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Nancy Bailey: How Betsy DeVos Fostered Squalid Learning Conditions in Detroit

By dianeravitch
May 7, 2020 //
8

Nancy Bailey just keeps getting better and better as she points her pen and her blog at malfeasance in education.

In this post, she points to the recent landmark decision that recognized that the children of Detroit have a right to literacy, a right not previously acknowledged by any court (or overturned on appeal). The court quite correctly decided that young people cannot exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens if they can’t read.

What is DeVos’s role in the Detroit debacle? She has spent large sums of money to promote the false idea that the way to improve education is to expand school choice. Detroit is her handiwork, and it proves the failure of school choice. What she purchased was widespread inequity and inadequacy.

Open the link to read the full article and see the links to other sources.

Bailey writes:

The Detroit landmark decision that children deserve to learn to read in school is a case that reflects decades of troubled education in Detroit. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and school privatization are not mentioned in this case. But school privatization initiatives have been failing children in the Motor City for years. DeVos is the current face of a long line of those peddling such reforms.

Harmful school reform initiatives go back to Gov. John Engler’s administration. Many school reformers, both Republican and Democrat, have their fingerprints on the crime scene. The DeVos family is from Michigan and has affected Detroit and school reform there for years.

The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Detroit students who claim they were denied their rights to a “basic minimum education.” Called the “Right to Read” lawsuit, Gary B. v. Whitmer exposes the decrepit conditions found in schools run by State leaders who failed to support Detroit’s students. The case was originally filed under former Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration.

It’s critical to recognize DeVos’s connection to the Detroit school failures. During this pandemic she is flagrantly redirecting public money to the same privatization agenda. It puts democratic public schools in jeopardy, like schools were put at risk in Detroit. Here’s a petition you can sign now to try and stop her.

School privatization cheerleaders have for years promoted the idea that choice will equalize education by giving parents choices. They’ve pushed for online charter schools and school turnarounds that get tough on teachers and students of color. Choice failed in Detroit.

Reading

Schools had no literacy programs.

The case describes what good reading instruction should consist of in school. Sometimes it appears to be delving into the Reading Wars, emphasizing the loss of explicit phonics.

The trouble is, one can’t get to a debate over how students learn to read, without overcoming the fact that students have untrained teachers and an atrocious learning environment.

It’s troubling to think the case might result in only professional development and a push for unproven programs, even online reading programs, that don’t address the need for creating quality schools, professional teachers, and more individualized attention for the children of Detroit.

School Buildings

Poor school conditions have been a part of Detroit’s schools for years. Students struggle to learn in slum-like conditions, no air-conditioning in the summer, freezing temperatures in the winter. Who can forget these pictures from 2016, the year the case was filed?

Vermin, mold, and contaminated drinking water plague the schools. Bullets, dead vermin, condoms, and sex toys have been found on the playground. Fire safety equipment and fire regulations are missing.

Betsy DeVos’s mantra is that education is about students and not buildings. She has done nothing to improve the condition of schools in Detroit or around the country.

Lacking Resources

Teaching resources were deficient. The case describes classrooms without enough textbooks, and old books that haven’t been updated in years.

The only school library mentioned had no librarian and was locked!

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Detroit, Education Industry, Failure, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Privatization

Twice Denied Testing, Young Black Teacher Dies of COVID-19

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2020 //
18

This is a tragic story. A 30-year-old woman, the first in her family to go to college, felt sick and sought testing in Brooklyn. Both times she was rejected. The hospital gave her Tylenol and sent her home. She died of COVID-19.

Rana Zoe Mungin was a black woman. Was she brushed off because of her race?

She must have been a remarkable young woman. She was a graduate of Wellesley College, where admission is highly selective, and UMass at Amherst.

The president of Wellesley, who is also black and is a physician, said that the death of Ms. Mungin highlights racial disparities in access to care.

Rana Zoe Mungin, a graduate of both Wellesley College and UMass Amherst, died Monday from complications associated with COVID-19. On two occasions prior to her death, her family said, Mungin went to a hospital seeking a coronavirus test but was unable to get one.

As the first member of her family to attend college, Rana Zoe Mungin quickly stood out for her work on race and class.

At Wellesley College, where she majored in psychology, she wrote about her family, and her upbringing in Brooklyn. At UMass Amherst, where she later studied creative writing, those at the school said her work added to the national discourse about institutional racism within MFA programs.

And so when Mungin, 30, died Monday from COVID-19 complications — after, her family said, she was twice denied coronavirus tests during trips to a Brooklyn hospital — some who knew her saw a tragic irony: The very biases that Mungin, who was Black, sought to bring attention to in her work ultimately played a role in her death, they say.

The circumstances surrounding her death have left those who knew her reeling. Though her sister believes the doctors and nurses who eventually treated Mungin did the best they could with the resources they had, she is also left to wonder whether earlier testing would’ve resulted in earlier treatment — and a different outcome.

“I felt like she had no fighting chance,” said Mia Mungin, who works as a registered nurse in Brooklyn, in an interview Thursday.

“Rana Zoe’s battle with coronavirus unfortunately sheds light on the systems of racial, gendered, and class bias — entrenched power dynamics — that she sought to expose and change in her work,” read a statement this week released by the English department at UMass Amherst, where Mungin earned her master of fine arts in creative writing in 2015.

“The dismissal of her symptoms is a register of the long history of economic and racial barriers to healthcare faced by Black women in this country.”

Dr. Paula Johnson, president of Wellesley College and a former chief of the division of women’s health at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that Mungin’s experience highlights the longstanding disparities that exist when it comes to minorities’ ability to access health care — and the manner in which they’re treated once they’re there.

“This is historic — we have data points overall for many years, and I think this pandemic has really brought to light these disparities in the most profound way,” said Johnson, who also is Black. “Here’s a young woman, a teacher, and she can not get the care she needs.”

COVID-19 death rates in communities of color have been vastly higher than overall mortality rates in many cities. Black people in New York have been twice as likely to die as white people; and at one point earlier this month, Black people in Chicago reportedly made up nearly 70 percent of the city’s coronavirus-related deaths, despite making up just 30 percent of the population.

