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Margaret Sullivan: ABC News Should Not Have Settled with Trump for $15 Million

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2024 //
20

Margaret Sullivan, the last public ombudsman for The New York Times, wrote on her blog that ABC News was wrong to settle with Trump for $15 million for “defaming” him. On television, ABC’s George Stefanopolous said that Trump had been found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll. Trump said that was wrong and malicious because he had been found guilty of “sexual assault,” not rape.

She points out that when she was chief editor of The Buffalo News, the paper had a longstanding policy of fighting every claim of defamation or libel. They did so to discourage future lawsuits and send a message: we will vigorously oppose lawsuits. If you sue, prepare for a long battle.

Trump’s lawyers claimed that Stephanopoulos was wrong to say that Trump was found guilty of rape and that he had defamed Trump. ABC settled before trial and agreed to pay $15 million for the future Trump Presidential Library and $1 million for Trump’s legal fees.

Media experts were stunned. Not only did ABC abandon its First Amendment defense, but it abandoned a viable claim that Stephanopooulos was right to use the language he did.

Judge Lewis Kaplan, who presided over the Carroll defamation case, said:

“The finding Ms. Carroll failed to prove she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the N.Y. Penal Law does not mean she failed to prove Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’. Indeed, as the evidence at trial… makes clear, the jury found Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

By settling–and at such a hefty price–ABC has encouraged Trump and other politicians to continue to sue journalists and their employers.

Sullivan believes ABC might well have won if they continued to fight:

ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement. 

As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual. News organizations generally don’t settle “because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.”

Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect. As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as “part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.”

Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing. 

But loyalty and kowtowing isn’t the job of the press, which is supposed to represent the public in holding powerful people and institutions accountable.

After his victory, Trump threatened to sue the Des Moines Register for posting a poll before the election that showed Biden beating him in Iowa. He also threatened to sue Bob Woodward, “60 minutes,” and the Pulitzer Prizes. This is the mischief that ABC News unleashed.

Last night Trump’s lawyers sued the Des Moines Register for publishing Ann Seltzer’s poll. The implications are frightening. The media publishes polls frequently during campaigns. They may be right, they may be wrong. If they are wrong, will candidates sue them for “election interference”? How did Trump suffer any damages by publication of that poll? He won Iowa by 13 points.

Win or lose, Trump has a strategy: to strike fear in the hearts of every journalist who dares to write critically about him.

Be sure to read Jeff Tiedrich’s condemnation of ABC’s capitulation. He attributes the deal to Disney’s overriding principle: “Protect the mouse.”

Categories Elections, Ethics, Injustice, Media, Trump

Texas: Immigrants Have Lower Crime Rates than Native-Born Citizens

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2024 //
7

A study of the crime rates of immigrants–both the documented and the undocumented–was released in September 2024. It found that undocumented immigrants had the lowest crime rates, compared to native-born citizens and documented immigrants.

This is directly counter to the current claim by Republicans that undocumented immigrants are responsible for vicious crimes.

The study was funded by the National Institute of Justice, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice.

September 12, 2024

An NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.[1]

The question of how often undocumented immigrants commit crimes is not easy to answer. Most previous research on crime commission by immigrant populations has been unable to differentiate undocumented immigrants from documented immigrants. As a result, most studies treat all immigrants as a uniform group, regardless of whether they are in the country legally.

The estimates in this study come from Texas criminal records that include the immigration status of everyone arrested in the state from 2012 to 2018. These data enabled researchers to separate arrests for crimes committed by undocumented immigrants from those committed by documented immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens. (For more detail on the study’s data sources and methodology, see the sidebar “What Makes the Texas Data Unique?”)

The researchers tracked these three groups’ arrest rates across seven years (2012-2018) and examined specific types of crime, including homicides and other violent crimes.[2] They used these arrest rates as proxies for the rates of crime commission for the three groups. It should be noted that arrest is a commonly used, but imperfect measure of crime that in part reflects law enforcement activity rather than actual offending rates.

During this time, undocumented immigrants had the lowest offending rates overall for both total felony crime (see exhibit 1) and violent felony crime (see exhibit 2) compared to other groups. U.S.-born citizens had the highest offending rates overall for most crime types, with documented immigrants generally falling between the other two groups.

Exhibit 1.Total felony crime offending rates in Texas for U.S.-born citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants

Total felony crime offending rates in Texas for U.S.-born citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants

(View larger image.)

