West Virginia is one of the poorest states in the nation, yet it has a billionaire governor (Jim Justice) and a billionaire senator (Joe Manchin), who pretend to serve their constituents by doing nothing for them. It is a deep red state. The legislature authorized charter schools and vouchers; the governor promised to veto both but he didn’t. Manchin continually blocks Biden programs that would help his constituents (like the Child Tax Credit) but protects the coal industry.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va.—West Virginia University’s proposal to eliminate nearly a 10th of its majors and 169 full-time faculty positions from its flagship campus led hundreds of students to protest Monday, as a student union’s organizing power added volume to the online employee protestations and national media coverage that’s been buffeting the institution for more than a week.
Pressure on the administration to reverse its recommended cuts is growing as the WVU Board of Governors’ Sept. 15 vote on the proposals nears. The suggested cuts—not the first in recent years at West Virginia—were discussed around the end of the spring and through the summer, but WVU’s big reveal of how extensive the proposed layoffs and degree reductions would be didn’t come until Aug. 11.
“Stop the Cuts!” was students’ first chant outside the Mountainlair student union Monday, followed by “Hey hey, ho ho, Gordon Gee has got to go!”
Multiple chants, signs and a flame-bedecked “Fire Gee” banner that students held in front of the entrance to the Stewart Hall administration building all targeted Gee, the university’s two-time president whose current run has lasted nearly a decade. Chants and signs said, “Stop the Gee-llotine!” while other signs said, “Gee can take home 800K but we can’t take Spanish?” and “Cut Gee’s Pay, Not Our Programs!…”
WVU has proposed axing, among other degree offerings, its Ed.D. in higher education administration; Ph.D. in higher education; master of public administration; Ph.D. and master’s in math; bachelor’s in environmental and community planning; bachelor degree in recreation, parks and tourism resources; doctor of musical arts in composition; master of music in composition; and master’s in jazz pedagogy, acting and creative writing.
The university’s enrollment has declined 10 percent since 2015, far worse than the national average. In April, WVU leaders, projecting a further 5,000-student plunge over the next decade, said they needed to slash $75 million from the budget.
The university has pointed to low enrollments in certain programs to justify cuts, including a lightning rod proposal to eliminate the entirety of the department of world languages, literatures and linguistics. But Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian studies at West Virginia, has retorted that WVU isn’t counting all students who are double majoring in languages.
“Cost-to-deliver is one of the metrics considered in the preliminary recommendations,” Kaull wrote in an email. “The data reflect students’ primary majors as they are the best reflection of the cost-to-deliver. Dual majors and minors don’t generate revenue like primary majors. Further, the cost and effort of supporting students (e.g., advising) is typically carried by the primary major.”
WVU’s Aug. 11 news release announcing the proposed cuts said it was “exploring alternative methods of delivery” for languages, “such as a partnership with an online language app.” A sign on Monday called the university “Duolingo U,” complete with the green bird mascot of that phone app.
Gee told Inside Higher Ed Friday, “What we’re doing is that we’re really looking at the numbers and we realize that our students have spoken to us. And our students have said that offering languages the way that we are is just not something that they want.”
Asked about the calls to reduce his salary, which were happening online before Monday’s protest, Gee said he contributes about 15 percent of his salary every year to student scholarships.
John Fox, who just started his master’s degree in creative writing, one of the programs to be cut under the proposal, carried water bottles for the protesters. He’s from Morgantown.
“We’re losing out on the culture of West Virginia,” he said, “like a voice to the culture of West Virginia.”
On August 20, the New York Times published a story about how Ron DeSantis joined the “ruling class” but now campaigns against it. His story is shot through with hypocrisy. He paints himself as the public school kid from middle-class Dunedin, Florida, surrounded by snobs from private schools who looked down on him. Yet now as governor, he treats public schools and their teachers with contempt and expanded vouchers to pay billions of taxpayer dollars for kids to go to private schools, including high-income families.
Why is he, the public school kid, subsidizing private and religious schools? Why is he so hostile to public schools? He complains that public schools indoctrinate their students yet he’s willing to send kids to religious schools whose purpose is indoctrination. Why does he subsidize the tuition of rich kids who go to private schools? Aren’t those the kind of kids who treated him with condescension?
Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis nestled into his chair onstage in Naples, Fla., to explain to an audience of the would-be conservative elite his journey through the reigning liberal one they hoped to destroy. His host was Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, a small Christian school in southern Michigan that has become an academic hub of the Trump-era right. His subject was Yale University, where Mr. DeSantis was educated and where, as he tells it, he first met the enemy.
The story begins:
“I’m a public school kid,” Mr. DeSantis told the audience, unspooling a story that he has shared in recent years with aides, friendly interviewers, donors, voters and readers of his memoir, “The Courage to Be Free.” “My mom was a nurse, my dad worked for a TV ratings company, installing the metering devices back then. And I show up in jean shorts and a T-shirt.” The outfit “did not go over well with the Andover and Groton kids” — sometimes it is Andover and Groton, sometimes it is Andover and Exeter, sometimes all three — who mocked his lack of polish.
