Economic Policy Institute: Vouchers Undermine Opportunity

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2024 //
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The Economic Policy Institute is a nonpartisan think tank that leans left, which is a rarity in D.C., where billionaires shower their largesse on rightwing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. This is the EPI analysis of the devastating effect of vouchers on public schools. This is their purpose: the privatization of public funding for education.

Here is the EPI report:

Since the early 2000s, many states have introduced significant voucher programs to provide public financing for private school education. These voucher programs are deeply damaging to efforts to offer an excellent public education for all U.S. children—and this is in fact often the intention of those pushing these programs. In this post we argue that: 

  • Public education is worth preserving—it should be seen as one of the most important achievements in our country’s history and crucial for the social and economic welfare of future generations. 
  • The economic logic behind voucher programs is weak; it rests on ideological commitments to markets over public provision of goods and services, even in realms of activity where the virtues of markets do not hold—like public education. 
  • Most damagingly, introducing significant voucher programs has gone hand in hand with steep declines in public school spending relative to states that have not adopted these policies.
    • This spending stagnation has had profound effects in generating larger “adequacy gaps” in school funding in voucher states. 
  • Paradoxically, even while they take resources away from public schools, many newly introduced voucher programs could result in more total state spending in coming years.  
    • This would be a particularly perverse result given the expansive research literature showing that vouchers do not improve educational outcomes. In essence, states that have introduced large-scale voucher programs are looking to substitute a more expensive and less effective system for educating kids than public education. The only reason for this policy thrust is ideology rooted in hostility to public education. 

Background on public education and the voucher debates 

Universal public education was perhaps the most important reason why the United States became the richest country in the world in the 20th century. As Claudia Goldin, the most recent Nobel Prize winner in economics, has written:  

At the dawn of the twentieth century the industrial giants watched each other cautiously. The British sent high-ranking commissions to the United States and the United States sent similar groups to Britain and Germany. All were looking over their shoulders to see what made for economic greatness and what would ensure supremacy in the future… Earlier delegations focused on technology and physical capital. Those of the turn-of-the-century turned their attention to something different. People and training, not capital and technology, had become the new concerns…For the twentieth century to become the human capital century required vast changes in educational institutions, a commitment by governments to fund education, a readiness by taxpayers to pay for the education of other people’s children, a belief by business and industry that formal schooling mattered to them, and a willingness on the part of parents to send their children to school (and by youths to go). The transition occurred first in the United States and was accompanied by a set of “virtues” or principles, many of which can be summarized by the word “egalitarianism.” 

In the 21st century, unfortunately, too many policymakers seem determined to squander this legacy by starving public education of money and legitimacy, often in the name of “school choice.” Their central claim (when they bother to make one with any clarity) is that public provision of goods or services is ineffective by definition and that a dose of private, market-like competition will lead to better schooling outcomes for the nation’s children.  

This claim is weak on its logical face, as the conditions needed for market competition to lead to better outcomes clearly do not exist in the educational realm. Take just three obvious examples. First, unlike other goods and services, there is no option to forego education entirely. In other markets, if the private sector is doing a poor job at offering attractive options for a good or service, people can just consume other things. But the United States—rightly—mandates basic education for all kids. Second, competition works well when the cost of switching providers is small. If you get tired of prices or goods at Whole Foods, you can shop at Giant. By contrast, switching schools is an extraordinarily costly decision in time, administrative burden, and severed social networks. Third, competition works well in markets when a transaction only affects the buyer and seller—and not unrelated third parties. But if third parties are affected by a transaction (think of pollution affecting third parties when I decide to buy gasoline for my car), then private markets will fail to match costs and benefits. Universal schooling generates positive spillovers to society at large, meaning that individuals would be inclined to underinvest in education relative to the full benefits it provides.  

The easiest way to boost educational outcomes is providing more public resources  

To the degree any evidence is mobilized in support of the view that public education needs market-like disruption through “school choice” instruments like vouchers, it generally relies on outdated research claiming that public schools already have “enough” funding, and that additional resources would not generate better outcomes. If one believed that the level of public education resources was sufficient, then strategies aimed at changing the composition of these resources or how they were mobilized—say through privatization via vouchers—might make some sense.  

But this is wrong on several fronts. 

First, newer research with better methods confirms that more money for public schools does improve educational outcomes. And not only does more money improve schooling outcomes for children, it also has the largest beneficial effects on the performance of particularly disadvantaged students.  

Such spending is not random and depends on a number of factors that are correlated with student success. For example, spending in a given district might rise as higher-income families move into the area and property values increase. These higher-income families might also be able to provide greater in home resources that will aid their children’s academic performance. Simple correlations between the level of district spending and student success might hence show a positive relationship, but the causality would not necessarily be running from district spending decisions to student success; both might instead be driven by a third variable, which is simply the level of family resources on average across the district.  

Running the opposite direction, much school funding is explicitly compensatory, targeting students facing greater socioeconomic disadvantage to attempt to even out total resources (both in home and public) available to students for academic success. But if this greater spending targets students with fewer in home resources, it could show a negative relationship between levels of spending and student performance, but again will not be reflecting the causal effect of this spending.  

The new research has overcome this key challenge in empirical assessments of the relationship between school spending and student outcomes: It found natural experiments that allow truly exogenous changes in school spending to be identified, and hence the effects on student achievement to reflect the causal effect of this spending. The exogenous changes that allowed for these examinations were largely court-ordered school finance reforms (SFRs).  

For example, Jackson, Johnson, and Persico (2016)examined the impact of school finance reforms between 1972 and 2010, and found that a 10% increase in school spending for 12 years lead to increases in high school graduation rates, 7% higher wages, and 10% higher family incomes in adulthood for children from districts that saw the spending increase. Gains were concentrated among students in high-poverty households. Lafortune, Rothstein, and Schanzenbach (2018)similarly found that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending for low-income districts would reduce the test score gap between low- and high-income school districts within a state by roughly 0.18 standard deviations (SDs) following court-ordered SFRs, or by nearly 40% of the baseline gap.  

In short, the evidence indicates that public schooling in the United States simply needs more resources to deliver even better student achievement—not some radical disruption in how it is delivered and by what institutions. 

