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DeSantis and His Failed Search for Voter Fraud in Florida

By dianeravitch
September 22, 2023 //
21

One of the most bizarre aspects of the 2020 election-denial drama is the search for voter fraud in states that voted for Trump. Florida is Exhibit Number One, as demonstrated in this excellent article in the New York Times by Alexandra Bersin and Sharon LaFraniere. Trump won Florida handily, yet Governor Ron DeSantis felt he had to mollify Trump’s rabid base by insisting that he would root out election fraud. Did he want to increase Trump’s numbers or what? Maybe Biden really won Florida? It made no sense. Or was DeSantis grandstanding for the nutty rightwing base?

The story begins:

It resembled a political rally more than a news conference. In November 2021, exactly one year after Donald J. Trump lost the presidential election to Joseph R. Biden Jr., Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida spoke to a raucous crowd in a hotel conference room just a few miles from Mr. Trump’s home base of Mar-a-Lago.

Their suspicions about vast election malfeasance would be heard, Mr. DeSantis promised. He was setting up an election police unit and he invited the crowd to send in tips about illegal “ballot harvesting,” nodding to an unfounded theory about Democrats collecting ballots in bulk.

The crowd whooped and waved furiously. “He gets it!” posted a commenter watching on Rumble.

But in his seven-minute, tough-on-election-crimes sermon, Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, never explicitly endorsed that theory or the many others spread by the defeated president and embraced by much of their party.

In this way, for nearly three years, Mr. DeSantis played both sides of Republicans’ rift over the 2020 election. As his state became a buzzing hub of the election denial movement, he repeatedly took actions that placated those who believed Mr. Trump had won.

Most prominent was the creation of an election crimes unit that surfaced scores of “zany-burger” tips, according to its former leader, disrupted the lives of a few dozen Floridians, and, one year in, has not yet led to any charges of ballot harvesting or uncovered other mass fraud.

Yet Mr. DeSantis kept his own views vague. Only last month — two years, six months and 18 days after Mr. Biden was sworn into office — did Mr. DeSantis, now running for president, acknowledge that Mr. Biden had defeated Mr. Trump.

DeSantis never spoke honestly to the election deniers. Instead he appeased them. His “election crimes unit” managed to find a grand total of 32 ex-felons who voted illegally. They didn’t know they were voting illegally because they received letters from the state urging them to vote and were issued voter registration cards.

Nathan Hart, a 50-year-old ex-felon from near Tampa, is among 32 people who have been arrested or faced warrants under the new initiative. Mr. Hart, who plans to appeal his conviction, said he lost his job as a warehouse worker because he had to show up in court. When he cast his ballot for Mr. Trump he had no idea he was ineligible to vote, he said.

He and others suffered so that the governor “could have a really good photo op and make himself look tough,” he said.

In the 2020 election, 11 million Floridians voted, and Trump won the state by 371,686 votes. Yet the leaders of the election fraud crusade descended on Florida, including Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, Michael Flynn, and Patrick Byrne, founder of Overstock.com. Local activists organized to find evidence of voter fraud. One group even delivered a box of claims to DeSantis’s mother, who sent it on to her son. None of the “evidence” or tips panned out. The search for voter fraud was a wild goose chase.

DeSantis’ much-ballyhooed election crimes unit turned over 1,500 names of potential fraudsters to local officials, which resulted in 32 arrests. A big nothing-burger.

DeSantis boasted about his crackdown on voter fraud, but never admitted that it produced no evidence of voter fraud. The only genuine fraud was the insistence by conspiracy theorists that the 2020 election was riddled with fraud.

And my initial question remains unanswered: what was the point of searching for voter fraud in a state that Trump won handily?

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Elections, Florida, Hoax, Trump

Florida: Most Voucher Recipients Never Attended Public School

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2023 //
11

Joshua Cowen of Michigan State University tweeted the following information from official sources in Florida:

Oh would you look at that—70% of expanded Florida #schoolvouchers users were already in private school.

Another 18% entering kindergartners.

