Dana Milbank: “You Weren’t Supposed to Fact-Check Me!”

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
5

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reacted quickly last night to the Vice-Presidential debate:

Half an hour into Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, JD Vance lodged a whiny protest.


“Margaret,” he said to moderator Margaret Brennan of CBS News, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact check!”


It was a lie on top of another lie, supplemented by a pair of other lies, in support of an even bigger lie.


There was no “rule” against fact-checking. And Vance had just told a whopper. He had alleged that, in Springfield, Ohio, “you’ve got schools that are overwhelmed, you’ve got hospitals that are overwhelmed, you have got housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants.”


There is no “open border,” Kamala Harris isn’t the president, and the thousands of Haitian migrants to which Vance was referring have legal status, which Brennan had accurately pointed out. But Vance claimed that “what’s actually going on” was that the Haitian migrants are there as part of “the facilitation of illegal immigration” — and he kept going until the moderators shut off the candidates’ microphones.

From the sidelines, Donald Trump cheered on his running mate. “Margaret Brennan just lied again about the ILLEGAL MIGRANTS let into our Country by Lyin’ Kamala Harris, and then she cut off JD’s mic to stop him from correcting her!” he posted on Truth Social.

The up-is-down moment was all the worse because it was in response to Vance’s original libels about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield: that they were bringing crime, disease and, yes, eating the cats and dogs of the town’s residents. Vance declined to walk back that calumny during the debate, instead saying: “The people that I’m most worried about in Springfield, Ohio, are the American citizens who have had their lives destroyed by Kamala Harris’s open border.”


It feels entirely appropriate that CBS chose to hold the vice-presidential debate in a studio once home to “Captain Kangaroo.”


For three decades beginning in the mid-1950s, the Captain, along with Mr. Green Jeans, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, Mr. Moose and other friends, regaled children with fantastic stories, a Magic Drawing Board, and cartoons featuring the likes of Tom Terrific, a shape-shifting boy who lived in a tree house and could transform himself into anything he wanted by using the funnel-shaped hat that sat on his head.


But Captain Kangaroo never conjured a figure quite so outlandish as JD Vance.

This shape-shifting boy has gone from being a never-Trump author who in 2016 compared the “reprehensible” Trump to Adolf Hitler, to a venture capitalist who in 2020 said Trump “thoroughly failed to deliver,” to the junior senator from Ohio who, as Trump’s running mate in 2024, worships the ground the former president walks on.


Vance has used his own Magic Drawing Board to create a whimsical portrait of reality in this election season. He has embraced the fiction that Trump won the 2020 election. He has falsely claimed that Democrats were responsible for two assassination attempts against Trump. He has seconded Trump’s routine lies about crime, jobs, tariffs and the border. He has slandered his vice-presidential opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, accusing him of “stolen valor” after Walz’s 24 years of honorable military service. And he has led the vile demonization of the Haitians in Springfield.


“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he admitted last month on CNN.


And that’s just what he did during the debate. Walz wasn’t a particularly skilled debater; he tripped over words and at one point said, “I’ve become friends with school shooters” when he was referring to the families of school-shooting victims. But even if Walz had been quicker on his feet, there wouldn’t have been a way to keep up with the fictions Vance submitted.

The senator said Harris “became the appointed border czar.” She received no such appointment.
He said “over $100 billion” of Iranian assets were unfrozen “thanks to the Kamala Harris administration.” Not so.


On abortion, he said he “never supported a national ban.” When running for the Senate two years ago, he said he “certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”


On health care, he served up the howler of the night when he said that Trump “saved” the “collapsing” Affordable Care Act. Instead of destroying Obamacare, Vance said, “Donald Trump worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans have access to affordable care.”
In reality, of course, Trump tried his best to kill Obamacare. (John McCain famously thwarted the effort in the Senate.)


Vance capped the night by saying that Trump “peacefully” surrendered power four years ago. When Walz asked him point-blank whether Trump had lost that election, Vance would not answer.


Throughout the debate, Vance pretended that Harris was the president, referring to “Kamala Harris’s open border” and “Kamala Harris’s atrocious economic record.” He claimed that “Kamala Harris let in fentanyl” and “enabled the Mexican drug cartels to operate freely in this country.”


And on Truth Social, Trump added still zanier claims. “Tim Walz wants to abolish ICE. … I SAVED our Country from the China Virus. … CBS is LYING AGAIN about the 2020 Election.” And best of all: “JD Vance just CRUSHED Tampon Tim with the FACTS.”


Fact check: Half true. JD Vance just crushed the facts.

In addition:

NPR fact-checked the debate in real time.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Lies, Vance, J.D.

The Vice-Presidential Debate: A Wash

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2024 //
56

The great debate between Senator JD Vance and Governor Tim Walz did not change any votes.

JD is a skilled debater, more so than Tim Walz. Both seemed to go out of their way to be civil. Neither of them attacked the other with teeth bared. They occasionally seemed to be searching for common ground.

