Trump World Is Heading for Chaos

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2025 //
24

Blogger “That’s Another Fine Mess” predicts trouble ahead for Team Trump. They are already squabbling because Trump insisted he would stop immigration but quickly backed down when Musk and Vivek said they needed highly skilled foreigners because no American was qualified. This is an excerpt. Open the link to read it all.

He writes:

The first year of Felon34 2.0 will be more shambolic than the first year of Felon 1.0, regardless of how many of the Felon’s idiots claim the benefit of four years of experience. Felon34 and his loyalists will take power better prepared to implement a number of malicious ideas, but will make less progress and create more chaos than they did in 2017 for two simple reasons:

First, because their added experience of preparedness will be swamped by their much greater arrogance, leading them to shed guardrails, fall into obvious traps, and overreach. We’ve seen it already on every major issue that has come up over this past month.

Second, because they’ll be inheriting the country at a somewhat less-stable equilibrium than they did last time: highly prosperous, but with less room to maneuver without generating inflation or triggering a recession. The market went through its longest period of decline since 1978 two weeks ago. With the uncertainty about whether Felon34 will be able to mount his mass deportation – and the effect that will have on the economy if he pulls off even a portion of it – added to his insane threats against Panama, Canada and Greenland; his plan to slap tariffs on the rest of the world; and his general insanity – the market will respond. The market does not like uncertainty. Felon34 sees his main job as keeping the market up – to support his billionaire owners and to flim-flam the flimflammables – and he is going to quickly run into the problem that he cannot please the droolers and the market simultaneously. He knows if he fucks the market he’s screwed, and if he doesn’t deliver the promises he made at his hatealongs he’s also screwed.

My prediction: Fire and fury. By this time next year it will be “a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” Felon34 is the most determined moron in US political history. And then in January 2026, the mid-term campaign begins.

The MAGA Civil War will continue in 2025. Former George W. Bush Campaign Manager Stuart Stevens, who is now a Democrat, says that people should not ignore the fact Steve Bannon turned on Elmo: “Bannon is a guy who has defined himself as a thug, and thugs must do thuggish things. I think Musk has no idea what he’s getting into when he gets in a fight with Bannon over this.” Stevens then explained that if Bannon is ever able to turn Trump against Musk as he’s trying to do, that could be a big problem for Elmo: “There’s been reporting that Musk was not a student when he got a visa, and when he made his application for naturalization he put false information on that document. That is grounds for revoking citizenship. It happens all the time. One reason why Musk is so obsessed with immigration is because he knows this. I wouldn’t bet against Steve Bannon.”

Former Trump Press Secretary Sean Spicer posted a poll on X which asked if Republicans agreed with Musk on the H-1B visas or if they agreed with Steve Bannon on it. He got over 92,000 votes, with 67% siding with Bannon over Musk.

Elmo continued his purge and punishments of right-wing accounts who disagreed with him on this. White nationalist talk show host Stew Peters (758,000 followers): “Elon Musk is STEALING money from my subscribers and LYING to them. This morning I woke up to find that he removed my blue check mark and canceled my ability to have subscribers. My subscribers were told that I canceled my subscription service and they would not be refunded for the next two weeks in which they’ve already paid X for, but which won’t allow me to provide them content. This is intentional deceit and theft.”

White nationalist Nick Fuentes: “Today X appears to have un-verified 5 more prominent critics of the H-1B program. Their checkmarks were taken, subs were refunded, and character limit reduced. This is now overt political censorship. This comes after the Project Groyper brand account and all of its affiliates were suspended last week.” 

My prediction: I agree with Stuart Stevens that one should not bet against Bannon. He knows how to fight like this and Elmo doesn’t. If Bannon’s side ever gets the goods on Elmo’s immigration and naturalization, expect Elmo to be in deep shit and Felon34 will abandon him.

In closing, this is the gang – as Jeff Tiedrich described them – who could screw up a fuck in a brothel. As I like to say, they’re the people who flunked the IQ test low enough to qualify for membership in MAGA. They’re the Broken Toys who never learned to work and play well with others. Over the past three weeks – before they’re even in office – they have screwed the pooch and munched the lunch. They couldn’t pass the bill they had to pass without Democrats, and Democrats aren’t going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire next time. They have till the middle of the month to fix the debt ceiling and they can’t elect a speaker. There’s going to be nobody there next Monday to accept the vote count of the electoral college. The odds are good the stupid sonofabitch can’t get sworn into office, in which case, the position goes to the Speaker – of which there is none. Assuming they find a way through this mess, they have twelve months to do all the things they have to put through Congress – with a one-vote margin. Their leader is Donald Trump – who bankrupted a casino!

They’re going to be throwing their best friend through a window, and they’ll be tripping when they try to pull their pants on and falling against the dresser and knocking themselves out.

We’re the side who won the Civil War and beat the Nazis and smashed the Japanese.

Act. Like. It.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Elections, Lies, Musk, Elon, Trump

Michigan: What Are Charter Schools Trying to Hide?

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2025 //
5

This article was written by Dr. Cassandra Ulrich, who served as president of the Michigan State Board of Education, and now is a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

Dr. Casandra Ulbrich is a former Michigan State Board of Education president (2014 – 2023). She is a member of the Network for Public Education Board of Directors Ulbrich has spent most of her career in higher education administration, currently serving as the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Ulbrich began her career as a press secretary to the former U.S. House Democratic Whip David Bonior, acting as the official spokesperson for the Congressman. She has been recognized as one of Michigan’s 40 under 40 by Crain’s Detroit Business.