Worse than Yale’s snobbery was its politics: College was “the first time that I saw unadulterated leftism,” he told the Republican Jewish Coalition this March. “We’re basically being told the Soviet Union was the victim in the Cold War.” Teachers and students alike “rejected God, and they hated our country,” he assured the audience in Naples. “When I get people that submit résumés,” he said, “quite frankly, if I got one from Yale I would be negatively disposed.”
Then there are the parts of the story he doesn’t tell: How his new baseball teammates at Yale — mostly fellow athletic recruits from the South and West who likewise viewed themselves as Yale outsiders — were among those who teased him about his clothes, and how he would nevertheless adopt their insular culture as his own. How he joined one of Yale’s storied “secret societies,” those breeding grounds of future senators and presidents, but left other members with the impression that he would have preferred to be tapped by a more prestigious one. How he shared with friends his dream of going to Harvard Law School — not law school, Harvard Law School — and successfully applied there, stacking one elite credential neatly onto another, and co-founded a tutoring firm that touted “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.” How his Yale connections helped him out-raise rivals as a first-time candidate for Congress, and how he featured his Ivy credentials — “a political scarlet letter as far as a G.O.P. primary went,” Mr. DeSantis likes to say — on his campaign websites, sometimes down to the precise degree of honors earned. And how that C.V. helped sell him to an Ivy-obsessed President Donald J. Trump, whose 2018 endorsement helped propel Mr. DeSantis to the governor’s office in Florida, where his Yale baseball jersey is displayed prominently on the wall next to his desk…
For Mr. DeSantis and his allies, the culture wars are the central struggle of American public life, and schools are the most important battleground where they will be fought. “Education is our sword,” Mr. DeSantis’s then education commissioner, Richard Corcoran, explained to a Hillsdale audience in 2021. And Mr. DeSantis is the man to wield it — a self-made striver who was “given nothing,” as he told the audience attending his campaign kickoff in Iowa in May. “These elites are not enacting an agenda to represent us. They’re imposing their agenda on us, via the federal government, via corporate America and via our own education system.”
DeSantis has aggressively taken political control of Florida’s schools and universities, passing laws that limit or eliminate what may be taught about gender and race. He has encouraged parent vigilantes to scour classrooms and libraries for books on controversial topics and ban them. His ally, radical conservative Chris Rufo, is quoted in the article:
“The goal of the university is not free inquiry,” Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and one of the new trustees [of New College], said during a recent appearance in California. Instead, he argued, conservatives need to deploy state power to retake public institutions wherever they can.
“The universities are not overly politicized. The universities are overly ideologized and insufficiently politicized,” Mr. Rufo said. “We should repoliticize the universities and understand that education is at heart a political question.”
At Yale, DeSantis joined Delta Kappa Epsilon (Dekes), which was known for its vicious hazing of pledges. As an upper-class member, DeSantis was known for bullying pledges and forcing them to engage in pranks like dropping their pants and exposing their genitals, while the older members mocked their private parts.
The story says that DeSantis took a course on the Cold War taught by the esteemed scholar John Lewis Gaddis, who was an outspoken critic of the Soviet Union. In other words, DeSantis lied about being exposed to pro-Soviet views of the Cold War.
DeSantis portrayed Harvard Law School, where he studied, as a bastion of left wing thought. But the Dean of the law school when DeSantis arrived belonged to the conservative Federalist Society. And he was not the only member of that group on the faculty.
A 2005 survey of The Harvard Law Review, published in the Federalist Society’s flagship publication, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, found that staff members “identifying themselves as left-of-center did not comprise even a majority.”
DeSantis neglects to mention that he was an active member of the Harvard Law School’s Federalist Society. He prefers to play the victim.
When he ran for Congress and then for governor, he tapped his Yale and Harvard networks to raise money.
But then he discovered there was even more political advantage for him if he played the role of the enemy of the ruling class.
How better to attack the ruling class than to destroy the public schools that enabled him to enter Yale? If this makes no sense, neither does DeSantis’ fable about being victimized at Yale and Harvard.
Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote in their blog Steady about the importance of saving public education from the forces trying to destroy and privatize it. They remind us and the general public that public schools unite us; privatization is inherently divisive. It is ironic that the red states are implementing voucher plans as the evidence about the failure of vouchers and the null effects of charter schools grows stronger. (The boldfacing of passages in their essay was added by me).
It is back to school. Students of all ages flock to campuses and classrooms. Fleeting memories of summer are quickly replaced by tests and textbooks.
Getting into the swing of a new semester has always included an adjustment period, but this is a particularly difficult time for many of our nation’s students and their parents, guardians, teachers, and others entrusted with the education of young minds.
The pandemic wreaked havoc with the emotional, intellectual, and social development of America’s youth. Dismal test scores provide depressing data of yawning learning deficits. Talk to anyone in or around schools and you hear stories of setbacks and struggle — heaps of qualitative data suggesting a staggering scale of generational loss. As usual, those who were already the most marginalized have paid the heaviest price. The pandemic exacerbated existing disruptions and placed greater strain on finances and time, particularly in large urban districts and small rural ones tasked with educating children from families struggling economically.
