Much has been written about “the Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic increase in fourth grade reading scores. New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristoff brought national attention to the phenomenon and remarked that these amazing results were due to the “science of reading” (phonics), not any new funding for the state’s woefully underfunded schools, nor any reduction in poverty or segregation..
At the time, I criticized Kristoff’s naïveté, because he failed to notice that the state’s fourth grade NAEP scores rose, but its eighth grade scores had not. What kind of miracle fades away over time? Of what value is evanescent progress? Kristoff attributed the stunning improvement in fourth grade scores to the “science of reading,” and minimized the significance of the state’s policy of holding back third graders who didn’t pass the reading test. Winnowing out the weakest readers lifts the average scores of those who are promoted to fourth grade. A manufactured miracle.
Julia James, a reporter for Mississippi Today, wrote recently about the disparity between the fourth grade scores, which rose impressively, and the eighth grade scores, which didn’t. The headline says that the state “fell short” of an eighth-grade reading “miracle.” In fact, Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading scores were completely unchanged over the period from 2011-2021; actually, the scores were slightly lower in 2021.
The balance of the article concerns ways to raise eighth grade reading scores.
But there is no thought given to whether there really was a “miracle” in fourth grade or just old-fashioned gaming of the system.
Incidentally, the Mississippi State Superintendent who oversaw the fourth grade reading “miracle” is now the state superintendent in Maryland, where she hopes to produce the same results. Let’s hope that those gains are sustained into eighth grade.
In October, 2018, on the night of a high-school homecoming dance in Southlake, Texas, a group of white students gathered at a friend’s house for an after-party. At some point, about eight of them piled together on a bed and, with a phone, filmed themselves chanting the N-word. The blurry, seesawing video went viral, and, days later, a special meeting was called by the board of the Carroll Independent School District—“Home of the Dragons”—one of the wealthiest and highest-rated districts in the state. At the meeting, parents of Black children shared painful stories of racist taunts and harassment that their kids had endured in school. Carroll eventually convened a diversity council made up of students, parents, and district staffers to address an evident pattern of racism in Southlake, although it took nearly two years for the group to present its plan of action. It recommended, among other things, hiring more teachers of color, requiring cultural-sensitivity training for all students and teachers, and imposing clearer consequences for racist conduct.
As the NBC reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton recounted in the acclaimed podcast “Southlake,” and as Hixenbaugh writes in his new book, “They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms,” Southlake’s long-awaited diversity plan happened to emerge in July, 2020, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer sparked Black Lives Matter protests against racism and police brutality across the United States. It was also the same month that a journalist named Christopher Rufo published an article in City Journal headlined “Cult Programming in Seattle,” which launched his campaign to make “critical race theory”—an academic discipline that examines how racism is embedded in our legal frameworks and institutions—into a right-wing panic button. A political-action committee called Southlake Families pac sprang up to oppose the Carroll diversity plan; the claim was that it would instill guilt and shame in white children and convince them that they are irredeemably racist. The following year, candidates endorsed by Southlake Families pac swept the local elections for school board, city council, and mayor, with about seventy per cent of the vote—“an even bigger share than the 63 percent of Southlake residents who’d backed Trump in 2020,” Hixenbaugh notes in his book. Some nine hundred other school districts nationwide saw similar anti-C.R.T. campaigns. Southlake, where the anti-woke insurgency had won lavish praise from National Review and Laura Ingraham, was the blueprint.
“Rufo tapped into a particular moment in which white Americans realized that they were white, that whiteness carried heavy historical baggage,” the education journalist Laura Pappano writes in her recent book “School Moms: Parent Activism, Partisan Politics, and the Battle for Public Education,” which also digs into the Southlake controversy. Whiteness could feel like a neutral default mode in many communities because of decades of organized resistance to high-density housing and other zoning measures—the bureaucratic backhoes of suburbanization and white flight. Today, the Carroll school district, though still majority white, has significant numbers of Latino and Asian families, but less than two per cent of the district’s students are Black.
In this last regard, Southlake is not an outlier, owing largely to persistent residential segregation across the U.S. Even in highly diverse metro areas, the average Black student is enrolled in a school that is about seventy-five per cent Black, and white students attend schools with significantly lower levels of poverty. These statistics are dispiriting not least because of ample data showing the educational gains that desegregation makes possible for Black kids. A 2015 analysis of standardized-test scores, for instance, identified a strong connection between school segregation and academic-achievement gaps, owing to concentrated poverty in predominantly Black and Hispanic schools. A well-known longitudinal study found that Black students who attended desegregated schools from kindergarten to high school were more likely to graduate and earn higher wages, and less likely to be incarcerated or experience poverty. Their schools also received twenty per cent more funding and had smaller classroom sizes. As the education reporter Justin Murphy writes in “Your Children Are Very Greatly in Danger: School Segregation in Rochester, New York,” this bevy of findings “lends support to the popular adage among desegregation supporters that ‘green follows white.’ ”
These numbers, of course, don’t necessarily reflect the emotional and psychological toll of being one of a relatively few Black kids in a predominantly white school. Other recent books, including Cara Fitzpatrick’s “The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America” and Laura Meckler’s “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” have also considered how those costs have been weighed against the moral imperative of desegregation. This is the axial force of a lineage that runs from the monstrous chaos that followed court-ordered integration in the nineteen-fifties and sixties and the busing debacles of the seventies to the racist slurs thrown around at Southlake. As my colleague Louis Menand wrote last year in his review of Rachel Louise Martin’s “A Most Tolerant Little Town: The Explosive Beginning of School Desegregation,” “It was insane to send nine Black teen-agers into Central High School in Little Rock with eighteen hundred white students and no Black teachers. . . . Desegregation was a war. We sent children off to fight it.” To Rufo and his comrades, there was no such war left to be fought; there were only the bitter-enders who hallucinate microaggressions in the wallpaper and whose books need to be banned from school libraries. A mordant irony of Rufo’s imaginary version of critical race theory is that Derrick Bell, the civil-rights attorney and legal scholar who was most closely associated with C.R.T., eventually came to be skeptical about school-integration efforts—not because racism was effectively over or because legally enforced desegregation represented government overreach, as the anti-C.R.T. warriors would hold today, but because it could not be eradicated. In a famous Yale Law Journal article, “Serving Two Masters,” from 1976, Bell cited a coalition of Black community groups in Boston who resisted busing: “We think it neither necessary, nor proper to endure the dislocations of desegregation without reasonable assurances that our children will instructionally profit…”
In the years before Brown v. Board of Education was decided, the N.A.A.C.P.—through the brave and innovative work of young lawyers such as Derrick Bell—had brought enough lawsuits against various segregated school districts that some states were moving to privatize their educational systems. As Fitzpatrick notes in “The Death of Public School,” an influential Georgia newspaper owner and former speaker of the state’s House declared, in 1950, “that it would be better to abolish the public schools than to desegregate them.” South Carolina, in 1952, voted 2–1 in a referendum to revoke the right to public education from its state constitution. Around the same time, the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman began making a case for school vouchers, or public money that parents could spend as they pleased in the educational marketplace. White leaders in the South seized on the idea as a means of funding so-called segregation academies. In 1959, a county in Virginia simply closed down its public schools entirely rather than integrate; two years later, it began distributing vouchers—but only to white students, as Black families had refused to set up their own segregated schools.