Second, vouchers don’t lead to better student achievement. Several high-quality studies have investigated the impact of recent voucher programs and have found notably worse outcomes for student achievement. In the first two years following Louisiana’s Scholarship voucher program, student achievement in language arts and math both decreased by as much as 0.34 SDs. In Ohio, under the Ed Choice program, students who went to private schools with a voucher performed worse than they would have had they remained in public schools. In Indiana, students that used the Indiana Choice Scholarship voucher program experienced an average achievement loss of 0.15 SDs in mathematics.  

The promise of vouchers improving educational outcomes rests on assumptions that the private sector is always and everywhere more efficient than public providers of goods and services. But the private schools that expand or are created in response to the introduction of voucher programs are often of very poor quality. In the case of Milwaukee’s longstanding voucher programs, for example, researchers found that 40% of private voucher schools failed or closed down within the program’s first 25 years. Parents often belatedly realize that these schools are no improvement relative to public schools; this has lead a large share of students that took vouchers to return to public schools shortly after. In Milwaukee, nearly 20% of kids left voucher programs every year, with most coming back to public school. 

Vouchers reduce public school resources, but introduce large new fiscal obligations overall 

It would be bad enough if the introduction of vouchers simply funneled some students into poorly performing private schools for a stretch of time. But vouchers also affirmatively drain resources from the entire public education system—resources that would reliably produce better outcomes for children if they had stayed in public schools. Paradoxically, while vouchers are associated with significant drains from public school resources, they could actually boost the total fiscal cost of state support for education over time by shoveling more and more resources to (poorly performing, on average) private schools.  

Arizona provides a cautionary tale. Arizona’s 2023 universal voucher program was forecast to cost $33 million in the first year and $65 million in the second. Instead, the program ended up costing $587 million in the first year and is projected to cost upwards of $708 million in 2024 fiscal year. Even smaller programs tend to be dramatically underestimated.  

Part of this unexpected cost was the subsidy offered to parents who had already enrolled their kids in private schools: 75% of the first wave of applicants to the Arizona program were parents of students with no history of public school attendance, who could now tap taxpayer money to pay for their children’s private schools. Much of the cost of vouchers is essentially a subsidy for parents (many of them affluent) who never intended on using the public school system. 

Other states have followed this pattern of introducing programs promised to be small and seeing them balloon in size. New Hampshire’s 2021 Educational Freedom Account was estimated to cost $300,000 in the first year and $3 million in the second, but in reality the bill cost $8.1 million in the first year, $14.6 million in 2022, and $25 million in the 2023-24 school year. 

The rise of vouchers in the past 15 years represents an affirmative effort to erode public education by starving it of needed funding. Voucher proponents often want voters to think these programs simply broaden the suite of options enjoyed by parents and students. But the data tell a different story: Where significant voucher programs have been instituted, the resources available to public school children have decreased. Again, highly persuasive recent research shows that public school resources are crucial on the margin, and that more public resources reliably improve student achievement and economic outcomes later in life—while fewer public resources reliably harm education. Voucher programs that starve public resources for education are therefore deeply damaging.  

Figure A shows state and local per-pupil funding levels in 2007 and 2021 (expressed in 2020 dollars) for states that passed substantial voucher programs during the period (defined as having >1% of enrolled students using vouchers by 2021) as well as for states without any voucher programs. In 2007, the average difference in per-pupil spending between these two groups of states was around $900 (higher in states that did not subsequently pass significant voucher programs). Between 2007 and 2021, voucher programs grew significantly in one set of these states. By 2021, states without voucher programs were spending $2,800 more per-pupil—essentially more than tripling the spending advantage they had before the rise of voucher programs in the 2010s and early 2020s.  

The failure to increase per-pupil funding leads to the erosion of public education services in all forms: everything from school meals, extracurricular activities, mental health and counseling services, vocational and technical programs, and investments in teacher quality and pay. It is also worth noting that flat per-pupil educational spending—even in inflation-adjusted terms—is effectively a decline in the quality of education over time. Take the example of teachers: In a growing economy, simply keeping real pay constant for teachers means that their pay, relative to other skilled and credentialed professionals, is declining. This decline in relative teachers’ pay (even with absolute pay levels flat) will put downward pressure on the quality of the teaching labor pool, as more and more people who could have been excellent teachers decide to choose higher-pay occupations.  

Stagnant spending in states with significant voucher programs has also left education funding in those states substantially below measures of funding adequacy. In school finance research, adequacy is defined as the level of funding needed in a district to ensure students reach an average level of student achievement. For the measure of adequacy used below, the outcome is achieving the national average of test scores. Adequacy measures account for needs that differ by district depending on influences like the socioeconomic status of the student population. 

FIGURE A

Per-pupil state and local education spendingBy voucher program status, 2007 and 2021

States without voucher programsStates with voucher programs2007$11,211$10,3242021$12,820$10,054

ChartData

Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis.

Source: Authors’ analysis of the Census Public Elementary-Secondary Education Finances: Fiscal years 2007–2021 (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/school-finances/data/tables.html).

 

State constitutions mandate sufficient education funding for students to have access to an adequate education, regardless of students’ economic or social circumstances. For example, students in high-poverty districts will need more education funding than students in low-poverty districts to achieve the same outcome because they live in neighborhoods where there are fewer resources available to help them succeed. Several court cases in recent decades have found a constitutional responsibility for states to provide such adequate funding.  

Figure B relies on total per-pupil spending data from the School Finance Indicator Database to assess the adequacy of school spending for states with large voucher programs and states without any voucher program, comparing the gap for students in medium-, high-, and highest-poverty districts in our two groups of states in 2021. A negative gap implies that state spending is inadequate, and students are not receiving the resources required to meet average academic achievement levels. Regardless of poverty status, states with substantial voucher programs in 2021 are not spending enough to meet students’ needs.    

FIGURE B

Funding gap for adequate per-pupil spendingBy voucher program status, 2021

States without voucher programsStates with voucher programsMedium Poverty-$249-$4,000High Poverty-$2,202-$5,429Highest Poverty-$8,490-$11,859

ChartData

Notes: States with substantial voucher programs, defined as having >1 percent of all students enrolled in 2021, include Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin. States with smaller voucher programs are excluded from analysis. Medium poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 3rd quintile (40-60th percentiles). High poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 4th quintile (60-80th percentiles). Highest poverty is defined as district neighborhood poverty in the 5th quintile (80-100th percentile).

