory, and purely ministerial, duty to publish the ERA. The only reason Congress gave the Archivist such a duty nearly a century ago was to ensure that the Nation got word that an amendment was in force, enabling officials at all levels of government to conform their actions to it. In our modern age of broadcast, cable and internet communication, the President’s announcement itself performed that function.

Accordingly, our Constitution now demands that “equality of rights under the law cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”

It’s long past time!


Laurence H. Tribe is Carl M. Loeb University Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard University.

Kathleen M. Sullivan is former Dean of Stanford Law School and professor of law at Harvard and Stanford.

Categories Biden, Equity, Ethics, Gender, History

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

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2025 //
2

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

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

Lewis and Plaza write:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To finish reading the article, open the link.

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

Just Published: My Review of the Trump Education Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2025 //
5

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas: State Will Not Release Data on Pregnancy-Related Deaths

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2024 //
5

Houston Chronicle reporter Jeremy Wallace wrote that state officials have decided not to release information about pregnancy-related deaths in the years following the state’s harsh ban on abortion. Under Governor Gregg Abbott’s lead, the less the public knows, the better off he is.

Bypassing data

Texas officials will not investigate pregnancy-related deaths for 2022 and 2023, skipping over the years immediately following the state’s controversial abortion ban, which critics say has led to more dangerous and sometimes fatal pregnancies. 

The state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee, which announced the decision this fall after years of trying to catch up on its count, said it was jumping ahead to provide “more contemporary” data for state lawmakers.

Dr. Carla Ortique, who chairs the committee, said the Texas Department of State Health Services will still release some mortality data from 2022 and 2023, even though the committee is not providing an in-depth analysis of causes and trends. Reached for comment this week, Ortique said the committee had been planning to skip forward since earlier this year.

The move comes after the committee delayed the release of its last major review, in 2022, which showed a higher rate of life-threatening hemorrhaging among Black women during childbirth in Texas through 2020. Critics at the time accused Gov. Greg Abbott, who appoints the committee members, of pushing it off until after his reelection bid. 

The committee now says its 2024 review, which would be the first glimpse into impacts from the period after the fall of Roe v. Wade, will be ready sometime in 2026, the same year Abbott has already said he will run for a record-setting fourth term.

Reporters Taylor Goldenstein and Julian Gill have more on the decision here.

Categories Data, Extremism, Gender, Texas

Jane Mayer: Pete Hegseth’s Secret History as a Drunk and Sexual Predator

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2024 //
10

Jane Mayer, superstar writer for The New Yorker, has scored a major scoop with her detailed account of Pete Hegseth’s secret life. She has details that have thus far eluded the major daily newspapers.

Hegseth, of course, is Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Defense. This is one of the most crucial and demanding jobs in government. The Defense Department has a budget of more than $800 billion and almost three million employees. The Secretary must be prepared to make consequential decisions of life and depth with in-depth knowledge and experience.

Pete Hegseth is not that man.

Mayer writes:

A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club. In a separate letter of complaint, which was sent to the organization in late 2015, a different former employee described Hegseth being at a bar in the early-morning hours of May 29, 2015, while on an official tour through Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, drunkenly chanting “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!”

In response to questions from this magazine, Tim Parlatore, a lawyer for Hegseth, replied with the following statement, which he said came from “an advisor” to Hegseth: “We’re not going to comment on outlandish claims laundered through The New Yorker by a petty and jealous disgruntled former associate of Mr. Hegseth’s. Get back to us when you try your first attempt at actual journalism….”

The whistle-blower report makes extensive allegations. It describes several top managers being involved in drunken episodes, including an altercation at a casino and a hotel Christmas party at which food was thrown from the balcony. Hegseth, it says, was “seen drunk at multiple CVA events” between 2013 and 2015, a time when the organization was engaged in an ambitious nationwide effort to mobilize veterans to vote for conservative candidates and causes…

In October, 2014, C.V.A. instituted a “no alcohol” policy at its events. But the next month, according to the report, Hegseth and another manager lifted the policy while overseeing a get-out-the-vote field operation to boost Republican candidates in North Carolina. According to the report, on the evening before the election, Hegseth, who had been out with three young female staff members, was so inebriated by 1 a.m. that a staffer who had driven him to his hotel, in a van full of other drunken staffers, asked for assistance to get Hegseth to his room. “Pete was completely passed out in the middle seat, slumped over” a young female staff member, the report says. It took two male staff members to get Hegseth into the hotel; after one young woman vomited in some bushes, another helped him into bed. In the morning, a team member had to wake Hegseth so that he didn’t miss his flight. “All of this happened in public,” according to the report, while C.V.A. was “embedded” in the Republican get-out-the-vote effort. It went on, “Everyone who saw this was disgusted and in shock that the head of the team was that intoxicated….”