Exhibit 2.Violent felony crime offending rates in Texas for U.S.-born citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants

Exhibit 2. Violent felony crime offending rates in Texas for U.S.-born citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented immigrants

(View larger image.)

Researchers also looked specifically at homicide arrest trends. These rates tend to fluctuate more than the overall violent crime arrest rates because murders are relatively rare compared to other crimes. In addition, a large share of homicides go unsolved. Still, undocumented immigrants had the lowest homicide arrest rates throughout the entire study period, averaging less than half the rate at which U.S.-born citizens were arrested for homicide.[3] (The homicide rate for documented immigrants fluctuated. Sometimes it was higher than the rate for U.S.-born citizens and sometimes it was lower.)

Every other violent and property crime type the researchers examined followed the same general pattern. The offending rates of undocumented immigrants were consistently lower than both U.S.-born citizens and documented immigrants for assault, sexual assault, robbery, burglary, theft, and arson.

For drug offenses, too, undocumented immigrants were less than half as likely to be arrested as native-born U.S. citizens.[4] Moreover, the drug crime arrest rate for the undocumented population held steady throughout the seven years of data, while the rate for native-born citizens increased almost 30% during that time. As a result, undocumented immigrants had a smaller share of arrests for drug crimes in 2018 than they had in 2012.

Finally, the researchers conducted statistical tests to determine whether the share of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants had increased for any offense types between 2012 and 2018. They concluded, “There is no evidence that the prevalence of undocumented immigrant crime has grown for any category.”[5] As with drug offenses, evidence suggests the share of property and traffic crimes committed by undocumented immigrants decreased or remained close to constant throughout the period.

About This Article

The work described in this article was supported by NIJ award number 2019-R2-CX-0058, awarded to the University of Wisconsin.

This article is based on the grantee report, “Unauthorized Immigration, Crime, and Recidivism: Evidence From Texas” (pdf, 78 pages), by Michael T. Light.

Categories Immigration, Injustice

Jeff Tiedrich: Biden Should Pardon Everyone on Trump’s “Enemies List”

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2024 //
31

Jeff Tiedrich proposes in his blog that President Biden should operate a “pardon factory” to protect everyone who has been threatened by Trump or Kash Patel.

One of the features of democracy is an assumption that parties will contend for power, accept their win or loss graciously, then prepare for next time. There will always be the next election to try again.

The threats by Trump and his toadies to prosecute his critics disrupts the comity on which a democratic system depends.

Trump thinks of his critics as “enemies,” not critics. He has made clear repeatedly that he will use his power as President to prosecute, imprison, and crush his enemies.

He said recently that the members of the January 6 Commission “should be in jail.” Why? Is it normal or acceptable that a mob summoned by the President descends on the U.S. Capitol as they meet to certify the election, smash through the windows and doors, beat up police officers, and rampage through the building? What was criminal? The summoning of the mob? The actions of the mob? Or the investigation of the events of the day?

Biden, writes Tiedrich, should issue pre-emptive pardons to all those whose lives and freedom might be endangered by Trump, Kash Patel, or Pam Bondi.

The next four years will be a trial for our democracy. Will the norms and institutions survive the reign of this bitter, vindictive old man?

Categories Accountability, Bias, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Trump

Trump Nominates MAGA Warrior Kash Patel to Lead the FBI

By dianeravitch
November 30, 2024 //
23

Trump is demonstrating his intention to purge the FBI by naming his close associate Kash Patel as FBI Director. Patel has said repeatedly that the FBI is loaded with “Deep State” enemies, and he plans to fire them.

The FBI is supposed to be an independent agency, not a vengeance weapon belonging to the President. Patel has made clear that he will find and punish Trump’s enemies. He will run the FBI, if confirmed, as Trump’s man, serving Trump, not justice and not the American people. He will be Trump’s avenger, as he destroys the reputation of the FBI.

Politico described him:

President Donald Trump announced Saturday night that he has picked staunch Trump loyalist Kash Patel as the next director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Patel, a Trump transition insider, has been one of Trump’s most visible and vocal allies, showing up at his criminal trial in Manhattan, perpetuating conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. He worked as chief of staff to the secretary of Defense during the first Trump administration, and has been outspoken about calling for a purge of Trump’s enemies from the Justice Department, FBI and other intelligence agencies.

