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Good News! Cong. DeLauro Lambastes Charter Lobby, Endorses Federal CSP Reforms

By dianeravitch
April 18, 2022 //
1

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote about the letter that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut sent to Secretary of Education Cardona. Congresswoman DeLauro is chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee:

Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, Chair of the House Appropriations Committee, issued a blistering reproach of how “the national trade organization representing for-profit EMO’s is running a well-funded misinformation campaign” to stop the proposed regulations of the U.S. Department of Education to provide more accountability and transparency in the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP).

Although Chairwoman DeLauro does not mention the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) by name, that organization has been leading the campaign telling President Biden and Secretary Cardona to #backoff. “In 2019, the NACPS Hall of Fame winner was Fernando Zulueta, the founder and owner of the largest for-profit chain in the United States, Academica. Zulueta served on their board for years,” according to Carol Burris, the Executive Director of the Network for Public Education. NPE issued a report last year on the for-profit charter industry, entitled “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain.”

 

Burris continues, “The campaign of misinformation waged by NACPS at defeating sensible reforms in CSP regulations has been relentless. Wild and untruthful claims made include that the Department does not believe rural charter schools and culturally affirming charter schools should exist, that public school districts would need to approve new charter schools, and that the regulations would override state law. Each of these outrageous false claims are intended to do one thing–frighten parents who send their children to charter schools to oppose the regulations in order to ensure that for-profit run charters and white flight charters can still get CSP funding.”

According to the Chair’s press release, which you can find here, this is not the first time that the same organization has used misinformation in order to protect the for-profit charter industry. The “trade organization” , presumably the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, led a similar campaign of misinformation last summer, according to Chair DeLauro.

“In July 2021, House Democrats passed the fiscal year 2022 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies appropriations bill which included a landmark provision prohibiting federal funding to charter schools run by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs),” wrote Chair DeLauro. “Predictably, the for-profit charter EMOs were not pleased with this legislative development. In response, their national trade organization led a well-funded misinformation campaign incorrectly claiming that the provision would prevent federal funds from going to any charter school that uses a contractor for any discrete service.”

Chair DeLauro goes on in the release to praise the Education Department’s CSP reforms. “I applaud the Department for its efforts to introduce greater accountability and transparency in the CSP program. Further, I urge the Department to disregard bad faith arguments from self-interested organizations that misrepresent these important proposals.”

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools received a CSP grant of nearly 2.4 million dollars in 2018, as did other charter school trade and lobby organizations who are joining the #BackOff campaign.

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ethics, Lies

Insane Lie About the Schools Goes Viral

By dianeravitch
April 9, 2022 //
28

Republicans will say anything crazy and insulting about public schools as a way to radicalize parents against them. The worst example: the repeated claim that schools are installing litter boxes in bathrooms for children who identify as cats or dogs.

No one knows for sure where this started–could have been Moms for Liberty or the National Parents Union or some other money-grubbing rightwing extremists.

The AP reported:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — A Nebraska state lawmaker apologized on Monday after he publicly cited a persistent but debunked rumor alleging that schools are placing litter boxes in school bathrooms to accommodate children who self-identify as cats.

Sen. Bruce Bostelman, a conservative Republican, repeated the false claim during a public, televised debate on a bill intended to help school children who have behavioral problems. His comments quickly went viral, with one Twitter video garnering more than 300,000 views as of Monday afternoon, and drew an onslaught of online criticism and ridicule.

Bostelman initially said he was “shocked” when he heard stories that children were dressing as cats and dogs while at school, with claims that schools were accommodating them with litter boxes.

“They meow and they bark and they interact with their teachers in this fashion,” Bostelman said during legislative debate. “And now schools are wanting to put litter boxes in the schools for these children to use. How is this sanitary?”