Mungin, who worked as a social studies teacher in Brooklyn, was hospitalized in New York. But in Massachusetts, where data on the race and ethnicity of those who’ve died has been spotty — the ethnicity of half of the state’s 3,562 deaths is unknown — Black and Hispanic people have made up about 22 percent of the deaths for which race and ethnicity is known. That’s about the same percentage the groups represent in the population of Massachusetts.

But Black and Hispanic people also make up a disproportionate share of the confirmed COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the state — roughly 40 percent of cases and 33 percent of hospitalizations for which race and ethnicity data is available…

According to her sister, Mungin visited Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn on two separate occasions between March 15 and March 19 with fever, chills, and shortness of breath. On both occasions, Mia Mungin said, her sister was told that the hospital wasn’t conducting COVID-19 testing.

Prior to one visit, her sister said, an EMT suggested Mungin was simply suffering from a panic attack.

“What they did was give her some Tylenol and sent her home,” said Mia Mungin.

On March 20, after her symptoms worsened, Mungin returned to the hospital for a third time, this time by ambulance. The following day, according to her sister, she finally received a test for the virus — which came back positive.

Brookdale Hospital did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Categories Health, Inequity, Injustice, Race, Racism

In America, Farmers Destroy Their Crops–While People are Starving

By dianeravitch
April 27, 2020 //
75

This is a conundrum. See if you can make sense of it.

According to the New York Times, farmers are destroying the food they produce because demand has fallen due to restaurants closing in response to the pandemic.

The New York Times reports:

In Wisconsin and Ohio, farmers are dumping thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits. An Idaho farmer has dug huge ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions. And in South Florida, a region that supplies much of the Eastern half of the United States with produce, tractors are crisscrossing bean and cabbage fields, plowing perfectly ripe vegetables back into the soil.

After weeks of concern about shortages in grocery stores and mad scrambles to find the last box of pasta or toilet paper roll, many of the nation’s largest farms are struggling with another ghastly effect of the pandemic. They are being forced to destroy tens of millions of pounds of fresh food that they can no longer sell.

The closing of restaurants, hotels and schools has left some farmers with no buyers for more than half their crops. And even as retailers see spikes in food sales to Americans who are now eating nearly every meal at home, the increases are not enough to absorb all of the perishable food that was planted weeks ago and intended for schools and businesses.

The amount of waste is staggering. The nation’s largest dairy cooperative, Dairy Farmers of America, estimates that farmers are dumping as many as 3.7 million gallons of milk each day. A single chicken processor is smashing 750,000 unhatched eggs every week.

Many farmers say they have donated part of the surplus to food banks and Meals on Wheels programs, which have been overwhelmed with demand. But there is only so much perishable food that charities with limited numbers of refrigerators and volunteers can absorb.

And the costs of harvesting, processing and then transporting produce and milk to food banks or other areas of need would put further financial strain on farms that have seen half their paying customers disappear. Exporting much of the excess food is not feasible either, farmers say, because many international customers are also struggling through the pandemic and recent currency fluctuations make exports unprofitable.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, who has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.

In Delaware and Maryland, two million chickens will be “depopulated,” killed by agribusiness, because many processing plants are closed due to the virus. The chickens will be killed and disposed of, never reaching the hungry. If you have ever been to Delmarva, the small area where Delaware, Maryland and Virginia converge, you have seen the units where the chickens are hatched and confined until they are slaughtered. The chickens’ feet never touch the ground. The lights in these units are on 24/7 to speed their growth. This is agribusiness at its worst. Once you have seen these places, you will avoid buying chicken produced under these in humans conditions, like a crop.

But at the same time, people in impoverished nations are approaching starvation due to the absence of food supplies. This was also reported in the New York Times a few days after the story about farmers destroying their products:

The head of the U.N. food agency warned Tuesday that, as the world is dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, it is also “on the brink of a hunger pandemic” that could lead to “multiple famines of biblical proportions” within a few months if immediate action isn’t taken.

World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley told the U.N. Security Council that even before COVID-19 became an issue, he was telling world leaders that “2020 would be facing the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II.” That’s because of wars in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, locust swarms in Africa, frequent natural disasters and economic crises including in Lebanon, Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia, he said.

Beasley said today 821 million people go to bed hungry every night all over the world, a further 135 million people are facing “crisis levels of hunger or worse,” and a new World Food Program analysis shows that as a result of COVID-19 an additional 130 million people “could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020.”

He said in the video briefing that WFP is providing food to nearly 100 million people on any given day, including “about 30 million people who literally depend on us to stay alive.”

Beasley, who is recovering from COVID-19, said if those 30 million people can’t be reached, “our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period” — and that doesn’t include increased starvation due to the coronavirus.
“In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries, and in fact, in 10 of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation,” he said.
According to WFP, the 10 countries with the worst food crises in 2019 were Yemen, Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti.

In our own country, millions of people are going hungry and get their food from free food banks.

The Washington Post reported a few days ago on this paradox of farmers killing their crops while people go hungry:

Farmers in the upper Midwest euthanize their baby pigs because the slaughterhouses are backing up or closing, while dairy owners in the region dump thousands of gallons of milk a day. In Salinas, Calif., rows of ripe iceberg, romaine and red-leaf lettuce shrivel in the spring sun, waiting to be plowed back into the earth.

Drone footage shows a 1.5-mile-long line of cars waiting their turn at a drive-through food bank in Miami. In Dallas, schools serve well north of 500,000 meals on each service day, cars rolling slowly past stations of ice chests and insulated bags as food service employees, volunteers and substitute teachers hand milk and meal packets through the windows.

Surely some brilliant person or agency could figure out how to get our excess crops and produce to hungry Americans and to people in nations that are facing mass starvation.

Categories Accountability, Health, Injustice, International

NY Times: Economic Stimulus Bill is a Bonanza for Wealthiest

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2020 //
34

Jesse Drucker of the New York Times writes that the federal stimulus bill will bestow a bonanza on the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. While millions of Americans are jobless, and countless small businesses are facing bankruptcy, the 1% are scooping up unearned benefits, thanks to the unscrupulous strategies of Senate Republicans.

Drucker writes:


As the federal government dispenses trillions of dollars to save the economy, small businesses and out-of-work individuals are jostling to grab small slices of aid before the funds run out.