Source: Authors’ analysis of the State Indicators Database, 2021 (https://www.schoolfinancedata.org/the-adequacy-and-fairness-of-state-school-finance-systems-2024/).

 

For medium-poverty districts, the adequacy gap is negative, but quite small in schools without a voucher presence (roughly $220 per pupil). In medium-poverty districts of states with a significant voucher presence, however, the adequacy gap is negative and very large—with actual spending lagging adequacy measures by $3,750 per pupil. In high-poverty districts, even states without vouchers have large adequacy gaps—roughly $2,200 per pupil. But these gaps are double the size in states with significant voucher programs—roughly $5,400 per pupil. Finally, adequacy gaps are shamefully large in both states without vouchers ($8,500 per pupil) and in states with significant vouchers ($11,900), but the difference remains quite high. 

These results clearly show that school financing is far from perfect in states without voucher programs, but is far worse in states that have introduced these programs. 

Conclusion 

Vouchers are not a cost-free policy that simply adds on another education option for children—they are instead an intentional attack on universal public education, one of the crown jewels of U.S. society. Vouchers make no coherent economic sense, and the evidence shows that vouchers harm student achievement and expose state budgets to large future obligations that are hard to forecast, even while they divert spending away from public education. Our analysis shows that states that have introduced significant voucher programs over the past decade and a half have experienced significant declines in per-pupil spending relative to states without voucher programs. In short, the data clearly show that choosing to implement vouchers programs takes funding away from public education. The public spending declines associated with the introduction of vouchers will reliably cause significantly worse educational outcomes and will harm kids in high-poverty neighborhoods more than kids in low-poverty neighborhoods.  

The rise of vouchers is especially damaging given that we now know what does boost educational outcomes: more spending on public education. Leaving these potential gains on the table and promoting voucher programs instead of investing in public education demonstrates that kids’ education is not a priority.  

Categories Budget Cuts, Closing schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Vouchers

David Wallace-Wells: The Tragedy of Hurricane Helene

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2024 //
32

David Wallace-Wells, a regular contributor to the New York Times, is confounded by the lack of preparation for Hurricane Helene. The weather reports warned that it would be a deadly storm, yet many people thought they could ride it out, and they paid with their lives. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent, and the public is not adequately prepared. Have they been lulled by the politicians who claim that climate change is a hoax? Climate change denial claims lives.

Wallace-Wells writes:

Last week, warning about the imminent arrival of Hurricane Helene, the National Weather Service in Tallahassee, Fla., used the word “unsurvivable.”

And yet the storm seemed to take much of the country by surprise. You might have thought, not that long ago, that the arrival of extreme weather could wake us up, belatedly, from climate complacency. But the dull drumbeat of disaster seems almost to be putting us to sleep instead. Even the imminent arrival of a cataclysm like Helene, a Category 4 storm that spanned more than 400 miles across the Gulf Coast and threatened communities as far north as Appalachia, was not enough to generate all that much attention ahead of time, when more might have been done to limit the devastation. The storm has so far produced at least 100 deaths and perhaps $160 billion in damages (according to early estimates).

In Florida’s Big Bend region, Helene was the third hurricane to make landfall in barely a year, flattening beach towns and barrier islands and sending water into the attics of homes as far away as Tampa Bay. In several states to the north, locals from dozens of communities hundreds of miles from one another were calling the storm “our Katrina,” some of them watching whole homes or shiny caskets carried downstream, others clinging to tree branches for hours on end waiting for the floodwaters to recede or help to arrive. In Tennessee, there was no emergency declared before hospital patients were evacuated from a rooftop by helicopter, and as of Saturday, across western North Carolina, hundreds of vulnerable power substations were still down, along with the infrastructure and power lines meant to actually deliver electricity and the vast majority of the world’s supply of high purity quartz, a necessary input for the production of semiconductors. Dozens of coal ash ponds holding billions of tons of toxic coal ash have likely been flooded, as well. Cars and trucks “were tossed around like toys.”

Forty trillion gallons of rain fell in total, the equivalent of one-third of the total volume of Lake Erie, enough to cover the entire state of Massachusetts in 23 feet of water. The intense rainfall was made, over the last week, perhaps 50 percent more intense over parts of Georgia and the Carolinas by global warming. (Other rapid assessments suggested it was perhaps only 20 percent more intense.) Entire towns appear to have been turned into flotsam or pulverized into splinters, and few of those living in the hardest-hit areas even carried flood insurance. In Asheville, N.C., which sits hundreds of miles from the coastline and thousands of feet above sea level and is now the drowned ground zero of the storm, the National Flood Insurance Program coverage rate was under 1 percent. Across the country, as many as six million more homes are at severe risk of flooding than are even included on the federal government’s flood risk maps, Michael Thomas pointed out in the aftermath of the storm. Across Asheville’s Buncombe County, 17 times as many homes had been judged at risk in a 100-year flood event as carried insurance against that risk; Helene was called a “thousand-year” flood for certain parts of the Southeast, though those terms grow less meaningful almost by the day. Another ostensible thousand-year storm had hit the coastal Carolinas just one week before. “Sometimes ‘worst case’ scenarios really do come to pass,” the climate scientist Daniel Swain wrote over the weekend on Sunday, “and I think we often lack the collective imagination to fully envision what that looks like.”

Former President Trump was the first politician to arrive, and he indulged his impulse to politicize the disaster. He asserted, falsely, that President Biden refused to take calls from Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, though Kemp said that he had talked to Biden, who sent the help he asked for. Trump also claimed that Biden wasn’t sending help to states with Republican leaders (every state but North Carolina), but that wasn’t true either.

Trump never learned that natural disasters are times when people help people, regardless of party.

Categories Environment, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee

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

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2024 //
4

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

She writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dan Rather: Trump Threatens Democracy, More Than Ever

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2024 //
14

Dan Rather always has a wise perspective on national politics. Here he warns that Trump is more dangerous than ever.