The rumor has persisted in a private Facebook group, “Protect Nebraska Children,” and also surfaced last month in an Iowa school district, forcing the superintendent to write to parents that it was “simply and emphatically not true…”

The false claim that children who identify as cats are using litter boxes in school bathrooms has spread across the internet since at least December, when a member of the public brought it up at a school board meeting for Midland Public Schools northwest of Detroit.

The claim was debunked by the district’s superintendent, who issued a statement that said there had “never been litter boxes within MPS schools.”

Still, the baseless rumor has spread across the country, and become fuel for political candidates, amid the culture wars and legislative action involving gender identification in schools.

Hours after his remarks, Bostelman backtracked and acknowledged that the story wasn’t true. He said he checked into the claims with state Sen. Lynne Walz, a Democrat who leads the Legislature’s Education Committee, and confirmed there were no such incidents.…

The furor over public school restrooms comes as a growing number of conservative states seek laws to ban transgender students from using bathrooms that match their gender identity.

People who believe this nonsense should actually visit a public school, talk to the principal, talk to teachers and students before they spread it and make fools of themselves.

Categories Fake, Ignorance, Lies

Billy Townsend: Florida Pol Blames Community for Failure of His Employer’s Charter School

By dianeravitch
April 8, 2022 //
2

Billy Townsend is an acerbic critic of Florida charter scandals and the state commissioner Richard Corcoran, whose wife runs a charter school. He never runs out of material.

In this post, he tells the story of a politician, Manny Diaz, who works for a charter chain, blaming a struggling community for the failure of his employer’s charter school, which was launched with much razzle-dazzle.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, Florida, For-Profit, Lies

Carol Burris: What the Proposed Regulations for the Federal Charter Schools Program Really Say

By dianeravitch
April 7, 2022 //
10

Charter school lobbyists have poured out lamentations about the U.S. Department of Education’s proposals to regulate the federal Charter Schools Program, which gives out $440 million to open new charter schools or expand existing charter schools. These lamentations are false, because the regulations have no effect at all on the 7,000+ existing charter schools. They are a good faith effort to clean up a program that has been riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, a program in which nearly 40% of the funding goes to charter schools that either never open or close soon after opening. The CSP under Betsy DeVos was a slush fund for large charter chains, which was far from its original intent in 1994, when it offered a few million to help jump-start mom-and-pop charters or teacher-led charters.

Carol Burris writes here, on Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in The Washington Post, about the falsehoods now promulgated by the charter lobby in their desperate effort to protect for-profit charter schools and to avoid the need to analyze the impact of new charters in the community where they intend to locate.

Burris, the executive director of the Network for Public Education, writes:

For the first time since the federal Charter Schools Program was established in 1994, the U.S. Department of Education is setting forth meaningful regulations for its grant applicants. While these proposed rules are aimed at ensuring greater transparency and control on how nearly a half-billion tax dollars are spent each year, charter supporters oppose them. We’ve also seen objections to reform — many of which I believe are misinformed — in op-eds, including those in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the New York Post (though these don’t all mention the same concerns). What follows is an explanation of the program and why these regulations are needed to protect taxpayers as well as the families who use charter schools.

Let’s begin with an explanation of the CSP. The program began in 2006. It is a competitive program that, among other things, gives awards to states, charter chains (known as CMOs), and sometimes directly to charter school developers to open or expand a charter school. The CSP program does not determine which charter schools can open and which cannot. The majority of charter schools that have opened over the past few decades never received a penny from the CSP. The average grant to a school is $499,818, although charter chains have received hundreds of millions of dollars.

Congress mandates that the Education Department give away a large proportion of the money appropriated to the program each year. The rush to spend the money helps explain why low-rated schools can get grants and unqualified or deceitful applicants whose schools never open can dip into those federal funds for planning. The mandate to spend the money is a problem only Congress can fix. Nevertheless, the proposed regulations would put in some solid rules of the road to better protect the tax dollars that are spent. What follows is an explanation of what the proposed regulations say and do not say.