The New York Times wrote:

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”

Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.

Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.

Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post….

Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.

He served in a series of administration positions at the tail end of Mr. Trump’s first term, including posts on the National Security Council and in the Pentagon. Before leaving office in early 2021, Mr. Trump floated the idea of making Mr. Patel deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. William P. Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir that Mr. Patel would have become deputy F.B.I. director only “over my dead body.”

FBI directors are appointed for a 10-year term, so their tenure is allegedly nonpolitical. Although Trump appointed Christopher Wray as FBI Director, Trump soured on him after the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago to recover hundreds of top/secret documents. Trump made clear to Director Wray that he should resign or be fired.

Current and former law enforcement officials have worried that a second Trump term would feature an assault on the independence and authority of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, and for many of them, Mr. Patel’s ascension to the director’s role would confirm the worst of those fears.

Mr. Patel laid out his vision for wreaking vengeance on the F.B.I. and Justice Department in a book, “Government Gangsters,” calling for clearing out the top ranks of the bureau, which he called “a threat to the people.” He also wrote a children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” telling through fantasy the story of the investigations into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign’s possible ties to Russians.

He has vowed to investigate and possibly prosecute journalists once he is back in government, adding that he would “follow the facts and the law.”

“Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” he said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

An article in the New York Times in October described how deeply hated Patel was by other high-level members of the Trump administration. He was considered a boastful self-promoter.

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 election and staff members began an exodus from the White House, Mr. Patel’s upward trajectory continued. Mr. Trump named him to one of the most important jobs at the Pentagon: chief of staff to Christopher Miller, the acting defense secretary.

Gen. Mark A. Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was shocked when Mr. Patel presented him a document signed in Sharpie by the outgoing Mr. Trump ordering a full withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan by Jan. 15. General Milley, the top military adviser to the president, had never even seen the order, and neither had several other senior advisers. It turned out it was drafted by Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel named as an adviser to the Pentagon after he impressed Mr. Trump with his appearances on Fox News, according to an account in “The Divider,” a book by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

Mr. Trump backed away from the Afghanistan plan, but soon sought to again elevate Mr. Patel by making him deputy director of either the C.I.A. or the F.B.I. Only after Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, and William P. Barr, the attorney general, both threatened to quit — Mr. Barr vowed that Mr. Patel would become F.B.I. deputy only “over my dead body”— did Mr. Trump abandon the idea.

Mr. Patel stayed at the Pentagon for three months, crediting himself in his book with leading “the biggest transition’’ of the Defense Department “in U.S. history.”

Categories Bias, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Injustice, Trump

Mississippi: Segregation Academies Enjoying New Voucher $$$

By dianeravitch
November 26, 2024 //
12

Repeat after me: The school choice movement began in response to the Brown Decision of 1954.

School choice was a euphemism for using public dollars to fund segregation academies for whites, to enable them to escape anticipated desegregated schools.

Steve Suitts wrote an excellent book about the history of school choice, called Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Chhoice Movement.

I reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books. The review was titled “The Dark History of School Choice.”

Now, ProPublica reports, southern states are using voucher money to fund the same segregation academies founded in the 1950s and 1960s.

The latest ProPublica report begins:

On May 14, the final day for submitting new bills in the Mississippi Legislature, a bold new package of them landed on the desks of Mississippi lawmakers. The plans called for the creation of a voucher program that paid for students to attend private schools.

A few weeks later, in the heat of mid-June, the governor urged lawmakers to support the $40 million program, promising it “will bear the sound fruit of progress for a hundred years after this generation is gone.” Public school support would continue, he assured. But vouchers would “strengthen the total educational effort” by giving children “the right to choose the educational environment they desire.”

It was 1964.

Key backers of the move included a group of white segregationists that had formed after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated public school segregation unconstitutional.

Across the South, courts had already rejected or limited similar voucher plans in Alabama, Louisiana, Virginia and Arkansas. But Mississippi lawmakers plowed forward anyway and adopted the program. For several years, the state funneled money to white families eager for their children to attend new private academies opening as the first Black children arrived in previously all-white public schools.

Now, 60 years later, ProPublica has found that many of these private schools, known as “segregation academies,” still operate across the South — and many are once again benefiting from public dollars. Earlier this week, ProPublica reported that in North Carolina alone, 39 of them have received tens of millions in voucher money. In Mississippi, we identified 20 schools that likely opened as segregation academies and have received almost $10 million over the past six years from the state’s tax credit donation program.