But another group is in no danger of missing out: wealthy individuals and big companies that are poised for tax windfalls.

As part of the economic rescue package that became law last month, the federal government is giving away $174 billion in temporary tax breaks overwhelmingly to rich individuals and large companies, according to interviews and government estimates.

Some of the breaks apply to taxes have long been in the cross hairs of corporate lobbyists. They undo limitations that were imposed to rein in the giveaways embedded in a $1.5 trillion tax-cut package enacted in 2017. None specifically target businesses or individuals harmed by the coronavirus.

One provision tucked into the federal economic-rescue law increases the amount of deductions companies are permitted to take on the interest they pay on large quantities of debt. Only companies with at least $25 million in annual receipts can qualify for that break.

Another change lets people deduct even more of their businesses’ losses from any winnings they reaped in the stock market, sharply reducing what they owe in capital gains taxes. Only households earning at least $500,000 a year — the top 1 percent of American taxpayers — are eligible.

And yet another provision in last month’s rescue package allows companies to deduct losses in one year against profits that they earned years earlier. The tax break most likely won’t put any extra cash directly into the hands of companies hit by the current crisis for at least a year.

The bottom line is that, barely two years after congressional Republicans and President Trump lavished America’s wealthiest families and companies with a series of lucrative tax cuts, those same beneficiaries are now receiving a second helping.

Many of the tax benefits in the stimulus are “just shoveling money to rich people,” said Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine. While the 2017 tax-cut package was a bonanza for big companies and wealthy individuals, in order to keep the law’s overall costs down it imposed a number of restrictions on who could take advantage of certain tax breaks and how much those taxpayers could reap.

Now, with the 2020 stimulus package, Congress has temporarily repealed a number of those limitations.

“Under the cover of the pandemic, they are undoing the perfectly sensible limitations” that moderated the size of the 2017 tax cuts, said H. David Rosenbloom, a corporate tax lawyer at Caplin & Drysdale and head of the international tax program at New York University’s law school. “And taking into account the giveaways in that act, it’s a joke.”

The new law temporarily undoes a restriction on companies using losses in one year to obtain refunds for previous profitable years. Big companies, including Morgan Stanley, have lobbied on related issues as recently as this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, defended the changes. The stimulus law “threw a much-needed financial lifeline to businesses of all sizes, types and industries to give them the best chance to survive,” he said. He added, “The attempt to paint these bipartisan tax provisions as a boon for particular industries or investors completely misses the mark.”

One of the breaks temporarily rolls back the 2017 restriction on how much debt some companies can deduct from their taxes. That restriction was the subject of lobbying for the last two years by big companies, including Coca-Cola and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, according to federal lobbying records. The National Association of Manufacturers, whose board includes executives from Exxon Mobil, Raytheon, and Caterpillar, has pushed lawmakers for similar changes.

Earlier this month, the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional body, found that the two other breaks — those that allow people to deduct only-on-paper losses from their tax bills — would go largely to people making at least $1 million a year.

That analysis came in response to requests by the Democratic lawmakers Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. On Tuesday, Mr. Doggett introduced legislation that would roll back major chunks of the tax breaks. Among other things, it would no longer let people who earn more than $500,000 to immediately deduct all of that year’s business losses from their capital gains.

“Tax giveaways for a wealthy few shouldn’t have come near a coronavirus relief bill,” said Senator Whitehouse, who plans to introduce a Senate version.

The biggest tax break permits wealthy investors in, say, the real estate or energy businesses to use only-on-paper financial losses — such as from writing down, or depreciating, the value of assets — to reduce the taxes they owe on profits from stock market investments.

The New York Stock Exchange. One element of the economic rescue package lets people deduct their businesses’ losses from any winnings they reaped in the stock market, sharply reducing what they owe in capital gains taxes.

The New York Stock Exchange. One element of the economic rescue package lets people deduct their businesses’ losses from any winnings they reaped in the stock market, sharply reducing what they owe in capital gains taxes.

The provision does not single out real estate. But the industry is well known for generating tax losses from depreciation even in profitable years.

The 2017 tax-cut law limited the ability to use those losses. A married couple could shelter only the first $500,000 of their nonbusiness income — such as capital gains from investments — in the year that the loss was generated. Any leftover losses would be rolled over into future years.

The stimulus undoes those restrictions for this year and, retroactively, for 2018 and 2019 — meaning that wealthy households will be able to shield far more of their capital gains from taxation.

The 2017 law also restricted the ability of companies to use so-called net operating losses — which are losses that companies report on their tax returns, even if they are otherwise profitable — to reduce their tax bills. (Net operating losses can include expenses that are only for tax purposes and that don’t reduce profits reported to shareholders.) No longer could such losses from one year be used to retroactively cancel out profits accumulated in previous years, thus generating tax refunds.

The new law temporarily undoes that restriction, enabling companies to use losses in one year to get refunds for previous profitable years.

Big companies, including Morgan Stanley, have lobbied on issues relating to such tax losses as recently as the first few months of this year, according to records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Among the problems with this tax break, critics say, is that it isn’t aimed at the companies hit by the coronavirus pandemic. Under the new law, companies that will suffer big losses in 2020 won’t be able to use those losses to obtain refunds until they file their tax returns at least a year from now.

The provision will quickly put cash into a company’s pockets if it had tax losses from 2019 or earlier — well before the pandemic — that can be applied against profits from preceding years.

“There’s no reason to send money in a blanket form to all the companies that have net operating losses,” said Mr. Fleischer. “We have some amazingly successful companies that don’t pay tax and have net operating losses, and there’s no reason to be subsidizing these companies or expect that money will find its way down to the employees.”

The tax breaks for companies that report losses are likely to be especially lucrative because the 2017 tax law created new deductions that could generate large paper losses — for tax purposes only — for otherwise profitable companies in 2018 and 2019. For example, the 2017 law permitted companies to fully write off certain types of investments in the first year, instead of stretching those deductions over several years. That, in turn, meant companies could report profits to their shareholders but losses on their tax returns.