Despite these disgraceful origins, vouchers remain the handmaiden of conservative calls for “school choice” or “education freedom.” In the run-up to the 2022 midterms, Rufo expanded his triumphant crusade against C.R.T. into a frontal assault on public education itself, which he believed could be replaced with a largely unregulated voucher system. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public-school distrust,” Rufo explained. He had been doing his best to sow that distrust during the previous two years.
Twenty states currently have voucher programs; five states launched universal voucher programs in 2023 alone. But reams of evidence show that vouchers negatively impact educational outcomes, and the money a voucher represents—around eight thousand dollars in Florida, sixty-five hundred in Georgia—is often not nearly enough to cover private-school tuition. In practice, then, vouchers typically act as subsidies for wealthy families who already send their children to private schools; or they pay for sketchy for-profit “microschools,” which have no oversight and where teachers often have few qualifications; or they flow toward homeschooling families. Wherever they end up, they drain the coffers of the public schools. Arizona’s voucher system, which is less than two years old, is projected to cost close to a billion dollars next year. The governor, Katie Hobbs, a Democrat and former social worker, has said that the program “will likely bankrupt the state.”
Back in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has become the Captain Ahab of school choice—he fanatically pursued a voucher program through multiple special sessions of the state legislature, failed every time to sink the harpoon, and then tried to use the rope to strangle the rest of the education budget, seemingly out of spite. Abbott’s problem is not only that Democrats don’t support vouchers but that they’ve also been rejected by Republican representatives in rural areas, where private options are scarce and where public schools are major local employers and serve as community hubs. (Southlake’s state representative, a Republican with a background in private equity, supports Abbott’s voucher scheme—a bizarre stance to take on behalf of a district that derives much of its prestige, property values, and chauvinism from the élite reputation of its public schools.) White conservatives in Texas and elsewhere were roused to anger and action by Rufo-style hysteria. But many of them may have realized by now that these invented controversies were just the battering ram for a full-scale sacking and looting of public education.
From the beginning of the pro-Palestinian campus protests, I have objected to the students’ one-sided support of one side—Hamas. Their chant of “from the river to the sea” implicitly endorses Hamas’ demand to eliminate the state of Israel and to “Islamicize” all the land that includes Israel. With a better knowledge of history, the students would have condemned Hamas’ terrorism and Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has launched a campaign of intimidation and terror against the civilian population of Gaza, who have been victims of not only mass bombing but famine.
The Washington Post reported that the campus protests have failed to win the support of the American public. Perhaps they remember 9/11 or the USS Cole or any number of other terrorist attacks where the victims were Americans.
Multiple polls in recent weeks have shown relatively little sympathy for the protesters or approval of their actions. And notably, large numbers of Americans have attached the “antisemitic” label to them.
The most recent data on this come in the form of a striking poll in New York, a hotbed of the protests at Columbia University, in particular. The Siena College poll shows residents even of that blue-leaning state — Democrats tend to sympathize more with the Palestinian cause — agreed 70 percent to 22 percent that the protests “went too far, and I support the police being called in to shut them down.”
Public sentiment has encouraged Republicans to politicize the issue by harassing university presidents for their failure to close down the student protests. There is something richly ironic about the new-found Republican interest in anti-Semitism. If they really cared about Jew-hatred, they would ask Trump to testify about his relationships to known anti-Semites and neo-Nazis.
But no. Their audiences want to see them pillory the presidents of elite universities, to please their base. The most aggressive of the questioners, Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a graduate of Harvard University. Her low tactics are a disgrace to her university.
Yesterday, members of Congress, mostly Republicans, harangued three university presidents for ignoring anti-Semitism displayed by campus protestors who support Palestinians, and in some cases, the terrorist group Hamas.
Three university leaders were accused on Thursday, during a congressional hearing, of turning a blind eye to antisemitism on their campuses, while capitulating to “pro-Hamas” and “pro-terror” student groups.
During more than three hours of grueling questioning, Northwestern University President Michael Schill, Rutgers University Jonathan Holloway and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block were often bullied and taunted by members of the House Committee on Education & the Workforce for not cracking down more forcefully on anti-Israel protesters who had set up unauthorized encampments on their campuses.
“Each of you should be ashamed of your decisions that allowed antisemitic encampments to endanger Jewish students,” said Chairwoman Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina.
Schill and Holloway bore the brunt of the wrath of the Republican-controlled committee for also cutting deals with the protesters rather than calling in police to clear the encampments. Seven Jewish members of a committee tasked with fighting antisemitism at Northwestern resigned in protest at the concessions made by their university president to the protesters.
Neither university agreed to an academic boycott of Israel, but they promised to hold discussions in the future on the possibility of divesting from companies with ties to Israel. As part of its agreement, Northwestern also promised to take in students from Gaza displaced by the war, while Rutgers agreed to form a partnership with Birzeit University in the West Bank.
“I think your performance here has been very embarrassing to your school,” U.S. Representative Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, told Schill after the president of Northwestern refused to answer questions about a journalism professor at his university who had participated in the protests and scuffled with police.
