Why are children in Baltimore sitting in frigid classrooms?
Republican Governor Larry Hogan says the public schools are mismanaged.
Jess Gartner, a former teacher and current analyst of education finance, fact checks Governor Hogan and says he is wrong/lying, to evade responsibility for inequitable funding.
Susan Lee Schwartz writes:
“I cannot relax as I listen to the cold, callous conversations among our people and hear that monster who passes as a leader.
“You go††a see these sycophants applauding the cruel tax bill. “There was a festival of flattery on the White House lawn today to celebrate the passage of the Republican tax cut bill,” Lemon said. After playing a clip, he couldn’t hold back the chuckles any longer. “Oh my god, is that SNL?” Lemon asks.
“But it wasn’t fantasy. This man leads, even as the television puts forth a torrent of violent images and aggression, and video games offer kids target practice.
“Selling callous, cruelty is the business model. Even the commercials are nasty.
What a surprise that crime is up and so is drug addiction. Coping with life in America, today, makes relaxing hard to do, especially when one ha to chose between putting food on the table, and paying the rent, let alone buy-in medical care, or education for a kid.”
This is the triumph of libertarian thought. Take care of yourself, no one else. If they suffer, Tough. It’s God’s will or fate or bad luck. I am not my brother’s keeper. This is not Christian. Jesus would reject those who preach indifference to suffering in His name.
Read Nancy MacLean’s “Democracy in Chains.” Read Jane Mayer’s “Dark Money.” Read Gordon Lafer’s “The One Percent Solution.”
We live in an era of greed, selfishness, ruthless power, and injustice, one in which the rich and powerful want more for themselves. Less for the needy. They happily put their boots on the backs of the poor and occasionally throw them a penny.
One of the very contentious decisions before the U.S. Supreme Court is the appeal of a baker in Colorado, who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. The couple sued, and said that the baker had violated Colorado law, which said it was wrong for a business or place of public accommodation to refuse service on grounds of sexual orientation (or race or gender or other of the usual reasons for discrimination). The baker contended that his cakes were artistic expressions, and he did not wish to sell one to this couple, based on his religious freedom rights.
Here are some interesting commentaries on this case, which was recently argued, and on which the Court will rule later.
This one by John Gehring appeared in the Catholic magazine Commonweal and represents the views of religious groups, who disagree with the baker.
Now that marriage equality has won in the courts and in the culture (even a majority of Republicans under the age of forty support same-sex marriage), conservative Christian activists are using new tactics to chip away at LGBT rights. By making a First Amendment appeal, lawyers for Phillips recognize that such an approach could have more salience and be more persuasive than a strict religious-liberty argument. David Cole of the American Civil Liberties Union, a co-counsel in the case, deconstructed the free-expression argument in the New York Review of Books this month. “Likening its cakes to the art of Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian, Masterpiece Cakeshop claims that they deserve protection as free speech no less than Pollock’s canvases,” Cole writes. “But whether the cakes are artistic is beside the point. As an individual artist, Pollock would not have been subject to a public accommodations law and could have chosen his customers. But if he had opened a commercial art studio to the public, he, too, would have been barred from refusing to sell a painting because a customer was black, female, disabled, or gay.” Cathleen Kaveny, a Boston College professor and Commonweal columnist, thinks there are compelling First Amendment arguments in the case, but worries about an overly broad interpretation of the Court’s eventual ruling. “Every bakery is not a Masterpiece Cakeshop,” she said. “Not everyone is asking for a unique wedding cake to exemplify their soul. The distinguishing features of this case really limit its application. I worry a ruling for Masterpiece would be read as accommodating anyone who is engaged in creative work. But there is a big difference between a couture shop that creates the perfect wedding dress or a cake that incorporates the designer’s artistic vision and a boutique selling off the rack. David’s Bridal isn’t Vera Wang.”
“These debates are not academic. Despite the seismic cultural shift in support for same-sex marriage over the last decade, LGBT people still face substantial discrimination. As shared in the amicus brief they filed, Lambda Legal detailed more than one thousand incidents of LGBT people being denied service in the United States. This demonstrates “an ugly truth,” according to the brief. “With disturbing frequency, LGBT people are confronted by ‘we don’t serve your kind’ refusals and other unequal treatment in a wide range of public accommodations contexts.” Only nineteen states and the District of Columbia have passed laws specifically protecting LGBT people in public accommodations.