A third break, worth more than $13 billion over a decade, temporarily loosens 2017 restrictions on how much interest big companies can deduct on their tax returns. Private equity firms, which rely on borrowed money to generate big profits, have been urging the Treasury Department to write favorable rules governing the restrictions on how much interest on their debt companies can deduct from taxes.

The private equity industry is poised to benefit from the rescue package. Companies with at least $25 million in annual revenue are now eligible to deduct more interest from their tax bills — a change that will make the private-equity business model even more lucrative. Private equity firms amplify their profits by using borrowed money to finance their investments. Deducting even more of the interest on that debt from their taxes would further boost their profits.

The tax break “allows private equity to swoop in and scoop up struggling businesses,” said Matthew Rappaport, a tax lawyer who specializes in private equity at Falcon Rappaport & Berkman in New York.

Jesse Drucker is an investigative reporter for the Business desk. He previously worked for The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News where he won a pair of awards in 2011 for investigative and explanatory reporting from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers for a series on how U.S. multinationals shift profits into tax havens. @JesseDrucker

Categories Accountability, Inequity, Injustice

Stuart Egan: The Step-by-Step Destruction of Democracy in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
April 22, 2020 //
7

In this powerful post, NBCT teacher Stuart Egan describes the calculated attack on democracy and social justice in North Carolina.

The state was once considered one of the most enlightened in the South. It is now one of the most regressive, taken down by the Tea Party, by a legislature dominated by ALEC, and by politicians determined to destroy opportunity for people of color and poor people.

Egan provides a timeline of North Carolina’s descent, which accelerated after the Tea Party capture of the General Assembly in 2010. Behind the scenes, big money pushed ALEC bills.

Egan writes:

That timeline is filled with actions that are calculated, highly crafted, delicately executed, and driven by dogma deliberately done to hurt public education and communities that rely on public schools. Each occurred before the May 16th, 2018 march in Raleigh.

Citizens United, you may remember, allowed for corporations and other entities to donate to political candidates. It gave rise to PACs and SUPERPACs. It’s why you now see an incredible amount of money in political races donated by people who have a vested interest in a race or candidate but cannot vote in that race.

HB17 was the legislation produced in a special session in December of 2016 right before Roy Cooper took office. It was a power grab that granted the incoming state superintendent, Mark Johnson, the most power any state super had ever had. Johnson might be the most unqualified person to ever hold the job. What ensued was a lawsuit between Johnson and the State Board of Education that lasted for 18 months. Ultimately, it cemented Johnson’s role as a puppet and led to DPI’s reorganization and reduction of personnel.

The Innovative School District is an educational reform that allows the state to select “poor” performing schools to be taken over by an out-of-state entity. In three years, it has only one school under its umbrella, but has gone through multiple leaders.

And then there was the Voter ID law, racially driven gerrymandered political maps, and the abolishment of automatically paycheck deductions for groups like NCAE. (Yes, the Voter ID law and the gerrymandered districting has been overruled, but we still as a state have not had an election cycle since both were overturned.)

It used to not be this way, but after the Great Recession of 2008 and the rise of a new wing of the Republican Party, a noticeable shift occurred in North Carolina politics. Decades ago, public education was championed by both Democrats and Republicans alike. Think of governors like Holshousher and Martin and you will see a commitment to funding public education like NC saw with Sanford, Hunt, and Easley. The governor’s office and the General Assembly were often in different hands politically speaking, but on the issue of public education, they stood much more united than it is today.

That unification is not there anymore. And it wasn’t caused by public education or its advocates. It was planted, fed, fostered, and championed by those who came to power after the Great Recession. These are not Eisenhower Republicans or Reagan Republicans; they are ALEC Republicans whose sole purpose is to politicize all things and try and privatize as many public goods as possible. And on a state level, nothing is more of a public good than public schools.

They have been very adept at combining racial and social issues with public education to make it hard not only to compartmentalize each through legislation, but easy to exploit how much social and racial issues are tied to public education without people thinking they are interlinked. Laws and mandates like HB2, the Voter ID Law, the gerrymandered districts, and the attempted judicial system overhaul have as much to do with the health of public schools as any other factor.

When you keep people from being able to vote, you affect public education. When you keep people below the poverty line, you affect public education. When you gerrymander districts along racial lines, you affect public education. You cannot separate them exclusively. And we have lawmakers in power who know that very well. It’s why when you advocate for public schools, you must be aware of social and racial issues and be willing to fight along those lines.

Public school advocacy that was “successful” before 2008 will not work as effectively in 2020. No ALEC aligned politician who is in a right to work state that outlaws collective bargaining is going to “work with” advocacy groups like NCAE.

For NCAE and other groups to truly advocate for public schools, they must fight for issues outside of school rooms that affect the very students, teachers, and staff who come into those school rooms.

By every measure, North Carolina has regressed and opposed equity and democracy.

For example, “Now name the only state in the country with the lowest legal minimum wage, no collective bargaining rights, no Medicaid expansion, loosely regulated voucher and charter school expansion, and a school performance grading system that measures achievement over growth. North Carolina.“

The legislators who have passed regressive laws are not interested in dialogue or reason. They knew exactly what they were doing. They don’t negotiate. They don’t listen. They must be voted out of office.

Categories Accountability, ALEC, Corruption, Cruelty, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Reform, Inequality, Inequity, Injustice, North Carolina

Jack Schneider: Pandemic Lays Bare the Gaping Inequities in Our Society

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2020 //
14

Jack Schneider, historian of education at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, says that the pandemic lays bare the fact that vast social inequality produces vast educational inequality. So-called reformers have argued that “fixing the schools” will “fix society.” Schneider shows that this is backwards. Readers, please send this article to the teacher-bashers and public-school-bashers at Education Post, Teach for America, the Walton Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the many other organizations who insist that public schools alone can fix the inequities that harm children before they enter school.

He writes, on Valerie Strauss’s blog:

For the past generation, we have been talking about the achievement gap in American public education — the fact that low income students and students from historically marginalized racial groups, on average, score lower than their more privileged peers. Chiefly, this matter has been treated as a problem with the schools.
In a news release accompanying No Child Left Behind legislation, for instance, president George W. Bush celebrated that “An ‘age of accountability’ is starting to replace an era of low expectations” in our schools. His Democratic successor, Barack Obama, went a step further, pinning responsibility on educators. “The single most important factor” in determining student achievement, Obama insisted, is “who their teacher is.”