When asked by Banks whether he allows professors at Northwestern to praise Hamas, Schill, who is Jewish, responded: “They have all the rights of free speech.”
Banks retorted: “Four billion dollars have gone to your university. We should not give you another taxpayers’ dollar for the joke your university has become.”
Elise Stefanik, the Republican congresswoman from New York, was especially hostile, accusing Schill of “unilateral capitulation to the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, antisemitic encampment.“
When he tried to clarify a point, Stefanik – who has been fashioning herself as a leading voice against the pro-Palestinian student protests – cut him off. “I’m asking the questions here,” she said angrily.
When asked by Stefanik if it was true that he had asked the director of the Hillel chapter at Northwestern whether it was possible to hire an ant-Zionist rabbi as university chaplain, Schill responded emphatically that he had never made such an inquiry.
“That’s not true according to the whistleblowers who’ve come forth to this committee,” retorted Stefanik.
Holloway was interrogated by Congressman Bob Good, a Republican from Virginia, about a think tank at Rutgers that has referred to Israel’s government as genocidal, among other anti-Israel statements it has issued in recent months. When asked, Holloway said he had no intention of closing down this Center for Security, Race and Rights.
Holloway: “Sir, I don’t have an opinion about Israel in terms of that phrase.”
Good: “You do not have an opinion as to whether or not Israel’s government is genocidal?”
Holloway: “No, sir. I think Israel has a right to exist and protect itself.”
Good: “Do you think Israel’s government is genocidal?”
Holloway: “I think Israel has a right to exist and protect itself, sir.”
Good: “But you will not say that Israel’s government is not genocidal? You can’t say that?”
Holloway: “Sir, I believe the government . . . “
Good: “Are you in a position to answer any questions? Do you have an opinion on anything?
Later on in the hearing, Holloway was given a second chance to address the question, phrased somewhat differently. When asked by Congressman Eric Burlison, a Republican from Missouri, whether they believed Israel was genocidal, all three university leaders responded that they did not.
Tim Slekar is a fearless warrior for public schools, teachers, and students. I will be talking to him about Slaying Goliath and the struggle to protect public schools from the depredations of billionaires and zealots.
This Thursday on Civic Media: Dive Back into “Slaying Goliath” with Diane Ravitch
Grab your pencils—BustEDpencils is gearing up for a no-holds-barred revival of Diane Ravitch’s game-changing book, *Slaying Goliath*, live this Thursday on Civic Media.
Launched into a world on the brink of a pandemic, *Slaying Goliath* hit the shelves with a mission: to arm the defenders of public education against the Goliaths of privatization. But then, COVID-19 overshadowed everything. Despite that, the battles Diane described haven’t paused—they’ve intensified. And this Thursday, we’re bringing these crucial discussions back to the forefront with Diane herself.
This Thursday at 7pm EST on BustEDpencils, we’re not just revisiting a book; we’re reigniting a movement. Diane will dissect the current threats to public education and highlight how *Slaying Goliath* still maps the path to victory for our schools. This isn’t just about reflection—it’s about action.
**It’s time to get real. It’s time to get loud. It’s time to tune in this Thursday at 7 PM EST on Civic Media.**
If you believe that without a robust public education system our democracy is in jeopardy, then join us. Listen in, call in (855-752-4842), and let’s get fired up. We’ve got a fight to win, and Diane Ravitch is leading the charge.
Mark your calendars and fire up Civic Media this Thursday at 7pm Central.
The propaganda surrounding COVID vaccines has led to parental uncertainty about other vaccines. This may explain recent measles outbreaks. For most of us, measles is a childhood disease that was conquered by scientists many years ago. But it’s returning.
This year is not yet one-third over, yet measles cases in the United States are on track to be the worst since a massive outbreak in 2019. At the same time, anti-vaccine activists are recklessly sowing doubts and encouraging vaccine hesitancy. Parents who leave their children unvaccinated are risking not only their health but also the well-being of those around them.
Measles is one of the most contagious human viruses — more so than the coronavirus — and is spread through direct or airborne contact when an infected person breathes, coughs or sneezes. The virus can hang in the air for up to two hours after an infected person has left an area. It can cause serious complications, including pneumonia, encephalitis and death, especially in unvaccinated people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one person infected with measles can infect 9 out of 10 unvaccinated individuals with whom they come in close contact.
But measles can be prevented with the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine; two doses are 97 percent effective. When 95 percent or more of a community is vaccinated, herd immunity protects the whole. Unfortunately, vaccination rates are falling. The global vaccine coverage rate of the first dose, at 83 percent, and second dose, at 74 percent, are well under the 95 percent level. Vaccination coverage among U.S. kindergartners has slipped from 95.2 percent during the 2019-2020 school year to 93.1 percent in the 2022-2023 school year, according to the CDC, leaving approximately 250,000 kindergartners at risk each year over the past three years.
Florida and Illinois have had a surge in measles cases. The Surgeon General of Florida, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, ignored standard practice and told parents to make their own decisions about whether to keep their unvaccinated child home to avoid getting the disease.
Another source of misinformation is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s organization:
Vaccine hesitancy is being encouraged by activists who warn of government coercion, using social media to amplify irresponsible claims. An article published March 20 on the website of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Children’s Health Defense organization is headlined, “Be Very Afraid? CDC, Big Media Drum Up Fear of ‘Deadly’ Measles Outbreaks.”
The author, Alan Cassels, claims that the news media is advancing a “a fear-mongering narrative,” and adds, “Those of us born before 1970 with personal experience pretty much all agree that measles is a big ‘meh.’ We all had it ourselves and so did our brothers, sisters and school friends. We also had chicken pox and mumps and typically got a few days off school. The only side effect of those diseases was that my mom sighed heavily and called work to say she had to stay home to look after a kid with spots.”
Today, he adds, “Big media and government overhyping the nature of an illness, which history has shown us can be a precursor to some very bad public health policies such as mandatory vaccination programs and other coercive measures.”