At least eight of the 20 schools opened with an early boost from vouchers in the 1960s.

“The origins of private schools receiving public funds were with the segregation academies,” said Steve Suitts, a historian and the author of “Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School Choice Movement.”

Most private schools receiving money from the voucher-style programs exploding across the country aren’t segregation academies. But where the academies operate, especially in rural areas, they often foster racial separation in schools and, as a result, across entire communities.

Despite the passage of decades, most segregation academies across Mississippi remain vastly white — far more so than the counties where they operate, federal private school surveys show. Mississippi is the state with the highest percentage of Black residents.

At 15 of the 20 academies benefiting from the tax credit program, student bodies were at least 85% white as of the last federal private school survey, for the 2021-22 school year. And among the 20, enrollments at five were more than 60 percentage points whiter than their communities. Another 11 were at least 30 percentage points whiter.

In 1964, the White Citizens’ Council was among those pushing for the voucher plan. The pro-segregation group was founded in the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola in the 1950s by Robert “Tut” Patterson, who sought to “save our schools if possible” from integration and “if that failed, to develop a system of private schools for our children.”

For Patterson, it was personal. His family, including a young daughter who would start school that fall, lived on what he called a “plantation” with 35 Black families. As he later told an interviewer, “We took care of them. We practically lived with them. We loved them. We tended to them, but I didn’t want to mingle my children with them.”

Vouchers. This is the education idea that Republicans have been pushing for 30 years. This is the policy that is now universal in half a dozen red states. This is the main policy idea of the next Trump regime.

Segregation returns, funded by the taxpayers.

Categories Bigotry, Charter Schools, Extremism, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Mississippi, Racism, Segregation

Was Today the Worst Day in American History?

By dianeravitch
November 25, 2024 //
40

The blog known as “That’s Another Fine Mess” declared November 25 , 2024, the worst day in our history. Read on to know why.

Do you agree?

Donald Trump’s real reason for running for re-election in 2024 was to stay out of prison. He knew that only a return to the White House would prevent him standing trial for initiating the January 6 insurrection, and standing trial for the theft of top secret documents. Conviction in either case would mean he would end his days as a convicted felon, quite possibly dying in prison.


Mission accomplished.


November 25, 2024, will be remembered in American history as the day the constitutional rule that no individual is above the law was ended.


Whether this leads to the end of the democratic constitutional republic – that has existed because of that rule – being overthrown by Donald J. Trump is unknown at this point, but it is at a minimum a severe blow to the foundation of that republic that will be difficult if not impossible to repair.


This morning, Special Counsel Jack Smith moved to drop both cases. This afternoon, that motion was granted in the case of the Seditious Insurrection by Juge Tanya Chutkan. The action was taken “without prejudice,” meaning that the charges could be brought again at some time in the future. Does anyone think that one of the first acts of Attorney General Pam Bondi will not be to drop the cases in such a way that they can never be reinstituted?


This is the worst defeat of the forces of democracy in the history of this country.


Two men are solely responsible for this outcome: President Joseph R. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland.


As productive as his presidency has been, Joe Biden suffered from the fatal flaw of being unable to see that his bedrock belief in “go along to get along” congressional bipartisanship had been decisively overthrown over the 20 years before he took office as president – something he hold have learned from his botched handling of the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 – and was no longer an operating philosophy that could be successful. His Irish stubbornness led to his inability to see modern Republicans as the deadly enemy of everything he believed in that they were – which he only began to clearly see in the final two years of his presidency, when it was too late – was directly responsible for this defeat. His inability to take the kind of decisive action against that enemy – commencing the investigation and prosecution of the criminal Trump and his fellow conspirators on Day One of his term of office – meant that the enemy would be able to use the rights and privileges of a defendant when the investigation and prosecution was finally authorized too late, and defeat the system by retaking power, using the rules of the system to defeat it.

Biden’s inability to understand the true nature of the threat he faced was compounded by his decision to nominate the exact wrong candidate to be his Attorney General. Merrick Garland did not and does not have the heart of a fighter, which is the quality that was most needed in whoever took that office at that time. His judiciousness would have been excellent had he been able to become the Supreme Court Associate Justice President Obama nominated him to be. It is tragic that neither Garland – the victim of the “conservative movement” that had consumed the GOP – nor then-Vice President Biden who took part in making the nomination and was an eyewitness to the treason of Mitch McConnell as President of the Senate – took the proper understanding from what they had been part of. 