We like to tell ourselves that the United States is a great meritocracy, but wealth and levels of family education continue to play outsized roles in dictating a child’s likelihood of academic success long before she learns her ABCs. The simple truth is that kids come to school from widely different circumstances, and these influence their ability to thrive, independent of whatever innate intelligence or drive they may possess. The pandemic made these differences more acute.
The United States does possess a system (or more accurately, a collection of thousands of systems) that, if nurtured and respected, could foster greater equality of opportunity. And it is exactly the institution that is now struggling the most: public education. America’s public schools were once the envy of the world as engines of opportunity and upward mobility. If the nation had the will, they could return to that status once again.
Our public schools certainly weren’t perfect in the past, especially during legal racial segregation, when the lie of “separate but equal” (separate is never equal) helped enshrine white supremacy. The segregated schools of the Jim Crow Deep South were a shameful injustice and a stain on our national identity. They were inconsistent with our founding documents, which spoke eloquently about equality among people. Of course there was (and remains, to some extent) de facto segregation throughout America based on who lives in what neighborhoods. Well-financed suburban schools were often part of the draw of “white flight” from urban districts.
The very ethos of public education should be one of inclusion for America’s diverse population. It should be a place where children of different backgrounds come together to learn both from teachers and from each other. Our schools should be places that allow students to wrestle with what it means to be part of this great country, including understanding America’s uneven and often bloody road to greater equality.
Sadly, in recent years, we have seen a grave regression from these noble goals. Our schools and school districts have become fiercely contested frontlines in an era of stepped-up culture wars. As reactionary political forces target what we teach our children, it is no accident that truth, empathy, and our democratic values have become casualties.
A chief concern is how and what we teach about our history, particularly the Black experience, and race and ethnicity more generally. We have written here before about the shameful whitewashing of racial violence and injustice, including slavery, by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. But this effort is not limited to him or that state. There is a national movement to not tell the full — and unfortunately tragic — reality of race in American history and how it continues to shape the nation.
Another serious concern is the othering of LGBTQ+ students and teachers. After years of progress, we see a wave of intolerance spread across America, including in our schools.
Few institutions in American life are as essential to the continuation of our democracy as the public schools. In a time of ascendent autocracy, attacks on our schools — how they are run, what they teach, what books they have in their libraries — are among the most pernicious, pathetic, and painful assaults on the health of our nation.
Several months back, Texas Monthly ran a striking piece of journalism with the headline, “The Campaign to Sabotage Texas’s Public Schools.” It tells a story that extends beyond the raucous school board meetings and book banning campaigns that have gotten the most attention. There is a movement afoot, and not just in Texas, to destroy public schools more generally, to privatize education through vouchers and other means.
In this context, the various culture fights become battles in a larger war over the very future and viability of public education:
Taken individually, any of these incidents may seem like a grassroots skirmish. But they are, more often than not, part of a well-organized and well-funded campaign executed by out-of-town political operatives and funded by billionaires in Texas and elsewhere. “In various parts of Texas right now, there are meetings taking place in small and large communities led by individuals who are literally providing tutorials—here’s what you say, here’s what you do,” said H. D. Chambers, the recently retired superintendent of Alief ISD, in southwest Harris County. “This divisiveness has been created that is basically telling parents they can’t trust public schools. It’s a systematic erosion of the confidence that people have in their schools.
The ideal of quality, integrated public schools for all children in the United States epitomizes the promise of our country’s founding as a place of equality and opportunity for all. It thus makes sense that would-be autocrats and protectors of privilege would seek to undermine our public schools by whatever means necessary. We must see this as what it is: as much a threat to the nation as was the violent storming of our Capitol.
The future of the United States depends on an educated and empathetic citizenry. It requires us to share a sense of common purpose and recognize our common humanity. It requires an environment that allows every child to thrive and see themselves included in the American story. It requires quality public education. Full stop.
A historic battle to save this institution and the very idea of good public schools has been underway for some time. It is now intensifying. Attention must be paid.
A reader who uses the sobriquet “Retired Teacher” posted the following succinct summary of the harm caused by vouchers.
Vouchers represent anti-democratic education policy. Instead of serving the interests of society, vouchers turn unaccountable public dollars over to unaccountable schools and parents that can often do as they wish with the money. Vouchers are also a form of taxation without representation. When vouchers are used to supplement tuition for affluent children, which is often the case, they represent a massive transfer of wealth from working class to the affluent. They undermine community stability and force austerity on the public schools that serve the most students. They do not save poor students from failing schools. They create an economic reality that legitimizes the defunding of public education.
At the urging of Governor DeSantis, Florida’s legislature rubber stamped his proposal to expand vouchers to all students in the state without income restrictions. As Leslie Postal reported in The Orlando Sentinel, demand for vouchers in the state surged by 44%. Many of the applicants are already enrolled in private and religious schools. In other states where vouchers were made universal, most of the vouchers were claimed by students who never attended public schools. Thus, instead of “saving poor kids from failing public schools,” vouchers have become a subsidy for affluent families.
By Aug. 11, more than 382,000 students had received vouchers for the 2023-24 school year, giving them access to money for private school tuition, homeschooling services or therapies for children with disabilities, according to Step Up For Students, the private group that administers most of Florida’s scholarship programs.