This is just wrong. The CDC reports that, in the decade before the measles vaccine became available in 1963, the disease killed 400 to 500 people, hospitalized 48,000 and gave 1,000 people encephalitis in the United States every year — and that was just among reported cases. The elimination of measles in the United States in 2000, driven by a safe and effective vaccine, was a major public health success. Although the elimination status still holds, the U.S. situation has deteriorated. The nation has been below 95 percent two-dose coverage for three consecutive years, and 12 states and the District below 90 percent. At the same time, the rest of the world must also strive to boost childhood vaccination rates, which slid backward during the covid-19 pandemic. According to the WHO, low-income countries — with the highest risk of death from measles — continue to have the lowest vaccination rates, only 66 percent.
Forgive me for posting two reviews of my last book, which was published on January 20, 2020.
As I explained in the previous post, I did not see either of these reviews until long after they appeared in print. Slaying Goliath appeared just as COVID was beginning to make its mark, only a few weeks before it was recognized as a global pandemic. In writing the book, I wanted to celebrate the individuals and groups that demonstrated bravery in standing up to the powerful, richly endowed forces that were determined to privatize their public schools through charters or vouchers.
America’s public schools had educated generations of young people who created the most powerful, most culturally creative, most dynamic nation on earth. Yet there arose a cabal of billionaires and their functionaries who were determined to destroy public schools and turn them into privately-managed schools and to turn their funding over to private and religious schools.
Having worked for many years inside the conservative movement, I knew what was happening. I saw where the money was coming from, and I knew that politicians had been won over (bought) by campaign contributions.
Publishing a book at the same time as a global pandemic terrifies the world and endangers millions of people is bad timing, for sure.
But the most hurtful blow to me and the book was a mean-spirited review in The New York Times Book Review. The NYTBR is unquestionably the most important review that a book is likely to get. Its readership is huge. A bad review is a death knell. That’s the review I got. The reviewer, not an educator or education journalist, hated the book. Hated it. I found her review hard to read because she seemed to reviewing a different book.
I was completely unaware that Bob Shepherd reviewed the review. I didn’t see it until two or three years after it appeared. He wrote what I felt, but I, as the author, knew that it was very bad form to complain, and I did not.
A new report ranks US states in terms of how well their legislatures are protecting public schools and the students who attend them. From expanding charters to launching illiberal attacks on kids and families, a worrying number of states failed the test.
State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe. (SDI Productions / Getty Images)
On February 8, sixteen-year-old nonbinary sophomore Nex Benedict died of causes that have yet to be explained to the public. The day before, Nex had told a police officer they were beaten by three schoolmates in a bathroom at their Oklahoma high school. Sue Benedict, Nex’s grandmother and adoptive parent, told the Independent that Nex suffered from identity-based bullying, beginning shortly after Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a lawforcing trans students to use bathrooms that match the sex listed on their birth certificates.
In addition to the bathroom ban, Stitt has signed severalotherlaws targeting trans youth. There are currently fifty-four other anti-LGBTQ bills before the Oklahoma legislature. While the exact cause of Nex’s death remains unverified, it’s clear that the violence preceding it occurred in an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ youth in the state of Oklahoma.
According to the American Medical Association and the National Institutes of Health, bathroom bans put vulnerable kids at risk for serious harm. And even when anti-LGBTQ laws don’t pass, researchindicates that young people are adversely affected by proposed legislation that puts their safety and humanity up for debate, fueling a climate of tension and suspicion which can exacerbate bullying behavior and mental health issues. Per 2019 data, majorities of LGBTQ kids have experienced harassment or bullying in school, leading to increased absences and potentially dire long-term consequences. But LGBTQ students in schools with LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum and policies are more likely to feel safe and report that their peers accept them.
In other words, adults — from educators to social media personalities to lawmakers — set a tone that appears to be highly determinative of whether school is a place where kids like Nex can safely be themselves.
This pattern is hardly restricted to LGBTQ issues. State-level legislation shapes the societies in which kids live and schools operate. For this reason “Public Schooling in America,” the latest data-packed national report card from the Network for Public Education (NPE), focuses on the extent to which each state legislature protects young people, both in and out of public school systems.
While the previous two NPE report cards have focused primarily on school privatization, this one goes further, connecting the dots between seemingly distinct attacks on public schooling that are advancing as part of the push for Christian nationalism: charter and voucher expansion, publicly funded homeschooling, defunding of public schools, and illiberal restrictions on kids and educators.
Using a points system based on how statehouses treat the above topics, NPE awarded “A” grades to five states, both red and blue, that demonstrate a strong commitment to students and democratically governed public schools: 1) North Dakota, 2) Connecticut, 3) Vermont, 4) Illinois, and 5) Nebraska. Seventeen states — all but two of which are governed by a Republican trifecta— earned “F” grades. The poorest scoring of these “F” states will come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to school privatization or the anti-LGBTQ laws curtailing kids’ and educators’ rights: 47) Arkansas, 48) North Carolina, 49) Utah, 50) Arizona, and 51) Florida.
Ultimately the report underscores a critical point: while schools are directly tasked with prioritizing child well-being and student safety, they don’t perform these duties in a vacuum. State legislatures play an enormous role in making public school systems functional and safe — or, in many cases, severely undermining them.
Privatization: Vouchers and Charters
Vouchers, which subtract taxpayer dollars from public education and turn them over to privately operated schools and service providers (including for-profit and religious schools), have notched considerable statehouse wins in recent years. In 2023 alone, seven states launched new voucher plans, while others made existing programs available to wealthy families who have never sent their kids to public schools.
Significantly, while voucher programs’ costs to taxpayers have mushroomed since 2000, bathing state budgets in red ink, overall private school enrollment actually decreased from 11.38 percent in 1999 to 9.97 percent in 2021. That’s because vouchers aremostpopular among privileged parents whose kids were already attending private schools. These privatization schemes may be propping up academically impoverished religious schools, but they are not incentivizing an exodus from public education.
Vouchers take various forms, including traditional vouchers or tuition grants, tuition tax-credit scholarship programs (TTCs), and education savings accounts (ESAs), which turn large sums of public money over to parents with virtually no strings attached. With all vouchers, and ESAs in particular, there are few or no safeguards to prevent fraud or ensure that kids are actually learning core subjects.