Both men desperately held on to obsolete beliefs with the tenacity of French Generals who stared uncomprehendingly at the German panzers that thoroughly defeated them in 1940. They clung to the idea that they could “look forward” and ignore the Great Crime that had been committed, but this time papering over the recent past only made the defeat inevitable. How thorough this defeat will loom in the history of the United States cannot be known at this time, but it cannot be seen as anything other than the Major Defeat that it is. There is no argument to be made that it is anything other than a disaster.

Those who fail to understand when the knowledge on which they have based their lives becomes obsolete cannot end other than how Joe Biden and Merrick Garland have arrived at the end their careers. This failure will outweigh all their other successes, viewed with the 20-20 hindsight of history.

Joe Biden should have listened to the counsel of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who said: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Injustice, Lies, Trump

John Thompson: Steve Brill’s Destructive Attacks on Teachers Did Real Damage

By dianeravitch
November 18, 2024 //
8

Retired Oklahoma City teacher John Thompson wrote in The Oklahoman about the early days of the teacher-bashing movement. At its center he found a journalist-entrepreneur named Steve Brill, who wrote a slashing attack on teachers, tenure, and teacher unions in The New Yorker. Even in Oklahoma, Brill’s article was big news, because it identified the scapegoat that legislators wanted: teachers. Brill subsequently wrote a book celebrating charter schools, called Class Warfare. In that book, he falsely claimed that I had been bribed by teachers’ unions to become pro-union and pro-public school. So, as you might imagine, he is not a friend of mine.

John Thompson wrote:

In 2010, I attended an Oklahoma legislative committee meeting where most lawmakers were reading a New Yorker article, Steve Brill’s “The Rubber Room.”  It was full of attacks on teachers. Legislators found his narrative persuasive, and it contributed to the passage of the most destructive education bill I ever witnessed.

I then reached out to Brill, trying to share the social and cognitive science that explained why he was using invalid and unreliable data in support of a blame game that would undermine teaching and learning.

So, I was curious about what he now believes. After all, the subtitle for a recent interview with him was:

New York repealed measures that made it easier to fire ineffective teachers. The veteran journalist wonders if they ever mattered.

But, Brill, a non-educator, still sticks with an anti-teacher ideology, propagated by “astro-turf think tanks” that rejected the scientific method when trying to use venture capitalism procedures for transforming traditional public schools. Even after those reward-and-punish policies demonstrably failed, Brill says, “in public education, I think there’s a pretty good argument that the people abusing and undermining the system are actually the teachers.” 

“The Rubber Room” presented little evidence that teachers were to blame. His sources focused on “the twentieth of one percent of all New York City teachers” who had been removed from the classroom, but not fired. He believed the PR from corporate reformers like The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and the New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein who thought “tenure is ridiculous.” 

Although value-added models (VAMs) were the foundation for holding teachers accountable for test score growth, Brill only used the term “value-added” once, and he didn’t bother to address that statistical model’s flawed methodology for evaluating individual teachers. (Some of those models even held teachers accountable for outcomes of students they never met!)

Brill merely wrote that the “value-added scores” was “a phrase that sends chills down the spine of most teachers’ union officials.”

Brill didn’t understand why it was impossible to recruit top teachers to highest-poverty schools using evaluation metrics that were biased against inner city teachers. Neither did he understand why these data-driven evaluations would prioritize “jukin the stats” and drill-and-kill instruction that would undermine holistic and meaningful teaching and learning. Brill certainly didn’t understand that teachers and unions also fought against VAMs in order to protect their students from teach-to-the-test malpractice which they would incentivize.

Brill was also dismissive of peer review, which the teachers union supported, and which was a constructive and efficient method of removing ineffective teachers from the classroom. (In my experience, union leaders invested a great deal of political capital in removing ineffective teachers; it was administrators that would lose their nerve and not exit those teachers.)  