Only 13% came from public school.


@FLBaloney @FloridaPolicy @DianeRavitch
drive.google.com/file/d/1yyl80J…

Categories Education Industry, Fake, Florida, Hoax, Lies, Vouchers

Don’t Fall for This Telephone Scam!

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2023 //
23

CNN reports that telephone scams now use artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of a loved one who is in desperate trouble and needs help or ransom money right away. In this example, a mother gets a call from what sounds like her daughter, who has been kidnapped, and the gruff voice of a man demanding $1 million to ransom her. It’s a scam, but sometimes it works. If you get a call like this, don’t fall for it. Call your child, call the police, record the call.

The Boston Globe reported on a scam that has become commonplace. An elderly person gets a call from someone with a youthful voice who says, “Grandma, I’m in trouble. I rented a car and ran a red light. I crashed into a car driven by a pregnant woman. I’m in jail, and I need money to make bail. Please help me.”

This happened to a 93-year-old woman in Massachusetts. She rushed to the bank, withdrew $9,500, spoke to a smooth-talking man who claimed to be a lawyer, and handed the money over to a LYFT driver.

I mention this because I received the same scam call. A young man called, claiming to be my grandson. He was in a car accident, he said. It was his fault. He needed money right away for bail. He gave me the badge number and telephone number of the arresting officer. I asked if he had called his mother. He said he couldn’t reach her. I hung up, called his mother, and she said the grandson in question was in his dorm, preparing for finals. I didn’t fall for the scam.

But this grandmother did.

Last month, a 93-year-old grandmother from Pembroke took a call from someone she thought was her granddaughter Abby. Through sobs, Abby begged for money to get out of jail.

Yes, it was a scam, and the grandmother ― who asked that her name not be used for fear of being targeted by other scammers ― fell for it.

The scammers used a somewhat elaborate ruse that included having “Abby’s lawyer” come on the phone to matter-of-factly explain the necessary steps to secure her release.

It was a cruel and wicked exploitation of a grandmother’s love and concern, perpetrated by slick con artists who have no decency.

But the grandmother and her family said they were also upset that Bank of America, from which she hurriedly withdrew $9,500 in cash, did nothing to stop her from throwing away thousands of dollars.

The family also wondered about Lyft, the ridesharing giant, which picked up the cash and delivered it to the scammers, apparently unwittingly.

The family contacted me to call attention to the roles played by two of the country’s biggest corporations and to warn other elders and their families to be on guard, they said.

When the grandmother answered the phone in her home on the morning of Feb. 25 she was stunned to hear a hysterical “Abby” pleading for help.

Here’s what happened:

“Grandma, you got to help,” the voice said. It sounded like Abby, who is in her early 20s. She grew up nearby and spent plenty of time with her grandmother.

She told “Grandma” she was accused of texting while driving and causing an accident in which the pregnant driver of the other car was hurt and taken to the hospital. “Abby” insisted it wasn’t her fault and told “Grandma” she broke her nose in the accident.

“Abby” swore her grandmother and grandfather (he’s 96) to secrecy before putting someone purporting to be her lawyer on the phone. He told her, among other things, that the money was “fully refundable.”

The grandmother hurried off alone to a Bank of America branch office in nearby Marshfield, where she regularly does her banking, feeling anxious and afraid.

At the teller’s window, she showed her driver’s license and presented a check made out to cash. Very few words were exchanged before the teller put a small stack of bills into a white envelope and slid it to the grandmother.

The grandmother was so preoccupied with her mission that she left the bank without counting the money or even looking in the envelope, she said.

Back home, she called the telephone number the phony lawyer had given her. He instructed her to find a small box into which to put the envelope.

The “lawyer” told the grandmother someone would come to her house to pick up the box and gave her the license plate number, make, and model of the car.

A few minutes later, the “lawyer,” still speaking in a reassuring voice on the phone, told her to bring the package to the driver. The driver said little before driving away with it.

About 30 minutes later, the “lawyer” called again and told the grandmother he had bad news: The pregnant woman’s baby had died and Abby was now charged with manslaughter. He needed $9,000 more to get her released.