Vouchers are a preferred tool of religious extremists seeking state-funded Christian education, but most state constitutions have clauses prohibiting public funding of religious institutions. ESAs and TTCs are designed to evade these restrictions by funding families rather than schools (ESAs), or allowing people to donate to private school scholarships instead of paying their taxes (TTCs). Generally speaking, voucher-funded private schooling is rife with discrimination that would be illegal in public school systems. A 2023 report by the Education Voters of Pennsylvania, for example, found that 100 percent of surveyed voucher schools have policies that overtly discriminate against kids based on LGBTQ identity, disability status, academic ability, religion, pregnancy or abortion history, or other factors.
Vouchers have made splashier headlines than charter schools of late, as Republicans abandon the decades-old bipartisan education reform truce. But Christian nationalists have also been using charter schools to press their agenda, with a significant increase in right-wing “faith-friendly,” “classical,” or “back-to-basics” charter schools (and at least one officially religious church-run charter school on track to open in Oklahoma). Another in-depth report from NPE documents this rise, noting that these charter schools, which market themselves to conservative white families, are nearly twice as likely to be run by for-profit corporations as the charter sector at large.
The growth of online charter schools, which have terrible academic track records, and charter schools run for a profit has continued apace. Thirty-five states allow for-profit corporations to manage nonprofit charter schools, and in six states (Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and West Virginia), for-profits manage over 30 percentof all charter schools. Fraud and mismanagement result in the frequent shuttering of publicly funded charter schools, sometimes leaving families in the lurch mid–school year. Since 2019, NPE has been collecting news stories of charter school malfeasance and abrupt closures (charter churn). Thirteen states have racked up at least fifty such reports: California takes the prize for one hundred and eighty charter scandal stories, and Pennsylvania comes in second.
Though often cleverly referred to as “public,” charter schools are not equally accessible by all kids. In School’s Choice, researchers Wagma Mommandi and Kevin Welner show how charter schools use branding and promotional strategies to sway enrollment toward students with more resources and fewer needs than the general population.
In an even more blatant example of the nonpublic nature of charter schools, NPE points to the phenomenon of workplace charters. Under Florida law, such schools are permitted to restrict enrollment to the children of a specific firm’s employees — functioning as a form of labor discipline reminiscent of the last century’s coal “company towns.” At the Villages Charter School (VCS)’s six campuses, parental employment is verified monthly. If a VCS parent hates working at the Villages (a large, highly profitable retirement community) and wants to quit, they had better be prepared to upend their kids’ educational and social lives.
Homeschooling
The number of homeschooling families spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to rise. Journalists at the Washington Post found a 51 percent increase over the past six years in states where it’s possible to track homeschooling trends. Once a practice found mainly among fundamentalist Christians in rural areas, it is now the fastest growing education sector.
Thirteen states directly subsidize homeschooling through vouchers or tax credits. A flourishing tech-based industry (including charter schools for homeschooling families) has emerged to cash in on these state subsidies, with parents putting taxpayer dollars to questionable uses. In Arizona, a proliferation of news stories has documented homeschooling families spending ESA money on things like LEGO sets, snowboarding trips, ninja training, and aeroponic indoor gardens. Very few states have regulations in place to ensure that homeschooled children are receiving basic academic instruction. In fact, most states allow parents to issue a diploma with no verification of student learning.
Culture warriors like Chaya Raichik have used the slippery concept of “grooming” to gin up fears about adults hurting kids in public schools. In reality, because public schools are governed by strict child safety laws including background checks and mandated reporting, they are much more likely to detect and prevent abuse than minimally regulated private schools and totally unregulated homes. Eleven states don’t even require parents to report that they’re homeschooling their kids, while fourteen more just require a onetime notice with no follow-up. Only Pennsylvania and Arkansas conduct any form of background check on homeschooling parents.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has cataloged about one hundred and eighty horrific stories of homeschooled children suffering and even dying from neglect, abuse, and torture in their educational settings. Nicole and Jasmine Snyder, for example, experienced things like having their heads bashed against a wall, being forced to stand in a dark hallway for long stretches, and having urine and feces smeared on their faces as punishment for potty accidents. They starved to death in 2016 and 2017, weighing five and ten pounds respectively. Because they were homeschooled, no one outside the family had any idea the abuse was happening. Their murders were not revealed until 2021.
Public School Financing
Researchers have clearly established the relationship between school funding and student learning outcomes. And because school funding enables everything from adequate staff-to-student ratios to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems to essential structural repairs, it’s undeniably a student safety issue.
To rank school funding, NPE looked at the following metrics from the Education Law Center, which issues an annual school funding report: funding levels (cost-adjusted, per-pupil revenue from state and local sources), funding distribution (how states allocate funds to high-needs schools serving economically disadvantaged students), and funding effort (the relationship between a state’s GDP and its investment in schools). They also looked at average teacher salaries, adjusted for each state’s cost of living.
The states that earned the most points for funding public education and narrowing resource discrepancies were New York, New Jersey, and Wyoming. Florida lost every single available point for school funding, while Arizona, Idaho, and Nevada lost all but one. Washington, DC, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all stand out for having exceptionally low teacher pay despite relatively high per-pupil spending.
It’s important to recognize that numerous GOP-controlled states are in the process of defunding their public schools — through spending cuts and policies that drain public coffers by enabling skyrocketing voucher costs coupled with generous tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. If this experiment is allowed to continue, it will ultimately disfigure the landscape of community life and civic participation.
Freedom to Teach and Learn
Because the right-wing attacks on students and educators have ramped up in conjunction with efforts to defund public schools and boost private alternatives, this NPE report card includes a new category, Freedom to Teach and Learn, which encompasses a range of factors pertaining to student safety and well-being: laws protecting LGBTQ students in public schools, corporal punishment bans, censorship and curriculum bans, collective bargaining for teachers, and teacher quality…..
[Please open the link to read the rest of this important article.]
Chris Tomlinson is a regular opinion writer for The Houston Chronicle. I tuned in to a zoom with him yesterday and learned that he is known for his fierce independence. I signed up for his column and discovered his thoughts about “the immigration crisis,” which Americans tell pollsters these days is the most serious problem facing the nation. Tomlinson thinks both parties have failed to tell the truth, so he did. Trump, in particular, has demagogued the issue with his fear-mongering.