Dan Rather and his team at Steady write about the crisis that stares us in our faces.

He writes:

We need to be talking more, not less, about the threat Donald Trump poses to our democracy. The former president and his understudy, JD Vance, have been trying to convince voters, with no evidence and a head-spinning level of hypocrisy, that violence against the former president was caused by rhetoric from Democrats. 

Trump has upended the political script, saying, “[The Democrats’] rhetoric is causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country.” Followed closely by JD Vance’s incendiary quip: “The big difference between conservatives and liberals is that no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence. The left needs to tone down the rhetoric. It needs to cut this crap out.”

And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Among the media and the campaigns, the “threat to democracy” line has apparently become old hat. When he was running for reelection, President Joe Biden often used it in an effort to differentiate himself. Unfortunately, this idea apparently doesn’t poll all that well. While it is true and terrifying, it is also a bit abstract — and for some, hard to believe. Lowering the price of milk is concrete and plausible.

So the Harris campaign hasn’t been talking about democracy much, instead concentrating on tangible policies to help the middle class. While this makes sense politically — and I hope it works — I’m here to say we cannot lose sight of the fact that a second Trump presidency would threaten our way of government and our way of life. 

Trump’s term as president was just a precursor to what we can expect the second time around, but it bears repeating to remind us what he is capable of. In case anyone has forgotten, here is a partial list of how he has jeopardized democracy:

  • Attempted to overturn a free and fair election, a number of times in a number of ways. 
  • Tried to block the peaceful transfer of power by inciting a mob to attack the United States Capitol. 
  • Undermined the independence of the Justice Department, while claiming our legal system was rigged. 
  • Botched the federal government’s response to the pandemic, resulting in a massive loss of life, because he doesn’t believe in inconvenient truths. 
  • Cozied up to dictators and autocrats, even asking one to investigate a baseless claim against his political rival. 
  • Selected Supreme Court justices who curtailed reproductive rights, to the point where women are being denied care and dying. 
  • Lied. All the time. The leader of the free world must be credible.
  • Is sowing seeds of doubt that the 2024 election will be legitimate.

There is every indication that a second Trump trip to the White House would be even more harmful than the first. 

This time around he is angrier and thirstier for vengeful retribution. He has said he will weaponize the Justice Department against his enemies. Full stop.

His loyal cronies have had more time to plan. We know they are vetting and training a legion of sycophants to displace career bureaucrats across the executive branch. The guardrails we had last time, whistleblowers and “adults in the room,” will be gone.

After nine years of Trump at the top of the Republican Party, his cult-like reach has created an army of MAGA-elected officials at the state and local levels who are more than happy to do his bidding, even if it’s illegal. 

He is more gullible than ever — wanting, needing to believe his own hype. Believing his own bluster has had dangerous consequences. See: January 6, 2021. He spends his time searching social media for confirmation of his over-inflated self-importance. He surrounds himself with yes-men and women falling all over themselves to prove their fealty. No one will tell him the truth, for fear of retribution. It is a modern spin on the children’s fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes” — only this horror story would be titled, “The Politician’s Stupefying Greatness.” 

The coup de grace is that Trump has carte blanche to do whatever he wants. That terrifying reality is brought to you by none other than the Supreme Court with its ruling in Trump v. United States. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee following that decision, representatives from 75 legal organizations said it “poses a significant threat to our democracy by effectively providing the president with sweeping legal immunity for criminal acts.”

We tend to memorialize significant dates in our nation’s history. In my lifetime, there was Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. More recently, September 11, 2001, and January 6, 2021, have been etched into our psyche. But I would argue November 5, 2024, could be as or even more significant. It will test the strength of our country’s democratic infrastructure. That infrastructure and the American voter can save democracy by sending Kamala Harris to the Oval Office. 

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Harris, Kamala, Trump

The New Republic: Vance Lied about the GOP Position on Abortion in the Debate

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2024 //
14

Let’s be clear about one thing: JD Vance lied about every important issue during his debate with Tim Walz. He lied about Obamacare (Trump did not save it, he repeatedly tried to kill it). He lied about Trump’s refusal to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election. He lied about January 6. And he lied about abortion, expressing his sorrow that Amber Thurman died of a botched abortion in Georgia because the state ban made it impossible for her to get the care she needed. I tweeted this yesterday: “JD Vance is sorry that Amber Thurman died but happy that Roe v. Wade was overturned, which led to Georgia’s ban on abortion care, which caused Amber’s death.” So much for contrition.

Melissa Girardi Grant wrote in The New Republic about Vance and Trump’s efforts to confuse voters about their opposition to abortion:

She wrote:

During the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, former President Trump tried to bail his running mate out of an abortion question with a series of half-truths and lies. “EVERYONE KNOWS I WOULD NOT SUPPORT A FEDERAL ABORTION BAN, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, AND WOULD, IN FACT, VETO IT,” Trump posted to social media, “BECAUSE IT IS UP TO THE STATES TO DECIDE BASED ON THE WILL OF THEIR VOTERS (THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE!).”

This is a nonsensical sentence for many reasons. Among them: No one is saying that Congress would pass a new federal ban and hand it Trump to sign or veto. What Trump might do—what his allies want him to do—is enact a ban by enforcing the 1873 Comstock Act, which can’t be vetoed since it’s already on the books. Trump’s misdirection distracts from his consistent anti-abortion record while in office, what the Republican Party platform states, and the very public plans of his former staffers detailed in Project 2025, which Trump also pretends he has nothing to do with. That is part of the Trump-Vance campaign’s plan on abortion: to do whatever they can not to talk about that plan, or at least to confuse the public about what that plan is.

The questions moderators posed to vice presidential candidates Governor Tim Walz and Senator JD Vance on Tuesday night did little to clear matters up. They were not about abortion or abortion rights; they were questions about whether the candidates were lying about abortion.

The question one moderator asked Walz reinforced anti-abortion misinformation spread by Trump. “After Roe v. Wade was overturned, you signed a bill into law that made Minnesota one of the least restrictive states in the nation when it comes to abortion. Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion ‘in the ninth month is absolutely fine.’ Yes or no? Is that what you support?” asked Norah O’Donnell of CBS News. “I’ll give you two minutes.”

O’Donnell’s own news organization debunked this same “ninth month abortion” point after the last debate. “Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed during Tuesday night’s presidential debate that Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, supports the ‘execution’ of babies after they are born, repeating earlier false assertions that Democrats support killing babies,” CBS News fact-checker Laura Doan wrote way back on September 11.

Walz answered the question posed to him about Minnesota’s abortion law very, very briefly—“That’s not what the bill says”—before pointing out the simple truth that, via his appointments of Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump helped end the federal right to an abortion in this country. “He brags about how great it was that he put the judges in and overturned Roe v. Wade, 52 years of personal autonomy.”

Trump typically responds to this kind of argument by talking about “the will of the people,” as he did in his all-caps post. But when voters have been asked directly about abortion through ballot measures, they affirm the right to abortion. Trump is going to have his say as one of these voters: As a Florida resident, he will be able to vote on the Florida ballot measure that would repeal Florida’s post-Dobbs six-week abortion ban. He has said he would vote “no.” The Republican Party’s platform advances the idea that a fetus is a legal person with rights under the Fourteenth Amendment—which, should the courts agree, would effectively make abortion a crime in every state. Failing that, Trump’s former head of Health and Human Services, Roger Severino, argues that a national abortion ban already exists, in his section of Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership.” This argument that the Comstock Act of 1873 could be enforced today to ban abortion is legally dubious at best, but it enjoys the support of 145 Republican members of Congress and has already been entertained at the Supreme Court by Justices Thomas and Alito.

The first abortion question moderators posed JD Vance was about whether he and Trump would create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency. “No, Norah, certainly we won’t,” he said, before launching into a lengthy digression about how the Republican Party needs to win back Americans’ trust on “this issue.” But having affirmed the importance of trust, in subsequent questions, he went on to lie spectacularly on two fronts: First, by saying “I never supported a national ban” (in 2022 he said he “would like abortion to be illegal nationally” and backed Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks), and later, by making an utterly bizarre claim about Minnesota abortion law. “The Minnesota law that you signed into law, the statute that you signed into law,” Vance said to Walz, “it says that a doctor who presides over an abortion where the baby survives, the doctor is under no obligation to provide lifesaving care to a baby who survives a botched late-term abortion.”

“The idea of abortion being performed after birth is sometimes used to stigmatize abortion care received later in pregnancy,” as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists write in a fact sheet responding to such misinformation. Talking points like Trump’s also distort perinatal palliative care, ACOG points out, which is given to reduce the discomfort of sick or disabled newborns whose conditions cause them to die shortly after birth. “At no point in the course of delivering a newborn with life-limiting conditions and subsequently providing palliative care does the obstetrician–gynecologist end the life of the newborn receiving palliative care.”

Walz tried to push back again, to say this isn’t what the law said. Vance adopted a know-it-all debate club stance: “What was I wrong about? Governor, please tell me. What was I wrong about?”

In this way, the debate became more about competing claims of what the other person said than about clarifying the candidates’ actual positions. If this sounds tedious to you and impossible to follow, well, you’re not alone. The meta-debate about abortion is boring and exhausting. But you can see why Trump and Vance would prefer to stay there, in the meta-debate. So long as the campaign sows confusion and rewrites reality around a policy position that is wildly unpopular—restricting abortion access—it helps Trump.

Democrats should take every opportunity to argue for what they want and reassert reality, as Walz tried to do. But there’s still a lot further to go: According to a May 2024 Times/Siena poll, around 17 percent of registered voters in swing states said that Biden is more responsible “for the Supreme Court ending the constitutional right to abortion” than Trump. Twelve percent of Democrats in those states said the same thing. What more proof do Democrats need that they have more and better storytelling to do?

Yes. However, I would say that Democrats need more truth-telling to their voters. Leave the storytelling to JD.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Gender, Georgia, Health, Lies, Vance, J.D.

Tom Ultican: “The Science of Learning” is Another Hoax

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2024 //
48

The world of education is continually susceptible to hoaxes, frauds, and panaceas. The media pounces on miracle schools, miraculous teachers, and methods that turn every student into a genius.

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of physics and advanced math in California, cannot tolerate scams and overblown claims.

His latest commentary is about “the science of learning,” which comes with the usual fanfare.

He writes:

On September 24, The 74 headline read, “What Happens When a 48K-Student District Commits to the ‘Science of Learning’ – In Frederick County, Maryland, test scores rose, achievement gaps shrank and even veteran educators slowly embraced the decidedly not-faddish fix.” This statement is mostly baloney used to sell the “science of learning.”

The article opens with a new first grade teacher discussing her next day’s math lesson with the school’s principal, Tracy Poquette. The third paragraph says,

“Poquette recommended the whiteboards. ‘You’re going to ask them to hold them up,’ Poquette coached Able, miming holding a whiteboard in the air. Then you can see their answers, and how they got to that. Every student is responding.”’

This seems fine but it is hardly innovative. This technique comes from the 20th century or maybe even the 19th century. The next paragraph states, “The sessions are meant to accelerate student learning and take some of the guesswork out of becoming an effective teacher, part of a larger district plan to incorporate research from the fields of neuroscience, educational psychology and cognitive science — often referred together broadly as the ‘science of learning.’”

They are selling baseless malarkey. Neuroscience and cognitive science still do not provide much usable insight into how students learn or what the best teaching methods are.

The claim of rising test scores is deliberately misleading. The scores may have risen a little but this is a case in which the cause is pretty clear. In statistics, the r-value correlation has a value between o and 1 for determining the effects of different inputs on education testing results. An r = 0 means there in no relationship and an r = 1 means the input is 100% determinative. Inputs like teacher, curriculum design, class size, etc. can be evaluated. The only input ever found with more than o.3 r-value is family wealth at a 0.9 r-value. Between 2021 and 2022, Frederick County, Maryland had “the largest net positive change in total income in the state.” As indicated by statistical analysis, of course test scores raised some.