“As a Catholic with a platform as a writer, I take seriously the public demands of faith. From the abolition of slavery to the civil-rights movement to the resurgence of progressive faith activism in the Trump-era, religion has been and will continue to be a part of the civic fabric of our nation. Religious Americans on the right also recognize that their faith comes with public responsibilities, and progressive people of faith should not blithely dismiss their sincere convictions. But respecting the sincerity of a conviction from a faithful fellow citizen and codifying that conviction into a law governing a diverse society are two different things. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative Catholic, noted in a 1990 case, laws of general applicability “could not function” if they were subject to nearly unlimited religious exemptions. Quoting from an 1878 decision, Scalia warned that such exemptions would “permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”
“Pope Francis describes religious liberty as “one of America’s most precious possessions.” We don’t honor religious liberty or the radical inclusivity of Christ by telling people made in the image of God that their love and commitment are not worth a cake.”
David Cole of the ACLU, a co-counsel in the case, wrote in the New York Review of Books:
It is one of the most talked-about cases of the term, in part because it’s so easy to conjure hypothetical variations: What if the cake includes the message “God bless this union”? What if a wedding photographer, who has to be present at the ceremony in order to provide her services, objects to same-sex marriage? Should bakeries or photographers be permitted to refuse their services to an interracial or interfaith couple? Could a bakery refuse to make a birthday cake for a black family because its owner objects to celebrating black lives?…
“The Trump administration has filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting the bakery, the first time in history that the solicitor general has supported a constitutional exemption from an antidiscrimination law. One of the Justice Department’s principal responsibilities is to enforce public accommodations and antidiscrimination laws, so it is generally skeptical of arguments for allowing citizens to evade their strictures. But not this administration, at least not when what’s at issue is a religious objection to selling a cake to a same-sex couple…
“Masterpiece Cakeshop’s objection rests on its owner’s Christian beliefs. And its complaint is ultimately a desire not to be associated with a same-sex couple’s wedding celebration; it objected to selling Craig and Mullins even a nondescript cake. But because the Supreme Court has flatly rejected both association- and religion-based claims in such cases already, the bakery stresses that it is making a free speech claim. It maintains that it speaks through its cakes, which should make this case different.
“The reasons for rejecting exemptions based on religion and association, however, are equally applicable to free speech claims. Because almost any conduct can be engaged in for “expressive” purposes, the exceptions would very quickly swallow the rule. As the Supreme Court has recognized, “it is possible to find some kernel of expression in almost every activity a person undertakes.”6 Any business that uses creative or artisanal skills to produce something that communicates in some way could claim an exemption. A law firm, which provides its services entirely through words, could refuse to serve black clients. Photographs are undeniably expressive, so a commercial photography studio could post a sign saying it takes pictures only of men if it objected to depicting women. A sign-painting business whose owner objects to immigration could refuse to provide signs to Latino-owned businesses.
“Likening its cakes to the art of Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian, Masterpiece Cakeshop claims that they deserve protection as free speech no less than Pollock’s canvases. But whether the cakes are artistic is beside the point. As an individual artist, Pollock would not have been subject to a public accommodations law and could have chosen his customers. But if he had opened a commercial art studio to the public, he, too, would have been barred from refusing to sell a painting because a customer was black, female, disabled, or gay…
“Only laws that target religion, or that are intended to deny equal treatment to a protected class, trigger heightened scrutiny under the First Amendment’s religion clause and the Equal Protection clause. In a pluralist society, it is inevitable that many generally applicable laws will have incidental effects on different community members. But unless every man is to be a “law unto himself,” there cannot be an exemption for everyone who complains about a law’s indirect effect on his constitutional rights.
“That principle is especially appropriate for antidiscrimination laws, like the Colorado law that Masterpiece Cakeshop seeks to evade. Such laws are by their very nature designed to ensure equal treatment for all, so that no one has to endure the stigma and shame of being turned away by a business that disapproves of who they are. If those laws were subject to exemptions for anyone who could claim his product or service was expressive, they would become not a safeguard against discrimination, but a license to discriminate.”
If the Supreme Court favors the baker, expect businesses to claim that they don’t sell to interracial couples or to Muslims or Catholics or blacks or Jews or any group that offends their religious beliefs. This is an important decision.
Thanks to Susan Schwartz for this gem.
Nora Gordon, an economist at Georgetown University who studies school finance, explains how the GOP tax plan will hurt the nation’s poorest schools. Schools will suffer while corporations and wealthy individuals will enjoy big tax cuts.
She writes:
It’s common to hear people say that the quality of students’ education shouldn’t depend on their ZIP code. But the Republican House and Senate tax bills would make ZIP codes matter more than ever. They would create an incentive to hoard opportunity by raising funds that remain close to home.
Why does our education system have so much at stake? A vast majority of funding for public schools, about 90 percent, comes from the money raised by state and local governments. Currently, taxpayers can deduct their state and local taxes, and that deduction makes them more likely to support higher spending on programs funded by those taxes, including public schools.
With its bills, Congress would significantly cut the deduction of state and local taxes, slicing into that incentive. This is why education advocates are fighting to keep the deductions, and why those who believe state and local governments are too big want to get rid of them.