Tomlinson writes:
The two-ring presidential circus performed along Texas’ border on Thursday, injecting cash into the local economy but adding little to the national debate over one of the year’s most consequential issues.
President Joe Biden met with local officials in Brownsville and blamed Republicans in Congress for blocking new border security spending for political advantage. He correctly stated the broken asylum system encourages desperate people to gamble their life savings for a chance to live in the United States.
“If they get by the first day, they’ve got another five, seven, eight years before they have to do anything because they know (the immigration courts) cannot handle the caseloads quickly, and they’ll be able to stay in this country,” Biden said.
“With the new policies in this bill and the addition of 4,300 additional asylum officers, we’ll be able to reduce that process to less than six months,” he added.
Former President Donald Trump paraded before U.S. flags and uniformed National Guard troops in Eagle Pass. He renewed themes popularized by the Ku Klux Klan a century ago, sowing fear of foreigners and painting his opponent as a friend of dark-skinned criminals.
“They’re coming from jails, and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums. And they’re terrorists. They’re being let into our, our country,” Trump said in a rambling, bigoted speech. “It’s not just South America. It’s all over the world. The Congo, very big population coming in from jails from the Congo.”
Immigration is the most critical problem facing the nation, Americans told a recent Gallup poll. The issue was top of mind for 57% of Republicans, 22% of independents and 10% of Democrats.
“A separate question in the survey finds a record-high 55% of U.S. adults, up eight points from last year, saying that ‘large numbers of immigrants entering the United States illegally’ is a critical threat to U.S. vital interests,” Gallup added.
Most voters believe Trump would do a better job on border security, while only 28% of Americans approve of Biden’s immigration policies. Biden is in deep trouble, with only a 38% approval rating and a base already angry over his Middle East policies.
Anyone who’s spent time along the border will tell you most Americans don’t understand what goes on there. For example, asylum seekers are not invading the country; they turn themselves in as quickly as possible. Most of the $29 billion worth of drugs smuggled into the United States crosses at commercial entry points, which are the arterial roads keeping our economy going.
Migrants, documented or not, are critical for our workforce and society. I know people like to draw distinctions between documented and undocumented migrants, but both contribute more to the United States economy than they take. Most undocumented workers would happily pay a fine to get right with the government.
In Houston, immigrants make up almost a quarter of the population and 31% of the workforce, U.S. census data analyzed by the American Immigration Council, the Texas Association of Business and the Center for Houston’s Future found. Immigrants in the Houston statistical area earned $66.5 billion and paid $11.1 billion in federal taxes.
If Trump rounded these people up and deported them, as he promised, the construction, hospitality and hospital services would collapse.
Houston is home to more than 572,000 undocumented migrants whose households earned $13 billion in 2021. Most have fake documents and paid $794.8 million in federal taxes and $595.6 million in state and local taxes, the U.S. Congressional Budget Office reported.
Meanwhile, Biden must come up with a new approach to processing asylum seekers after Congress made it clear they will not help. But he must overcome opposition from within his party and federal courts.
Federal and international law requires the United States to grant asylum to anyone with a well-founded fear of persecution. However, establishing which claims meet that high standard under current policies can take years.
Thom Hartmann connects the dots: the Republican Party is now controlled by Vladimir Putin. The Republicans do only what is in the interest of Putin. His goal, as it was in 2016 and 2020, is to get Trump elected. Trump is subservient to Putin. Trump wants to block American aid to Putin. So does House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called a two-week recess as Ukrainian forces are running out of ammunition. How do you define GOP these days? Guardians of Putin? Goons of Putin? Other ideas?
Thom Hartmann
There’s little doubt that Russian President Vladimir Putin has succeeded in achieving near-total control over the Republican Party. They’re gutting aid to Ukraine (and have been for over a year), working to kneecap our economy, whipping up hatred among Americans against each other, promoting civil war, and openly embracing replacing American democracy with authoritarian autocracy.
Putin has declared war on queer people, proclaimed Russia a “Christian nation,” and shut down all the media he called “fake news.” Check, check, check.
Over the past two years, as America was using Russia’s terrorist attacks on Ukraine to degrade the power and influence of Russia’s military, Putin was using social media, Republican politicians, and rightwing American commentators to get Republican politicians on his side and thus kill off US aid to Ukraine.
The war in Gaza is making it even easier, with Putin-aligned politicians like Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) tweeting: “Any funding for Ukraine should be redirected to Israel immediately.”
Most recently, the three-year “Biden bribery” hysteria Republicans in the House have been running — including thousands of hits on Fox “News” and all over rightwing hate radio — turns out to have been a Russian intelligence operation originally designed to help Trump win the 2020 election. The Russian spy who’d been feeding this phony info to “Gym” Jordan and James “Gomer Pyle” Comer is now in jail.
Russia’s battlefield, in other words, has now shifted from Ukraine to the US political system and our homes via radio, TV, and the internet, all in the hopes of ending US aid to the democracy they’ve brutally attacked.
And the momentum is following that shift: Russia is close to having the upper hand in Ukraine because of Putin’s ability — via Trump and Johnson — to get Republican politicians to mouth his talking points and propaganda.
Now, with Speaker “Moscow Mike” Johnson shutting down the House of Representatives so nobody can offer a discharge petition that would force a vote on Ukraine aid (and aid for Palestinian refugees, Taiwan, and our southern border), it’s becoming more and more clear that Vladimir Putin is running the Republican party via his well-paid stooge, Donald Trump.
I say “well paid” because Donald Trump would have been reduced to homelessness in the early 1990s if it weren’t for Russian money, as both of his sons have said at different times. He’d burned through all of his father’s estate, even stealing a large part of it from his siblings. He’d lost or hidden almost two billion dollars running a casino.
As Michael Hirsch noted for Foreign Policymagazine:
“By the early 1990s he had burned through his portion of his father Fred’s fortune with a series of reckless business decisions. Two of his businesses had declared bankruptcy, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City and the Plaza Hotel in New York, and the money pit that was the Trump Shuttle went out of business in 1992. Trump companies would ultimately declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy two more times.”
He’d been forced to repeatedly declare bankruptcy — sticking American banks for over a billion dollars in unpaid bills — after draining his businesses of free cash and stashing the money in places he hoped nobody would ever find.