That represents a 44% increase from a year ago when about 264,400 scholarships were awarded by the same date….
The scholarships are worth an average of about $7,800 a year, though actual amounts vary by student’s grade level and by county. The voucher programs are still required to prioritize giving awards to children whose families earn no more than 185% of the federal poverty limit, or a family of four earning $55,000 a year or less. But everyone, whether middle class or very rich, is now eligible to apply….
The hike in scholarships was expected after Gov. Ron DeSantis in March signed the new law, which he called a “major game changer” that would boost educational options for families. The law was celebrated by GOP leaders, school choice advocates and parents already paying for private school who are now eligible for state assistance.
They argued families who never opted for free public schools still pay school taxes and so it makes sense to provide them school vouchers to help offset private school costs.
This week, the Archdiocese of Miami credited the new law with boosting enrollment at its Catholic schools and creating waitlists at some campuses. “Step Up Blew Up,” it wrote on its website, like many, using Step Up as shorthand for Florida’s school scholarship programs.
The archdiocese noted that at one Catholic school in Coral Gables, with about 900 students, the number of families receiving state scholarships leapt from 160 last year to more than 560 this year.
“The public dollars that they have given to private schools, those are our public school dollars that they are now giving to people to go to a private school,” Castor Dentel said. “Those are public school dollars they are now handling over to unaccountable private schools where you don’t have to have a qualified teacher.”
Private schools that take state vouchers are mostly religious schools, and they make their own decisions as far as teacher qualifications, curriculum and facilities. Some have hired teachers without college degrees and employees with criminal convictions, set up in rundown buildings and offered curriculum outside mainstream academics, the Orlando Sentinel has reported.
Providing scholarships to families whose children already were in private school or were being homeschooled “is absolutely taking away from public school dollars,” said Norin Dollard, a senior policy analyst with the Florida Policy Institute, a progressive think tank that warned back in February that the new law would cost the state billions of dollars.
Dollard said the state earmarked about $3.3 billion for all its scholarship programs this school year and likely will run through that by the end of October, given the number of awards announced so far.
Thom Hartmann is an insightful, incisive journalist and blogger. In this terrifying post, he describes what to expect if the Republican Party wins the presidency.
Please read and react.
Thom Hartmann
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a GOP president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher…
Hartmann writes:
Every day that goes by, even with yesterday’s newest indictment, looks more and more like Donald Trump will be the GOP’s standard bearer in 2024. After all, his popularity stood at 44 percent when NY DA Alvin Bragg indicted him; it then rose to 49 percent when he was indicted in the documents crime; following his conviction for raping E. Jean Caroll it rose to 54 percent among Republicans.
But even if he’s not the candidate, Republican primary voters will demand a candidate with the same affection for Putin and other dictators; the same disdain for racial, religious, and gender minorities; the same abusive attitude toward women and girls; the same faux embrace of Confederate and hillbilly values and hatred of city-dwellers and college graduates; the same cavalier attitude toward guns and fossil fuels.
There’s also the growing possibility that Trump or another MAGA Republican could win the White House. Yesterday, both the New York Times and CNN reported on polls showing that Trump and Biden are right now at a dead heat.
And even if Trump collapses in the polls as the result of the indictments, which is unlikely (Netanyahu is under indictment for bribery and some pretty terrible stuff and he just got re-elected), there are numerous other Republicans who would love to take his place.
And no matter who it is, if they are MAGA inclined, Trump has shown them where there are levers of power and corruption that are consequential in ways that they never dreamed of before him.
Joe Biden, at 81, faces multiple possible personal scenarios that could pull him out of the race. No Labels and the Green Party’s candidates (presumably Joe Manchin and Cornell West) could pull enough votes from Biden to hand the election to Trump as Jill Stein did in three swing states in 2016 (she pulled more votes in each of those states than Trump’s margin of victory).
The prosecution of Trump (which almost certainly won’t be resolved before the election — and it’s not even remotely possible that appeals would be resolved by then — because of Garland’s dithering for two years) could backfire politically and make him into a popular martyr even with Republicans who disliked him before.
And don’t discount the impact Putin throwing millions of rubles into social media can have: his previous fleet of trolls overwhelming social media helped get Trump elected in 2016 and drove Brits to make the crazy decision to separate from the European Union.
So, it’s important to examine what a second Trump or 2025 MAGA presidency would look like, what effect it would have on America and the world, and how it will impact average Americans.
Forewarned, after all, is forearmed, and all these predictions are based on past behavior and public statements:
Women make up 51 percent of the American populace but they won’t be spared by a MAGA presidency.
MAGA voters celebrate Trump’s “proof of manhood” through his multiple sexual assaults, from his alleged rape of 13-year-old Katie Johnson (with Jeffrey Epstein) to the adult E. Jean Carroll and more than 20 others. He publicly bragged that he just “grabs them by the…” whenever he wants, and Republicans — including more than half of all white women voters — ran to the polls to mark his name on their ballots.
The MAGA base supports bans on abortion: the white nationalist part of that base is fervent about having more white babies (and middle class white women are the most likely to get abortions when they’re legal, according to these people).