Scholars, meanwhile, have made a very different case.
In the research community, it is widely recognized that students transition into schools not from a blank slate, but from an unequal society. Because of that, young people enter school with vastly different levels of preparation. As renowned teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings argued in a celebrated address to the educational research community, the “achievement gap” is a misnomer, implying an expectation that all children would perform equally at school. Instead, she suggested, we should train our collective gaze on the “education debt” — the damage done to particular communities by “the historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral decisions and policies that characterize our society.”




The achievement gap, in this framing, is merely a symptom of broader inequality, past and present. The implication is that maybe schools are not to blame, after all. Such a position is well-supported by educational research. But for many Americans, it remains relatively abstract.


The covid-19 outbreak, then, may be the best time to actually see the education debt in action. The playing field across schools has been leveled with a bulldozer — differences in school funding, facilities, curricular resources, teacher experience, arts and music education and more are essentially moot. With students at home, schooling has shifted online, dramatically reducing what can happen educationally.

Assume, then, that the schools are now more or less equal. An outgoing tide has lowered all boats.
Yet, some students will make significant educational progress during this hiatus from school, even as many of their peers lose ground.


Consider, first, the parental supports some young people have. Roughly 69 percent of students will have two parents at home with them, tag-teaming to offer support and encouragement. Some of those parents — disproportionately drawn from those with extended formal education — will feel at ease generating a school-like environment.


Those adults who successfully navigated school themselves, especially the minority of Americans who have college degrees, will be more likely to press their children to stay focused on academic work for several hours a day. That is not because they are better parents; it is because they are better situated to pass on their educational privilege.

Parents are a child’s first teachers — teaching language, social skills, dispositions and more — and remain the primary influence on how young people approach school.


Consider, too, the resources that are now differentially available to students.

Unlike their high-poverty peers, children from middle-class and affluent households almost all have high-speed Internet access at home, as well as web-enabled devices. They’ve got enough books to see them through the end of the crisis — twice as many, on average, as low-income families and African American families. Their homes are more likely to be set up in a manner that supports school learning.

Such differences explain why summer breaks from school widen the achievement gap.


Finally, it is important to consider the way that basic needs will be met, or not, in American households over the next several months. Many families have well-stocked pantries and a satisfying rotation of takeout orders; others will struggle to put food on the table.


In Somerville, Mass., where I live, the district is preparing “grab and go” meals to replace the free and reduced-price breakfasts and lunches that children here — and 20 million students across America — ordinarily receive at school.

To relax, some families will take day trips for nature walks or retreat to their second homes; their less privileged counterparts will be stranded in place, often without heat.

Twenty-two percent of the homeless population are children.
Our schools are not equal.

Schools in affluent neighborhoods often have more resources than their counterparts in poor neighborhoods, even as research demonstrates a need for the opposite. White children and middle-class children are generally taught by more experienced teachers than their peers and are less likely to experience schooling as an unending preparation for standardized tests. Privileged students receive a more well-rounded curriculum and maintain better access to arts and music education.




Yet even if our schools were equal, they would not produce equal results. They would reflect the different circumstances that characterize the home and neighborhood environments in which young people spend a majority of their time. For the poorest and most marginalized, this means not just present disadvantage, but also the cumulative effects of intergenerational poverty.

Right now, this is what you will see. Gaps are not closing; they are beginning to yawn.


For two decades, we have been trashing schools and blaming teachers. It is easy to assume 
responsibility rests with them. But the achievement gap is a product of our unequal society — the reflection of an education debt that has never been settled.

It is not something schools alone will fix; and as they remain shuttered, that fact will become painfully clear.
Perhaps the present crisis, then, will prompt some deeper reflection about why students succeed. And perhaps we will awaken to the collective obligations we have for so long failed to fulfill.


Schools will eventually reopen. When they do, we should return with eyes unclouded. Rather than finding fault with our schools and the educators who bring them to life, we might begin to wrestle with what it would take for all students to enter on equal footing. Until then, even an equal education will not produce equal outcomes.

Categories Education Reform, Inequity, Injustice, Poverty

Teresa Hanafin on Trump’s Politicizing the Justice Department

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2020 //
17

Teresa Hanafin writes the “Fast Forward” column for the Boston Globe:

 

The biggest story that is still reverberating today isn’t Bernie Sanders’ victory in the New Hampshire primary, or Pete Buttigieg’s close second-place finish, or Amy Klobuchar’sremarkable rise, or the surprising slide of Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.

No, it’s Trump’s stunning, deliberate, and unprecedented insertion of presidential power, politics, and favoritism into our judicial system.

Look, we all know there’s plenty of injustice in the justice system. Look at the decades-long practice of imposing far harsher sentences on those convicted of using or distributing crack cocaine vs. cocaine in powder form. Those using crack cocaine tended to be Black, while powder cocaine was the preferred drug of white people. What a coincidence!

That’s an example of systemic disparities that many are working to change. (The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the cocaine penalties’ differences.)

Trump used the power of the presidency to put his stubby thumb on the scales of justice to benefit a close ally and longtime friend.

Trump’s demand that the sentence recommended by federal prosecutors for his good buddy Roger Stone be reduced is astonishing enough. But adding to the impropriety was the fact that AG William Barr and top Justice Department officials jumped when Trump interfered, declaring that they would change the prosecutors’ recommendation to a lighter sentence for the president’s friend because, well, that’s what you do when you’re in the tank.

The whole stinking mess caused all four prosecutors to resign from the case — and one quit the Justice Department altogether.

To recap: Stone is a longtime political adviser to Trump, who used him during the 2016 campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks, which had more than 19,000 e-mails that had been stolen from the servers of the Democratic National Committee. He tried to use Stone to get a heads-up when WikiLeaks was going to release e-mails that were damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

It was special counsel Robert Mueller who charged Stone last year. There were seven charges, all felonies: five counts of lying to investigators, one count of obstructing Congress (specifically, the House Intelligence Committee), and one count of tampering with a witness (in both the House inquiry and Mueller’s investigation).