You would need a fair amount of background knowledge to know how frequently and coolly Vance lied. He said that Trump saved Obamacare. That was a lie. In fact, Trump tried to repeal Obamacare; the party slogan was “repeal and replace.” The GOP never had a plan to put in its place. They still don’t.

Vance denied that he ever supported a national ban on abortion. That was a lie. He is on video saying just that.

Vance said for the umpteenth time that the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were there illegally; a few days ago, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine wrote an opinion article in The New York Times saying that the Haitians in Springfield were legally introduced to this country.

When asked directly about January 6, he dodged the question and said that on January 20, there was a peaceful transfer of power. He didn’t mention Trump’s refusal to concede or to attend Biden’s inauguration.

When asked whether Trump lost the 2020 election, he dodged the question and claimed that Kamala Harris had engaged in censoring people during the height of COVID (I’m not sure but I think he referred to the government’s efforts to combat COVID misinformation.)

CNN released a fact-checker’s report on the debate. According to CNN, Vance was fact-checked 15 times on his claims, while Walz was fact-checked only twice.

NPR had the best of the fact checks of the debate.

Tim Walz was flustered and failed to answer crisply when questioned about claims he made over the years about being in Hong Kong at the time of the Tianamen Square massacre in 1989. He answered awkwardly, then said he “misspoke.”

No one is likely to change their mind after the VP debate.

Categories Elections, Lies, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

The Georgia Court Decision Overturning the Abortion Ban

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
5

This decision by Superior Court Judge Robert C.I. McBurney is well worth reading. It’s a thoughtful analysis of why the state ban on abortion at six weeks of pregnancy in Georgia deprives the pregnant woman of her rights. The decision is 26 pages. Start reading on page 6: The Issue.

One of the best passages appears on pp. 14-15, where the judge writes:

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could–or should–force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the sake of another.”

Categories Gender, Georgia, Health

Eugene Robinson: Why Is the Presidential Election So Close?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
8

Eugene Robinson is a regular columnist for The Washington Post. He is baffled that the election is so close. He finds one demographic where Trump holds a decisive lead. This group is loyal to Trump. They think he cares about them and empathizes with them. He does care about separating them from their hard-earned cash. He does care about getting their votes. He does care about exploiting their grievances, their resentment about being left behind. It’s hard to remember what precisely he did for them during his four year term in office.

Robinson writes:

It is absolutely, completely, totally ridiculous that this election is even close. But here we are.

The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump should not be a tough call. Harris is a former prosecutor; Trump, a felon. Harris gives campaign speeches about her civic values; Trump rants endlessly about his personal grievances, interrupting himself with asides about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. Harris has outlined a detailed set of policy proposals for the economy; Trump nonsensically offers tariffs as a panacea, describing this fantasy in terms that make it clear he doesn’t understand how tariffs work.

Also, Harris never whipped thousands of supporters into a frenzy and sent them off to the Capitol, where they smashed their way into the citadel of our democracy, injuring scores of police officers and threatening to hang the vice president, in an attempt to overturn the result of a free and fair election. Trump did.

Yet polls tell us that either candidate could win. The Post’s polling average has Harris ahead by 2 percentage points nationally. The Post also finds that Harris holds leads in four of the seven crucial swing states — 3 percentage points in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, 2 points in Michigan, less than a point in Nevada — but adds a note of caution: “Every state is within a normal-sized polling error of 3.5 points and could go either way.”

So how is it possible that this is not a done deal? I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer, but I can throw out a few theories.

One obvious potential factor is that Harris would be the first woman to serve as president and commander in chief. It amazes me that the preceding sentence can be written in 2024 — decades after the careers of Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir and so many other women who have led their nations in peace and war. But, again, here we are.

Harris and her advisers have made the decision not to lean into the history-making aspects of her candidacy, which I think is wise — if only because Trump so desperately wants to have a fight over gender and race. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), are trying hard to win the votes of men who equate manhood with cartoonish machismo — men who somehow feel that their status and prospects are threatened because they are men.

An Associated Press poll released on Thursday found that about 4 in 10 Americans believe Harris’s gender “will hurt her chances of getting elected this fall,” which suggests the manly-men act by Trump and Vance might be having some impact. Then again, the issue of reproductive rights, along with gratuitous insults such as Vance’s “childless cat ladies” slur, might be driving enough women into Harris’s corner to offset Trump’s harvest of dudes. I find it hard to conclude that gender alone answers the question of why Harris doesn’t have a bigger lead.

Deep in the numbers, you can find other hypotheses. Trump got 74 million votes in the 2020 election. Joe Biden got 81 million — thankfully — and won the electoral vote 306-232. But Trump’s showing means he started his 2024 campaign with a big base of support, and it has remained loyal.