*The proposed regulations say charter schools that for-profit operators fully or substantially control would not be eligible to get grants. They do not say that charter schools cannot use for-profit vendors.

The federal definition of a public school under the federal laws IDEA (Individuals With Disabilities Education Act] and ESEA (the Every Student Succeeds Act) is that it must be a nonprofit. When the department challenged for-profit charter schools in Arizona over a decade ago, the for-profits created nonprofit facades to allow the for-profit and its related organizations to run the charter school and still receive federal funds, including CSP dollars.

The present provisions in the CSP are not now strong enough to close this loophole; thus, the proposed regulations say:

Each charter school receiving CSP funding must provide an assurance that it has not and will not enter into a contract with a for-profit management organization, including a nonprofit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity, under which the management organization exercises full or substantial administrative control over the charter school and, thereby, the CSP project.

Why is this important? Because for-profits have used CSP dollars to enrich their bottom line at the expense of students for years. I offer as examples the recent CSP expansion grant awarded to Torchlight Academy Charter School of North Carolina, which is now being shut down, as well as a grant to Capital Collegiate Preparatory Academy of Ohio, which has been passed from one for-profit operator to another.

The State Comptroller of New York specifically chided a school run by the for-profit National Heritage Academies (NHA) in New York for letting NHA take oversized fees for its services. NHA uses its schools to acquire and sell real estate and operates them with “sweeps contracts,” requiring the school to pass all or nearly all funding and operational control to NHA.

When taxpayer dollars go into the pockets of owners or corporations, fewer dollars go into the classroom for students.

Some argue that public schools do business with private vendors for books or transportation and that is true. However, the relationship between a for-profit management organization (EMO) is quite different from the relationship between a vendor who works with a district or a charter school to provide a discreet service. A school or district can sever a bus contract and still have a building, desks, curriculum, and teachers. This is not the case when a sweeps contract is in place. In cases where charter schools have attempted to fire the for-profit operator, they find it impossible to do without destroying the schools in the process. And public schools are subject to bidding laws to ensure that nepotism does not drive vendor choice. Charter schools are not.

13 ways charter schools shape their enrollment

The Network for Public Education identified more than 440 charter schools operated by a for-profit that received CSP grants totaling approximately $158 million between 2006 and 2017, including CSP grants to schools managed with for-profit sweeps contracts. It is a way to evade the law, and it must stop. It is remarkable that the IRS has not, to date, stepped in.

*The proposed regulations say an applicant must include an analysis of school enrollment in the area from which it would draw students. Regulations do not say that grants only go to charter schools in districts facing over-enrollment.

More than one in four parents who walk their kindergartners into a new charter school will have to find another school for their children by the time they reach the fifth grade. That is how alarming the charter closure rate is. Over one in four closes during the first five years; by year 10, 40% are gone. Between 1999 and 2017, nearly 1 million children were displaced due to the closure of their schools.

One of the primary reasons charters close is under-enrollment — they cannot attract enough students to their school to keep it going. Sometimes that occurs because of school quality. But often, it happens because a new, shiny charter school with great marketing opens nearby and draws students away.

New Orleans, a district where virtually all nonprivate schools are charter schools, is facing a crisis because they allowed the charter sector to grow out of control; they no longer have sufficient enrollment, and the district cannot force schools to merge because they are charter, not district-run, schools.

The proposed regulations do not preclude applicants who want to open a charter school in a district already saturated with public and charter schools from getting a CSP grant. It simply asks them to provide information on enrollment trends — specifically:

include any over-enrollment of existing public schools or other information that demonstrates demand for the charter school, such as evidence of demand for specialized instructional approaches.

In other words, it is asking the applicant to make their case for why the school is needed. That information will be used by reviewers of applications when they evaluate applications and rank them. Sounds like common sense to me.

*The proposed regulations say that applicants must provide assurances that they would not get in the way of district-mandated or voluntary desegregation efforts. They do not say that you cannot open a charter in a non-diverse or economically disadvantaged neighborhood.