A jury found Stone guilty of all seven charges. As is customary, the probation department then came up with a recommended sentence — 7 to 9 years in prison — and the prosecutors agreed.

They argued that Stone’s conduct was exceptionally egregious because the House and Mueller probes into Russian interference in the 2016 election were critical to our electoral system, and because of the danger to our democracy posed by foreign meddling.

But the bulk of the prison time prosecutors requested was related to Stone’s witness tampering because it involved threats of physical violence to his longtime associate, Randy Credico, after Credico indicated that he would cooperate with the House committee. Stone and Credico both said the threats were jokes, but the jury didn’t believe them.

Stone’s defense attorneys say federal guidelines call for a sentence of 15 to 21 months, and they are asking for probation. Prosecutors say their enhanced sentence request because of the threatened violence is in keeping with federal guidelines. As I’m sure you know, prosecutors often overreach when asking for sentences, and defense attorneys always downplay the offenses.

After Trump’s interference, the Justice Department announced that it would take the rare step of changing its prosecutors’ recommendation. DOJ officials ended up submitting a statement to the judge without a sentence recommendation, but asked her to impose a lighter sentence.

Yes, these are the prosecutors asking the judge to go easy on a convicted felon.

So it’s up to Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who could impose a lesser sentence or a harsher sentence. Or she could demand that the Justice Department explain why it changed the original recommendation, and ask the prosecutors who resigned why they did so.

Unsurprisingly, Trump already has attacked Jackson. He also declared that Stone should not have been found guilty — a nice trashing of the system of trial by jury — and should never have even been charged with anything because only Trump’s political opponents are supposed to be investigated and locked up.

Now congressional Democrats are demanding that the DOJ inspector general — who is independent of the department — investigate. House Democrats may also call Barr to Capitol Hill to explain his actions.

Please remember how critical it is to our democracy that justice be administered fairly and independent of influence. Imagine if one of your kids were arrested with a friend for say, drug use, but the parents of your child’s friend were chummy with the mayor, who gets the local prosecutors to drop the charges against that kid. But your kid gets jail time because you’re not buddies with the mayor. Would you shrug your shoulders the way congressional Republicans are?
Categories Injustice, Justice

Dana Milbank: Bill Barr Supports Hookers for Jesus

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2020 //
29

No U.S. Attorney General in history has ever turned the Department of Justice into a political tool belonging to the president. Until now. Bill Barr has totally politicized the Department.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post wrote today:

There has never been a better time to be a Hooker for Jesus.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr’s management, it appears no corner of the Justice Department can escape perversion — even the annual grants the Justice Department gives to nonprofits and local governments to help victims of human trafficking.

In a new grant award, senior Justice officials rejected the recommendations of career officials and decided to deny grants to highly rated Catholic Charities in Palm Beach, Fla., and Chicanos Por La Causa in Phoenix. Instead, Reuters reported, they gave more than $1 million combined to lower-rated groups called the Lincoln Tubman Foundation and Hookers for Jesus.

Why? Well, it turns out the head of the Catholic Charities affiliate had been active with Democrats and the Phoenix group had opposed President Trump’s immigration policies. By contrast, Hookers for Jesus is run by a Christian conservative and the Lincoln Tubman group was launched by a relative of a Trump delegate to the 2016 convention.

That Catholic Charities has been replaced by Hookers for Jesus says much about Barr’s Justice Department. Friends of Trump are rewarded. Opponents of Trump are punished. And the nation’s law enforcement apparatus becomes Trump’s personal plaything.

Federal prosecutors Monday recommendedthat Trump associate Roger Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for obstruction of justice, lying to Congress, witness tampering and other crimes.

Then Trump tweeted that the proposed sentence was “horrible and very unfair” and “the real crimes were on the other side.” And by midday Tuesday, Barr’s Justice Department announced that it would reduce Stone’s sentence recommendation. All four prosecutors, protesting the politicization, asked to withdraw from the case.

But politicization is now the norm. Last week, Barr assigned himself the sole authority to decide which presidential candidates — Democrats and Republicans — should be investigated by the FBI.

Also last week, the Department of Homeland Security, working with the Justice Department, announced that New York state residents can no longer enroll in certain Trusted Traveler programs such as Global Entry — apparent punishment for the strongly Democratic state’s policies on illegal immigrants.

On Monday, Barr declared that the Justice Department had created an “intake process” to receive Rudy Giuliani’s dirt from Ukraine on Joe Biden and Hunter Biden — dirt dug in a boondoggle that left two Giuliani associates under indictment and Trump impeached.

The same day, Barr’s agency announced lawsuits against California, New Jersey and King County (Seattle), Washington — politically “blue” jurisdictions all — as part of what he called a “significant escalation” against sanctuary cities.

On Tuesday, to get a better sense of the man who has turned the Justice Department into Trump’s toy, I watched Barr speak to the Major County Sheriffs of America, a friendly audience, at the Willard Hotel in Washington.

Even by Trumpian standards, the jowly Barr, in his large round glasses, pinstripe suit and Trump-red tie, was strikingly sycophantic. “In his State of the Union, President Trump delivered a message of genuine optimism filled with an unapologetic faith in God and in American greatness and in the common virtues of the American people: altruism, industriousness, self-reliance and generosity,” he read, deadpan.

Trump, he went on, “loves this country,” and “he especially loves you.” The boot-licking performance continued, about Trump’s wise leadership, his unbroken promises and even the just-impeached president’s passionate belief in the “rule of law.”

Then Barr turned to the enemy. He attacked “rogue DA’s” and “so-called social-justice reformers,” who are responsible for “historic levels of homicide and other violent crime” in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Chicago and Baltimore. Politicians in sanctuary jurisdictions, he said, prefer “to help criminal aliens evade the law.” Barr vowed to fight these foes with “all lawful means” — federal subpoenas to force them to turn over “information about criminal aliens,” dozens of lawsuits to invalidate statutes and attempts to deny them both competitive and automatic grants.

In response to a question, Barr railed against tech companies’ use of encryption: “They’re designing these devices so you can be impervious to any government scrutiny,” he protested.

Maybe people wouldn’t be so sensitive about government scrutiny if the top law enforcement official weren’t using his position to punish political opponents and reward political allies.