Catholics and evangelicals even support bans on birth control, an issue that’s already been floated by Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court and in several state legislatures. Fully 195 Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against protecting birth control from state bans. And all of the Republicans on the Court are conservative Catholics (Gorsuch attends his wife’s church, but was raised Catholic).
Additionally, MAGA Republicans support ending no-fault divorce and limiting alimony, putting women back under husband’s thumbs; lowering the marriage age for girls to as low as 12, as Republicans have already attempted in Idaho, Wyoming, Tennessee, Missouri, and Louisiana; and seizing and monitoring the health and doctor’s records of all childbearing-age women to catch early pregnancies so those women can be detained or surveilled “for their own good” (yes, it’s already happened).
The LGBTQ+ community will come under assault in ways not seen for decades.
Like in Germany in 1933, the trans communitywill be the first to come under assault, a process that’s already begun as Red state after Red state enacts laws banning gender-affirming healthcare. Drag queens are already criminalized in multiple states.
Gays and lesbians won’t be far behind; Republicans are already trying to outlaw gay marriage and adoption. Three-quarters of all House Republicans voted against a Democratic bill protecting gay marriage; all but one Republican on the House Appropriations Committee voted for a Republican bill that would allow states to ban gay and lesbian parents from adopting.
Stochastic terrorism against the LGBTQ+ community will explode, and, in a throwback to the 1980s (when Reagan refused to say the word “AIDS” for 8 long years as tens of thousands, including close friends of mine, died) and before, rural law enforcement will often yawn when queer people are assaulted or even murdered.
Terror against racial and religious minorities will become routine.
The last time Trump was president and sanctioned a “very fine people on both sides” climate of hate and bigotry, incidents of lone-wolf terrorism exploded. Jews executed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue; Blacks gunned down in a supermarket in Buffalo and executed at Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston; Hispanics slaughtered in El Paso. All of the killers cited or wrote what were essentially MAGA or MAGA-aligned propaganda instruments as part of their motivation.
When minority communities rise up in indignation and step out into the streets to demand protection from roving bands of street Nazis, armed vigilantes will threaten and even kill them with impunity. As I noted yesterday, Kyle Rittenhouse is now lionized by Republicans and three states have passed into law provisions that hold people who kill protestors with their cars free from prosecution.
American support for democracy around the world will end and Putin will destroy Ukraine.
During his first four years, Trump did everything he could to ridicule and minimize our democratic allies and suck up to strongman dictators around the world.
He tried to blackmail Ukraine’s president and then withheld defensive weapons from that country when Zelenskyy refused to go along.
He told the world that he trusts Putin more than America’s intelligence services. After meeting privately with Putin, he demanded a list of all of America’s spies and their stations around the world; within months, the CIA reported that their assets were being murderedwith an unprecedented speed and efficiency.
He or his son-in-law conveyed top-secret documents to the brutal murderer MBS in Saudi Arabia that enabled him to stage a coup and seize control of that nation, a gift for which the Trump family has already received at least $2.5 billion with more coming every day.
Trump has now said that he will end the Ukraine war “in 24 hours.” His strategy? As Mike Pence (who would know) said, “The only way you’d solve this war in a day is if you gave Vladimir Putin what he wanted.”
Putin’s allies, in fact, have told the press that his main strategy for seizing all of Ukraine is to wait for Trump to re-take the White House (and, of course, he’ll do everything he can to make that happen). And just last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump came right out and saidthat he’d end all arms support to Ukraine on day one.
Seeing that America will no longer defend democracies, China will take Taiwan and North Korea may well attack South Korea. It could trigger a nuclear World War III, although instead of America being the “bulwark of freedom” as we were in the 1940s, that burden will fall to Europe, Japan, and Australia.
Reagan’s Republican War on Workers will resume and even pick up steam.
The Heritage Foundation already has a 900+ page plan to change the American government, stripping the DOJ, FBI, FCC and the Fed of their independence while ending most union rights and effectively outlawing strikes.
Billionaires will receive more tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare will be fully privatized, and public schools will be replaced with vouchers for private, segregated, religious academies as has already happened under Republican administrations in Arizona and Florida.
The EPA and other regulatory agencies that protect workers, consumers, and the environment will be gutted to the point of impotence in the face of corporate and billionaire assaults.
Efforts to mitigate the climate emergency will be rolled back and fossil fuel extraction and use will explode.
The world just lived through the hottest month in human history; ocean waters off Florida are at the temperature Jacuzzi recommends for their hot tubs; the world’s oceans are dying and winter sea ice isn’t forming in Antarctica.
Right now we humans are adding heat to the atmosphere (because of higher levels of greenhouse gasses) at a rate identical to 345,600 Hiroshima bombs going off in our atmosphere every day: four nuclear bombs per second, every second, minute, and hour of every day.
In response, our planet is screaming at us.
Fossil fuel billionaires and their shills, however, are unconcerned as they continue to fund climate denial nonprofits and Republican politicians who claim it’s all a hoax. They apparently believe their vast wealth will insulate them from the most dire effects.