Charter schools have been magnets for white flight from integrated schools in some places. Other charter schools attract high-achieving students while discouraging students with special needs from attending. In this letter submitted to the Department of Education last year, 67 public education advocacy and civil rights groups provided documentation that the North Carolina SE CSP sub-grants were awarded to charter schools that actively exacerbated segregation, serving in some cases as white flight academies.

The proposed regulations clarify that an application from “racially and socio-economically segregated or isolated communities would still be eligible for funding.” Nevertheless, it is repeated over and over in editorials that schools in non-diverse neighborhoods would not apply as well as “schools that don’t prioritize racial diversity,” a polite way to refer to white flight charters.

*The regulations do not say charter schools must engage in a cooperative activity with districts. The regulations state that they may receive some bonus points on their application if they do.

According to the op-ed in the Wall St. Journal: “The administration also plans to require applicants to ‘collaborate’ with a traditional public school or school district on an ‘activity’ such as transportation or curriculum.” It doesn’t, actually.

When deciding which schools get a grant, reviewers rate applications using a point system. Every grant cycle, the department puts forth priorities as a way for applicants to get a few bonus points on their applications. The majority of schools get CSP grants without them.

The regulations propose two priorities. One gives points if the school is commonly referred to as a “community school.” The second provides points to schools that work cooperatively with a district on a transportation plan, curriculum, or another project. Neither priority is required to apply for or to receive a grant.

The 72 pages of proposed regulations are tedious reading. Because they apply to three separate programs in the CSP, there is much repetition. But the details matter. Read the new regulations. You can see the Network for Public Education’s statement of support for them here, and submit your own comments before April 13, 2022.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Lies, U.S. Department of Education

Jan Resseger Urges You to Support New Regulations Curbing Charter Profiteers

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2022 //
6

Ohio knows charter schools. A lobbyist for the charter school industry wrote the law. Charter schools are mistakenly called “community schools.” Most charter schools in the state are failing schools, but that does not dim the enthusiasm of the GOP legislature for them. Ohio welcomes for-profit charter schools. Charters drain money from public schools.

For the first time in the history of the federal Charter Schools Program, which started in 1994, the federal U.S. Department of Education has proposed regulations to exclude for-profit management of charters that seek federal funding to expand and to require charters seeking federal funding to present a summary of their charter on the locality where they plan to open.

Jan Resseger, who lives in Ohio, sent the following appeal to her followers.

Please Support the Proposed USDOE Rule Changes for the Federal Charter Schools Program

Submit a comment supporting the Department’s new stronger regulations. You can submit your comment HERE, and you must submit the comment before April 13, 2022.

Please read Ohio Public Education Partners’ explanation of an urgently important development that requires our immediate attention. The U.S. Department of Education has published a notice in the Federal Register proposing new rules to strengthen oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP). It is urgently important for each one of us to write and submit a formal comment expressing support for stronger oversight of the Charter Schools Program.

First, even though the Elementary and Secondary Education Act forbids the allocation of federal dollars to for-profit charter schools, the owners of for-profit charter management organizations (CMOs) have learned how to get around the law. The U.S. Department of Education has proposed to stop the misallocation of federal Charter Schools Program (CSP) dollars to for-profit charter school management companies that hide behind the nonprofit charter schools they manage under sweeps contracts.

Second, when a charter school asks for Charter Schools Program startup funds, the Department has declared its intention to require a community impact statement to ensure that there is a need for a new charter school in the community and that the school won’t promote racial segregation. Neither should rapid expansion of charter schools undermine urban neighborhoods. The most serious consequence of out-of-control charter school expansion has been evident in large cities, where charter schools advertise lavishly to attract families from public schools.

Here is the language of the two urgently important rules the U.S. Department of Education proposes to add:

First — “Each charter school receiving CSP funding must provide an assurance that it has not and will not enter into a contract with a for-profit management organization, including a non-profit management organization operated by or on behalf of a for-profit entity, under which the management organization exercises full or substantial administrative control over the charter school and, thereby, the CSP project.”