That’s when she told her son, who happened to be visiting, what was happening. He spoke with the “lawyer,” whom he described as sounding “unbelievably calm and professional.” The “lawyer” told the son the name of the jail where Abby was supposedly being held.

The son hung up and called his niece. She answered. The jig was up.

The son called back the “lawyer.” The call went dead. (I called the same number several times but kept getting a fast busy signal.) The son gave the police the license plate number given to the grandmother. Police said the pickup was made by a Lyft driver.

The reporter for the Globe, Sean P. Murphy, was able to persuade Bank of America to refund the woman’s payout. The scammer got away with it.

Categories Corruption, Fake, Fraud, Hoax, Lies

Raymond F. Tirana: The Libertarian Goal for K-12 Schooling

By dianeravitch
September 10, 2023 //
27

Reader Raymond F. Tirana posted a comment in which he described the end goal of the libertarian overhaul of school funding. In Kansas, Florida, and other red states, he says, they are trying to shift responsibility for funding and providing schools from the state to parents. This will not only exacerbate segregate but increase inequity. Of course, they will do this under false pretenses, claiming to “widen opportunities” and to “save poor children from failing schools.” Don’t believe them.

He wrote in a comment:

What will really happen once the state offloads all responsibility for educating children: Inevitably, the budget will be slashed each year (Kansas is already enacting a flat tax that will decimate the State’s ability to raise revenue – people remember Koch Industries is based in Kansas, right?) until the public schools are forced to fold and Kansas parents will be lucky to get any crumbs from their masters to be used toward the education of their kids. This was Milton Freidman’s fantasy, and we are close to seeing it realized in Kansas, Florida and other states, as parents sit by and let their children’s future be stolen from them.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Economy, Education Industry, Elections, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Florida, Funding, Hoax, Lies, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Understanding the Voucher Scam

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2023 //
7

A reader who signs as “Retired Teacher” posted this astute analysis of how vouchers work. Why are billionaires like Betsy DeVos, Charles Koch, the Waltons, etc. so enthusiastic about vouchers? No voucher will ever be large enough to send a child to the schools their children attend. Why do they want to defund public schools?

During the first phase of the privatization of education was the belief that the private sector can do everything better and more efficiently than the public sector. What ensued was trying to turn education into a commodity. Market based principles applied to education made everything so much worse including hiring the wrong people, endless testing, waste, fraud, firing legitimate teachers and closing public schools. The main goal of privatization has always been to gain access to public funds and transfer it into private pockets. The current interest in vouchers is an extension of this trend. It certainly is not about education as vouchers provide worse education.

Vouchers have always been the goal of DeVos, the 1% and right wing extremists. They are a way to scam the working class out of the public schools that protect their children’s rights and send them to valueless schools with zero accountability while teaching them religious dogma and almost anything else the school deems worthy for less cost. Unfortunately, the students are unlikely get a valid background in science, history, civics or the exposure to diverse students. Vouchers benefit the wealthy and affluent, and they are a losing proposition for the poor and working class.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bigotry, Billionaires, Corruption, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Reform, Fake, Hoax, Lies, Vouchers

Thom Hartmann: Why Are Billionaires Funding Attacks on Black History and Trans People?

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2023 //
75

This is one of the most brilliant articles I have read in many years. It answers the question that constantly arises: why do poor people vote for a political party that offers them nothing but alarming narratives about the Other?

Thom Hartmann explains that if you get people to vote for racism, against trans people, and against other imaginary threats, they will ignore the facts of poverty, health care, and the extreme income inequality and wealth inequality that characterizes our nation today.

Hartmann writes:

There’s a popular internet meme going around that says:

“Say you’re in a room with 400 people. Thirty-six of them don’t have health insurance. Forty-eight of them live in poverty. Eighty-five are illiterate. Ninety have untreated mental illnesses. And every day, at least one person is shot. But two of them are trans, so you decide ruining their lives is your top priority.”