Brill drew upon the anti-union TNTP, which spread inaccurate information on the Toledo Plan, where districts and unions worked together to efficiently remove ineffective teachers. The TNTP claimed that the Toledo peer review program only removed .7% of probationary teachers over a five-year period.  In fact, 12.9% of teachers in the plan were removed from the classroom in 2009. The percentages of 2008 probationary teachers removed from the classroom in Syracuse (9.7%), Rochester (7%), Montgomery County (10.5%), and Minneapolis (37%) were far greater than outcomes that VAMs produced.

And that brings us to today’s attacks on education. After a history of failure, corporate reformers have moved away from teacher evaluation systems that rely on test score growth, even though they still tend to blame teachers and unions. But state schools Superintendent Ryan Walters now represents today’s version of disempowering teachers.

Walters pushed for and succeeded in getting the Oklahoma State Board of Education to revoke the license of Norman High School’s Summer Boismier, who “covered her bookshelves with red paper, [with] the words ‘books the state doesn’t want you to read,’ and a QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library, which offers any student free access to banned books.” 

She has asked an Oklahoma County judge to review and reverse the revocation order, saying it was unlawful, frivilous and without a legitimate cause.

Also, Edmond’s Regan Killackey is fighting against Walters’ effort to revoke his teaching license for a photo showing him playing with his kids at a Halloween supply store in September 2019. His daughter was wearing a mask of Donald Trump and his son held up a plastic sword, and Killackey had a grimaced look on his face.

If teachers lose their due process rights, who will be able to resist Walters’ civics curriculum committee which includes the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts, a key sponsor of Project 2025?

Categories Failure, Inequity, Injustice, New York City, Teachers

Trump Tries to Bypass the Senate to Install His Cabinet of Horribles

By dianeravitch
November 17, 2024 //
71

Trump knows that there is a strong possibility that some of his nominees for his Cabinet are so unqualified that they may not be approved by the Republican majority of the Senate. The Senate typically advises and gives its consent to high-level appointments. But Trump is trying to exercise a relatively obscure provision of the Constitution to bypass the Senate.

Since we know that Trump never read the Constitution, it’s certain that one of his creative lawyers planted the idea.

Trump’s selection of Matt Gaetz, who faces allegations of sex-trafficking minors and drug abuse, as Attorney General, produced shock and disbelief among some Republicans. So has Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump would elevate to the highest position in the American intelligence community. So has Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine advocate, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Medical and scientific experts are appalled. So has Trump’s choice of Pete Hegseth, FOX talk show host, to lead the department of Defense.

But Trump could give them “recess appointments” and have no scrutiny or review by Senators. And avoid the risk that some or all might be rejected.

We know that Trump doesn’t care about norms, traditions or laws that constrain his power. If the Senate abandoned its role to please Trump, he would be empowered to trample the rule of law at every turn. That is most definitely a threat to our democracy.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune says “all options are on the table,” and has neither accepted or refuted the scheme.

Edward Whelan, a prominent conservative lawyer, criticized Trump’s devious route in this op-ed in The Washington Post.

He wrote:

President-elect Donald Trump is threatening to turn the Constitution’s appointment process for Cabinet officers on its head. If what I’m hearing through the conservative legal grapevine is correct, he might resort to a cockamamie scheme that would require House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to play a critical role. Johnson can and should immediately put an end to this scheme.

The Senate’s power to approve or reject a president’s nominees for Cabinet positions is a fundamental feature of the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. As Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers, that power “would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters,” including those “who had no other merit than that … of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.” Almost as if Hamilton were describing Matt Gaetz, Trump’s pick for attorney general.

To be sure, the Constitution also provides a backup provision that allows the president to make recess appointments — “to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” But as Hamilton put it, this “auxiliary method of appointment” is “nothing more than a supplement” to the “general mode of appointing officers of the United States” and is to used “in cases to which the general method was inadequate.”

It appears that the Trump team is working on a scheme to allow Trump to recess-appoint his Cabinet officers. This scheme would exploit an obscure and never-before-used provision of the Constitution (part of Article II, Section 3) stating that “in Case of Disagreement” between the houses of Congress, “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.”

Under this scheme, it appears that the House would adopt a concurrent resolution that provided for the adjournment of both the House and the Senate. If the Senate didn’t adopt the resolution, Trump would purport to adjourn both houses for at least 10 days (and perhaps much longer). He would then use the resulting intrasession recess to appoint Gaetz and other Cabinet nominees.