Second — “Each applicant must provide a community impact analysis that demonstrates that there is sufficient demand for the proposed project and that the proposed project would serve the interests and meet the needs of students and families in the community or communities from which students are, or will be, drawn to attend the charter school, and that includes the following: (a) Descriptions of the community support and unmet demand for the charter school, including any over-enrollment of existing public schools or other information that demonstrates demand for the charter school, such as evidence of demand for specialized instructional approaches. (b) Descriptions of the targeted student and staff demographics and how the applicant plans to establish and maintain racially and socio-economically diverse student and staff populations, including proposed strategies (that are consistent with applicable legal requirements) to recruit, enroll, and retain a diverse student body and to recruit, hire, develop, and retain a diverse staff and talent pipeline at all levels (including leadership positions).”

Please submit a comment supporting the Department’s new stronger regulations. Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the complicated language and presentation of the new rules in the Federal Register. Begin your comment by thanking the Department of Education for strengthening long-needed accountability in this program. In simple prose, explain your support for each of the proposed new rules for the Charter Schools Program. In your comment, if you like, you may quote the language (above) of each rule followed by your reason for believing the new regulation is so important. Your comment may be as long or as short as you like—a few sentences or several paragraphs. Longer comments must be submitted as attached documents.

You can submit your comment HERE, and you must submit the comment before April 13, 2022.

If you are not planning to write your own comment, you may send the Network for Public Education’s action alert letter, but I urge you to personalize your letter by adding a few sentences of your own.

Jan Resseger

 

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Lies, Ohio

Peter Greene: “Moms for Liberty” Reveals Their Plan on Steve Bannon’s Show

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2022 //
12

Peter Greene reports here on the battle plans of the radical rightwing “Moms for Liberty,” as revealed by its leader Tiffany Justice on the Steve Bannon show. In short, take over all the school boards, fire everybody, and replace then with conservatives who share the hateful views of Tiffany Justice.

Greene writes, and adds his comments:

BANNON: Are we going to start taking over the school boards?


JUSTICE: Absolutely. We’re going to take over the school boards, but that’s not enough. Once we replace the school boards, what we need to do is we need to have search firms, that are conservative search firms, that help us to find new educational leaders, because parents are going to get in there and they’re going to want to fire everyone. What else needs to happen? We need good school board training. We need lawyers to stand up in their communities and be advocates for parents and be advocates for school board members who are bucking the system. Right now, parents have no recourse within any public education district.

The “no recourse” talking point sits awkwardly next to a description of the recourse (democratic elections) that Justice (who was defeated when she ran for re-election to her own school board seat) plans to take, but sure. Parents will take over school boards, fire everybody, and hire The Right Sort to replace them. And while some training is needed for school board members, the main thing is to run, because

But what my message today is – get out and run for school board. It’s a part-time job. It’s not a full-time job. Anyone can do it. You do not need to have a background in education and we need more people.

Justice was on Bannon’s show War Room: Pandemic, because angling for political victories and advocacy spins is just like what folks are going on in Ukraine these days. She talked about the heroism of Ron DeSantis, and of course parental rights:

Parental rights are rights that every parent has, and the government does not give them to you, and they cannot take them away. Every parent has the fundamental right to direct the upbringing of their children, their medical care. That includes mental health, by the way, their education and their values, education, their morals, their religious and character training. All of these things lie within the responsibility of the parent. We, as parents, are happy to own those responsibilities within our rights.

It underlines the way in which the parental rights movement at its most extreme seems to have nothing at all to do with a children’s rights movement. I’m a parent, and I absolutely get the rights and responsibilities that parents have to protect and guide their children, but there’s a line past which it all starts to become creepy, as if you own this child and will engineer the tiny human to turn out to be exactly what you choose them to be, and much of the parental rights activist rhetoric lives close to that line. “I have total ownership and control of my child” is exactly how you get to the notion of “My child didn’t turn out exactly the way I demanded they turn out, so somebody else must have messed with their head.” Parental rights are a real thing, and parental responsibilities are a very real thing, but children are actual human beings and not lumps of clay to be crafted by other adult humans.