Consider some of the basic realities of life in modern America:

— Almost 30 million Americans lack health insurance altogether, and 43 percent of Americans are so badly under-insured that any illness or accident costing them more than $1000 in co-pays or deductibles would wipe them out.

— Almost 12 percent of Americans, over 37 million of us, live in dire poverty. According to OECD numbers, while only 5 percent of Italians and 11 percent of Japanese workers toil in low-wage jobs, almost a quarter of Americans — 23 percent — work for wages that can’t support a normal lifestyle. (And low-income Japanese and Italians have free healthcare and college.)

— More than one-in-five Americans — 21 percent — are illiterate. By fourth grade, a mere 35 percent of American children are literate at grade level, as our public schools suffer from a sustained, two-decade-long attack by Republicans at both state and federal levels.

— Fully a quarter of Americans (26 percent) suffer from a diagnosable mental illness in any given year: over half of them (54 percent) never receive treatment and, because of cost and a lack of access to mental health care, of the 46 percent who do get help, the average time from onset of symptoms to the first treatment is 11 years.

— Every day in America an average of 316 people are shot and 110 die from their wounds. Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children, a situation not suffered by the children of any other country in theworld.

And these are just the tip of the iceberg of statistics about how Americans suffer from Reagan’s forty-year-long GOP war on working-class and poor people.

— Almost half (44 percent) of American adults carry student debt, a burden virtually unknownin any other developed country in the world (dozens of countries actually pay their young people to go to college).

— Americans spend more than twice as much for healthcare and pharmaceuticals than citizens of any other developed country. We pay $11,912 per person per year for healthcare; it’s $5,463 in Australia, $4,666 in Japan, $5496 in France, and $7,382 in Germany (the most expensive country outside of us).

And we don’t get better health or a longer lifespan for all the money; instead, it’s just lining the pockets of rich insurance, pharma, and hospital executives and investors, with hundreds of billions in profits every year.

— The average American life expectancy is 78.8 years: Canada is 82.3, Australia is 82.9, Japan is 84.4, France is 83.0, and Germany is 81.3.

— Our public schools are an underfunded mess, as are our highways and public transportation systems. While every other developed country in the world has high-speed train service, we still suffer under a privatized rail system that prevents Amtrak from running even their most modern trains at anything close to their top speeds.

Given all this, it’s reasonable to ask why Republicans across the nation insist that the country’s most severe problems are teaching Black History and trans kids wanting to be recognized for who they are.

If you give it a minute’s thought, though, the answer becomes pretty obvious. We have a billionaire problem, compounded by a bribery problem, and the combination of the two is tearing our republic apart.

The most visible feature of the Reagan Revolution was dropping the top income tax bracket for the morbidly rich from 74 percent down to 27 percent and then shooting the tax code so full of loopholes that today’s average American billionaire pays only 3.4 percent income tax. Many, like Trump for decades, pay nothing or next to nothing at all. (How much do you pay?)

But for a few dozen, maybe a hundred, of America’s billionaires that’s not enough.

Afflicted with the hoarding syndrome variant of obsessive compulsive disorder, there is never enough money for them no matter how many billions they accumulate.

If they’d been born poor or hadn’t gotten a lucky break, they’d be living in apartments with old newspapers and tin cans stacked floor-to-ceiling; instead, they have mansions, yachts, and virtual money bins worthy of Scrooge McDuck.

That in and of itself wouldn’t be so problematic if those same billionaires hadn’t worked together to get Clarence Thomas to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Citizens United case a few billionaires helped bring before the Supreme Court.

After Thomas and his wife, Ginni, were showered with millions in gifts and lavish vacations, the corrupt Supreme Court justice joined four of his colleagues — several of whom (Scalia, Roberts) were similarly on thetake — to legalize political bribery of politicians and Supreme Court justices.

The rubric they used was to argue that money isn’t really money; it’s actually “free speech,” so the people with the most money get to have the loudest and most consequential voices in our political and judicial discourse.