These fraudulent claims about the “science of learning” are being financed by wealthy people wanting to implement competency based education (CBE). With its concentration on developing mastery of small discrete information bites, CBE makes kids learning at screens more possible. Since 2010, the annual GSV+ASU conference, which is a big deal with tech billionaires, has been striving toward this goal. At their 2023 conference in San Diego, Carnegie and ETS announced a new partnership to create functional testing for competency based education (CBE).

GSV appears to have convinced Tim Knowles and the Carnegie Foundation to abandon the Carnegie Unit to open the way for CBE based testing and badges.

The Claims and Propaganda

Trish Jha, a research fellow at the Center for Independent Studies in Australia, just published a more than 15,000 word essay explaining why the “science of learning” is needed. She claims:

The proponents of the “science of learning” claim that Pestalozzi, Herbart and Dewey, the fathers of progressive education, were wrong. They tell us that “problem based education” is counterproductive and that discovery approaches are harming children. They claim that direct instruction and drilling small bits of information to mastery are what children need.

“Australian education needs to position the science of learning as the foundation for policy and practice.”

“Unfortunately, key pillars of Australian education policy do not reflect the science of learning, due to the far-reaching impacts of progressive educational beliefs dating back to the 18th century.

These beliefs include that:

  • Students learn best when they themselves guide their learning and it aligns with their interest;
  • Rote learning is harmful;
  • Learning should be based on projects or experiences, and that doing this will result in critical and creative thinkers.

But these beliefs are contradicted by the science of learning.”

Ms. Jha asserts, “The teaching approach best supported by the evidence is explicit instruction of a well-sequenced, knowledge-focused curriculum.” She sites E. D. Hirsh as one of her experts supporting this thinking.

It is part of a worldwide effort by wealthy people to digitized education under the cover of “science of learning”. In 2018, the Center for American Progress (CAP) wrote:

“This brief builds on the growing momentum for both the science of learning and school redesign. Last month, for instance, the XQ Institute released a policy guide for states on how best to redesign their schools. The document argued, among other things, that students should be able to learn at their own pace, progressing as they demonstrate mastery of key concepts.

And CAP went on to quote XQ:

“[Competency-based education] isn’t about replacing what goes on in the classroom with less-demanding experiences outside of it. This is about integrating innovative approaches to teaching in the classroom with opportunities for students to develop practical, concrete skills in real world settings. And it’s about awarding credit for learning—demonstrated learning—no matter where or when the learning takes place.”

The XQ institute is the creation of noted anti-public school and teacher-disparaging billionaire, Laurene Powell Jobs.

For 50 years, mastery-based education now called CBE has been a major flop. Established on the mind-numbing drill and skill approach, CBE undermines authentic learning. It has never worked.

Deans for Impact a Billionaire Created Example

The Deans for Impact Supporters Page

Teach for America (TFA) is viewed by many people as the billionaires’ army for school privatization and the New Schools Venture Fund (NSVF) is the Swiss army knife of public school privatization. Deans for Impact (DFI) was created in 2015 with personnel from TFA and NSVF.

DFI founder, Benjamin Riley, was a policy director at NSVF. Riley stepped down as executive director of DFI in August 2022 and was replaced by another NSVF alumnus, Valarie Sakimura. Francesca Forzani, the current board president, spent 4 years as a TFA teacher in Greenville, Mississippi. The list of people from public school privatization promoting organizations who have served on the DFI board of directors is extensive:

Supporters of DFI have been very generous since the founding in 2015. The last year for which tax records are available was 2022. Federal tax forms 990-PF show:

  • Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (TIN: 56-2618866)  $3,482,504
  • Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation (TIN: 73-1312965)  $2,135,000
  • Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (TIN: 36-4336415)  $2,375,000
  • The Joyce Foundation (TIN: 36-6079185)  $2,400,000
  • Carnegie Corporation of New York (TIN: 13-1628151) $875,000

These are huge sums of money but not for billionaires. 

The Carnegie Corporation did not contribute to DFI until Timothy Knowles became president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 2021; probably not a coincidence.

Deans for Impact states:

“DFI believes all teacher-candidates should know the cognitive-science principles explored in The Science of Learning. And all educators, including new teachers, should be able to connect those principles to their practical implications for the classroom.”

Of course cognitive scientists do not agree on these principles and the neuroscience pitch is fantasy, but DFI is coming through with its deliverables.

Deans for Impact is just one small example of the many organizations billionaires have created to do their bidding.

Please open the link to read Tom Ultican’s conclusion.

Categories Accountability, Curriculum, Education Industry, Fake

Michael Hiltzik: Trump’s Pathetic Lies About Obamacare and COVID

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2024 //
1

At the recent Vice-Presidential debate, JD Vance engaged in sanewashing and normalizing Trump, falsely claiming that Trump tried to improve or salvage Obamacare. He lied, as LA Times’ Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist Michael Hiltzik shows. In fact, Trump and most other Republicans tried to kill Obamacare. Trump was also responsible for incompetent management of the federal response to COVID, which increased the death toll.

Every newspaper should either have its own Michael Hiltzik or repost his columns.

Hiltzik writes:

My favorite Lily Tomlin line is this one: “No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”

I love it more today than ever, because it applies so perfectly to how we must respond to the campaign claims of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Especially Trump’s assertions about his role — heroic, in his vision — in “saving” the Affordable Care Act and fighting the COVID pandemic.

I’ve written before about the firehouse of fabrication and grift emanating from the Trump campaign like a political miasma. On these topics, he has moved beyond his habit of merely concocting a false reality about, say, immigration and crime to deliberately concocting a false reality about himself. 

Donald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.

— JD Vance, flagrantly lying about Trump’s management of the Affordable Care Act

To start by summarizing: Trump did everything in his power to destroy the Affordable Care Act, starting on the very first day of his term in 2017. On COVID, he did everything in his power to make America defenseless against the spreading pandemic.

Let’s take them in order. 

Here’s what Trump said about the Affordable Care Act during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris: “I had a choice to make when I was president, do I save it and make it as good as it can be? Never going to be great. Or do I let it rot? … And I saved it. I did the right thing.” 

This was the prelude to his head-scratching assertion that he has “concepts of a plan” to reform healthcare in the U.S. I examined what that might mean in a recent column, in which I explained that it would turn the U.S. healthcare system to the deadly dark ages when people with preexisting medical conditions would be either denied coverage or charged monstrous markups.