White voters without a college degree are a key component of Trump’s base, and two recent polls — one by the New York Timesand one by CNN — showed Harris with a huge deficit of roughly 35 points to Trump among this segment. That is worse than Biden did against Trump in 2020, when he lost this big demographic by 32 points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Whites without a college degree make up 42 percent of the electorate — meaning that if Harris were matching Biden’s performance with this group, she would add a full point to her overall national lead.

This might suggest that Trump’s red-meat-to-the-base campaign strategy is not as crazy as it looks. His vicious demagoguery on immigration — the lies he keeps telling about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, for example — invites working-class Whites to see their jobs and communities as under threat. That kind of tribal appeal likely does not win Trump many new voters, but it might keep some of the old ones on his side.

Still, though, how does any of this overcome Trump’s manifest unfitness? How does any of it erase his pathetic performance in the debate? How does it nullify the fact that he awaits sentencing by a New York judge after 34 guilty verdicts in a criminal trial? If the answer is buried somewhere in some poll, I can’t find it.

The truth about the election might be simple: It is what it is. Look at the trend lines in the polling averages. Trump had a narrow but consistent lead over Biden. Soon after Harris became the candidate, the lines crossed, and she took a lead over Trump. Since taking that lead, she has not surrendered it. In fact, she has slowly expanded it.

It is possible that Harris could pull ahead decisively. But it is also quite possible that this race will still be too close to call on Election Day. And at that point, the question we face will not be theoretical, but urgently practical: With Democrats’ huge advantage in money and volunteers, will they be able to turn out their supporters in numbers big enough to overwhelm any hidden population of Republican voters that the pollsters might be missing?

The people, not the pollsters, will give that answer.

Categories Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Hypocrisy, Trump

Umair Haque: Why Is the Presidential Election So Close?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2024 //
36

Umair Haque is an economist who writes at a blog called The Issue. He recently addressed an issue that has befuddled me and probably you as well. How is it possible that Trump is tied in the polls with Kamala Harris? He is an embittered old man who spews hate and cares only about himself; she is a vibrant and empathetic woman who wants to make life better for everyone. How can they be tied?

Haque has an answer. Democrats keep talking about how good the economy is, but they don’t speak to the vast number of people who are struggling economically.

He writes:

Day after day now, polls say the same thing.

The election’s deadlocked.

Despite all of it. History, immense spending, speeches, rallies, the drama surrounding Biden stepping down, the euphoria around Kamala.

So: what’s going on here?

What Makes Politics Move in a Capitalist Society?

By now, you should know, because precisely what we’ve discussed over the last few months is coming true.

Kamala and Tim aren’t connecting on the economy.

And yet it’s the Number One Issue for voters.

Let’s recap. America’s a hyper capitalist society. In such a society, the economy is always the top issue. It comes before everything else, because in a place like America, economics is existential. There are no real safety nets. And money, having enough of it, is literally everything.

That’s not so much the case elsewhere. To use the example I always do, the Sorbonne in Paris—Europe’s best university—is free. In America, sending a kid to an Ivy League school costs three times the median income, enough to bankrupt most families.

So the economy is always issue number one. Always.

And that’s why the Dems have a long, long history of losing. Because they are frankly pretty poor at crafting economic agendas which convince Americans, since they won’t admit Americans are in dire economic pain to begin with. Americans, meanwhile, have grown up in an environment which has sort of been poisoned, and any social contract or agenda remotely European or Canadian is instantly called “communism” or “socialism.”

Put those two trends together, and you can explain the Democrats’ long losing record—or why, in America, the default is that the GOP tends to win.

How Long Can the Democrats Keep on Ignoring the Economy?

But in times like these, the economy is…even more important. Crucial. It’s always the decisive factor, but this isn’t a normal era by any stretch of imagination.

The economy is a wreck.

It is doing really, really badly. If the question is: how’s capitalism doing, then the answer is, great. Yes, stock prices are roaring, sure, profits are in rude health, and yeah, CEOs are making out like pirate emperor bandits. But none of that’s the economy.

The economy is how average people are doing, and all the indications are they’re doing pretty terribly. Incomes just now crossed 2019 levels, and that means they fell for five straight years.

Meanwhile, prices exploded.

Before that came a long, long run of stagnation: median incomes for men, for example, are lower today than they were in the 1970s.

So people are struggling. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck, large percentages struggle to pay bills, and of course, generations are in downward mobility, while “unretirement” is becoming a social trend.

The Democrats continue to make the fatal mistake they always make.

Ignoring all this.

People Trust Trump on the Economy More Because the Democrats Don’t Seem to Actually Care About It

Who was it that reached right into the heart of the working class, and empathized with its misfortunes? It wasn’t the Democrats. It was Trump.

Think of how bizarre that is. Trump’s a guy that likes to flaunt being a billionaire. But because the Democrats ignored the biggest socioeconomic issue of the last half century, he was able to walk away with the whole ballgame.

Let me put that even more sharply.

To this day, Democrats won’t dare mention this damning statistic, that median incomes are where they were, or lower, than half a century ago.

Those really are Roman sorts of social indicators, no exaggeration necessary. A half decade of stagnation is OK, maybe. But a half century?

But the Democrats never, ever even look in this direction. They look away awkwardly.

Their silence is deafening.

Why is Trump still so widely supported?

Because more people trust him on the economy. (And on immigration, which is the same thing, because here there’s a naive theory of economics, that immigrants take our jobs and so forth, which can be true, but in America, has more to do with the reverse, offshoring, etcetera.)

Why do people trust Trump more on the economy?

He empathizes with their pain.

The Democrats don’t even attempt to. They deliberately ignore it. But this is, let me say it again, the single biggest socioeconomic issue in modern history.

What happens when socioeconomics stagnate for long periods of time—like half centuries? Democracies die. People give up on their institutions and leaders. They give up on each other. They turn on one another…

And there’s a good reason why.

How Economic Stagnation Leads to Social Collapse

If the pie’s the same size, or shrinking, as it is for many Americans, then the only option is to try and fight tooth and nail to keep your slice. To have a bigger slice, you need to take it from someone else.

That’s how democracies die by way of stagnant or declining economies.

It isn’t a theory, speculation, opinion: there’s a formal mechanism at work, a kind of vicious cycle, an engine of ruin.

A shrinking pie, a stagnant one, necessitates a less democratic society. I have to take from you. To keep my slice the same size, I need to wrest it away from everyone else.

Thus, democratic norms of peace, equality, justice, and truth soon corrode. They’re replaced by authoritarian fascist norms of violence, domination, hierarchy, and blood-and-soil destiny.

This is how democracies die, and while that’s a phrase you’ll see used a lot, it’s not very well understood even by the columnists and pundits who sort of utter it ad infinitum. This isn’t a game. It’s not a set of platitudes.

This is what happened to America.

And still is.

“Hey, At Least They’re Not the Fascists”

The Democrats just refuse to acknowledge any of this. The long run stagnation. The decline. Any real aspect of it how it’s sort of wrecked the Dream, and destroyed generations of Americans’ fortunes and possibilities.

That leaves a gigantic, truly enormous, vacuum. One that’s big enough for Donald Trump’s ego to fill.

It’s a striking, bizarre thing to see the working and lower middle class support a billionaire, who of course, is also a convicted fraudster. Sort of crazy, right? That happens because nobody trusts the Dems on the economy, and nobody trusts the Dems on the economy because they won’t even admit a glimmer of reality when it comes to the economy.

So what truths can they speak back to people, to gain their trust?

Hence, here we are, sort of half-heartedly supporting them, most of us, knowing that they aren’t going to do a whole lot to really fix much, but hey, at least they’re not the fascists.

Not exactly the stuff of an inspiring politics, is it?

Why the Election’s Closer Than it Should Be

The Democrats still have time to fix this problem, and I say that chuckling, because we all know they won’t.

If anything, it’s probably going to get worse.

People are going to be mystified about why the Democrats think things are great, when they struggle to pay the bills.

They’ll look at Trump, who at least empathizes with them, and says things are bad out there, and it’ll strike a chord in them. Trump will continue to be more credible on the economy, the most important issue, even though he’s, wait for it, a convicted fraudster.

And after a time, Kamala’s grin is going to seem a little off kilter to a lot of people. Why does she keep on smiling, when things are pretty bad for me and mine? Is she for real? What’s the deal here?

I’m not trying to be unkind, I’m just pointing out that being joyous, while it’s fine and nice and good, and even touching, for those who are already true believers, also carries a risk in times like these. It can come across as tone-deaf. These are difficult, difficult days for the vast, vast majority of people, and I know that in statistics like “50% of young people feel numb” or “70% of people feel financially traumatized.”

Given those sorts of social currents, it might be tough to grin your way into the Presidency. In fact, it already is. The contest’s deadlocked. Joy is a tough sell, and at some point, it can verge on Let Them Eat Cake.

Again, those are wicked words, and I’m sorry to write them, but it has to be said, if only for the 0.001% chance the Democrats come to their senses, and begin to actually speak sense, truth, reality, on the Number One Issue to most people, the economy.

People don’t trust them on this issue, and there’s a good reason for that. Not what they want to do. But what they won’t say. The attitude they won’t take. The deafening silence everyone can hear when it comes to admitting how troubled and tough things actually are.

If I wanted you to trust me, and there was smoke billowing from the house, but I kept on telling you the curtains were wonderful, and hey, wait until you see the garage, what would you think of me? This is where the Democrats are heading when it comes to the economy, if they aren’t already, with a whole lot of people.

And that’s why the election’s a lot closer than it should be.

Categories Accountability, Democrats, Economy, Harris, Kamala, Republicans, Trump

Georgia: Court Overturns Abortion Ban!