At the end of the 2023-2024 session, the House and Senate of Michigan took up bills to increase charter school transparency in a state where 70% of the schools are run by for-profits. Ultimately, the bills did not pass, but the problems persist. Below is the testimony given by Dr. Casandra Ulbrich, the former President of the Michigan Board of Education.

As the former President of the State Board of Education, I would like to commend the State Senate for taking the issue of financial transparency seriously. The bills before you today level the playing field by requiring charter schools, education management companies, and authorizers to demonstrate that they are responsible stewards of public dollars, just as traditional public schools are currently required to do.

Financial transparency is an essential element of accountability for all publicly funded institutions and a necessary component for an engaged citizenry. Absent timely and accurate financial data in a manner that is easily accessible and understood by the public, citizens lack the resources necessary to make informed decisions. Missing or misleading financial information removes a citizen’s ability to adequately determine the value of their public investments. Similarly, a charter school board that is denied this information cannot fulfill its oversight duty and its commitment to the citizens it serves.

This is particularly true for the K-12 public schools that educate approximately 1.3 million students in the State of Michigan, nearly 10 percent of whom attend a charter school. In 2022 – that year will be relevant during my testimony – Michigan Charter schools received roughly $1.4 billion in taxpayer funding. How this money is spent is often hidden from taxpayer view behind a wall of secrecy. One reason is that Michigan law allows charter school boards to contract out all the school’s services to a for-profit education management company that also assumes control of the school’s budget. This arrangement is known as a ‘sweeps’ contract in the charter school sector. Its name comes from the fact that nearly all of the school’s public dollars – anywhere from 95 percent to 100 percent – is ‘swept’ into a charter management company. Once that happens, that money is no longer reportable to the taxpayers who funded those dollars.

While the schools themselves must adhere to Freedom of Information Act(FOIA) laws, private, for-profit management companies themselves are not subject to FOIA. Therefore, when a management company assumes the vast majority, if not all, of the school’s budget, how that money is spent is legally hidden from public view.

For years, the charter lobby has argued that charter schools adhere to all applicable transparency laws. In most cases, they are correct. But, those laws fall far short of allowing taxpayers adequate oversight over the schools for which they fund.

In 2022, the State Board of Education used the Freedom of Information Act to identify and disclose the similarities and differences in financial reporting between traditional and charter school districts.

We sent FOIA requests to all school districts, both traditional and charter, in five Michigan counties. Of those districts, 112 were traditional school districts, representing over 551,000 full-time equivalent (FTE) student counts, and 166 were charter school districts, representing nearly 80,000 FTE student counts. For the charter districts, 117 (71%) used for-profit management companies, 19% used non-profit management companies, and 11% were self-managed. Individual district student counts ranged from a low of 71 to a high of more than 55,000 FTEs.

On January 5, 2022, each district received a FOIA from me as the President of the SBE. A second letter was sent to those who did not respond, and in some cases, a third letter was also sent. The FOIA request included five items:

  • Contracts for rental or lease of facilities.
  • Contracts for food service management or vended meals.
  • Contracts with custodial service vendors.
  • Contracts with lawn and grounds service vendors.
  • Contracts with educational service providers or education management
    companies.

The results demonstrated what we had assumed all along.

Following the third letter, 100% of traditional school districts responded to the FOIA request, while only 93% of charter districts responded. Seven percent of charter school districts didn’t even bother to respond to three Freedom of Information Requests from the State Board of Education.

When it came to facility contracts, Charter school districts were more likelyto submit facility rental or lease contracts. Sixty-eight percent, or 105, of charter districts submitted these contracts. Many charter districts lease their buildings from entities related to the management companies overseeing the schools.

A management company that also subleases its own facilities to the schools they manage raises obvious questions about conflicts of interest. It also allows the management company/facility owner to set lease terms that may be excessive. The State Board of Education FOIA did not address the market rates of each lease, but other states have identified this as an issue. For example, in 2012, the New York State Comptroller issued a report detailing how a Brooklyn charter school managed by National Heritage Academies approved a lease from a “related business” at a rate nearly $800,000 above market value, or $3.96 million more over the term of the five-year lease. The report also indicated that NHA refused to divulge financial records supporting expenses that it charged to the charter school. A 2019 Ohio Auditor report found similar examples in that state.

Another issue is that many charter management contracts also include a provision that allows the management company to own all property in the school, even though that property was most likely funded by taxpayers.

Food Service, Custodial, and Lawn Contracts

Charter school districts, particularly those managed by for-profit companies, were far less likely to share food, custodial or lawn contracts. In fact, these charter districts indicated they were not responsible for these contracts. This reflects the fact that many charter districts engage in “sweeps contracts.” Therefore, a common response among for-profit managed companies was to deny the State Board’s FOIA request related to these three contracts. The FOIA coordinator responded, “Your request for information contained in bullets 2 through 4 is denied because the Academy does not (i) contract for food service management or vended meals, (ii) contract with custodial service vendors, or (iii) contract with lawn and grounds service vendors. Instead, the Academy contracts for the above services through a third-party management company by way of an educational management agreement and, thus, the Academy is not a party to the service contracts.” (S. Wilson, personal communication, January 14, 2022).

Financial Disclosures

One thing that became evident through the FOIA process was the vast differences in detailed financial disclosures. All districts, regardless of charter or traditional, are required by statute to submit annual comprehensive financial data (MCL 388.1618(5) and a financial audit report (MCL 388.1618(4). While the reports tend to be detailed for traditional school districts, this is not the case for charter districts. Most PSAs report most of their current operating expenditures as“purchased services” through their management company. The management companies, themselves, are not required to report detailed information. As a private vendor, there is no statutory requirement for management companies to submit financial reports to the state.

It’s important to note that, with limited exceptions, traditional school districts are not permitted by law to contract for instructional services. On the other hand, many charter school districts contract with a management company for all or most of these services. According to a state board of education resolution, in FY21, 90.4% of charter schools reported that more than 50% of the school’s current operating expenditures were spent on purchased services (totaling $1.3 billion in purchased services), resulting in those expenditures not being reported and audited with the same level of detail provided for expenditures of traditional school districts, and not subject to public disclosure under FOIA” (MI State Board of Education, 2022).

Financial Reporting

Michigan school districts provide financial information to the state via the Financial Information Database (FID). Data submitted to the FID includes financial reports, revenues, and expenditures. However, what is reported looks very different depending on the type of district and their management contracts, leading to greater disparity between traditional and charter school districts. Under current reporting requirements, the costs for services provided to charter districts under a management agreement are often aggregated under “purchased services” and therefore lack any detailed information.

As a result of this method of reporting, it is nearly impossible to make any kind of accurate comparisons of financial spending. And, since management companies are not subject to the same financial reporting and audit requirements as districts, taxpayers have no way of knowing if their investments are being spent appropriately or if those dollars are being spent in an illegal or
inappropriate manner. In my role on the State Board of Education, I have heard many anecdotal examples of this happening, but absent real transparency laws, there is no way of holding bad actors accountable for their actions. Not only is this inappropriate for a public entity, but it also serves as a stain on all charter schools, including those that are acting in good faith and are truly interested in
providing quality education for children.

The bills before you today alleviate many of the concerns that the State Board of Education has been raising over the last twenty years. Specifically, financial information will be available to the Boards that are charged with overseeing these schools, allowing them to do their jobs effectively. Financial
information will also be not only FOIA-able for the public but in many cases available on the school’s website. It will bring to light related party transactions and taxpayer overspending.

If we are truly interested in parents making choices for their children, they should have access to this information, as should taxpayers who are funding these schools.

For these reasons, the Charter School lobby should be the first in line tosupport these financial transparency laws that could demonstrate what they have been saying…that the vast majority of charter school operators are conducting themselves appropriately and to send a message to those who may not be.

Absent that, I would ask yourself, what do they have to hide?

Dr. Casandra Ulbrich is a former Michigan State Board of Education president (2014 – 2023). She is a member of the Network for Public Education Board of Directors Ulbrich has spent most of her career in higher education administration, currently serving as the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Ulbrich began her career as a press secretary to the former U.S. House Democratic Whip David Bonior, acting as the official spokesperson for the Congressman. She has been recognized as one of Michigan’s 40 under 40 by Crain’s Detroit Business.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Michigan

ProPublica: Ohio Pays to Expand Religious Schools

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2025 //
1

Once upon a time, public money was spent only for public schools, with a few exceptions for government-mandated programs and services.

Once upon a time, there was a wall of separation between church and state. That wall was accepted and respected by most Americans.

Ohio has decided to tear down that wall. Ohio Republicans want the state to pay for all education-related expenses of every student.

Now, Ohio has taken a step beyond by allocating taxpayer money to pay for building religious schools.

ProPublica wrote:

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.

The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate president and a Republican, told the Columbus Dispatch.

Huffman did not respond to a request to comment.

Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found.

But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.

“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.

They’ve never, until now, been able to build schools expressly on the public dime.

“This breaks through the myth,” said David Pepper, a political writer and the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party. Pepper said that courts have long given voucher programs a pass, ruling that they don’t violate the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state because a publicly funded voucher technically passes through the conduit of a parent on the way to a religious school.

With this latest move, though, Ohio is funding the construction of a separate, religious system of education, Pepper said, adding that if no one takes notice, “This will happen in other states — they all learn from each other like laboratories.”

Open the link to finish reading.

Categories Education Reform

Oklahoma’s State Schools Chief Blames Teachers for Terrorism

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
14

Having followed the wacky behavior of Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters since he was elected, I knew he was not the sharpest tack in the box. But I didn’t realize he was downright stupid.

While reading Ron Filipowski’s blog, I came across this crazy statement:

… OK Schools Chief Ryan Walters says the people most responsible for these acts of domestic terrorism are … public school teachers. Of course. “You have schools teaching kids to hate their country, saying this country is evil. You have teachers unions pushing this on our kids. We cannot allow our schools to become terrorist training camps.”

This is an insult to every teacher. And it reveals Ryan Walters’ ignorance and malice.

Categories Extremism, Oklahoma, Stupid, Teachers, Unions

Police Identify Driver of Tesla That Exploded at Trump Hotel in Las Vegas

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
5

There seems to be no connection between the New Orleans terrorist attack and the Tesla explosion in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas. The driver killed himself. He was a Green Beret.

The Los Angeles Times reported:

Officials have identified the driver of a Tesla Cybertruck that was packed with fireworks and fuel and exploded outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, leaving the driver dead and seven others injured

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said they believe 37-year-old Colorado Springs resident Matthew Livelsberger was in the driver’s seat when the truck exploded, though the body was not immediately identifiable. Police say Livelsberger was dead before the explosion from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A handgun was found at his feet, police said.

LVMPD Sheriff Kevin McMahill said in a Thursday news conference that a charred body was found inside the vehicle but they were able to determine the identity from the military identification, credit cards and passport found at the scene.

“His body is burnt beyond recognition and I do still not have confirmation 100 percent that that is the individual inside our vehicle,” McMahill said. “I will not come back until I have the confirmation through DNA or medical records that this is indeed in fact the subject inside of the vehicle.”

Officials believe Livelsberger acted alone and the motivation is still under investigation.

Las Vegas police said they responded to a report of an explosion at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on Wednesday around 8:40 a.m. A rented 2024 Tesla Cybertruck exploded near the entrance doors of the hotel and went up in flames. Authorities found camp fuel and gasoline canisters and firework mortars in the truck bed.

Both Livelsberger and Shamsud-Din Jabbar, identified as the man who drove a truck into crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans early Wednesday, previously served at the Army’s Ft. Bragg, now known as Ft. Liberty, in North Carolina, but it is not clear whether they served at the same time or in the same unit. Both men also served in Afghanistan in 2009, though officials say they don’t have any evidence they were in the same location in the country or in the same unit, McMahill said. They both used rental company Turo to rent their vehicles.

Livelsberger was in the U.S. Army and served as a Green Beret operations sergeant, who spent the majority of his time at Ft. Carson in Colorado and in Germany. He was on approved leave from Germany at the time of his death.

Livelsberger rented the Cybertruck in Denver on Dec. 28 and charged the vehicle at Tesla charging stations throughout Colorado and New Mexico, McMahill said. The vehicle was tracked around 5:33 a.m. on Wednesday in Kingman, Ariz., and was first spotted in Las Vegas around 7:29 a.m.

According to surveillance footage, Livelsberger pulled into the Trump hotel’s valet area and 17 seconds later, the explosion went off.

The explosion was caused by “very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck,” Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, said in a statement on X.

Livelsberger worked as a special forces operation manager for the U.S. Army since 2006 before switching to a remote and autonomous systems manager two months ago, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Livelsberger worked as a special forces operation manager for the U.S. Army since 2006 before switching to a remote and autonomous systems manager two months ago, according to his LinkedIn profile.

On his Facebook profile, Livelsberger once criticized the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Afghanistan in 2021. He called it the “biggest foreign-policy failure in the history of the United States.”

“Bet Bolton got a hefty chunk from the DNC and other slimy donors to put the book out,” he wrote in a comment, referring to former U.S. national security advisor John Bolton and his memoir released in 2020. 

When accused of being a conspiracy theorist, Livelsberger responded: “It’s not conspiracy when it’s pretty obvious guy made money from the dems.”

Categories Extremism

Jeff Tiedrich: The Origins of the “Immigrant-Did-It” Story

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
11

Blogger Jeff Tiedrich traces the origins of the phony story about the terrorist who ruthlessly mowed down revelers in New Orleans.

The tale told on FOX News was that the truck used by the terrorist crossed the Mexican border only two days earlier. This was immediately accepted by the MAGAverse because it confirms what they already believed: immigrants are murderers, rapists, and now….heartless terrorists.

Jeff’s post has a screen shot of the original story before it was retracted.

We now know that the perpetrator was born in Beaumont, Texas, went to Georgia State, and lived in Houston.

Open the link and see how quickly this lie spread and continued to spread long after FOX retracted its first report.

Why so much hatred of immigrants?

Donald Trump is married to an immigrant from Slovenia.

JD Vance is married to the daughter of immigrants from India.

Elon Musk is an immigrant from South Africa.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s parents were immigrants from India. His father still holds an Indian passport.

Categories Bigotry, Extremism, Fake News, Immigration, Lies, Republicans

Brian Stelter: The Rush to Judgment, As Usual, Was Wrong

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
9

Brian Stelter writes about the media for CNN. When CNN went through a reorganization a year or so ago, attempting to be “centrist” or appeal to the right, Brian was fired. He is actually very even-handed in his comments. After CNN’s shakeup failed, Brian was rehired and CNN again posts his “Reliable Sources” commentary in the media. Subscribe; it’s free.

He wrote this morning:

Within 24 hours of the Bourbon Street terror attack, reporters pieced together a relatively complete picture of the suspect. But a key early bit of misreporting confused the public – and possibly the president-elect. It’s a cautionary tale for everyone in the news industry as the new year begins.

Just after 10 a.m. Wednesday, Fox News reported that the suspect’s truck crossed the U.S. border in Eagle Pass, Texas “two days ago.” Some of Fox’s coverage explicitly said “the suspect” drove across the border, leading Fox viewers to believe that a foreigner might be responsible for the deadly carnage.

Evidently, Fox was misinformed by anonymous sources. The network walked it back within two hours and said the truck was in Eagle Pass nearly two months ago, not two days ago. And more importantly, the truck was being driven by someone else at the time, so the detail about the border was completely irrelevant and misleading. 

But the damage was already done. President-elect Donald Trump, seemingly misinformed by Fox, issued a statement about “criminals coming in” from other countries. “Biden’s parting gift to America — migrant terrorists,” Donald Trump Jr.wrote, sharing the Fox claim. “Shut the border down!!!” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene exclaimed.

The president-elect ironically used the New Orleans attack to say that he was right and the “Fake News Media” was wrong about the threat posed by illegal immigration. If he had waited a couple hours to react, he would have learned that the suspect was a U.S. citizen and Army veteran.

“Some Republicans continued to beat the border drum well after Fox News retracted its initial report,” The Daily Beast’s Josh Fiallo wrote last night. This morning I’m still seeing people on social media share the misinfo. 

A couple of takeaways: One, it’s incredibly difficult to claw back a bogus claim that people want to believe. And two, in a repeat of 2017-2020, it’s going to be crucial for reporters to scrutinize Trump’s sources of information, since his favorite sources have so often misled him in the past.

Stelter added, later in his post, a caution to the media:

I love what Kaitlan Collins told Semafor about 2024’s political surprises being “the ultimate reminder to never assume what the news is going to be.” As a reporter, “you should always operate with an open mind,” she said. “It’s easy, but risky, to think you know where a story is going.”

Categories Media

Heather Cox Richardson: MAGA Threatens the Ideals of Liberal Democracy

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
27

Heather Cox Richardson recalls the days of bipartisan consensus around the goals of liberal democracy, in which government protected the rights of individuals. By today’s MAGA standards, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would be considered a dangerous leftwinger.

She wrote on her blog, “Letters from an American”:

Cas Mudde, a political scientist who specializes in extremism and democracy, observed yesterday on Bluesky that “the fight against the far right is secondary to the fight to strengthen liberal democracy.” That’s a smart observation.

During World War II, when the United States led the defense of democracy against fascism, and after it, when the U.S. stood against communism, members of both major political parties celebrated American liberal democracy. Democratic presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman and Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower made it a point to emphasize the importance of the rule of law and people’s right to choose their government, as well as how much more effectively democracies managed their economies and how much fairer those economies were than those in which authoritarians and their cronies pocketed most of a country’s wealth.

Those mid-twentieth-century presidents helped to construct a “liberal consensus” in which Americans rallied behind a democratic government that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, promoted infrastructure, and protected civil rights. That government was so widely popular that political scientists in the 1960s posited that politicians should stop trying to court voters by defending its broadly accepted principles. Instead, they should put together coalitions of interest groups that could win elections.

As traditional Republicans and Democrats moved away from a defense of democracy, the power to define the U.S. government fell to a small faction of “Movement Conservatives” who were determined to undermine the liberal consensus. Big-business Republicans who hated regulations and taxes joined with racist former Democrats and patriarchal white evangelicals who wanted to reinforce traditional race and gender hierarchies to insist that the government had grown far too big and was crushing individual Americans.

In their telling, a government that prevented businessmen from abusing their workers, made sure widows and orphans didn’t have to eat from garbage cans, built the interstate highways, and enforced equal rights was destroying the individualism that made America great, and they argued that such a government was a small step from communism. They looked at government protection of equal rights for racial, ethnic, gender, and religious minorities, as well as women, and argued that those protections both cost tax dollars to pay for the bureaucrats who enforced equal rights and undermined a man’s ability to act as he wished in his place of business, in society, and in his home. The government of the liberal consensus was, they claimed, a redistribution of wealth from hardworking taxpayers—usually white and male—to undeserving marginalized Americans.

When voters elected Ronald Reagan in 1980, the Movement Conservatives’ image of the American government became more and more prevalent, although Americans never stopped liking the reality of the post–World War II government that served the needs of ordinary Americans. That image fed forty years of cuts to the post–World War II government, including sweeping cuts to regulations and to taxes on the wealthy and on corporations, always with the argument that a large government was destroying American individualism.

It was this image of government as a behemoth undermining individual Americans that Donald Trump rode to the presidency in 2016 with his promises to “drain the swamp” of Washington, D.C., and it is this image that is leading Trump voters to cheer on billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as they vow to cut services on which Americans depend in order to cut regulations and taxes once again for the very wealthy and corporations.

But that image of the American government is not the one on which the nation was founded.

Liberal democracy was the product of a moment in the 1600s in which European thinkers rethought old ideas about human society to emphasize the importance of the individual and his (it was almost always a “him” in those days) rights. Men like John Locke rejected the idea that God had appointed kings and noblemen to rule over subjects by virtue of their family lineage, and began to explore the idea that since government was a social compact to enable men to live together in peace, it should rest not on birth or wealth or religion, all of which were arbitrary, but on natural laws that men could figure out through their own experiences.

The Founders of what would become the United States rested their philosophy on an idea that came from Locke’s observations: that individuals had the right to freedom, or “liberty,” including the right to consent to the government under which they lived. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

In the early years of the American nation, defending the rights of individuals meant keeping the government small so that it could not crush a man through taxation or involuntary service to the government or arbitrary restrictions. The Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—explicitly prohibited the government from engaging in actions that would hamper individual freedom.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Republican president Abraham Lincoln began the process of adjusting American liberalism to the conditions of the modern world. While the Founders had focused on protecting individual rights from an overreaching government, Lincoln realized that maintaining the rights of individuals required government action.

To protect individual opportunity, Lincoln argued, the government must work to guarantee that all men—not just rich white men—were equal before the law and had equal access to resources, including education. To keep the rich from taking over the nation, he said, the government must keep the economic playing field between rich and poor level, dramatically expand opportunity, and develop the economy.

Under Lincoln, Republicans reenvisioned liberalism. They reworked the Founders’ initial stand against a strong government, memorialized by the Framers in the Bill of Rights, into an active government designed to protect individuals by guaranteeing equal access to resources and equality before the law for white men and Black men alike. They enlisted the power of the federal government to turn the ideas of the Declaration of Independence into reality.

Under Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, progressives at the turn of the twentieth century would continue this reworking of American liberalism to address the extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power made possible by industrialization. In that era, corrupt industrialists increased their profits by abusing their workers, adulterating milk with formaldehyde and painting candies with lead paint, dumping toxic waste into neighborhoods, and paying legislators to let them do whatever they wished.

Those concerned about the survival of liberal democracy worried that individuals were not actually free when their lives were controlled by the corporations that poisoned their food and water while making it impossible for individuals to get an education or make enough money ever to become independent.

To restore the rights of individuals, progressives of both parties reversed the idea that liberalism required a small government. They insisted that individuals needed a big government to protect them from the excesses and powerful industrialists of the modern world. Under the new governmental system that Theodore Roosevelt pioneered, the government cleaned up the sewage systems and tenements in cities, protected public lands, invested in public health and education, raised taxes, and called for universal health insurance, all to protect the ability of individuals to live freely without being crushed by outside influences.

Reformers sought, as Roosevelt said, to return to “an economic system under which each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him.”

It is that system of government’s protection of the individual in the face of the stresses of the modern world that Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and the presidents who followed them until 1981 embraced. The post–World War II liberal consensus was the American recognition that protecting the rights of individuals in the modern era required not a weak government but a strong one.

When Movement Conservatives convinced followers to redefine “liberal” as an epithet rather than a reflection of the nation’s quest to defend the rights of individuals—which was quite deliberate—they undermined the central principle of the United States of America. In its place, they resurrected the ideology of the world the American Founders rejected, a world in which an impoverished majority suffers under the rule of a powerful few.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, History, Trump

John Thompson: This Worked in My Classroom

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
6

John Thompson retired after many years as a teacher in Oklahoma. Although he usually writes about politics, he has recently been writing about what he learned in the classroom.

He wrote:

If we want to prepare our students for the 21stcentury, educators, patrons, and politicians should relearn the lessons of history as to why classroom instruction is only one of the education tools we need to develop. 

After more than two decades of failures, the corporate reform belief that individual teachers can transform public schools has been disproven. But, holistic learning requires a team effort where we bring students out of the school, as well as bringing members of diverse communities into the school. This narrative describes the learning that my young friends and I shared when exploring nature.

The first time I took inner city kids camping and fossil hunting, a couple of minutes into the first lesson I became hooked by my new career. A third grader shouted that she had found a “real live dinosaur nose! It still has blood on it!” 

Sleepy Hollow Camp was the type of progressive institution you would expect from the veterans of the civil rights campaign “Freedom Summer” who helped lead the program. Sleepy Hollow was committed to positive behavioral reinforcement.  We received marvelous professional development for picking up on warning signs before misbehavior escalated, for disengaging when necessary, and for re-engaging kids in a constructive manner. The data from the families’ applications for the program gave us extremely valuable information. Outstanding social workers helped us to interpret the students’ records.  Professional development included cooperative games and culminated in a “ropes course” for building teamwork. 

Sleepy Hollow’s professional development for environmental education was fantastic.  We were provided the hands-on materials about our camp in the Arbuckle Mountains, where “twice this ancient mountain range had been worn away.  But three times it rose from the sea.” We identified plants and animals that flourished “where the American South met the West, and as a result we had as much biodiversity as anywhere in the United States.” 

When teaching such lessons to adolescents, it did not take long for them to recognize them as metaphors for their lives. The children first raised the issue of respecting the diversity of people, as well as biomes. And kids sought the reassurance that people who have been beaten down, like mountain ranges, can rise again. 

After each long day of adventures, an evening campfire was always perfect for celebrating new friendships, reflecting on the day’s discoveries, and contemplating the meaning of life.  

Rashad, one of the teen leaders at camp who was well-known at his middle school for political protests involving Black Nationalism, took charge of the evening talent shows. He excelled at satire, and my lessons often inspired the jokes and dance numbers. In such a setting, the power of children’s moral consciousness in driving the intentionality required for deep learning was clearly illuminated.    

August offered extraordinary meteorite showers as the campfires were dimming.  Walking back to the cabin or the tent, the kids were quiet and contemplative knowing that they were sharing something profound. Those night- time reflections borrowed the language of the Black church.  We were all lying silently in our bunks one night when the cabin’s leader, Tyson, volunteered an account of a family tragedy.  He asked if we knew the story behind the song “Amazing Grace,” and told his cabin mates about the slave trader, John Newton’s, conversion at sea and his becoming an abolitionist.  Tyson then sang for us an incredibly beautiful version of the hymn.

I came to know Richard a bit more intimately after violence broke out after a turtle was killed. Members from another street gang knew how devoted Richard was to wildlife, so they provoked a fight by killing a turtle he had adopted. 

The wiry and high-strung 8th grader began our most intense conversation with a calm account of the death of his grandmother along with six others in a boiler explosion at an Oklahoma City school. Summing up the lessons he learned through mourning, he spoke in a low voice, “I think about things – deep things,” while his eyes darted back and forth, frantically, on high alert for danger.

Richard switched the subject to tales about his days in California living with a rich uncle, an “O.G.” (Old-time Gangsta.) Richard talked about how he would plan ways to invest the family’s wealth to help the underprivileged.  Pumping his fists and striking out for emphasis, Richard repeated again, “I think of things – deep things.”

But everything changed for Richard when his uncle was busted on drug charges and all their money was lost.  He claimed to not being upset by all of that. It brought him closer to real suffering and prompted new ideas for helping the poor.  By this point in our conversation, he exhibited the explosive force of a television evangelist, proclaiming, “I think of things – deep things!”

Back home, his once-powerful uncle still had enemies, and Richard was now more vulnerable and afraid. But that just made him identify more with people who never had power and made him wish he could do good – not just for people, but for all of the earth.  That is why the turtle’s death upset him so much. Again subdued, Richard wrapped up his sermon, “I think of things – deep things.”

Richard’s peers confirmed that his uncle had had money, power, and a reputation, and that I would understand when we returned to the city and saw his family.  It was on the bus ride home that I fully grasped the trauma and fearfulness that dominated Richard’s home life. In those two weeks away, the camp had become a safe zone for him and he grew more and more agitated the closer we got to the inner city.  He sat pensively, practically glued to me for the ride home.  

Richard’s suffering was also apparent to the other students and I was struck by the empathy that they expressed. Even the kids who were the most “down” with the “Crips” — the gang that rivalled his uncle’s “Bloods” — started to treat him with kindness. Something transformative had happened over the course of the two weeks at camp.  

Richard was picked up by his uncle. Someone who had once displayed power and inspired fear was now a broken man and clearly an alcoholic. Richard made a point of introducing me as his friend, and the uncle earnestly voiced appreciation. Though we had just met, the former gang leader grasped my hand and forearm and made it clear that he needed to communicate his deep appreciation for helping his nephew. Like many others, O.G. grieved for the pain he had inflicted upon his family.

This, and countless other poignant conversations, illustrates the challenges faced by children and educators alike in trying to overcome the legacy of poverty. But it also points to solutions. Simply put, there is no substitute for honest and painful discussions with young people about the troubles and transgressions of their past, and often grim and anxious aspects of their present. Long after high-profile tragedies are forgotten by society, trauma endures for many survivors. Despite such stress and tragedy, Richard, his friends, and even his uncle, managed to hold onto their moral core. 

This could be the rock upon which school improvement in the inner city is founded. 

Categories Character, Creativity, Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching

Jan Resseger: Project 2025 and the Demise of Civil Rights Protections

By dianeravitch
January 2, 2025 //
3

Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior in Ohio who writes deeply researched observations on national and Ohio issues. She reviews here the Trump administration’s plans to roll back the civil rights protections for vulnerable students.

She writes:

It is disgusting that Donald Trump’s election campaign set out to create the myth that the nation’s public schools are widespread settings for “woke” indoctrination. Good educators seek to make all students welcome and engaged. They are not pushing critical race theory to make school kids to feel guilty about our nation’s history, despite that our society has not always lived up to its proclaimed ideals. Neither are teachers and school counselors pushing kids to become gay or transgender. In fact Trump’s plea for reducing “woke” policy covers a more cynical plan to reduce the protection of the civil rights of racial minority and gay, lesbian and transgender students. Racism and homophobia seem to be at the center of both President-elect Trump’s re-election campaign and also the policies prescribed in Project 2025, which many believe has served as the handbook to Donald Trump’s educational priorities.

Education Week‘s Alyson Klein describes the public school policies in Trump’s recent campaign: “For months on the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump pledged to take money from school districts that teach critical race theory, champion a version of American history he sees as unpatriotic, or promote supportive policies and instructional practices for transgender students. In fact, Trump said he would sign an executive order on his very first day back in office to that effect. ‘We are going to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content onto the shoulders of our children,’ Trump said at a July campaign event in Minnesota.”

In fact President-elect Trump’s policies go much deeper than merely cleansing the schools of policies he believes offend his supporters. By proposing to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, to remove some of the civil rights protections for vulnerable students, and to move responsibilities of its Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, the President-elect has proposed turning back our nation’s progress in protecting the educational opportunity and safety of extremely vulnerable groups of children.  Klein explains that Trump’s policies are based on a  false understanding what the Office for Civil Rights does, why its work is important, and how today’s civil rights investigations of schools usually work. The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) receives complaints, processes them, and then works with school districts to reform policy:

“OCR doesn’t just yank money from school districts. Instead, the loss of federal funding is just one—very rare—possible conclusion of a lengthy, detailed process that typically unfolds over the course of years. The office receives complaints from students, staff members, parents, or other community members alleging that a school or district has violated a key civil rights law—commonly Title VI of the Civil rights Act, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The department then investigates the claim and decides whether the school has indeed run afoul of the law. If so, the school or district could technically risk losing a portion of federal funding. But school districts seldom see their money revoked. Instead, OCR works to help them comply with civil rights laws… For instance, in 2010, OCR concluded that instruction of English learners in the Los Angeles Unified School District was grossly inadequate, prompting a reimagining of district practice.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights adds: “Project 2025 proposes that the Departments of Education and Justice… should enforce civil rights laws only in the courts, eliminating important administrative tools to address discrimination. The overwhelming majority of complaints of discrimination in schools are handled through administrative enforcement by… (the Department of Education’s) Office for Civil Rights… Without this process, fewer students would see schools and districts change their policies to prevent further discrimination, and fewer schools would have examples of how to comply with the law.” The Leadership Conference also reminds us that Project 2025 has also proposed to eliminate “disparate impact” as a standard.  This means that it wouldn’t constitute a violation if, for example, a school district has engaged in a pattern of disparate school discipline policies for children of different races.

The National Education Policy Center has released a series of short, accessible interviews with academic researchers who explore the history and implications of education proposals in this year’s Trump campaign and Project 2025. Two of these short briefs explore the civil rights issues in Trump’s proposals relating to, first, preventing homophobia at school, and second confronting racism.

In the first, Protections against Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination in Schools: The Federal Role, University of Colorado, Boulder professor, Elizabeth Meyer explains the history of the federal government’s role in protecting students’ civil rights around sexual orientation and gender identity: “The Federal Government got officially involved in this issue… in 2010 when the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued Title IX guidance… that explicitly included LGBT students as entitled to protection from discrimination. The guidance prohibited forms of bullying and harassment that are ‘gender-based’ or related to ‘stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity’… The goal has been primarily to address anti-LGBTQ+ violence in schools and ensure sexual and gender minority youth are able to access educational opportunities… Starting in 2017, under the Trump administration that approach changed, as the guidance documents mentioned above were rescinded and official statements were issued refusing to hear complaints about anti-transgender discrimination in schools…  This backslide in legal protections for LGBTQ+ people ended in 2021 whcn President Biden issued his Executive Order…. Yet these protections are currently only symbolic in much of the country, since their implementation is being halted by injunctions affecting students in 26 states.”

Meyer concludes: “The ways the RNC and Project 2025 frame their approach to gender and sexuality diversity goes against what has been well-established in the research literature… Under the (previous) Trump administration, school climate declined for LGBTQ+ youth, and this is likely to recur during a second Trump presidency.”

In the second short civil rights brief, The Elections and Issues Around Racial and Ethnic Diversity, Kevin Lawrence Henry, Jr., an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, examines the Trump campaign and Project 2025 proposals from the point of view of racial justice: “(F)ederal educational provisions and regulations that are concerned with the enforcement of civil rights protections can positively impact the educational lives of students. For instance, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights enforces a variety of consent decrees, ranging from ensuring desegregation within school districts, to improving multilingual learner instruction, to addressing racial discrimination in student discipline… (Federal initiatives such as President Obama’s efforts to address discipline disparities that disproportionately impact Black and Latinx students is noteworthy. Federal guidance, interventions, and oversight that address racial inequity attends to institutional and organizational realities that stymie and limit educational opportunity, and in doing so gives meaning to educational equity and the unreached promises of a multiracial democracy.”

Henry continues: “Nevertheless, these initiatives are fragile…. During Donald Trump’s administration, movement away from race-conscious remedies for racism-caused harms intensified. For instance, the Trump administration rescinded Obama-era guidance on the reduction of suspensions and expulsions. Additionally, the Trump administration reduced the federal emphasis on enforcing Title VI protections for English Language Learners… and decreased Office of Civil Rights investigations into systemic discrimination… We need policies that explicitly aim to redress and counteract institutional and structural racism.”

Henry concludes: “Project 2025 and the RNC platform completely abandon a vision of a pluralistic, multicultural democracy. Focused on deregulation and the expansion of privatized education (which has historically been used to evade civil rights efforts and currently reproduces systemic racial inequity), these policy statements would significantly curtail and constrain regulatory civil rights enforcement in K-12 and higher education settings. Moreover, Project 2025 calls for the elimination of Head Start…  (and) calls for rescinding the equity provision within the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which specially aims to evaluate and address racial disproportionality in special education. Project 2025 calls for the redistribution of Title I funds (over $18 billion) as deregulated block grants to states, and then for the phasing out of these funds.. over a 10-year period… Project 2025 calls for the prosecution of entities committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This would be a fundamental disavowing of educational justice.”

The attack on public education embodied in the President-elect’s education plans is directed at federal policies, programs, and regulations designed to protect the most vulnerable among the roughly 50 million students served by public schools. Trump’s campaign and other politicians, however, have  turned discussion of these complex policies that shape public education across the nation’s 13,318 public school districts into an attack on the public schools themselves and the teachers who work with our students. I believe that teachers’ work with students is not political. The goal is to make students feel authentically welcome so that they are able to learn.

Kids bring who they are to school, and it is responsibility of school staff to make each student feel included.  Schools must also ensure that all students are physically safe, and safe from meanness and bullying. The late Mike Rose, a fine writer and a teacher of future teachers, reflected on what shapes a student’s experience of school: “We need to pay attention to the experience of school.” (Why School?, p. 34)  “I’m especially interested in what opportunity feels like… What is the experience of opportunity? Certainly one feels a sense of possibility, of hope. But it is hope made concrete, specific, hope embedded in tools, or practices, or sequences of things to do—pathways to a goal. And all this takes place with people who interact with you in ways that affirm your hope.” (Why School?, p. 14)

Categories Civil Rights, Elections, Trump
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