During his own debate Tuesday with Tim Walz, Vance made himself an accomplice to Trump’s crime against truth.

Here’s Vance’s version of the Trumpian fantasy: 

“Donald Trump has said that if we allow states to experiment a little bit on how to cover both the chronically ill, but the non-chronically ill … He actually implemented some of these regulations when he was president of the United States. And I think you can make a really good argument that it salvaged Obamacare. … Donald Trump could have destroyed the program. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.”

Here’s what Trump actually did to the Affordable Care Act during his presidency. He had made repealing the ACA a core promise of his 2016 presidential campaign, stating on his website, “On day one of the Trump Administration, we will ask Congress to immediately deliver a full repeal of Obamacare.” (Thanks are due to the indispensable Jonathan Cohn of Huffpost for excavating the quote.)

Trump drove down Obamacare enrollment every year he was in office; when Biden removed Trump’s obstacles, enrollment soared. 

(KFF / Kevin Drum)

On Inauguration Day, Trump issued an executive order instructing the entire executive branch to find ways to “waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation of any provision or requirement” of the ACA. 

During his presidency, he never abandoned the Republican dream of repealing Obamacare, even after July 28, 2017, when the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) strode to the Senate well and delivered a thumbs-down coup de grace to a GOP repeal bill.

Trump never ceased slandering the ACA as a “disaster.” He returned to the theme during last month’s debate: “Obamacare was lousy healthcare,” he said. “Always was. It’s not very good today.” As president, he threatened to make it “implode,” and used every tool he could get his fingers on to do so. 

In September 2017 he slashed the advertising budget for the upcoming open enrollment period for individual insurance policies by a stunning 90%, to $10 million from the previous year’s $100 million. He also cut funds for nonprofit groups that employ “navigators,” those who help people in the individual market understand their options and sign up, by roughly 40%, to $36.8 million from $62.5 million. 

Just after taking office, he abruptly canceled the customary last-minute advertising blitz to encourage enrollments in Obamacare plans before open enrollment ended on Jan. 31. The last minute surge in enrollments, which had occurred every previous year, vanished. The drop-off was particularly devastating because it was concentrated among the healthiest potential enrollees — those who often wait until the last minute to sign up and whose premiums generally subsidize older, less healthy patients.

The impact these policies had on enrollment was inescapable. In the three years before Trump took office, ACA marketplace plans experienced annual enrollment increases, to 12.7 million enrollees in 2016 from 8 million in 2014. During every year of the Trump administration, enrollment declined, falling to 11.4 million in 2020.

Every year since Joseph Biden took office, enrollment has increased, reaching a record 21.3 million this year — an 86% increase over Trump’s last year. 

As for Vance’s fatuous claim that Trump “worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care,” you have the right to ask what Vance has been smoking.

The only bipartisanship on the ACA during the Trump years, Cohn observes, were the actions of GOP senators such as McCain and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to cooperate with Democrats to stave off their fellow Republicans’ anti-ACA vandalism.

Now onto Trump’s fantasy vision of his role in fighting the COVID pandemic. Speaking in a low-energy, exhausted monotone at a speech Tuesday in Milwaukee and reading at times from a binder, he praised himself for instituting Operation Warp Speed, which funded COVID vaccine development in record time and got them rolled out in January 2021.

“We did a great job with the pandemic. Never got the credit we deserved,” he said. He then veered into blaming China for the pandemic, a familiar topic. He said bluntly that the pandemic was “caused by the Wuhan lab. I said that from the beginning, came from Wuhan. And the Wuhan lab, it wasn’t from bats in a cave that was 2,000 miles away. … It’s really the China virus.”

As for the rest of his COVID performance, he said this: “We did a great job with the ventilators, the masks and the gowns and everything. … When we got here the cupboards, our cupboards, I used to say our cupboards were bare. … No president put anything in for a pandemic.” Then he segued into praising himself for a big tax cut, and COVID was forgotten.

A few points about this spiel:

Trump is correct that Operation Warp Speed was a significant achievement. But he didn’t follow up by advocating for its product, the COVID vaccine. Instead, he has thrown in his lot with fanatical anti-vaccine agitators such as Robert F. Kennedy. He has repeated an anti-vax mantra, promising, “I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.” This is a formula for exposing children to vaccine-preventable diseases such as measles and even polio.

Trump’s reference to the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the source of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, underscores how closely the so-called lab-leak theory of COVID’s origins is tied to right-wing partisan politics. The theory originated with Trump acolytes at the State Department, who saw the accusation as a convenient weapon in Trump’s economic war with China.

To this day, not a speck of evidence has been produced to validate this claim; scientists versed in the relevant disciplines of virology and epidemiology say the evidence overwhelmingly supports the hypothesis that the virus reached humans via the wildlife trade, and that its journey may well have started with bats thousands of miles from Wuhan, China.

Trump is lying when he says his predecessors in the White House left him without resources. The truth is that Trump himself hobbled pandemic response from the start. 

In 2016, in the wake of the Ebola epidemic in Africa, President Obama had established the the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense at the National Security Council “to prepare for and, if possible, prevent the next outbreak from becoming an epidemic or pandemic,” in the words of its senior director, Beth Campbell. Trump dissolved it in 2018.

During the pandemic, Trump cut off funding for the World Health Organization. He eliminated a $200-million pandemic early-warning programtraining scientists in China and elsewhere to detect and respond to such threats. He sidelined the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which had been established under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Due to these steps, the U.S. was fated to sleepwalk into the pandemic. The COVID death toll in the U.S. stands at more than 1.2 million, and its reported death rate from COVID of 341.1 per 100,000 population is the highest in the developed world.

Ventilators, masks and gowns? Trump placed the procurement of this essential personal protective equipment in the hands of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who handled the task incompetently. Kushner turned away urgent appeals from state and local officials for those supplies.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile, it’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” Kushner said at a briefing. 

Following his remarks, the website of the government’s national strategic stockpile of medicines and supplies was changed from asserting that its purpose was to “support” the emergency efforts of state, local and tribal authorities by ensuring that “the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most.” The new language redefined the stockpile’s role as “to supplement state and local supplies … as a short-term stopgap.”