Ten years ago, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia labeled the president’s recess-appointment power an “anachronism” because “modern forms of communication and transportation” make the Senate always available to consider nominations. Along with three of his colleagues, Scalia also argued that the president’s power to make recess appointments is limited to intersession recesses and does not apply to the intrasession recess that the Trump scheme would concoct. The justice, who died in 2016, would be aghast at the notion that a president could create an intrasession recess for the purpose of bypassing the Senate approval process for nominations.

Mike Johnson should not be complicit in eviscerating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role. He should promptly make clear that the House will abide by its usual schedule of recesses and will not attempt to engineer a recess of the Senate.

Edward Whelan is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he holds the Antonin Scalia chair in constitutional studies.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Health, Injustice, Republicans, Science

Matt Gaetz Should Not Be Confirmed as Attorney General

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2024 //
33

When Trump announced that he intended to nominate Representative Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, a gasp went up in both political parties.

Gaetz has been a fierce Trump loyalist, which is why Trump chose him. He certainly didn’t choose him because he is an eminent member of the bar, because he has the respect of his peers, or because he is a pillar of integrity. Trump wants someone who is certain not to investigate him and certain to prosecute Trump’s “enemies.” Perhaps Trump thinks he has found his latter-day Roy Cohn, a man who can be counted on to twist the law to justify whatever Trump wants.

Gaetz was just reelected on November 5, yet resigned as soon as Trump announced that he had chosen him to be Attorney General, the very epitome of our justice system.

Candidates for the Cabinet usually wait to see if they are confirmed before resigning. Why did he rush to resign a seat he just won?

The House Ethics Committee was investigating serious charges against him and was about to issue its report. His resignation ends the investigation.

But, Politico writes, that’s not the end of the Gaetz story:

The lawyer representing a woman former Rep. Matt Gaetz allegedly had sex with when she was a minor called on the House Ethics Committee to “immediately” release its report into his alleged conduct.

“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” attorney John Clune wrote Thursday on X. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”

Gaetz, a conservative firebrand whom President-elect Donald Trump tapped Wednesday to serve as attorney general — and who pushed the effort to oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy —  resigned abruptlyfrom the House Wednesday, days before the chamber’s ethics panel was reportedly set to release a report of its investigation.

Gaetz has repeatedly denied the allegations. A spokesperson for Gaetz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The former congressman was also the subject of a separate federal sex trafficking investigation by the Department of Justice — which he could soon lead — but was ultimately not prosecuted. That probe, started in 2020 during the Trump administration, was focused on whether Gaetz paid women for sex and traveled overseas to attend parties with teenagers under the age of 18.

In May, he was subpoenaed to sit for a deposition in a civil lawsuit brought against the woman with whom he allegedly had sex — who is represented by Clune — by a friend of Gaetz, ABC News reported.

House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) told reporters Wednesday before Gaetz’s resignation that the probe would end if Gaetz was no longer a member of the House — and reiterated that position on Thursday.

But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have said they hope to review the report ahead of Gaetz’s Senate confirmation. Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) demanded in a statement that the House Ethics Committee share its findings with the Senate Judiciary Community, saying “We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people.”

Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post described the Gaetz nomination as “a middle finger to the Senate.” She hopes it never reaches a vote. Maybe Trump is testing the Senate to see how low they will go to please him.

The New York Times summed up Trump’s reasons to admire Gaetz:

Gaetz, a Florida Republican, says Trump’s ties to Russia should never have been investigated. He wants “the Biden crime family” to face justice. And he called nonpartisan D.O.J. officials whom he may soon oversee the “deep state.” He has introduced legislation that would limit sentences for people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 and suggested “abolishing every one of the three-letter agencies,” including the F.B.I.

The New Republic referred to stories about Gaetz’s drug-fueled sexual adventures:

Then-Representative Markwayne Mullin, now a senator, candidly told CNN last year that Gaetz bragged about having sex with young women to other members on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

“We had all seen videos … of the girls that he had slept with,” Mullin said. “He’d crush [erectile dysfunction] medicine and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night.” Mullin, now a Senator, has done a total 180 on this, saying on Wednesday that he “completely” trusts Trump’s decision to nominate Gaetz.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville said that any Republican senator who voted against Gaetz should be ousted. Only four defections, and Gaetz is defeated.

Categories Character, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Jan Resseger: Two Decades of Tax-Cutting in Ohio Have Helped the Rich and Harmed Public Services

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2024 //
4

Jan Resseger writes here about Ohio’s passion for cutting taxes, which benefits the wealthiest Ohioans and diminishes public services.