In December, 2014, the group held an office Christmas party at the Grand Hyatt in Washington. Once again, according to the report, Hegseth was “noticeably intoxicated and had to be carried up to his room.” The report stated, “His behavior was embarrassing in front of the team, but not surprising; people have simply come to expect Pete to get drunk at social events.”

Earlier in his career, in 2007, Hegseth was hired to lead a small veterans’ group called Vets for Freedom, which advocated for expanding the war in Iraq. By 2009, VFF was virtually bankrupt, with $1,000 in the bank, and nearly $500,000 in debts. The billionaire backers lost confidence in him and merged VFF with another vets’ group to minimize his role.

Mayer quotes Margaret Hoover, an advisor to VFF during Hegseth’s tenure, who said to CNN:

 “I watched him run an organization very poorly, lose the confidence of donors. The organization ultimately folded and was forced to merge with another organization who individuals felt could run and manage funds on behalf of donors more responsibly than he could. That was my experience with him.” Hoover stressed that V.F.F. was an exceedingly small organization, with fewer than ten employees, and a budget of between five million and ten million dollars. She told CNN, “And he couldn’t do that properly—I don’t know how he’s going to run an organization with an eight-hundred-and-fifty-seven-billion-dollar budget and three million individuals.”

Categories Accountability, Character, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Trump

Pete Hegseth’s Mother Denounced His Treatment of Women, Then Retracted It

By dianeravitch
December 1, 2024 //
4

Pete Hegseth, the FOX talk show host selected by Trump as Secretary of Defense, has a problem with women.

He has been accused of rape by a California woman, with whom he reached a financial settlement in exchange for her silence. But since no charges weee filed by the police, that incident won’t get in the way of confirmation.

His record of fidelity to his wife is blemished, to say the least.

The New York Times wrote:

Mr. Hegseth married Meredith Schwarz, his high school sweetheart, in 2004, one year after they both graduated from college. Ms. Schwarz sued for divorce less than five years after their wedding. The 2009 court judgment cited Mr. Hegseth’s infidelity as the reason for the breakdown of the marriage.

The following year, Mr. Hegseth married Samantha. Within five years, they had three boys.

Mr. Hegseth has repeatedly said he is a Christian who adheres to conservative family values. In a short-lived bid for the Republican nomination for a Minnesota seat in the U.S. Senate in 2012, he credited his parents for instilling those values in him, saying, “I didn’t learn conservatism out of a book.”

In an essay that same year, he acknowledged that he had erred by fathering a child “out of wedlock” with Samantha, who had been his co-worker at a nonprofit group called Vets for Freedom, after his first marriage ended…

By late 2016, Mr. Hegseth, a Fox News contributor and aspiring anchor, was having an affair with Jennifer Rauchet, an executive producer at Fox News. He was named as the weekend anchor of Fox & Friends in early 2017 — a post he held until earlier this month, when Mr. Trump announced he wanted him to head the Defense Department.

Ms. Rauchet, who has three other children, delivered a baby girl in August 2017, one month before Samantha Hegseth filed for divorce. Mr. Hegseth married Ms. Rauchet in 2019 at a ceremony at Trump National Golf Club Colts Neck in New Jersey.

Thus far, Pete has had three marriages and two children born “out-of-wedlock” to his future wives.

Pete’s mother was outraged by his adulterous behavior, the Times reported.

The mother of Pete Hegseth, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, wrote him an email in 2018 saying he had routinely mistreated women for years and displayed a lack of character.

“On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself,” Penelope Hegseth wrote, stating that she still loved him.

She also wrote: “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.”

Mrs. Hegseth, in a phone interview with The New York Times on Friday, said that she had sent her son an immediate follow-up email at the time apologizing for what she had written. She said she had fired off the original email “in anger, with emotion” at a time when he and his wife were going through a very difficult divorce…

Hegspeth wears his Christian nationalism on his body, literally, with tattoos. What kind of devout Christian repeatedly commits adultery. It would not be tolerated in the military, where it is treated as a crime. Should the Secretary be held to different standards than the members of the military?

Hegseth has been outspoken in his opposition to women serving in combat. He has not said yet what he plans to do with women who are now serving in the Green Berets and Navy Seals, who passed rigorous tests to earn their badges.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Cruelty, Elections, Gender, Trump
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »