Houston: Enrollment Drops by 9,000

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
20

Many principals, teachers, parents, and students in Houston are fed up with Mike Miles’ lockstep, scripted curriculum. Miles boasts that test scores are going up, but far more important indicators are in decline, especially morale. After Miles stripped autonomy away from professionals, the district experienced alarming numbers of resignations. Hundreds of uncertified teachers have been hired to replace those who left.

Student enrollment sharply dropped by about 5%.

The Houston Chronicle reported:

Sarah Malik used to think Houston ISD’s Lantrip Elementary School was a great fit for her daughter.

After the departures of the school’s principal and several teachers in the spring, Malik knew they had to go. 

Malik is one of thousands of parents who pulled their child from HISD this year. Several told the Chronicle they were leaving the district due to the stringent reforms, plummeting morale, principal and teacher departures or cookie-cutter lessons that they said did not account for children’s individual learning needs during the previous academic year.

HISD’s enrollment will not be finalized until October, but it appears to be on track to drop below 180,000 students. 

If you read the literature about motivation, you will learn that the most important driver of motivation is a sense of autonomy. Read Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink. Miles is crushing morale, motivation, and autonomy.

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Disruption, Education Industry, Houston

Peter Greene: Conservatives Think States Can Support Both Public Schools and “Choice.” They Can’t.

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
21

Peter Greene critiques the conservative idea that states should support public schools and all sorts of choice. Greene explains why this idea erodes the quality of public schools, which enroll the vast majority of the nation’s students. Conservatives blame teachers’ unions for whatever they dont like about pibkic schools, but Greene denonstrates that they are wrong. Open the link to read the full article.

He writes:

In the National Review, Michael Petrilli, Thomas Fordham Institute honcho and long-time reformster, poses the argument that folks on the right don’t need to choose “between expanding parental options and improving traditional public schools.” Instead, he asserts, they “can and should do both.”

On the one hand, it’s a welcome argument these days when the culture panic crowd has settled on a scorched earth option for public schools. As Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, put it in his now-delayed-until-after-it-can’t-hurt-Trump-election-prospects book, “We don’t merely seek an exit from the system; we are coming for the curriculums and classrooms of the remaining public schools, too.” For many on the right, the education policy goal is to obliterate public schools and/or force them to closely resemble the private christianist schools that culture panickers favor. 

Pertrilli is sympathetic to the “let’s just give parents the money and be done with it” crowd. 

We’ve inherited a “system” that is 150 years old and is saddled with layers upon layers of previous reforms, regulations, overlapping and calcified bureaucracies, and a massive power imbalance between employees and constituents, thanks to the almighty teachers unions.

Sigh. Reforms and regulations, sure, though it would be nice for Petrilli to acknowledge that for the last forty-ish years, those have mostly come from his own reformster crowd. And I am deeply tired of the old “almighty teachers unions” trope, which is some serious baloney. But his audience thinks it’s true, so let’s move on. 

Petrilli’s point is that conservatives should not be focusing on “school choice” alone, but should embrace an “all of the above” approach. Petrilli dismisses Democrats as “none of the above” because of their “fealty to the unions,” which is, again, baloney. Democrats have spent a couple of decades as willing collaborators with the GOP ; if they are “none of the above” it’s because they’ve lost both the ability and authority to pretend to be public education supporters. The nomination of Tim Walz has given them a chance to get on the public education team, but let’s wait and see–there’s no ball that the Democratic Party can’t drop.

Petrilli sits on a practical point here (one that Robert Pondiscio has made repeatedly over the years)– public schools are a) beloved by many voters, b) not going away, and c) still educate the vast, vast majority of U.S. students. Therefore, folks should care about the quality of public education.

Petrilli then floats some ideas, all while missing the major obstacle to his idea. There are, he claims, many reforms that haven’t been tried yet, “including in red states where the teachers unions don’t have veto power.” I believe the actual number of states where the union doesn’t have veto power is fifty. But I do appreciate his backhanded acknowledgement that many states have dis-empowered their teachers unions and still haven’t accomplished diddly or squat. It’s almost as if the unions are not the real obstacle to progress.

His ideas? Well, there’s ending teacher tenure, a dog that will neither hunt nor lie down and die. First of all, there is no teacher tenure. What there is is policy that requires school districts to follow a procedure to get rid of bad teachers. Behind every teacher who shouldn’t still have a job is an administrator who isn’t doing theirs. 

Tenure and LIFO (Last In First Out) interfere with the reformster model of Genius CEO school management, in which the Genius CEO should be able to fire anyone he wants to for any reason he conceives of, including having become too expensive or so experienced they start getting uppity. 

The theory behind much of education reform has been that all educational shortfalls have been caused by Bad Teachers, and so the focus has been on catching them (with value-added processing of Big Standardized Test scores), firing them, and replacing them with super-duper teachers from the magical super-duper teacher tree. Meanwhile, other teachers would find this new threatening environment inspirational, and they would suddenly unleash the secrets of student achievement that they always had tucked away in their file cabinet, but simply hadn’t implemented.

This is a bad model, a non-sensical model, a model that has had a few decades to prove itself, and has not. Nor has Petrilli’s other idea– merit pay has been tried, and there are few signs that it even sort of works, particularly since schools can’t do a true merit pay system and also it’s often meant as a cost-saving technique (Let’s lower base pay and let teachers battle each other to win “merit” bonuses that will make up the difference).

Petrilli also argues against increased pay for teacher masters degrees because those degrees “add no value in terms of quality of teaching and learning” aka they don’t make BS Test scores go up. He suggests moving that extra money to create incentives for teachers to move to the toughest schools. 

Petrilli gets well into weeds in his big finish, in which he cites the “wisdom of former Florida governor Jeb Bush” and the golden state of Florida as if it’s a model for all-of-the-above reform and not a state that has steadily degraded and undercut public schools in order to boost charter and private operations, with results that only look great if you squint hard and ignore certain parts(Look at 4th grade scores, but be sure to ignore 8th and 12th grade results). And if you believe that test results are the only true measure of educational excellence.

So, in sum, Petrilli’s notion that GOP state leaders should support public education is a good point. What is working against it?

One is that his list is lacking. Part of the reform movement’s trouble at this point is that many of its original ideas were aimed primarily at discrediting public education. The remaining core– use standardized tests to identify and remove bad teachers– is weak sauce. Even if you believe (wrongly) that the core problem of public education is bad teaching, this is no way to address that issue. 

Beyond bad teachers, the modern reform movement hasn’t had a new idea to offer for a couple of decades. 

Petrilli also overlooks a major challenge in the “all of the above approach,” a challenge that reformsters and choicers have steadfastly ignored for decades.

You cannot run multiple parallel school systems for the same cost as a single system. 

If you want to pay for public schools and charter schools and vouchers, it is going to cost more money. “School choice” is a misnomer, because school choice has always been available. Choicers are not arguing for school choice–they’re arguing for taxpayer funded school choice. That will require more taxpayer funds. 

You can’t have six school systems for the price of one. So legislators have been left with a choice. On the one hand, they can tell taxpayers “We think school choice is so important that we are going to raise your taxes to pay for it.” On the other hand, they can drain money from the public system to pay for charters and vouchers all while making noises about how the public system is totes overfunded and can spare the money easy peasy. 

I can offer a suggestion for conservatives who want to help public schools improve.

Get over your anti-union selves.

Please open the link to finish the article.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, School Choice, Segregation, Unions, Vouchers

Dean Baker: The Little-Known Biden-Harris Success Story

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
6

Dean Baker published a terrific article in The New Republic, called “The Biggest Success Story the Country Doesn’t Know About.” Baker is a  macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research(CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot.

He wrote:

Over the last few weeks, an extraordinary series of events has altered the course of an election that previously seemed to have few surprises in store. Eight days after Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to withdraw from the presidential race and cast his support for Vice President Kamala Harris to run in his stead. It will be some time before we know all the political ramifications of these events, but whatever they may be, they will not change the past.

What can the past tell us about what’s to come? Perhaps the most critical element of a candidate’s platform is their approach to the economy. In assessing Harris as a presidential candidate, people will want to look at the economic track record of the Biden-Harris administration. As always, the president takes the lead role in setting the economic course for the administration, but throughout Biden’s term in office, Harris was standing alongside him. The Republicans will surely blame her for everything that went wrong and many things that didn’t. On the other hand, Harris can take credit for what went right, and there is much here to boast about. Indeed, she can (and should) run on the outstanding—and criminally underappreciated—economic record of the Biden administration.

Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seenthe longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed’s 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president’s watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden’s recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growtheven as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

Finally, the negative assessment that voters routinely give the Biden administration on the economy seems more based on what they hear from the media or elsewhere. They generally rate their own financial situation positively and say that the economy in their city or state is doing well. It is only the national economy, of which they have no direct knowledge, that they rate poorly.

Let the Good Times Roll!

Before going through what is positive about the Biden economy, I’ll just state the obvious. Tens of millions of people are struggling to get by, or not getting by at all. This is a horrible situation, which we should be trying to change every way we can. However, this has always been the case. We have a badly underdeveloped system of social supports, so that people cannot count on getting the food, health care, and shelter they need.

It’s also the case that the spurt of inflation in 2021 and 2022 was a shock after a long period of low inflation. People found themselves paying considerably more for food, gas, shelter, and other essentials, and in many cases their pay did not keep up, especially at the time these prices were soaring.

But the Biden administration has taken important steps to directly improve the situation for low- and moderate-income people, notably by making the subsidies in the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, more generous and expanding the Child Tax Credit, or CTC. He increased the benefitsin the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by 21 percent. Unfortunately, the expansion of the CTC, which was included in the initial recovery package, was only temporary. It expired at the end of 2021, and Biden has been unable to get the support needed in Congress to extend it.

While we should always recognize the enormous work left to be done, we need as well to acknowledge when we are making progress, and we have made an enormous amount of progress in improving living standards during Biden’s presidency. Also, the suffering of tens of millions of people at the lower end of the income distribution can’t possibly be the explanation for negative views of the economy. People at the bottom were suffering at least as much in 2019, when most people gave the economy high marks.

Categories Biden, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Higher Education

Right-Wingers Claim Tim Walz Was Not Really a Coach; GOP Investigates Whether He Is a Spy for China

By dianeravitch
August 19, 2024 //
27

Trump supporters are desperate. First, they attacked Tim Walz’s 24 years of service in the National Guard because he retired to run for Congress at a time when his unit knew they might be deployed to Afghanistan in the next two years.

The Trump rumor mill has been working overtime to depict Walz and his wife as dangerous, leftwing radicals.

Snopes debunked a rightwing rumor that Tim and Gwen Walz have a net worth of $182 million and their daughter Hope got a student loan of $82,000 forgiven. In fact, the Walz family has a net worth made up of their pensions; they own no stocks or bonds. In 2023, they had a joint income of $299,000, with almost half coming from pensions. By contrast, Republican VP candidate J.P. Vance is a multimillionaire, with a net income of $1.2 million-$1.3 million in 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal. Some Americans like the fact that Walz is not wealthy, says the WSJ, but others think he lacks the financial acumen of a wealthy man.

Now, says The New York Times, they say Walz wasn’t really a coach because he was not the head coach of the high school football team. Only the head coach, they claim, is a real coach. How petty can they be?

Meanwhile, hard–right Congressman James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, announced that his committee will investigate Walz because of his visits to China as an exchange student and as chaperone for student exchanges. Is he a spy?

All of this is a reflection of Republican desperation and Red-baiting.

Jess Bidgood, a reporter for the New York Times, asked her colleague Alan Blinder of the New York Times to explain whether Walz was really a coach:

Fact-checking questions about Walz’s role as a coach

A surprising argument has emerged from some right-wing circles: that Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was not a high school football coach because he was his team’s defensive coordinator, not the head coach. I asked my colleague Alan Blinder, a font of football knowledge who wrote about Walz’s coaching career *and* answers my questions about sports whenever I have them, to explain what’s what.

Setting aside that assertion’s spuriousness for the moment, our reporting last week on Tim Walz as Coach Walz suggests just how comfortable he is with not being the top dog.

Rocky Almond, who coached basketball with Walz in Nebraska in the early 1990s, said that Walz had “been the supporting actor for his whole life,” recalling a trip to China that the future vice-presidential pick organized. Even though Walz was the group’s veteran Asia hand, Almond remembered a coach who never tried to seize command.

“He just was always in the background,” said Almond, who thought the vice presidency was “the perfect role” for his old colleague’s temperament.

“I think he had the intensity, but it was a positive energy,” said Jeff Tomlin, the Nebraska high school head football coach who brought Walz aboard to coach linebackers. “He was a very good assistant that way. As the head coach, you sometimes have to be an enforcer and really guard your culture and make hard decisions. As assistant, you want to be loyal to your head coach and back up your head coach, and he was all of those things.”

And as for that question of whether Walz should count as a coach at all? Some players on his Minnesota title-winning team still refer to him as “Coach Walz,” and football staffs are filled with specialty coaches who are, in fact, coaches with headsets and playbooks.

“Defensive coordinator is arguably the most important position on a coaching staff other than the head coach,” the ESPN commentator Paul Finebaum mused to me today. “You can’t win a game, let alone a state championship, without being able to stop someone.”

— Alan Blinder

Categories Character, Elections, Ethics, Lies, Republicans, Trump, Walz, Tim

Josh Marshall: Why Kamala Harris Has Not Released Policy Papers or Given Interviews

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2024 //
100

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo cites several critical headlines in major newspapers about Kamala Harris’s campaign. One says her campaign is light on details. Another says she is running a substance-free campaign. Yet another demands to know when she will meet the press. He remembers how the Washington press corps treated her as a lightweight, as a problem, as a dead weight at the top of the ticket. There was an unspoken assumption that the public was not ready for a Black woman for president, especially not this one.