Justice and Bannon are sad that folks are lying about Florida’s bill, which is just a parental rights and anti-grooming bill and not– they interrupt themselves before they can say what it is. But Justice says she doesn’t see the big deal “We said no sexual orientation instruction or gender identity instruction in grades K through three” and many of her fans and Bannon think it should be K through twelve. Yes, why is everyone so upset that supporters of the bill equate teachers, LGBTQ persons, and pedophiles? (Also, implying that Disney only opposes the law because they are interested in sexualizing children.) As with all talk in support of the law, Justice and Bannon skip past the part where any parent can decide for themselves what constitutes “instruction” about sexual orientation or gender identity, so teachers now have to watch out for any lesson that could lead to Pat talking about having two Mommies at home. Though it would be entertaining if the first parent lawsuit under the bill is some parent arguing that boys and girls restrooms are a means of instructing about gender identity. Maybe fans of the law should just wait until we see how the court challenge turns out.

Justice throws around some numbers about public school failure, which serve mostly as a good example of why school board members and other people who want to talk about education policy should know something about it (she cites 29.8% of Kentucky third graders reading on grade level, but she appears to be talking about proficiency, which is above grade level). This, somehow, is related to talking about gender identity and sexual orientation in first grade.

Justice could be on the show because she was in DC to talk to some GOP House members. She can’t imagine why Dems don’t want to talk to her (I’m not sure, but one possible explanation that comes to mind is that she didn’t call their offices to make an appointment). Which brings us back to the point at the top– Moms For Liberty wants to talk about how to take over the states (because states rights are at the heart of all this stuff).

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Lies, Parent Groups

How Russia Defends the War That Is Not a War

By dianeravitch
April 1, 2022 //
36

A friend forwarded this message from her friend in St. Petersburg, Russia:

1. Russia did not attack Ukraine, but Ukraine must definitely stop defending itself.

2. A special operation is not a war, but economic sanctions are a war.

3. The war began so that the war would not start.

4. Conscripts were not sent to Ukraine, but some of them died there.

5. The maternity hospital was bombed because the Nazis were sitting there dressed as pregnant women, but it was still not bombed.

6. The special operation is proceeding according to plan, the troops do not meet resistance, but in 20 days they only managed to capture Kherson and surround Mariupol.

7. All Ukrainian planes were destroyed by missiles at airfields. But 2 weeks later, Ukraine vilely bombed Belarus.

8. You can wish death on Ukrainians on Russian TV, but wishing death on Russian invaders on Facebook is extremism. 9. Russian troops are fighting not with civilians, but with the Nazis. All 40 million Nazis. You will be surprised, but it easily fits and in all seriousness coexists in the minds of a significant part of Russians.

I added this one, since I recently read a statement from a spokesman for the Russian Defense Agency stating that Russia never targets civilians.

9. Russia never attacks civilians or civilian facilities, like hospitals, apartment buildings, homes, theaters, or civilian evacuees.

Categories Accountability, Hypocrisy, Lies

Steve Ruis: There Are Lies and There Are Breitbart Lies

By dianeravitch
March 29, 2022 //
20

Steve Ruis doesn’t like lies. And he understands that some lies are worse than others. This Breitbart lie, he writes, is a giant whopper.

A young man tragically took his life in Virginia. His mother went to the local school board and said he killed himself because of COVID isolation and “critical race theory.” Breitbart said so.

But what Breitbart did not say was that the young man graduated high school before COVID closed it down. And that CRT was not taught in his school.

And there is more.