Supplies of ventilators, masks and gowns remained scarce through the first months of the pandemic. A procurement official at a Massachusetts hospital system told me of having had to cut a deal with a shadowy broker offering 250,000 Chinese-made masks at an inflated price, completing the transaction for $1 million at a darkened warehouse five hours from home.

Trump made anti-science incompetence and disregard for the welfare of Americans part of our history. The same thing, or worse, looms on the horizon in a second Trump term.

My comment: who can forget that dramatic moment in 2017 when the late Senator John McCain strode down to the well of the Senate to cast the deciding vote not to repeal Obamacare by dramatically extending his good arm and showing a thumb’s down gesture? Trump forgot.

As to COVID, why didn’t Trump take credit for the vaccines produced by Iperatuon Warp Speed? If the scientists had called it “the TRUMP vaccine, he probably would have boasted about it. Instead, he threw his support to the anti-VAXX conspiracy theorists, which surely contributed to the death toll.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Lies, Science, Vance, J.D.

Two Front Pages: 2016 and 2024

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
8

Veteran journalist James Fallows put up a post today on his blog comparing the front page of the New York Times on October 29, 2016 to the front page of the same newspaper on October 3, 2024.

I recommend that you open the link and see what he was comparing.

Categories Elections, Hillary Clinton, History, Media, Trump

Jack Smith’s Case Against Donald Trump for Launching a Failed Coup Attempt

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
14

For those of us who take the law seriously, Trump’s successful evasion of accountability for the failed coup on January 6, 2021, is outrageous. Trump has used delay as his primary strategy for avoiding accountability, as well as his partisan ties to federal judges like Aileen Cannon, whom he appointed, and the rightwing majority on the Supreme Court. Judge Cannon tossed out the documents case. The only viable case right now is Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for launching the events of that day. That case will be heard by Judge Tanya Chutman, who was appointed by Obama. It’s a sad day when the ability to get justice depends on which judge is assigned to the case.

Jordan Rubin writes about Jack Smith’s latest filing here. Smith had to rewrite his brief to acknowledge the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the President has absolute immunity for any “official acts.” Should planning to overthrow the Constitution, to subvert the election, and to send a mob to storm the Capitol be considered “official acts”?

Special counsel Jack Smith’s big immunity brief is here. The 165-page (somewhat redacted) motion lays out why, in the government’s view, the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling doesn’t stop Donald Trump from standing trial in his federal election interference case.

As an example of what the motion seeks to accomplish, consider the discussion of the alleged evidence related to former Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump pressured to subvert the 2020 presidential election.

As an example of what the motion seeks to accomplish, consider the discussion of the alleged evidence related to former Vice President Mike Pence.

To understand the Pence analysis, recall that Chief Justice John Roberts’ July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States granted absolute immunity for “core” presidential acts, presumptive immunity for all other official acts, and no immunity for unofficial acts. While the high court’s Republican-appointed majority said that it’s up to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to perform the immunity analysis in the first instance, the justices gave the Washington judge a head start in some parts, including with Pence. They said that whenever Trump and Pence discussed “their official responsibilities” — namely regarding Pence’s certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — they had engaged in “official conduct.”

That means Trump would have presumptive immunity for those alleged actions, which Smith would need to rebut. Roberts’ opinion (rather vaguely) said that can be done by showing that the prosecution wouldn’t “pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” So that’s why Smith wrote in the motion that because that branch “has no role in the certification proceeding — and indeed, the President was purposely excluded from it by design — prosecuting the defendant for his corrupt efforts regarding Pence poses no danger to the Executive Branch’s authority or functioning.” (The vice president is involved in certification via the office’s role as president of the Senate.)

Raskin on the Jack Smith brief: ‘American carnage is Trump’s legacy’

07:00

The special counsel further wrote that Trump “sought to encroach on powers specifically assigned by the Constitution to other branches, to advance his own self-interest and perpetuate himself in power, contrary to the will of the people.” Therefore, Smith wrote, prosecuting Trump wouldn’t “pose any danger of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch; rather, it would advance the Constitution’s structural design to prevent one Branch from usurping or impairing the performance of the constitutional responsibilities of another Branch.”

Smith’s team also made clear in the filing that prosecutors intend to introduce more evidence at trial related to Pence, who is not accused of any wrongdoing. For instance, they want to introduce evidence of what they call unofficial communications that Trump had with Pence in their capacity as candidates (not as president and vice president), including when Pence “tried to encourage” Trump “as a friend” when news networks began to call the 2020 race for Joe Biden, and later when Pence suggested that Trump should recognize the process was over and run again in 2024. Even if those communications were deemed “official,” Smith wrote, the immunity presumption would be rebutted there too, he argued.

To be sure, the Pence evidence is only part of the case that Smith wants to bring against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty.

To be sure, the Pence evidence is only part of the case that Smith wants to bring against Trump, who has pleaded not guilty. And if the former president wins next month’s presidential election, he’ll be empowered to dismiss the case entirely.

But if Trump loses, then Chutkan would have a heavy task ahead in weighing the voluminous allegations and evidence Smith presents in the monster filing and deciding whether it passes the high court’s (again, rather vague) immunity test. Ultimately, whatever the judge rules will be subject to review again by the justices before any trial can go forward. That won’t happen before the election.

The case will either be killed soon by way of a Trump victory or will linger on for months, if not years, to first determine whether the Supreme Court will even let Trump stand trial over any of these allegations.

Categories Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Justice, Trump

Rachel Maddow on JD Vance: Who Is He?

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2024 //
20

Rachel Maddow often manages to come up with a very different take on the news as compared to other talk show hosts. She is fascinated with history, so she often takes her viewers down new paths.

When she was trying to figure out JD Vance, she discovered two of the men who influenced his views. One is a podcaster named “Jack Murphy,” whose real name is John Goldman. He is known for racism, misogyny, and his association with the alt-right. He is very big on the idea of women’s submission to men. He even wrote a book about it.

The other is a man named Curtis Yarvin, a podcaster who is known for his anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian views.

Watch this segment.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Vance, J.D.
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