No American bank would touch him, and property developers in New York were waiting for his entire little empire to collapse. Instead, a desperate Trump reached out to foreign dictators and mobsters, who were more than happy to supply funds to an influential New York businessman…for a price to be paid in the future.
He sold over $100 million worth of condos to more than sixty Russian citizens during that era, and partnered with professional criminals and money launderers to raise money for Trump properties in Azerbaijan and Panama. According to Trump himself, he sold $40 to $50 million worth of apartments to the Saudis.
He then partnered with a former high Soviet official, Tevfik Arif, and a Russian businessman, Felix Sater, who’d been found guilty of running a “huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia.”
As the founders of Fusion GPS wrote for The New York Times in 2018:
“The Trump family’s business entanglements are of more than historical significance. Americans need to be sure that major foreign policy decisions are made in the national interest — not because of foreign ties forged by the president’s business ventures.”
Thus, when it came time to run for president, Trump had to pay the price. He and the people around him were inundated with offers of “help” from Russians, most associated directly with Putin or the Russian mafia.
Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had been paid millions by Putin’s oligarchs and ran Trump’s campaign for free. Reporters found over a dozen connections between Russia and the Trump campaign, and during the 2016 campaign Trump was secretly negotiating a deal to open a Trump tower in Moscow. Trump’s son and his lawyer met with Putin’s agents in Trump Tower.
Putin’s personal troll army, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) based out of St. Petersburg but operating worldwide, began a major campaign in 2016 to get Trump elected president.
Manafort fed Russian intelligence raw data from internal Republican polling that identified a few hundred thousand individuals in a half-dozen or so swing states the GOP thought could be persuaded to vote for Trump (or against Hillary), and the IRA immediately went to work, reaching out to them via mostly Facebook.
Mueller’s report and multiple journalistic investigations have noted that the most common message out of Russia then was directed at Democratic-leaning voters and was, essentially, “both parties are the same so it’s a waste of time to vote.”
A report from Texas-based cybersecurity company New Knowledge, working with researchers at Columbia University, concluded, as reported by The New York Times:
“‘The most prolific I.R.A. efforts on Facebook and Instagram specifically targeted black American communities and appear to have been focused on developing black audiences and recruiting black Americans as assets,’ the report says. Using Gmail accounts with American-sounding names, the Russians recruited and sometimes paid unwitting American activists of all races to stage rallies and spread content, but there was a disproportionate pursuit of African-Americans, it concludes.
“The report says that while ‘other distinct ethnic and religious groups were the focus of one or two Facebook Pages or Instagram accounts, the black community was targeted extensively by dozens.’ In some cases, Facebook ads were targeted at users who had shown interest in particular topics, including black history, the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X. The most popular of the Russian Instagram accounts was @blackstagram, with 303,663 followers.
“A Senate inquiry has concluded that a Russian fake-news campaign targeted ‘no single group… more than African-Americans.’ …
“Thousands of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and You Tube accounts created by the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) were aimed at harming Hillary Clinton’s campaign and supporting Donald Trump, the committee concludes.
“More than 66% of Facebook adverts posted by the Russian troll farm contained a term related to race.
“African-American community voters were discouraged from voting, and from supporting Hillary Clinton.”
Between the information compiled by Oxford Analytica and the details passed along from the GOP to Prigozhin via Manafort, a mere margin of 43,000 votes across a handful of swing states —all mictotargeted by Russia — handed the electoral college to Trump, even though he lost the nationwide vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million ballots.
So now Trump has succeeded in making the entire GOP a party to his long-term debt to Putin and his oligarchs. “Moscow Mike” Johnson has blocked any aid to Ukraine for over a year; the last congressional appropriation for foreign aid was passed in 2022, when Nancy Pelosi ran the House.
Meanwhile, under Trump’s and Putin’s direction, Republicans in Congress are doing everything they can to damage the people of the United States.
They believe it will help them in the 2024 election if they can ruin the US economy while convincing American voters that our system of government is so corrupt (“deep state”) that we should consider replacing democracy with an autocratic strongman form of government like Putin’s Russia. Tucker Carlson is even suggesting that Russia is a better place to live than the US.
They revel in pitting racial, religious, and gender groups against each other while embracing a form of fascism that pretends to be grounded in Christianity, all while welcoming Putin’s social media trolls who are promoting these divisions.
Republican-aligned think tanks are working on Project 2025, a naked attempt to consolidate power in the White House to support a strongman president who can override the will of the people, privatize Social Security and Medicare, shut down our public school system, fully criminalize abortion and homosexuality (Sam Alito called for something like that this week), and abandon our democratic allies in favor of a realignment with Russia, China, and North Korea.
Trump got us here by openly playing to the fears and prejudices of white people who are freaked out by the rapid post-1964 “browning” of America. Putin jumped in to help amplify the message a thousandfold with his social media trolls, who are posting thousands of times a day as you read these words.
Now that Putin largely controls the GOP, today’s question is how far Republicans are willing to go in their campaign to bring the USA to her knees on behalf of Putin and Trump.
— When Congress comes back into session next week, will they take up Ukraine aid?
— Will they continue their opposition to comprehensive immigration and border reform?
— Will they keep pushing to privatize Social Security with their new “commission”?
— Will they work as hard to kneecap Taiwan on behalf of President Xi as they have Ukraine on behalf of Putin?
— Will they continue to quote Russian Intelligence propaganda in their effort to smear President Biden?
— Instead of just 7 Republicans going to Moscow to “celebrate” the Fourth of July, will the entire party move their event to that city like the NRA did? Or to Budapest, like CPAC did?
Or will the GOP suddenly start listening to the rational voices left in their party, the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys who still believe in democracy (even if they want to gut the social safety net and turn loose the polluters)?
Robert B. Hubbell writes a sensible blog about politics today. In this post, he eviscerates the proposal by Ezra Klein of The New York Times that Biden should step down before the Democratic National Convention and let the delegates choose a replacement.
Why should he step down? Because of his age.
Why should he stay in the race? Because he has been an excellent President, and he is the Democratic Party’s best candidate to beat Trump. Because Biden is wise and thoughtful, and Trump is neither. Because Biden respects the Constitution and Trump does not. Because Biden wants to defend democracy, and Trump does not. Because Biden understands the value of international alliances, and Trump wants to destroy them.