Instead, with Barr’s acquiescence, we live in a moment in which: Trump’s Treasury Department immediately releases sensitive financial information about Hunter Biden, while refusing to release similar information about Trump; Trump ousts officials who testified in the impeachment inquiry and even ousts the blameless twin brother of one of the witnesses; and Trump’s FBI decides to monitor violent “people on either side” of the abortion debate — although the FBI couldn’t point to a single instance of violence by abortion-rights supporters.

This week, the Pentagon released a new color scheme for Air Force One, replacing the 60-year-old design with one that looks suspiciously like the old Trump Shuttle.Surprised? Don’t be. Soon the entire administration will be able to apply for a Justice Department grant as a newly formed nonprofit: Hookers for Trump.

Bill Barr will be remembered by historians for his role in destroying the professionalism, morale, and ethics of the Department of Justice. He is Trump’s Joker.

 

Categories Character, Injustice, Lies

Jan Resseger: Ohio Voucher Plunges Public Districts into Fiscal Crisis

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2020 //
4

Jan Resegger summarizes the disastrous Ohio plan to expand vouchers and how grossly unfair it is to public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of the children in the state. As she points out, most of the children drawing money away from her district never attended public schools, yet now their tuition will be extracted from the budget of the public schools. Read her post in its entirety.

She writes:

On Tuesday afternoon, I went to a meeting of my monthly book discussion group—all of us retired and over 70.  But as we sat down with our coffee and before we discussed the book we had all been reading for the month, we found ourselves distracted by the topic that is tearing our community apart: the changes the Ohio Legislature made last summer in the fine print of the FY 20-21 state budget—changes that exploded the size of the state’s EdChoice school voucher program.

I wonder whether legislators have any real understanding of the collateral damage for particular communities from policies enacted without debate. Maybe, because our community has worked for fifty years to be a stable, racially and economically diverse community with emphasis on fair housing enforcement and integrated schools, legislators just write us off as another failed urban school district. After all, Ohio’s education policy emphasizes state takeover and privatization instead of equitable school funding. The state punishes instead of helping all but its most affluent, outer ring, exurban, “A”-rated school districts, where property values are high enough that state funding is not a worry.

What this year’s EdChoice voucher expansion means for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district where the members of my book discussion group all live is that—just to pay for the new vouchers—our school district has been forced to put a property tax levy on the March 17 primary election ballot. Ohio’s school finance expert, Howard Fleeter explains that in our school district, EdChoice voucher use has grown by 478 percent in a single year.  Fleeter continues: “Cleveland Heights isn’t losing any students…. They are just losing money.’” “If this doesn’t get unwound, I think it is significant enough in terms of the impact on the money schools get to undermine any new funding formula.”

Ohio deducts the price of the vouchers students carry to private and religious schools from the local school district budget even though, in the case of Cleveland Heights-University Heights this year, 94 percent of those students have never attended the public schools in our district. The state counts the voucher students who live in our community as though they are enrolled in our school district and then deducts the voucher from the local school budget, but the cost of each voucher is more than the state allocates per pupil.  In fact, in the current Ohio biennial FY20-21 state budget, state public education basic aid funding is frozen, which means our district actually gets no new state funding for each voucher student, but one hundred percent the cost of each voucher is deducted anyway.

Why are the people in my book group so upset about the voucher explosion and another levy on the ballot in March?  We are not a bunch of old ladies grousing about the burden of our taxes.  Two of us co-chaired a successful school levy campaign back in 1993; one person served on the board of education; and the rest were teachers in our school district. As we read the conversation threads on Next Door, where people are accusing our district of mismanaging funds, or paying teachers too much, or hiring too many school psychologists, we worry about all the undocumented misinformation floating around. Members of our group are anxious about our grandchildren and our neighbors’ children who depend on the public schools we have spent our lives supporting and protecting.  But it is difficult to explain what happened in the budget, our plight this winter set in motion last June and July in the budget conference committee, when amendments were added to the state budget without debate. It was done so quietly at the time that people across the state only began to grasp the impact later in August when the Ohio Association of School Business Officials alerted school treasurers about the potential impact.

Fortunately the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City School District sponsored a special public meeting on January 9, 2020, to explain the changes in the EdChoice Voucher Program and begin quelling the anxiety that is tearing our community apart. The school district has posted the powerpoint presentation from the meeting, and at the meeting,  the school district distributed a clear, factual brochure about the legislature’s changes in the EdChoice Vouchers.  The brochure explains: “(T)he program was expanded to the point of unsustainability. Ohio had fewer than 300 buildings deemed eligible for vouchers in 2018-2019; that number has exploded to 1,200 for 2020-2021. When the Ohio General Assembly passed its biennial budget in July 2019, it froze receipts at 2018-2019 levels. This means that for every new voucher used, none of the cost would be offset by state aid. Legislators also removed the provision that required students to attend a public school prior to using the voucher. Unable to prepare financially for the change, the District was forced the following month to negotiate one-year contracts with the teachers union, as opposed to multi-year contracts. In CH-UH, approximately 1,400 students, 94% of whom have never attended our K-12 public schools, are taking scholarships to attend private schools. This has amounted to an actual loss of $4.2 million for us last fiscal year and an estimated loss of $6.8 million this fiscal year.” Each time a student secures an EdChoice Voucher, that student can keep the voucher, paid for by the school district deduction, every year until the student graduates from high school.

The school district’s information handout continues: “The CH-UH City School District will ask the community for a new 7.9 mill operating levy in March. The current funding issues with EdChoice are the major reason for this millage. In fact, the District would not need to ask for a levy until 2023 if it weren’t for the way EdChoice was funded, and the millage would be significantly less.”

School districts across Ohio are demanding that the Legislature do something about what has become a crisis for many school districts. It is important that the Legislature act quickly, before the February EdChoice Voucher enrollment period for next school year. The Heights Coalition for Public Education, a community organization, has prepared a list of short-term voucher fixes which the Legislature should consider:

  1. “Remove budget language from House Bill 166 (the current state budget) expanding vouchers in grades 7-8 and for high schools.  Restore voucher language to pre-budget language.”
  2. Limit state report card ratings on which EdChoice schools are designated to 2017-18 and 2018-19.  Currently districts are held accountable all the way back to 2013-14, and considerable changes in school programming have occurred in the seven ensuing years.
  3. “Restore funding for school districts that have lost funds to voucher students who were not part of their 2019 Average Daily Enrollment.”
  4. “Cut the loss of funds for high poverty (50% economically disadvantage) districts at 5% and other school districts at 10%.”
  5. Adopt the funding methodology for EdChoice Expansion (another Ohio voucher program) which awards vouchers to needy students and pays for the vouchers fully with state funds (not the school district deduction).