To compound the crisis, they threw in thenotion that corporations aren’t corporations but, instead, are “persons” fully deserving of the human rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to theConstitution — including the First Amendment right of free speech (now redefined as money).

In the forty-two years since the start of the Reagan Revolution, bought-off politicians have so altered our tax code that fully $51 trillion has moved from the homes and savings of working class Americans into the money bins of the morbidly rich.

As a result, America today is the most unequal developed nation in the world and the situation gets worse every day: many of our billionaires are richer than any pharaoh or king in the history of the world, while a family lifestyle that could be comfortably supported by a single income in 1980 takes two people working full-time to maintain today.

In the years since the Court first began down this road in 1976, the GOP has come to be entirely captured by this handful of mentally ill billionaires and the industries that made them rich.

As a result, Republican politicians refuse to do anything about the slaughter of our children with weapons of war; ignore or ridicule the damage fossil fuel-caused global warming is doing to our nation and planet; and continue to lower billionaire and corporate taxes every time they get full control of the federal or a state government.

The price of all this largesse for America’s billionaires is defunding the social safety net, keeping the minimum wage absurdly low, and gutting support for education and public services.

While there are still a few Democrats who are openly and proudly on the take (Manchin, Sinema, the corporate “problem solvers” in Congress), most of the Democratic Party has figured out how severe the damage of these neoliberal policies has been.

In the last session of Congress, for example, the For The People Act passed the House of Representatives with near-united Democratic votes (and not a single Republican) and only died in the Senate when Manchin and Sinema refused to go along with breaking a Republican filibuster.

The Act would have rolled back large parts of Citizens United by limiting big money in politics, providing for publicly funded elections, restoring our political bribery laws, and ending many of the GOP’s favorite voter suppression tactics.

All of this, then, brings us back around to that meme that opened this article:

Why are rightwing billionaires funding “activist” groups and politicians who’re trying to end the teaching of Black History and make the lives of trans people miserable?

When you think about it a minute — and look at the headlines in the news — the answer becomes apparent: as long as we’re all fighting with each other about history or gender, the “hoarding syndrome billionaires” and their corporations are free to continue pillaging America while ripping off working people and their families.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Evil, Extremism, History, Hoax, Ignorance, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republicans

Ed Johnson Asks Why the King Center Is Offering a Platform to 50CAN

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2023 //
7

Ed Johnson is a systems thinker and advocate for public education. He lives in Atlanta. He has studied the work of G. Edwards Deming, an international expert on systems thinking, and knows that those who promise instant success by breaking up public schools are perpetrating a hoax. He knows the history of 50CAN, funded largely by Jonathan Sackler of the notorious family that profited by selling opioids. He knows that charter schools are distractions from the hard work of systems improvement. After more than three decades of charter schools, it should be clear that they do not produce “achievement now.”

He writes:

Part 2 of the The King Center’s Strategies for Beloved Community Education is set to be presented online on Tuesday, September 5, at 6:00 PM EST. Visit https://thekingcenter.org/for details.

As with Part 1, available for viewing on YouTube here, Part 2 will feature an “expert panel” in facilitated discussion.

One member on the “expert panel” for Part 2 will be Marc Porter Magee, CEO of 50CAN.

Thus, the simple question, asked without prejudice, is, why?

This question was presented to The King Center 24 hours ago along with requesting an immediate reply, so as to avoid assuming why. A reply has yet to come. Given that, I offer the following.

50CAN, which stands for 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, is the umbrella organization that includes GeorgiaCAN, and we know GeorgiaCAN pushes for school choice and charter schools, do we not?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An organization known to be about making “Beloved Community” a virtual impossibility, in all respects?

 

Ed Johnson

Advocate for Quality in Public Education

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

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Hoax

Rethinking Schools: The “Learning Loss” Hoax

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2023 //
8

The editors of Rethinking Schools wrote the following commentary on the media frenzy about the post-pandemic “learning loss.”