Categories Accountability, Lies, Race, Virginia

Putin’s Disinformation Campaign Collapses When He Orders Invasion of Ukraine

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2022 //
43

Tom Southern writes in WIRED about the spectacular collapse of Putin’s well-oiled disinformation machine after he ordered the invasion of Ukraine. Very few people—other than a small number of extremists on the right and the left—were fooled by his claims that he was “liberating” Ukraine from its “Nazi” government.

Southern writes:

FOR DECADES NOW, Vladimir Putin has slowly, carefully, and stealthily curated online and offline networks of influence. These efforts have borne lucrative fruit, helping Russia become far more influential than a country so corrupt and institutionally fragile had any right to be. The Kremlin and its proxies had economic holdings across Europe and Africa that would shame some of the smaller 18th-century empires. It had a vast network of useful idiots that it helped get elected and could count on for support, and it controlled much of the day-to-day narrative in multiple countries through online disinformation. And many people had no idea.

While a few big events like the US’ 2016 election and the UK’s Brexit helped bring this meddling to light, many remained unaware or unwilling to accept that Putin’s disinformation machine was influencing them on a wide range of issues. Small groups of determined activists tried to convince the world that the Kremlin had infiltrated and manipulated the economies, politics, and psychology of much of the globe; these warnings were mostly met with silence or even ridicule.

All that changed the moment Russian boots touched Ukrainian soil. Almost overnight, the Western world became overwhelmingly aware of the Kremlin’s activities in these fields, shattering the illusions that allowed Putin’s alternative, Kremlin-controlled information ecosystem to exist outside its borders. As a result, the sophisticated disinformation machinery Putin spent decades cultivating collapsed within days.

RUSSIA’S NETWORK OF influence was as complex as it was sprawling. The Kremlin has spent millions in terms of dollars and hours in Europe alone, nurturing and fostering the populist right (Italy, Hungary, Slovenia), the far right (Austria, France, Slovakia), and even the far left (Cyprus, Greece, Germany). For years, elected politicians in these and other countries have been standing up for Russia’s interests and defending Russia’s transgressions, often peddling Putin’s narratives in the process. Meanwhile, on televisions, computers, and mobile screens across the globe, Kremlin-run media such as RT, Sputnik, and a host of aligned blogs and “news” websites helped spread an alternative view of the real world. Though often marginal in terms of reach in and of themselves (with some notable exceptions, such as Sputnik Mundo), they performed a key role in spreading disinformation to audiences in and outside of Russia.

Please open the link and finish this important article.

Categories Fake News, Fraud, International, Lies

Please Confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2022 //
24

After four days of hostile grilling by Republicans, the nation had the chance to see a person who stood up to every insulting and demeaning question with a calm and collected demeanor. Judge KJB has a judicial temperament. She demonstrated grace under pressure.

She just received the highest rating from the American Bar Association, in recognition of her record, wisdom and intellect.

The senators running for the Republican nomination used the opportunity to appeal to their racist, Q Anon base, asserting that she was an advocate of critical race theory (false), soft on crime (false), and easy on child pornographers (false).

The judge has been endorsed by police organizations; several of her family members were law enforcement officers.

She opposes racism, but that does not make a CRT ideologue. The fact that her husband is white gives the lie to those like Senator Cruz who portray her as a racist who is hostile to white people.

The flap about child pornographers was an effort by GOP senators to placate the crazies in Q Anon who believe the government is filled with predators of children. Anyone who panders you them should be ashamed.

The judge was even questioned about whether she supports court-packing, a strange question coming from a party who refused to meet with President Obama’s choice “because it was an election year,” but rushed through Justice Barrett’s nomination on the eve of the 2020 election. The court now has 6 conservatives and only three liberals. Judge Brown would not change that uneven balance.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is well qualified to serve on the High Court. She should be promptly confirmed. Republicans should demonstrate that they are not knee-jerk partisans by voting for her.

Categories Bigotry, Courage, Democracy, Hypocrisy, Justice, Lies, Racism, Republicans
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