After a consideration of eliminating all state and local deductions, current proposals have been marketed as a political compromise: Both bills take away taxpayers’ ability to deduct income taxes but allow a property tax deduction of up to $10,000 per year. The problem is that states depend more heavily on income taxes, and local governments on property taxes, so the compromise favors raising funds at the local level. Structuring it this way will only add to inequality in the school system.
As an economist who has studied education funding and policy, to me the historical record is clear: State-level school spending is critical. Economic segregation across school districts means some areas need an infusion of resources to have a chance at serving their students well, and states are the primary source of that infusion. Research shows that when states send more resources to their neediest districts, achievement levels in those districts rise.
But states are already in a tough spot: The most recent data show they are still recovering from the recession, with over half of them spending less on K-12 now, in inflation-adjusted terms, than they did in 2008.
It’s worth noting that more is at stake for states than just education funding. Federal spending cuts are sure to come to pay for this tax bill. There will most likely be calls for cuts in programs that provide food, health care and income assistance to poor families. Just as people will look to the states to fill these new holes in the safety net, it will be harder than ever for states to raise the funds to do so.
John Kuhn’s powerful and passionate 2-minute video about inequitable funding has gone viral!
Released days ago, it has already had nearly 900,000 views!
Help it pass one million!
Watch, tweet, post, share.
http://bit.ly/JohnKuhnNPEJustice . And the
NPE Letter Writing Action http://bit.ly/FairlyFundSchools
We can’t match the billionaires money, but we can beat them with our numbers and the power of our voices!
Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Orenstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote about the tax bills passed by the Republican Party in the House and Senate, soon to be reconciled and signed into law.
“In the past three days, Republican leaders in the Senate scrambled to corral votes for a tax bill that the Joint Committee on Taxation said would add $1 trillion to the deficit — without holding any meaningful committee hearings. Worse, Republican leaders have been blunt about their motivation: to deliver on their promises to wealthy donors, and down the road, to use the leverage of huge deficits to cut and privatize Medicare and Social Security.
“Congress no longer works the way it’s supposed to…
“Mr. Trump’s election and behavior during his first 10 months in office represent not a break with the past but an extreme acceleration of a process that was long underway in conservative politics. The Republican Party is now rationalizing and enabling Mr. Trump’s autocratic, kleptocratic, dangerous and downright embarrassing behavior in hopes of salvaging key elements of its ideological agenda: cutting taxes for the wealthy (as part of possibly the worst tax bill in American history), hobbling the regulatory regime, gutting core government functions and repealing Obamacare without any reasonable plan to replace it.
“This is a far cry from the aspirations of Republican presidential giants like Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, as well as legions of former Republican senators and representatives who identified critical roles for government and worked tirelessly to make them succeed. It’s an agenda bereft of any serious efforts to remedy the problems that trouble vast segments of the American public, including the disaffected voters who flocked to Mr. Trump.
“The failure of Republican members of Congress to resist the anti-democratic behavior of President Trump — including holding not a single hearing on his and his team’s kleptocracy — is cringe-worthy. A few Republican senators have spoken up, but occasional words have not been matched by any meaningful deeds. Only conservative intellectuals have acknowledged the bankruptcy of the Republican Party.
“We have never suggested that Democrats are angels and Republicans devils. Parties exist to win elections and organize government, and they are shaped by the interests, ideas and donors that constitute their coalitions. Neither party is immune from a pull to the extreme.
“But the imbalance today is striking, and frightening. Our democracy requires vigorous competition between two serious and ideologically distinct parties, both of which operate in the realm of truth, see governing as an essential and ennobling responsibility, and believe that the acceptance of republican institutions and democratic values define what it is to be an American. The Republican Party must reclaim its purpose.”
Arthur Camins refers to the famous line of attorney Joseph Welch, challenging Senator Joseph McCarthy.
“Don’t let Republicans take away your self-respect and humanity– your claim to be a decent person. Tell them enough. Stop. Tell the Democrats to stand up and fight back for all of us or get out of the way for politicians who will.
“Self-respect, humanity and decency are what is at stake in the Republican give-to-the-rich tax plan, their effort to undo environmental and financial regulations, their unrelenting push for charter schools and vouchers instead of public schools, their efforts to undermine voting and labor rights, their endless attempts to undo the advances of the Affordable Care Act, cut back on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and support for the disabled, their drive to control access to information on the Internet, and their opposition all reasonable controls on guns.
“Republican ascendancy in federal, state, and local government marks the triumph of an immoral moral principle: Their gain comes at my expense. Historically, the identity of them (Native Americans, African Americans, the latest immigrants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, women, LGTBQs, the disabled, and always the poor) has been fluid, as suits the political exigencies of the moment, but the core principle and morality is consistent.