This school year, as teachers carefully construct unit plans, build community with students, and navigate ongoing staff shortages, they also have to contend with a barrage of media coverage catastrophizing about so-called “learning loss.” Headlines suggest the losses are “historic,” “devastating,” and that students are “critically behind.” This fearmongering comes not only from the political right; there is a dangerous liberal-conservative consensus. President Biden’s Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, said: “I want to be very clear: The results in today’s Nation’s Report Card [delivered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress] are appalling and unacceptable.”

The learning loss narrative shrouds itself in moment-in-time data from standardized tests, but it is not really about this moment. Rather, it is a weapon wielded against the past, to shift blame for pandemic school closures, and against the future, to narrowly frame the policy choices ahead.

The last few years have negatively impacted — sometimes terribly — young people’s lives. In what is likely an undercount, more than a million people in the United States have died of COVID-19. And the pandemic is not over; people in our students’ families continue to become debilitated or die. Each lost life is a thread in the tapestry of relationships that knit together families, communities, neighborhoods, and schools. The very groups that make up the bulk of public school families — people of color and poor folks — also disproportionately bear the burden of the pandemic, suffering the highest rates of infection, severe illness, hospitalization, and death.

Was the shuttering of schools and move to remote learning necessary? Yes. Did it exacerbate the emergency for families and young people? Of course. Schools matter. Schools are hubs of community and care, and without them we are all worse off. In a country that offers no public childcare to families, schools make it possible for parents and caregivers to work. In a country in which roughly 10 percent of the population struggles with hunger — again, disproportionately represented in public schools —schools make it possible for children to eat. And yes, schools are places where children learn: to read, multiply, and sing; to be a good friend and community member; to ask questions and seek answers — how photosynthesis works, what activists mean when they call themselves “water protectors,” and so much more.

Given the importance of schools, and the magnitude of the pandemic’s devastation, what is puzzling is not that students’ academic skills were impacted, but that anyone would imagine otherwise. We are almost three years into an ongoing health crisis that has shaved years off the average life expectancy in the United States. Of course it has left marks on us.

But the learning loss narrative does not invite reflection on the whole range of collective losses we’ve suffered, nor does it encourage asking why our government — and our political and economic system — failed so spectacularly in anticipating, planning for, and coping with the coronavirus.

Shifting blame away from the for-profit healthcare system and the government’s response to the coronavirus is part of what makes the learning loss narrative so valuable to politicians who have no interest in challenging existing patterns of wealth and power. It is a narrative meant to distract the public and discipline teachers. Here’s the recipe: 1. Establish that closing schools hurt students using a narrow measure like test scores; 2. Blame closure of schools on teacher unions rather than a deadly pandemic; 3. Demand schools and teachers help students “regain academic ground lost during the pandemic” — and fast; 4. Use post-return-to-normal test scores to argue that teachers and schools are “failing”; 5. Implement “teacher-proof” (top-down, standardized, even scripted) curriculum or, more insidiously, argue for policies that will mean an end to public schools altogether.

The path ahead looks eerily like what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine,” where powerful actors, like politicians, corporate tycoons, and pundits, use people’s disorientation following a collective shock — whether a devastating earthquake or a deadly pandemic — to push pro-business, neoliberal policies. The Washington Post quoted a statement from former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos that the pandemic test scores proved children were “hostages” in a “one-size-fits-none system that isn’t meeting their needs.” Her solution, of course, is what she has long pushed: more “school choice” and privatization.

The Biden administration has offered some respite from billionaire free market fanatics like DeVos, but its policies are woefully inadequate. (See “Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests” in the Spring 2021 issue.) The latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund allocated a relatively generous $122 billion to “help safely reopen and sustain the safe operation of schools and address the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the nation’s students.” But the law prioritizes speed — schools must spend all of the money by 2024 or forfeit it — over investments in teachers, counselors, school librarians, and nurses. Many school districts cannot quickly fill positions or, knowing that the federal windfall is only short-term, choose not to. According to Marianna McMurdock, a staff reporter at The 74, a recent survey of 291 district leaders found that districts are expanding hiring of substitutes, paraprofessionals, and tutors while shying away from hiring full-time teachers and lowering class sizes — reforms that would have more impact on student learning and better inoculate schools from the overcrowded classrooms that made shuttering schools necessary.