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
6

At least for now, abortion is legal again in Georgia.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported:

The state can no longer enforce its ban on abortion that took effect in 2022, a Fulton County judge said Monday, allowing the procedure again to be performed in Georgia after a doctor detects fetal cardiac activity.

Fulton County Superior Judge Robert McBurney issued an order Monday that said abortions must be regulated as they were before Georgia’s 2019 law took effect in July 2022 — meaning the procedure is again allowed up until about 22 weeks of pregnancy.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in his order that “liberty in Georgia includes in its meaning, in its protections, and in its bundle of rights the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her healthcare choices.”

Categories Freedom, Gender, Georgia, Health

Please Help Those Who Are Working for People Affected by Hurricane Helene

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
11

We have all seen the devastating photos of the effects of Hurricane Helene. Many people in the areas hit by this storm have lost their homes, everything. My older sister lives on the border of Florida and Georgia, in the direct path of Helene; she was lucky: a tree fell onto her roof but no one was killed, and she still has a home.

Please donate to charities that are helping people, such as:

The Red Cross

The North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund


World Central Kitchen


Salvation Army

North Carolina Foundation for Public School Children’s disaster relief fund

If you have other charitable groups to add to this list, please send them.

Categories Hope

Brookings Institution: A View of Education in the Republican and Democratic Platforms

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
25

Jon Valant, head of the Brown Center at the Brookings Institution, reviewed the education sections of both parties.

He writes:

K-12 education has captured its share of headlines over the last few years. Schools—and, specifically, local school boards—became a lightning rod for anger about the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. From the first weeks of the pandemic, Republicans accused Democratic leaders of being too slow to reopen schools. That accusation gained potency as evidence mounted that schools hadn’t been the vectors of COVID-19 transmission that experts initially feared. Sensing vulnerability, Democrats became reluctant to engage on K-12 issues, and Republicans such as Glenn Youngkin showed that Democrats wouldn’t put up much of a fight if education became a battlefield for culture war conflicts. The result was a dizzying, maddening stretch where schools were embroiled in controversies over critical race theory and transgender students’ rights when education leaders needed to focus on pandemic recovery.

Now, as memories of the pandemic recede, the politics of education are changing. Democrats are talking more about schools, emboldened by the selection of a former schoolteacher, Tim Walz, as Vice President Harris’s running mate. Republicans, for their part, have harnessed discontent with public schools into an aggressive push for private school voucher programs that threaten America’s public education systems.

The platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties, along with the education-related portions of Project 2025, provide a glimpse of where K-12 education might be headed.

The Democratic platform

The Democrats’ 2024 platform is light on specifics, with more attention to the current administration’s accomplishments and the would-be Harris administration’s support for some broadly defined goals (e.g., reducing chronic absenteeism). To some extent, the lack of specifics stands in contrast to both the Democrats’ 2020 platform—which, for example, pledged a tripling of Title I funds for high-needs schools—and more detailed 2024 proposals for early childhood education (e.g., free, universal pre-K) and higher education (e.g., free community college). 

The 2024 platform does contain relevant, specific ideas outside of its “Education” section. For example, Democrats propose rebates for school districts that purchase electric school buses—an idea grounded in research on the harms of students’ exposure to toxins. They also offer specific proposals to reduce gun violence (amid a scourge of school shootings) and to strengthen civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ children and students of color (frequent targets of culture war attacks).

Notably, some of the platform’s clearest statements on education describe what Democrats oppose. That includes private-school voucher plans and policies hostile to transgender youth that have become increasingly popular among Republican leaders.  

The Republican platform

Republicans’ 2024 platform is also light on policy specifics. The platform has a few ideas that have long been cornerstones of GOP education politics. That includes ending teacher tenure—an idea that would require local or state action and confront fierce opposition from teachers’ unions.

The platform has language about resisting political indoctrination in schools—while seeming to propose some indoctrination of its own. This includes proposals to “support schools that teach America’s Founding Principles and Western Civilization” and “promote Fair and Patriotic Civics Education.” Along similar lines, former President Trump recently described a bewildering plan to create a credentialing body to “certify teachers who embrace patriotic values, support our way of life, and understand that their job is not to indoctrinate children.”

Substantively, the most important part of the Republican education platform might be its support for universal school choice. In about a dozen states, Republicans have recently created or expanded education savings account (ESA) programs that make public funds available to pay for private school or other educational expenses. Critics of these programs—myself included—argue that they violate our basic traditions, benefit the wealthy at the expense of others, and are not well supported by research.

Project 2025

If the Republican platform is light on policy proposals, Project 2025 certainly is not.

Along with my colleagues Rachel Perera and Katharine Meyer, I recently wrote a more detailed piece that analyzes Project 2025’s education proposals. Project 2025 proposes severe cuts to the resources and protections available to the country’s poorest, most marginalized children. For example, it proposes to eliminate the Head Start program (for young children in poverty), discontinue federal Title I funding (for schools that serve low-income children), and kneecap IDEA (federal legislation that supports students with disabilities). It’s especially harsh on transgender children, with proposals aimed at reorienting civil rights enforcement around “rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory” and stripping Title IX protections from transgender students.

In other words, Project 2025 sets its sights on the programs that serve America’s neediest students. It would essentially terminate the federal government’s long-running role in addressing inequities that arise in locally governed school systems.

Notably, many key Project 2025 proposals would require an unlikely degree of congressional cooperation. This includes some of the highest-profile proposals, such as eliminating the U.S. Department of Education (a vaguely defined idea that’s unlikely to materialize in its most extreme form). Still, a second Trump administration couldenact some Project 2025 proposals unilaterally. That includes rolling back civil rights protections and replacing civil servants in the U.S. Department of Education with political appointees after reinstating Schedule F.

Taking stock

It’s fair to say that Democrats’ plans for federal education policy are modest. Democrats aren’t proposing a markedly stronger role for the federal government. On K-12 education, Democrats remain in a mostly defensive posture as they offer a more “conservative” agenda that protects against the GOP’s increasingly radical efforts.

Just what those GOP plans might be—and just how radical they are—depends on whether the true Trumps X administration plan is the Republican platform, Project 2025, or some combination of the two. That remains to be seen

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Democrats, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Vouchers

Indiana: Most Private Schools Taking Vouchers Are Nearly All Tax-Subsidized

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
7

Indiana has followed the lead of Florida, Arizona, Ohio and other states, starting a small voucher program, expanding year by year until almost every child in the state is eligible for a voucher. Voucher advocates in Indiana hope that the only remaining limits are soon removed so that all students in the state, rich and poor alike, will qualify for a voucher.

Most of the students who use vouchers were already enrolled in private schools. The same is true in every other state with vouchers. The voucher program creates an entitlement for parents who can already afford private school.

The cost of the voucher program is near $500 million. About 70,000 students use vouchers. The public schools of Indiana enroll one million students.

Chalkbeat reports:

Voucher use has soared in Indiana since lawmakers made nearly every student in the state eligible, with more than 90% of students at more than half of all participating schools using a voucher during the 2023-24 school year, a Chalkbeat analysis found.

That was true in just 11% of private schools before lawmakers made the Indiana Choice Scholarship available to nearly every student in Indiana by relaxing income eligibility and removing other requirements to participate in the program.

Since lawmakers approved the expansion last year, the number of schools where 100% of students receive a voucher rose from just one in 2022-23 to 28 in 2023-24. Last year, in 178 of the 349 private schools that accept vouchers, more than 90% of students enrolled used a voucher to pay for tuition.

The recent growth in the share of students using vouchers has remade the scope of Indiana’s school choice program. Instead of being limited initiatives allowing students to leave struggling public schools, it’s increasingly a means for all families to choose their preferred educational settings.

Among supporters of choice, there is disagreement about the shift. Some say it proves just how popular and justified vouchers are.

“It’s phenomenal. In some ways, it’s predictable,” said Betsy Wiley of the Institute for Quality Education, a school choice advocacy group in Indiana, about the growth in voucher use. “In the years where eligibility has been expanded, you’ve seen greater growth.”

But others worry about costs and say the program has moved too far from its original purpose.

“A few of us feel strongly that this movement is about leveling the playing field for low income kids and working class kids. There’s an argument that these are taxpayer funds and we should limit that to a purpose that’s necessary, for kids who could not make those choices without it,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative education policy think tank. “I do think I’ve lost that argument.”

Meanwhile, critics of vouchers say the result isn’t just that Indiana is subsidizing tuition for families who can afford it without state funds, but that the state is doing so at the expense of up to hundreds of millions in funding for public schools.

“It’s the legislature’s obligation to provide for the common school system,” said Cathy Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education. “You’re taking the pie and slicing it up.”

Another big change to Indiana school choice could be coming soon. Some Republican leaders are pushing to merge the state’s three voucher tracks into one universal program that would give parents free rein over where to spend state funding.

Universal education choice through incremental expansion

Data from the state released earlier this year indicated that voucher use grew faster than enrollment, suggesting that vouchers were going to families already enrolled at private schools.

A Chalkbeat analysis comparing enrollment data to voucher use data at individual schools shows voucher use has grown at a faster rate than enrollment at the vast majority of schools. (One caveat: Many private schools have populations of just a few dozen students, meaning changes in enrollment and voucher use lead to large jumps in percentages.)

Statewide, around 70,000 students out of the 92,000 enrolled at private schools used a voucher to attend, receiving either the cost of the tuition and fees at their school, or 90% of the per-pupil funding the state gives to their local public schools — whichever is less.

More students receive a voucher worth 90% of their public school funding rather than the full cost of tuition and fees.

At only 13 schools statewide, less than half of all students received a voucher in 2023-24. Not every private school in Indiana participates in the voucher program.

Though private school enrollment has grown, it remains far below that of public schools in Indiana, which enroll over 1 million students…

Average ILEARN scores for the last year show that students at private schools performed better on the tests than students in public schools. But several years of broader studies of vouchers’ effects on student achievement — and other outcomes — show mixed results.

Christopher Lubienski, director of the Center for Evaluation and Education Policy at Indiana University, said his research has shown that when socioeconomic factors are controlled, public school students outperform their private school peers…

But critics like Fuentes-Rohwer of the Indiana Coalition for Public Education say the $439 million price tag for the program in 2023-24 represented a costly diversion of public resources from public schools that the state is constitutionally obligated to fund.

According to the state’s 2023-24 voucher report, if all 70,000 students receiving vouchers had attended public schools, the state would have added over $500 million in public education funding. But most voucher students receiving vouchers have never attended a public school.

“There are so many things you have to go through as a public school system to be transparent,” Fuentes-Rohwer said. “We are very concerned that funding leaves public schools that have the obligation to educate everyone.”

With a rise in the number of schools that have a large voucher population, some predict that private schools may seek the same per-pupil funding as public schools in the future.

Lubienski noted that charter schools were once thought to be able to deliver greater achievement with less funding and regulation, but now are seeking equitable funding.

Petrilli of the Fordham Institute agreed: With less funding, charter schools ultimately couldn’t compete with traditional public schools on teacher salary.

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Categories Education Reform

Scientific American Endorses Kamala Harris

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2024 //
18

For only the second time in its 179-year history, the prestigious magazine Scientific American issued a Presidential endorsement. It endorsed Kamala Harris. The only other endorsement in its history was four years ago for Joe Biden. The magazine cares deeply about science, climate change, health, and factual evidence. For these reasons, it opposes Trump.

The editors of Scientific American wrote:

In the November election, the U.S. faces two futures. In one, the new president offers the country better prospects, relying on science, solid evidence and the willingness to learn from experience. She pushes policies that boost good jobs nationwide by embracing technology and clean energy. She supports education, public health and reproductive rights. She treats the climate crisis as the emergency it is and seeks to mitigate its catastrophic storms, fires and droughts.

In the other future, the new president endangers public health and safety and rejects evidence, preferring instead nonsensical conspiracy fantasies. He ignores the climate crisis in favor of more pollution. He requires that federal officials show personal loyalty to him rather than upholding U.S. laws. He fills positions in federal science and other agencies with unqualified ideologues. He goads people into hate and division, and he inspires extremists at state and local levels to pass laws that disrupt education and make it harder to earn a living.

Only one of these futures will improve the fate of this country and the world. That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president. That person is Kamala Harris.

Before making this endorsement, we evaluated Harris’s record as a U.S. senator and as vice president under Joe Biden, as well as policy proposals she’s made as a presidential candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, who was president from 2017 to 2021, also has a record—a disastrous one. Let’s compare.

HEALTH CARE

The Biden-Harris administration shored up the popular Affordable Care Act (ACA), giving more people access to health insurance through subsidies. During Harris’s September 10 debate with Trump, she said one of her goals as president would be to expand it. Scores of studies have shown that people with insurance stay healthier and live longer because they can afford to see doctors for preventive and acute care. Harris supports expansion of Medicaid, the U.S. health-care program for low-income people. States that have expanded this program have seen health gains in their populations, whereas states that continue to restrict eligibility have not. To pay for Medicare, the health insurance program primarily for older Americans, Harris supports a tax increase on people who earn $400,000 or more a year. And the Biden-Harris administration succeeded in passing the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which caps the costs of several expensive drugs, including insulin, for Medicare enrollees. Harris’s vice presidential pick, Tim Walz, signed into law a prohibition against excessive price hikes on generic drugs as governor of Minnesota.

When in office, Trump proposed cuts to Medicare and Medicaid (Congress, to its credit, refused to enact them.) He also pushed for a work requirement as a condition for Medicaid eligibility, making it harder for people to qualify for the program. As a candidate, both in 2016 and this year, he pledged to repeal the ACA, but it’s not clear what he would replace it with. When prodded during the September debate, he said, “I have concepts of a plan” but didn’t elaborate. Like Harris, however, he has voiced concern about drug prices, and in 2020 he signed an executive order designed to lower prices of drugs covered by Medicare.

The COVID pandemic has been the greatest test of the American health-care system in modern history. Harris was vice president of an administration that boosted widespread distribution of COVID vaccines and created a program for free mail-order COVID tests. Wastewater surveillance for viruses has improved, allowing public health officials to respond more quickly when levels are high. Bird flu now poses a new threat, highlighting the importance of the Biden-Harris administration’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy.