State Senator Matt Huffman has long been among the Ohio Legislature’s strongest proponents of school vouchers.  Earlier this week, the Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell reported that Senator Huffman himself supports the fifth voucher fix listed above: “State Sen. Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, wants a bigger change. He is resurrecting his 2017 proposal to offer vouchers to any family in Ohio whose income falls under certain limits… His proposal would have the state, not districts, pay for the vouchers of $4,650 for grades K-8 and the $6,000 a year for high school. That would eliminate many district complaints that voucher costs are killing their budgets.  He said the state can control costs by limiting how many students can use vouchers in a given year. Some extra money is already available in the budget, he said. ‘That seems to be the only way, really, to do this in a fair way,’ he added.”

There is reason for caution here, even though Huffman’s assessment is correct that eliminating the school district deduction method for funding vouchers is the only fair way to address what has become an urgent crisis for the Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools and for many other Ohio school districts. We all remember Naomi Klein’s 2007 warningabout the danger of adopting “shock doctrine,” privatization policies in a hurry in the midst of a crisis. We need to be sure that any so-called fix isn’t just an opportunity for the Legislature to grow the state’s voucher programs in some other way.  After all, in the case of Ohio’s current voucher mess, the Ohio Legislature itself created the crisis by expanding school privatization with explosive growth in the EdChoice school district deduction.

This blog has emphatically and consistently opposed private school tuition vouchers paid for with public funds, because vouchers undermine public funding for public education. Education privatization is never in the public interest.

However, currently in Ohio, an existential crisis for local school districts demands an immediate solution. The Legislature has saddled school districts with a school privatization program whose size the Legislature has no incentive to control because the money quietly washes out of local school district budgets. Neither can school districts control what is happening to their local budgets when the Legislature has set up an uncontrollable flow of dollars into the vouchers.

Huffman’s proposed solution would not solve the bigger problem of Ohio school vouchers. On the other hand, Huffman’s plan would pay for the vouchers out of the state budget, and as he points out, if it were to be so inclined, the Legislature could control costs by limiting how many students can use vouchers in a given year. Huffman’s idea would address the immediate school district financial crisis. It would then be up to all of us to pressure the Legislature to control the size and number of Ohio school vouchers awarded each year. Perhaps we can motivate a future legislature to eliminate vouchers entirely and return to a system where public dollars serve the mass of our children in the public schools.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Funding, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio, Vouchers

Teresa Hanafin Summarizes the Impeachment Proceedings So Far

By dianeravitch
January 22, 2020 //
10

Teresa Hanafin summarizes the impeachment proceedings, which should be called a “trial,” but since the Republicans voted in lockstep to allow no evidence and no witnesses, it would be better not to use the word “trial.” Hanafin writes the Fast Forward daily commentary for the Boston Globe.

Trump’s impeachment trial on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress continues at 1 p.m., with House Democrats starting their three days of arguments as to why Trump should be convicted and removed from office.

After some Republicans prevailed upon Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to loosen up the impossibly strict schedule he had proposed, which would have required 12-hour days. The new schedule will have 8-hour days and look like this:

Today through Friday: House Democrats’ arguments
Saturday, Monday, and Tuesday: Trump’s lawyers’ arguments
Wednesday and Thursday, Jan. 29-30: Questions from senators
Friday, Jan. 31: Debate on whether to debate on whether to vote to call witnesses. (No, that’s not a typo.) Given that the GOP isn’t interested in hearing any new evidence or from any witnesses who Trump blocked from testifying in the House, it’s likely the GOP will simply vote to acquit.

Honestly, I don’t know why they just don’t vote right now, except for the fact that Democrats have another chance to make their case to the American people that Trump is hopelessly corrupt.

Remember, McConnell is under strict orders from Dear Leader to get this over quickly, especially before Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday, Feb. 4, or else he’ll make McConnell cry by calling him a mean name on Twitter.

Yesterday’s session was a study in contrasts: The House managers came equipped with facts, documents, charts, video, just a ton of evidence to support their impeachment charges. The president’s lawyers didn’t mount a defense — perhaps they believe Trump’s actions are indefensible. Instead, they just attacked the House managers and the impeachment process.

And every Republican senator voted against every House amendment seeking to call witnesses or collect new documents blocked by Trump before arguments begin. Maine’s Susan Collins broke ranks to vote to give both sides more than two hours to respond to a motion. But even that failed.

At least Trump’s lawyers helped us all realize just how different this impeachment trial is from a real trial. For example, unlike in a traditional courtroom, Trump’s attorneys will suffer no sanctions for lying on the floor of the Senate.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone claimed that no Republicans were allowed into the closed-door hearings in the House when depositions were being taken from witnesses. Not sure where he dreamed up that whopper, but every Republican member of the three committees holding those hearings was there. (If they chose to attend, that is. Many didn’t.)

And Trump’s personal attorney, Jay Sekulow, lied when he told the senators that House Democrats refused to let Trump cross-examine witnesses. In truth, Trump’s lawyers could have cross-examined to their heart’s content, but Trump rejected the offer.

Meanwhile, “pettifogging” is my new favorite word. After Trump’s lawyers attacked House managers by name, and House manager Jerry Nadler called Trump a liar and accused GOP senators of being part of a coverup, Chief Justice John Roberts admonished both sides to act more civilly. And to emphasize his point, he referred to the impeachment trial of Charles Swayne, a judge who was impeached in 1904 and acquitted by the Senate in 1905.

“In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word ‘pettifogging’ and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used,” Roberts said. “I don’t think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.”

Merriam-Webster defines a “pettifogger” as a lawyer whose methods are petty, underhanded, or disreputable. Sounds like a word we should resurrect.
Categories Injustice
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