And they’re probably right: a third of poverty-stricken Bangladesh was underwater this year, as drought, floods, wildfires, heat domes, bomb cyclones, tornadoes, derechos, and typhoons ravaged America with unprecedented ferocity. Increasingly, those without the financial means to withstand weather disasters are killed or wiped out, losing their family homes and often their livelihoods.
Scientists tell us we may have as few as fiveyears, and certainly not more than 20, to end our use of fossil fuels and fully transition to clean renewables. Even within the five-year window it’s technically feasible, but if Trump or another MAGA Republican is elected, civilization-ending weather and the death of much of humanity is virtually assured.
We must wake up America.
So, yeah, let’s take seriously the existential threat a MAGA president represents to our nation, the nations of the world, and all life on Earth. The stakes have literally never been higher.
ALEC has about 2,000 state legislators as members. ALEC writes model legislation on the environment, education, gun rights, and every other topic likely to be considered by state legislatures. The members take the model legislation back to their home state and introduce it after writing in the name of their state. ALEC is against gun control, against public schools, against environmental protections, etc. ALEC is funded by major corporations and acts as a voice for corporations that want no government regulation.
Erik Gunn is the deputy editor of the Wisconsin examiner, which first published this report.
Wisconsin State Reps. Francesca Hong and Kristina Shelton aren’t exactly the typical lawmakers to belong to the American Legislative Exchange Council — ALEC for short.
Hong, of Madison, and Shelton, of Green Bay, are staunch Democrats who have consistently voted against bills advancing the policies of the sort ALEC promotes. While the organization is legally nonpartisan and a tax-exempt nonprofit, it has become widely known as the birthplace of right-wing legislative proposals that find a home mainly with Republican state lawmakers around the country.
Last week, however, the two second-term Assembly members were in Orlando for ALEC’s annual meeting. It was Shelton’s second visit and Hong’s third. When they posted about their participation on social media, some followers wondered what they were doing in a crowd so ideologically at odds with their own political stances.
“I think it’s important to understand the agenda of the opposition,” Hong says. “And our current political reality requires us to know what the motivation is of our colleagues and where they’re getting model legislation from [along with] talking points, candidate training. These are all things that are available at ALEC.”
“It gives us an understanding of what’s to come,” adds Shelton — in the form of future legislation that members of the Republican majority might introduce. “And it helps us prepare as Democrats, organizing our own legislation and messaging. There’s no better way to prepare than to hear it directly from the folks on the other side….”
Hong and Shelton view themselves as carrying on a tradition among progressive Wisconsin lawmakers in joining ALEC, attending its events and going back home to report what they see and hear. Their predecessors are former state Rep. Mark Pocan, now a member of Congress, and former state Rep. Chris Taylor, now an appeals court judge.
Their name tags for the ALEC event simply identify them as Wisconsin state representatives, and Hong and Shelton say they don’t go out of their way to out themselves as Democrats — but they aren’t undercover, either…
As paying ALEC members (dues are $200 a year; conference fees are $750), they can’t be excluded on ideological grounds because of the group’s nonpartisan legal status, says Hong, who adds she has asked ALEC for its guest list “multiple times” but never received it.
Membership includes the opportunity to join two subject-matter task forces. Hong chose energy and environment as well as taxation and federalism. Shelton’s two were health and human development and education and workforce. Those sessions are where the details of proposed model legislation from the organization are outlined. They are also where the role of big business is most evident in helping to shape the organization’s proposals….
On education, Shelton says, the organization has heavily promoted school privatization proposals, including education savings accounts and universal private school vouchers, such as were included in a sweeping education bill in Arkansas, the LEARNS Act, enacted earlier this year.
“They’re no longer interested in sort of nibbling around the edges on school vouchers,” Shelton says. “They’re going all in — removing the income limits, moving to those education savings accounts, wildly expanding public investment for religious schools … [and] dismantling any sort of bureaucratic accountability measures.”
Hong says the education proposals have also been made with reference to the difficulties that employers have had filling job openings.
“The framing of it didn’t come off as full, ‘We’re attacking public schools,’” Hong says. “This is how we’re going to get more workers is to essentially make schooling and education’s sole purpose is to be producing workers.”
On economic and social policy, a persistent talking point was “about making poor people rich, not rich people poor,” she adds, while government assistance is “dragging down the economy” and “morally wrong.”
“They’re really digging into that narrative and saying that growing government to help those people is going to be the end of time,” Hong says.
To be sure, ALEC is just one of many organizations, from the AFL-CIO to the Sierra Club, that pursue policy change, sometimes constructing model legislation for that purpose. The difference, Shelton says, is that the group’s agenda doesn’t appear to her to be about policy so much as about political power.
“I think what’s different here is a sort of militant approach by those on the conservative right to not be as interested in actually solving the problems in the critical issues of working people,” she says, “but rather creating legislation to drive issues that they see as winning at the ballot box.”
Even so, a prevailing theme was diminishing the role of government and freeing corporations and business, the two Wisconsin Democrats say.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reacts to an article in the Washington Post.
He writes:
I agree with Perry Bacon’s excellent and optimistic Washington Post analysis and its new path for improving America’s schools – with the possible exception of his first sentence and the first sentence of his last paragraph. After decades of working for the education policies and principles he supports, I’ve become too pessimistic to not doubt his title, “‘Education reform’ is dying. Now we can actually reform education.” I sure hope I’m wrong and he’s right.
Bacon writes, “Joe Biden is the first president in decades not aggressively pushing an education agenda that casts American schools and students as struggling and in desperate need of fixing.” Biden offers a 21st century path away from the 40-year “education gospel” launched by the 1983 Reagan administration’s “A Nation at Risk,” which was joined by presidents of both parties. Bacon then described the bipartisan “fixation” which:
Included the expansion of charter and magnet schools as an alternative to traditional public schools; an obsession with improving student test scores; accountability systems that punished schools and teachers if their kids didn’t score well.
“By 2001 and the passage of No Child Left Behind,” Shelton further explains, “Democrats and Republicans competed with each other to remake our education system under the pretext that our schools needed to be held accountable to the long-term economic fortunes of American workers.” Since they could only agree on making education a priority, Bacon added, the Republicans adopted the Democrats’ “view that education was the main way for Black people to make up for the effects of racism.”
Based on decades of experience teaching in the inner city, and studying what it would have actually taken to achieve equity, I’ve seen the way that the students who were supposed to be the main beneficiaries of accountability-driven, competition-driven mandates, were damaged the most. And on-the-cheap, quick fixes hurt these kids in the way educators and education research predicted. Even worse, I would add, the Billionaires Boys Club turned education into a reward-and-punish, data-driven privatization campaign based on the neoliberal venture capitalist model.
Having seen how worksheet-driven “accountability” and segregation by choice reforms drove our school into the lowest-performing mid-high in Oklahoma, and hearing my students protest that they had been completely robbed of an education, I thoroughly support Bacon’s vision of education. He writes:
Our education system should be about learning, not job credentialing. Schools and universities should teach Americans to be critical thinkers, not automatically believing whatever they heard from a friend or favorite news source. They should make sure Americans have enough understanding of economics, history and science to be good citizens, able to discern which candidate in an election has a better plan to, say, deal with a deadly pandemic. They should foster interest and appreciation of music, arts and literature.
They should be places where people meet and learn from others who might not share their race, class, religion or ideology. … They should provide a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, professor or any profession that requires specialized training without going into debt.
But, I’ve also seen the rightwing attacks on public schools. And these assaults come after decades of destructive, neoliberal corporate reforms. The difference was that they sought to “blow up” the education system so that entrepreneurs could rebuild it. Today, we have to resist extremist and conservative privatizers who are going for the kill while education is on the ropes.
And that gets me back to Bacon’s optimistic introduction and conclusion. Yes, he is correct in beginning, “America’s decades-long, bipartisan ‘education reform’ movement, defined by an obsession with test scores and by viewing education largely as a tool for getting people higher-paying jobs, is finally in decline.” The vast majority of the people I know agree that these reforms failed, and “what should replace it is an education system that values learning, creativity, integration and citizenship.” I hope I’m being too pessimistic because of my state’s rightwing minority’s assaults on democracy, but I don’t see evidence that the majority of parents and educators, as well as researchers, will be listened to.
Similarly, his last sentence is true, “Now we can reform our schools and colleges in a way that actually improves teaching and learning.” Yes, we can, but what will we be able to do as we again go up against market-driven elites and, worse, MAGA zealots?
I must emphasize that I have always been an optimist so, ordinarily, I would celebrate his sentence, “Blessedly, education reform is dying.” But after four decades of undermining the principles of public education, I worry that its decline has come too late, and I see no sign of progress in my state. Even so, regardless of the odds we face, we must draw upon the wisdom of Jon Shelton and Perry Bacon, and that requires us to keep our hopes up.
Governor Josh Shapiro promised Democrats that if they passed the state budget, he would veto the voucher legislation so beloved by Republicans. Gov. Shapiro had previously declared his support for vouchers. Thursday, the governor kept his promise. He signed the state budget and vetoed vouchers.
Carly Sitrin of Chalkbeat Philadelphia wrote:
As promised, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the $45.5 billion state budget without a state-funded private school voucher program on Thursday, ending weeks of drama about the proposal.
Budget negotiations had been stalled for nearly a month over the dispute about whether to create a $100 million statewide voucher program. With a one-vote majority in the House, Democrats refused to approve any spending plan that included vouchers — even one supported by Shapiro, a fellow Democrat.
In the end, Shapiro cut a deal to sign the budget and strike the voucher provision, much to the chagrin of Republicans who claimed the governor was turning his back on his own campaign promise.
“The people of Pennsylvania have entrusted me with the responsibility to bring people together in a divided legislature and to get things done for them – and with this commonsense budget, that’s exactly what we’ve done,” Shapiro said in a statement announcing the signing.
In his message announcing that he would use a line-item veto to eliminate vouchers from the budget, Shapiro said the proposal — called the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success Scholarship Program, or PASS — remains “unfinished business.”
“This budget is a first step towards a comprehensive solution that makes progress for our children over the long term, and I look forward to continuing this work with both chambers as we discuss additional programs to help our children including PASS,” Shapiro wrote.