Trump touted his pandemic efforts during his first debate with Harris, but in 2020 he encouraged resistance to basic public health measures, spread misinformation about treatments and suggested injections of bleach could cure the disease. By the end of that year about 350,000 people in the U.S. had died of COVID; the current national total is well over a million. Trump and his staff had one great success: Operation Warp Speed, which developed effective COVID vaccines extremely quickly. Remarkably, however, Trump plans billion-dollar budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, which started the COVID-vaccine research program. These steps are in line with the guidance of Project 2025, an extreme conservative blueprint for the next presidency drawn up by many former Trump staffers. He’s also talked about ending the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, calling it a pork project.

REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Harris is a staunch supporter of reproductive rights. During the September debate, she spoke plainly about her desire to reinstate “the protections of Roe v. Wade” and added, “I think the American people believe that certain freedoms, in particular the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body, should not be made by the government.” She has vowed to improve access to abortion. She has defended the right to order the abortion pill mifepristone through the mail under authorization by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, even as MAGA Republican state officials have tried—so far unsuccessfully—to revoke those rights. As a U.S. senator, she co-sponsored a package of bills to reduce rising rates of maternal mortality. In August, Trump said he would vote against a ballot measure expanding access to abortions in Florida, where he lives. The current Florida “heartbeat” law makes most abortions illegal after six weeks of pregnancy, before many people even know they are pregnant.

Trump appointed the conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, removing the constitutional right to a basic health-care procedure. He spreads misinformation about abortion—during the September debate, he said some states support abortion into the ninth month and beyond, calling it “execution after birth.” No state allows this. He also refused to answer the question of whether he would veto a federal abortion ban, saying Congress would never approve such a ban in the first place. He made no mention of an executive order and praised the Supreme Court, three justices of which he placed, for sending abortion back to states to decide. This ruling led to a patchwork of laws and entire sections of the country where abortion is dangerously limited.

GUN SAFETY

The Biden-Harris administration closed the gun-show loophole, which had allowed people to buy guns without a license. The evidence is clear that easy access to guns in the U.S. has increased the risk of suicides, murder and firearm accidents. Harris supports a program that temporarily removes guns from people deemed dangerous by a court.

Trump promised the National Rifle Association that he would get rid of all Biden-Harris gun measures. Even after Trump was injured and a supporter was killed in an attempted assassination, the former president remained silent on gun safety. His running mate, J. D. Vance, said the increased number of school shootings was an unhappy “fact of life” and the solution was stronger school security.

ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMATE

Harris said pointedly during the September debate that climate change was real. She would continue the responsible leadership shown by Biden, who has undertaken the most substantial climate action of any president. The Biden-Harris administration restored U.S. membership in the Paris Agreement on coping with climate change. Harris’s election would continue IRA tax credits for clean energy, as well as regulations to reduce power-plant emissions and coal use. This approach puts the country on course to spend the authorized billions of dollars for renewable energy that should cut U.S. carbon emissions in half by 2030. The IRA also includes a commitment to broadening electric vehicle technology.

Trump has said climate change is a hoax, and he dodged the question “What would you do to fight climate change?” during the September debate. He pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. Under his direction the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies abandoned more than 100 environmental policies and rules, many designed to ensure clean air and water, restrict the dangers of toxic chemicals and protect wildlife. He has also tried to revoke funding for satellite-based climate-research projects.

TECHNOLOGY

The Biden-Harris administration’s 2023 Executive Order on Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence requires that AI-based products be safe for consumers and national security. The CHIPS and Science Act invigorates the chipmaking industry and semiconductor research while growing the workforce. A new Trump administration would undo all of this work and quickly. Under the devious and divisive Project 2025 framework, technology safeguards on AI would be overturned. AI influences our criminal justice, labor and health-care systems. As is the rightful complaint now, there would be no knowing how these programs are developed, how they are tested or whether they even work.

The 2024 U.S. ballots are also about Congress and local officials—people who make decisions that affect our communities and families. Extremist state legislators in Ohio, for instance, have given politicians the right to revoke any rule from the state health department designed to limit the spread of contagious disease. Other states have passed similar measures. In education, many states now forbid lessons about racial bias. But research has shown such lessons reduce stereotypes and do not prompt schoolchildren to view one another negatively, regardless of their race. This is the kind of science MAGA politicians ignore, and such people do not deserve our votes.

At the top of the ballot, Harris does deserve our vote. She offers us a way forward lit by rationality and respect for all. Economically, the renewable-energy projects she supports will create new jobs in rural America. Her platform also increases tax deductions for new small businesses from $5,000 to $50,000, making it easier for them to turn a profit. Trump, a convicted felon who was also found liable of sexual abuse in a civil trial, offers a return to his dark fantasies and demagoguery, whether it’s denying the reality of climate change or the election results of 2020 that were confirmed by more than 60 court cases, including some that were overseen by judges whom he appointed.

One of two futures will materialize according to our choices in this election. Only one is a vote for reality and integrity. We urge you to vote for Kamala Harris.

Categories Elections, Environment, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Health, Science, Trump
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