We know what comes next — a round of dismal math and reading scores and the right’s favorite chestnut: “See? Just throwing money at schools doesn’t work.” Schools are racing to spend short-term government funds before they run out. But the point is that adequate funding for schools should never run out. Tripling Title I funding, a Biden campaign promise popularized by Bernie Sanders, would only cost one-fiftieth of the $1.5 trillion in wealth U.S. billionaires have added to their fortunes during the pandemic. Truly confronting the many losses students in the United States have shouldered requires connecting the dots to the gains of the wealthy.

The learning loss drumbeat reveals the mainstream media to have more contempt than curiosity about what might actually improve schools’ long-term health. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, writing in The New Yorker, is an exception. Noting the recent teacher strikes in Columbus and Seattle, Taylor wrote:

A real plan for recovery from the devastation of the pandemic in public education can be found in the strikes initiated by teachers and their unions. Their demands — for smaller class sizes, better conditions within school buildings, more resources to attend to students’ mental health, and higher pay for teachers and teacher assistants — have created a map for how to boost learning achievement.

This pandemic has brought real losses, and like our friends in Seattle and Columbus, we know what schools need to help students heal from the traumas of the last several years: more teachers, counselors, and nurses; smaller class sizes; planning time for educators to develop curriculum and pedagogical strategies centering students’ lives and realities; beautiful spaces to learn, make art, garden, and play.

Let’s not fall for the learning loss trick that shifts blame from the catastrophic results of decades of disinvestment in public goods to the victims of that catastrophe and those organizing to recover from it. It is not students and teachers who are failing the test of this pandemic, but a political and economic system that puts profit over people.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Education Industry, Hoax, Standardized Testing

Read Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Indictment of Donald J. Trump

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2023 //
61

Inform yourself about the latest federal indictments of former President Donald J. Trump. Do not listen solely to what talking heads on the TV news say about the indictment.

Read it yourself.

When I read it, several points seemed especially noteworthy.

First, all of the incriminating evidence came from Republicans, most of whom were appointed by Trump to advise him as Justice Department officials and White House advisors.

Second, Trump was repeatedly told that he had lost the election. He was told this by a long list of high-level officials appointed by him.

Third, Trump was told repeatedly by state Republican leaders that his claims of voter fraud in specific states such as Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were wrong.

Fourth, no matter how many times Trump was told that there was no election fraud that would change the outcome, he continued to repeat the lies about dead voters, illegal voters, and biased voting machines in speeches and on Twitter. There was never any evidence of voter fraud, but Trump would not stop lying about it.

Fifth, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman repeatedly told state officials about the scale of voter fraud in their states despite the lack of evidence for their claims.

Sixth, Trump and his co-conspirators devised a scheme to present alternate slates of electors in seven contested states. At first, they told the alternate electors that they would serve only if the courts determined that the results of the elections were illegal.

Seventh, since there were no successful court cases, the Trump strategy changed. He would pressure Mike Pence to recognize the alternate electors or to declare that he was returning the electoral votes to the states to investigate. Trump’s goal was to delay certification of Biden’s victory and to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the election.

Eighth, in the end, Trump’s conspiracy to block the peaceful transition of power was foiled because Pence would not go along with it. I read elsewhere that Pence consulted retired Federal Judge Mike Luttig, a conservative Republican. Luttig told Pence that his role on January 6 was purely ceremonial; he did not have the authority to change the outcome. Despite four years of obsequious loyalty to Trump, Pence stood up to Trump’s relentless pressure.

Lessons:

1. Our country avoided a major Constitutional crisis. If Pence had bowed to Trump, if Biden’s election had been canceled, the nation would have suffered grievously. The consequences would have been dire.

2. Trump knew that he lost the election. Almost all of his closest advisors told him so. But Trump is a sore loser. He refused to accept his loss. He simply ignored the facts and found a pod of true believers who conspired with him to overturn the election without regard to the vote, the Constitution or the good of democracy.