Hubbell writes:
Republicans and Russian trolls and bot farms will continue to spread disinformation about President Joe Biden to an eager American press and the surprisingly insecure American public. The report of special counsel Robert Hur has caused otherwise sober Democratic supporters and observers to consider a terrible proposal by Ezra Klein that Joe Biden drop out at the Democratic convention and anoint a different Democratic candidate who will begin campaigning for the presidency with three months to go and a ten-point deficit (at least). For my views on Klein’s proposal, read on!
Ezra Klein creates a small panic in the Democratic Party.
I received a steady stream of emails over the weekend asking me to comment on Klein’s proposal—something I did at length in Friday’s newsletter. (Always a puzzler when that happens; I try not to take offense.) Most of the emails commented favorably on Ezra Klein’s proposal. Others who support Biden and recognize that it would be terribly risky to switch from Biden at the last moment want to have a “respectful conversation” about the idea of Biden dropping out.
Expletive deleted! (Rhymes with “bulls-eye” and “base-hit.”)
At root, Klein’s idea credits the falsehood being promoted by Robert Hur, Trump, Fox News, and Putin’s army of bots that Joe Biden is incompetent to hold the presidency. We cannot fall for the false narrative that Joe Biden is unfit merely because he is 80 and is not the same person he was at 70 or 60 or 40 or 30.
Worse, having a ‘respectful public conversation’ about the proposal allows Republicans to change the narrative from the fascist rhetoric that Trump is spewing each day to a made-up controversy that is the functional equivalent of the “But her emails . . . ” fake controversy that the press swallowed hook, line, and sinker in 2016.
Every second people spend talking about Ezra Klein’s ridiculous idea is a second that we are not discussing Trump’s threat to abandon NATO, round up millions of immigrants, turn the FBI into a political hit squad, jail Joe Biden’s family, banrefugees from Gaza, begin “strong ideological screening of all immigrants, reboot his ban on travelers from Muslim-majority nations, and start his presidency as a “dictator for a day” (which, by the way, is the same thing as “a dictator,” because once you overthrow the Constitution to become a dictator, you cannot repair that wound.)
For example, at a rally over the weekend, Trump said the following:
I’m also going to indemnify all police officers and law enforcement officials throughout the US to protect them from being destroyed by the radical left . . . Once [criminals] see things happening that they never thought would happen to them, it’ll all stop overnight.
Let’s unpack Trump’s statement. He promises that he will protect and hold harmless (i.e., indemnify) police officers who “do things” to criminals “they never thought would happen to them,” a clear reference to police brutality. Trump is proposing a jack-booted police force that uses violence “with impunity” against “criminals” who have yet to be convicted of any crimes!
Every American citizen, media outlet, and political writer—including Ezra Klein—should spend every waking minute from now until November 5, 2024 telling anyone who will listen that Trump has proposed the creation of the equivalent of the Nazi Brown Shirts—a thuggish paramilitary that used violence and intimidation to fuel Hitler’s rise to power.
Trump’s threat to “indemnify” law enforcement for doing “things criminals never thought would happen to them” is not in the same universe of concern about the fake controversy over Joe Biden’s age. Every minute wasted on Joe Biden’s age is a minute not talking about Trump’s promise to unleash a violent police force on presumed-to-be-innocent-until-proven-guilty American citizens.
Many observers will say, “But Trump doesn’t really mean it. He can’t indemnify police officers from brutality.” Okay, I accept the argument: Trump is, therefore, spewing despotic fantasies that have no grounding in reality—a profound form of mental illness incompatible with being president of the U.S. And yet, sober Democrats who support Joe Biden want to waste our time asking to consider having a “respectful” conversation about Joe Biden’s age.
Those “sober Democrats” are doing Trump’s (and Putin’s) work, even if their intentions are pure and patriotic.
The flaws in the plan are too numerous to catalog, but here are a few:
Every replacement candidate (except one) starts with a 10 to 12 percentage point deficit to Trump, whereas Joe Biden is polling (at least) even with Trump. As Simon Rosenberg wrote on Sunday,
This week’s independent general election polling of registered voters finds a close, competitive race (Biden-Trump): Emerson 44-45 Economist/YouGov 44-44 Morning Consult 42-43 And a reminder that Biden led 47-45 (2 pts) in last NYTimes poll.
But in polling done in February, Gavin Newsom trails Trump by 10 points and Gretchen Whitmer trails by 12 points. (So far as I can tell, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro isn’t being polled nationally, only in Pennsylvania.)
But guess who is within striking distance of Trump (3 points)? Vice President Kamala Harris—who is never mentioned by readers who suggest that it is a good idea for Biden to step aside.
Why pass over the candidate in the strongest position (according to polls) to succeed Joe Biden in favor of candidates who sit at the bottom of a deep gravity well? I will let the readers suggesting the “Biden steps aside strategy” answer that question, but Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo describes what would happen if Biden steps aside and Kamala Harris is passed over:
I think if Biden stepped aside and then Harris was passed over, that would be like lighting a stick of dynamite at the center of the Democratic coalition.
There are no easy or obvious answers, but plenty of bad ones. Ezra Klein’s proposal pretends that none of the bad answers exist.
Finally, there are no “party bosses” to manage the Democratic Party’s selection process if Biden were to step aside. With no primary election results to guide the process, the 72-hour race on the convention floor for the nomination would be “nasty, brutish, and short.”
So, please, can we stop talking about the Ezra Klein strategy? It is a horrible idea because Joe Biden is a strong candidate who is an incumbent president with a phenomenal track record of success. He has the wisdom and experience to guide the nation through a difficult time. And he beat Donald Trump in 2020. He can do so in 2024.
The last point (even though I said “finally” above), is that it is incredibly disrespectful to the hundreds of thousands of Americans working their tails off to elect Joe Biden to suggest that their work is part of a big game of, “Just kidding, made you look!” They believe in Joe Biden and are willing to work hard for him because they believe in him. Let’s not abuse their well-placed trust in and admiration for Joe Biden.
Diane Ravitch's blog 