“In just one day, Donald Trump managed to stir more hatred by re-tweeting extremist anti-Muslim videos and defend proposed tax gifts to the already obscenely wealthy by promising to help struggling workers by curtailing government benefits to people who do not work. “Welfare reform, I see it, and I’ve talked to people,” he said. “I know people that work three jobs and they live next to somebody who doesn’t work at all. And the person who is not working at all and has no intention of working at all is making more money and doing better than the person that’s working his and her ass off.”
“The New Deal and perhaps later the Great Society, marked the American apotheosis of institutionalizing–through collective government action– the moral principle that that everyone is worthy of a decent life. Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and myriad other programs all represented the idea that people should not be left to fend for themselves in difficult times and circumstances. All manner of health, safety, environmental, and financial regulations were all enacted to protect people from unrestrained profiteers without concern for the wellbeing of others. Voting, civil and labor laws were enacted to move the nation closer to its founding principle, the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
“Republicans aim to undo it all. That is indecent.”
He is appalled by what Trump and the Republican Party are doing. They are crushing the lives and rights of millions of people while sanctimoniously claiming that they are doing the opposite.
How long can we stand for their lies, hypocrisy, indecency, and malice?
Let our anger turn into resolve, into determination to reverse the damage they are inflicting.
Join the Indisibles. Support the Flippables, a group of young people who crowd-source funding to flip seats from red yo blue.
Target: 2018.
Model: Virginia.
In South Carolina, funding for schools is both inadequate and inequitable.
Blogger Jean Jacques CrawB writes “They are destroying our children.”
“Evidently the current Supreme Court of the state of South Carolina has no trouble decimating our schools for the sake of some political purpose. The Abbeville equity case has gone on since 1992. It was finally decided in 2014 by a 3-2 vote affirming the plaintiff’s contention that the funding system is unfair and inequitable.
“Now, in the last few months of 2017, having replaced two judges, the Supremes now say, by a 3-2 vote that they are relinquishing control of the case and giving it back to the legislature to attend to. The court also praised the legislature for what they have already done. No one here can figure out what large things have been done to ameliorate the lack of resources and the lack of qualified teachers in rural school districts.
“South Carolina educators have not been aggressive in their lobbying efforts. The Abbeville case was their greatest hope for a reversal of policies that always disadvantaged poor and rural schools. As a simple example: whenever funds are dispersed in some sort of novel way, the condition of dispersal is the number of children in the district. Therefore, a small rural district might get an increase of $100 per student and in the same distribution a wealthy district would get the same amount per person.”
Paul Thomas summarizes the long conservative tradition of racism and classicism in South Carolina, once the property of the Democrats, now the domain of Republicans.
The politicians never wanted to spend money on black and poor children. Even the judiciary says it’s time to stop throwing money at schools, which has never happened.
“SC public schools (and public universities, in fact) exist in 2017 as a bold middle finger to everything promised by a democratic nation. But despite the political rhetoric, SC has failed its public schools; public schools have not failed our state, whose political leaders care none at all about poor, black, or brown children being currently (and historically) mis-served by K-12 education….
“Political and judicial negligence in SC—a microcosm of the same negligence nationally—remains entrenched in commitments to ideology over evidence, hard truths neither political leadership nor judicial pronouncements will admit.
“First, and foremost, one hard truth is that public schools in SC are mostly labeled failures or successes based on the coincidence of what communities and students those schools serve. Schools serving affluent (and mostly white) communities and students are framed as “good” schools while schools serving poor (and often black and brown while also over-serving English language learners and students with special needs) communities and students are framed as “bad” or “failing.”
“This political lie is grounded in the three-decades political charade called education reform—a bureaucratic nightmare committed to accountability, standards, and testing as well as a false promise that in-school only reform could somehow overcome the negative consequences of social inequity driven by systemic racism, classism, and sexism.
“The ironic and cruel lesson of education reform has been that education is not the great equalizer.
“Education reform is nothing more than a conservative political fetish, a gross good-ol’-boy system of lies and deception.
“Second, and in most ways secondary, another hard truth is that while education is not the great equalizer, public schooling tends to reflect and then perpetuate the inequities that burden the lives of vulnerable children.
“In-school only reform driven by accountability, standards, and testing fails by being both in-school only (no education reform will rise about an absence of social/policy reform that addresses racism and poverty) and mechanisms of inequity themselves.
“Affluent and white students are apt to experience a higher quality of formal schooling than black, brown, and poor students, who tend to be tracked early and often into reduced conditions that include test-prep, “basic” courses, and teachers who are early career and often un-/under-certified.
“Nested in this hard truth is that much of accountability-based education reform depends on high-stakes standardized testing, which is itself a deeply flawed and biased instrument. Tests allow political negligence since data appear to be objective and scientific; in fact, standardized testing remains race, class, and gender biased.
“Like school quality, test scores are mostly a reflection of non-academic factors.”
Bottom line: racism and classism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 