3. Trump and his co-conspirators are evil people who were ready to destroy our democracy rather than ceding power to the Biden administration.

4. I hope Trump is found guilty but I don’t believe he will ever serve a day in prison. He will be pardoned to avoid the spectacle of a former president in prison. However, in my view, the other conspirators are lawyers. They should lose their law licenses and serve time in prison.

Categories Accountability, Character, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Failure, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Trump

The Big Lie About America’s Public Schools and the Scheme to Privatize Them

By dianeravitch
July 30, 2023 //
49

America’s public schools were one of the glories of the nation until recently. Politicians hailed them as a symbol of democracy, a public institution open to all, supported by taxpayers, and controlled by elected local boards.

Local business leaders frequently served on local school boards. Americans broadly understood that the schools prepared the rising generation to be good citizens and to sustain our democracy. Certain principles were taken for granted: public funds were never used to fund religious schools; teachers and principals were career professionals, often the most educated members of their community, and were respected.

This is not to say that everything was rosy. I have written several books about the controversies that rocked the schools, especially over desegregation, which encountered vehement resistance in both the South and the North.

But despite the battles over race, curriculum, and other matters, the public schools garnered high praise from the public and elected officials.

However, this iconic symbol began to take a drubbing in 1983, when the Reagan-era National Commission on Excellence in Education released its harshly negative report called “A Nation at Risk.” The commission claimed that the nation’s schools were mired in a sea of mediocrity, that test scores were on a downward spiral, and that the nation’s public schools were responsible for the loss of major industries to other nations.

The reaction to the report was immediate: states set up task forces and commissions to find solutions to the schools’ crisis. Higher standards for students and teachers, more time in school, tougher curricula, etc.

The one refrain that became the legacy of “A Nation at Risk” was: Our schools are failing.

But we now know that the report was a hoax. James Harvey, who worked on the commission’s staff, explained that the books were cooked to produce a negative result. The data were cherry-picked to paint the schools in the worst possible light. The conclusions were a lie. The report ignored positive findings and chose to ignore the students living in poverty, the students with disabilities, and the other socioeconomic challenges facing the nation’s schools.

So today, relying on the Big Lie of 1983 (“our schools are failing”), ideologues, grifters, tax-cutters, religious interests, and others have joined forces to grab the money now devoted to public schools.

To the original Big Lie have been added new Big Lies to advance the cause of privatization and profits:

Big Lie number one: Test scores are reliable indicators of school and teacher quality. This simple but wrong idea was the basis for No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.

Big Lie number two: Teachers need not be professional to get good results. Inexperienced teachers with high expectations and a few weeks of training will get better results than career professionals. This lie undercut the profession, undermined respect for teachers, and was the founding myth of Teach for America.

Big Lie number three: the private sector will run schools more effectively than local government, therefore we need more charter schools. BUT: The charter sector has spawned scandals, with private entrepreneurs embezzling millions of dollars for themselves. Some charters get high test scores by excluding weak students, some get high scores by attrition of weak students. Many charter schools close every year due to academic or financial problems. On average, charter schools do not get better results than public schools.

Big Lie number four: vouchers will produce higher test scores. BUT: Voucher schools, funded with taxpayer dollars, are usually exempt from state testing and are not accountable as public schools are. Where voucher students do take state tests, they fall farther and farther behind their peers in public schools. Now that it’s well-known that voucher schools are academically behind public schools, their proponents have moved the goalposts to say: Parents should choose, no matter what the studies show about test scores.

The Republican Party, with few exceptions, has swallowed the Big Lies and is intent on giving every student—regardless of income—a voucher to attend a religious school, private school, or home school.

For the first time in two centuries, the very concept of public schools is in jeopardy.

Ninety percent of Americans were educated in public schools. That ninety percent made America a successful nation by most measures. Public schools built bridges among diverse communities.

What will the new paradigm contribute to our nation?

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Fake, Fraud, History, Hoax
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