PASS would have expanded the state’s school choice offerings, which currently include the Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit and Education Improvement Tax Credit.
Nathan Benefield, senior vice president of the conservative Commonwealth Foundation that has backed voucher programs, said in a statement Shapiro’s veto “while not unexpected, is disappointing and unnecessary.”
Benefield said his organization will continue to push for vouchers and cast the program as Shapiro’s “chance to redeem himself, fulfill his campaign promises, and offer a genuine opportunity to thousands of low-income kids who deserve a better future.”
Advocates opposing vouchers celebrated Shapiro’s voucher veto, but also expressed disappointment that the Republican-led Senate has yet to approve some education funding.
Among the programs in the budget Shapiro signed Thursday that will still require Senate approval is so-called Level Up funding for the 100 school districts with the lowest spending per pupil, including Philadelphia. Level Up funding is in addition to the Basic Education funding that schools receive from the state and is included in the $45.5 billion budget Shapiro signed.
“It is disappointing that Senate leadership is standing in the way of releasing needed funds for programs included in their own budget, including Level Up dollars that benefit students in the most underfunded school districts,” the PA Schools Work Campaign said in a statement.
The advocates called it “ironic” that Senate Republicans are still holding up “funding for our students in the most underfunded schools specifically because they were unsuccessful in an attempt to institute a new private school voucher program that purports to help … these very same students.”
Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said in a statement that the union is “pleased” that Shapiro signed the budget without the voucher program.
”The misguided push to divert public dollars into private institutions was a distraction that diverts us from our collective responsibility to truly invest in public education,” Jordan said.
Caroline Hendrie, a veteran journalist who wrote for many years at EdWeek, wrote an overview of the implementation of vouchers (or “Education Savings Accounts“) in states that have endorsed “universal” access, removing almost all limits on access to them. Vouchers for rich and poor alike. As Josh Cowen has written in many articles, most students who use vouchers never attended public schools. And those from public schools who use vouchers are likely to do less well academically than the peers they left behind. No longer do you hear that vouchers will “save poor kids from failing public schools” because they don’t. In red states, they are a gift of public funds to families who happy to collect $6,000-$10,000 to underwrite their private school tuition.
Hendrie explains that voucher fans fall into two camps: On one side are those who want voucher families to restrict their use of public funds only to authorized expenditures, like tuition, tutoring, computers, school supplies. On the others are parents who say they want no restriction on what they purchase.
Like Florida, the states of Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah have all enacted laws this year that would open ESAs—sometimes after a multiyear phase-in—to most if not all school-age children in their states. Those four followed Arizona and West Virginia, which started implementing similar universal programs in 2022.
That wave plus other legislative action in 2023 brought to 13 the number of states with one or more education savings account programs funded directly from state revenues. In addition, Missouri has an operating ESA program paid for through tax credits.
Amid this growth, controversies have flared over ESA implementation—most notably but not exclusively in Arizona.
Critics complain that voucher money has been spent on non-education expenses, like swimming pools, kayaks, bbq grills, greenhouses, chicken coops, pianos, pizza ovens, and trampolines.
But parent groups have advocated for maximum flexibility, in which parents get a debit card and are free to purchase whatever they want, with no oversight.
Of course, vouchers create new for-profit opportunities. A company named ClassWallet has emerged to provide financial services to voucher states.
In 2019, Arizona contracted with the company ClassWallet to facilitate ESA transactions on its online spending-management portal. ClassWallet is also used by ESA programs in Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.
On its website, the Florida-based ClassWallet lists its offerings:
ClassWallet is a digital wallet with an integrated eCommerce marketplace, automated ACH direct deposit, and reloadable debit card with pre-approval workflows and audit-ready transaction reporting. ClassWallet reduces overhead costs, saves valuable time, and better visibility and control for decentralized purchases.
Save Our Schools Arizona, which led the campaign to stop voucher expansion in 2018, is convinced that the state’s new commitment to universal vouchers will prove harmful to public schools, where most students are enrolled.
Save Our Schools Arizona, which advocates for public schools and opposes the 2022 ESA program expansion, argues that ongoing disputes over implementing the broader program prove it has become, as the organization’s executive director, Beth Lewis, puts it, “too big to succeed.”
Lewis said that the program is “wide open” for fraud. “It is interesting to watch my taxpayer dollars be used to build a garden in everybody’s backyard, when my public school can’t afford one,” she said. “It’s just this unspoken rule of, if you see it in a public school, then it’s approvable.”
Other states should view Arizona’s move to universal eligibility not as a model but as a cautionary tale, Lewis argues. She sees evidence of that happening in states such as Arkansas and Iowa, where newly passed laws call for incremental, multiyear expansions before getting to universal eligibility.
“I think they looked at Arizona and saw that this is a complete disaster and is not serving families well,” Lewis said. “There’s no way to ensure transparency. And they said, ‘Well, at the very least, we need to phase this in.’”
School-choice advocates tend to defend Arizona and see its uneven expansion process as par for the course when states try something different to promote educational freedom.
The last thing the choice lobby worries about (if ever) is the well-being of public schools, even though they enroll the vast majority of students in the state.