She writes:

As we head toward the November election, Policy Matters Ohio’s Bailey Williams exposes recent history that has been little reported.  In The Great Ohio Tax Shift, Williams explores simply and clearly the data showing that Ohio’s new billion dollar private school tuition voucher expansion is not the only factor that has threatened public school funding.  For two decades now, legislators have been cutting taxes and reducing investment in public services, including public schools. And Ohio’s legislature has increased the tax burden on Ohio’s poorest citizens and made life easier for our state’s wealthiest citizens.

Even though Ohioans have watched the legislature toss a tax cut into budget after budget instead of funding needed services, the cumulative effects Baily presents in the new report are astounding:

  • “Ohio families with the least resources—those making less than $24,000—pay more annual taxes on average today than they did before 2005.
  • The average household among the top 1 of Ohio earners, with incomes above $647,000, now contribute over $52,000 per year less than they once did.
  • The result is a loss of about $12.8 billion a year in revenue….
  • Ohioans of color are significantly more likely to pay a higher share of their incomes in taxes… while white Ohioans are more likely to have benefited….
  • 71% of the total value of personal income tax cuts has gone to the richest 20% of households….
  • Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, increased taxes for the bottom 99% of Ohio’s households.
  • Changes to sales taxes, excise taxes, and business taxes have, on average, allowed the richest 1% of Ohio tax filers to pay nearly $600 per year less than they did before 2005.”

Bailey reminds us why we pay taxes and explains what has been sacrificed in Ohio: “Through the state tax system, Ohio can ensure every child gets a world-class education, every community is vibrant and healthy, and every Ohioan, of every race and gender, has a secure economic foundation on which to build our futures. But for a generation, lawmakers have instead used tax policy to create loopholes for the wealthy and influential, and provide special treatment for powerful corporations… The politicians who write state tax policy often justify their decisions with promises that when billionaires’ pockets overflow with profits, the benefits will trickle down to working families. Year after year—now decade after decade—the consequences have been clear: The people with the lowest incomes are paying a little more, the wealthy are paying much less, and Ohio has too few resources to serve its purpose: creating a state where everyone has what they need to live a good life.”

Ohio’s legislature has reduced progressive taxation as it has reduced dependence on income taxes and increased regressive sales, excise and business taxes: “Ohio policymakers have made significant changes to personal income taxes over the two decades, lowering rates and making our tax structure more regressive. Since 2005, almost every biennial budget passed by the Ohio state general assembly has included some form of reduction to the personal income tax, generally through broad tax rate cuts and elimination of top tax brackets.  Some changes have benefited low-paid Ohioans: Increasing the threshold at which households begin to pay taxes means households with income below $26,050 don’t pay state income tax…. The creation of a 30% Earned Income Tax Credit has helped low-paid Ohioans.” However, “Other regressive changes in the tax code have completely erased the meager benefits of income tax cuts for the lowest-paid Ohioans. In fact, the lowest-income 20% now pay more on average in taxes than they did before the legislature began its tax cutting spree in 2005. Sales, excise, and business taxes now cost that group more each year on average—more than cancelling out the annual average $122 in income tax cuts this group benefits from….”

Most Ohioans are not prepared to gather and analyze this kind of technical information. Thanks to Bailey Williams and Policy Matters Ohio for this technical analysis. We have spent this year learning about the fiscal implications of the Legislature’s voucher expansion in the current biennial budget; now we are better prepared to understand why, in addition to perpetual voucher expansion, it has been such a struggle to press the Legislature to enact Ohio’s new public school funding formula, the Fair School Funding Plan, to rectify years of inadequate and inequitably distributed public school funding. Legislators have insisted on a slow, three-budget phase-in of the new formula and even now have been unwilling to commit to completing the full launch of the new plan in the budget they will begin negotiating in January.  Many of us have realized that the Fair School Funding Plan’s delayed rollout has derived from perennial tax cutting in addition to the enactment of what’s turning out to be an annual billion dollar voucher explosion. Williams’ analysis, released last week, provides information essential to our grasping the complex fiscal realities that will be part of the upcoming state budget debate.

Please open the link to get the full picture of the tax-cutting that has helped the richest Ohioans, hurt the poorest, and undermined public services.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequity, Injustice, Ohio
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