He writes:

I’ve come at this debate in my head from a bunch of different directions over the last few days…. I actually got in a minor spat today with a reporter who I’d dinged for an article description which presented Harris as a sort of mystery candidate verging on a Manchurian Candidate, with unknown views and barely detailed ambitions. Are we kidding with all of this?

On the one hand, journalists press for information, details, answers. That’s what they do. It’s their job. It’s part of their job to be annoying. They press for things that people aren’t going to volunteer. But there is something uncanny and vaguely absurd hearing this mix of complaints, demands and warnings of electoral disaster leveled at a campaign which is finishing up what has to be at least among, and quite possibly the, best single month of any presidential campaign in at least half a century. Campaign success isn’t what journalists are or should be concerned about. But it defies belief that Harris and her campaign would shift gears when what they’ve been doing is working this well.

I’ve made my points on this in the earlier piece. I don’t want to rehash them here. But there is one additional point: modern political campaign journalism is almost totally indifferent to public policy. Normally, Democrats cannot get reporters to pay attention to it. So these demands for a “vision” for this and a vision for that and detailed policy papers on all the rest are just a bit weird. Where does this newfound interest come from?

The whole thing will take care of itself. Harris will do some interviews — not because reporters are demanding it but because it will make sense for her campaign. And they’ll flesh out some policies — again, ones that make sense for her campaign.

The deeper story is that most campaign reporters simply don’t know what to make of Harris’ campaign and can’t figure out how it has managed, at least for the moment, to be so successful. That’s not a criticism: I think many of Harris’ supporters are equally mystified. But they’re just happy with the results. They don’t need an explanation. But for reporters the inexplicableness requires a storyline. And this is that storyline: the substanceless campaign, the lack of interviews, yada yada yada. As Kate noted in today’s pod: Biden started doing a bunch of interviews when his campaign started to tank. Trump’s been doing a spree of them because he’s floundering and he’s trying to regain attention. Candidate do these when they need to, not when reporters demand it.

The final part of the story is rooted in official Washington’s view of Harris. To put it baldly, most elite DC journalists treated Harris with a kind of breezy disdain that could scarcely rise to the level of contempt. For the first year of her vice presidency there was an ongoing series of critical reports about issues in the Office of the Vice President, staff drama, mean bossism, general turmoil. I don’t know how much reality there was to those reports. But they set a dismal tone. You’ll remember that when Ezra Klein and others got together the calls for a Thunderdome convention, Klein referred delicately and painedly to “the Kamala Harris problem,” a problem so obvious that it scarcely required explanation: how to usher her out of the way for others from the vaunted Democratic bench.

I’m not trying to pick on Klein here. I’ve done enough of that. I note this simply because it was such a deep conventional wisdom that it hardly required explanation. Everyone in that world knew what he meant. That certainly figures into this, and in both directions. It is not only that there is this great appetite to find out just what it is Harris must be doing wrong. That backstory must have left Harris just utterly uninterested in what these folks have to say. They treated her as something between a punchline and a nonentity and now she’s the odds-on favorite, if only by a small margin, to be the next President. Why should she care?

Categories Elections, Harris, Kamala, Media

Jess Piper: Abortion Is on the Ballot in Missouri!

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2024 //
10

Jess Piper is a former teacher who lives on a farm in Missouri and fights for democracy. She urges Democrats to run everywhere. In most districts like hers, the elections are uncontested. She writes here about a groundswell to restore reproductive rights in Missouri.

Abortion is on the ballot in November in Missouri. Missouri will be the first state to overturn a complete ban. And, you read that right…I do not doubt that we will have enough votes to overturn the ban and enshrine the right to reproductive healthcare in Missouri.
Abortion rights supporters have prevailed in all seven states that already had decided ballot measures since 2022: California, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Ohio, and Vermont.
And now Missouri will have the chance.

If approved, the initiative would amend the state’s constitution to establish a right to make decisions about reproductive health care, remove the state’s current restrictions on abortion, allow the regulation of reproductive health care to improve a patient’s health, and require the government not to discriminate against people providing or seeking reproductive health care.

Listen, I am not going to blow smoke up your you-know-what and act like Missouri will flip blue this year, but I am going to be optimistic for a minute. Optimistic about Missouri…a state with a 22 year GOP supermajority and a GOP trifecta.

Missourians have had enough. We currently have a total abortion ban — no exceptions for rape or incest. We were the first state to ban the procedure after Roe fell with our AG out in front of cameras within minutes of the Dobbs decision.

Missourians needed 180K signatures to put reproductive rights on the ballot. We gathered 380K signatures. 200,000 more than we needed. We crushed it. We killed it. We proved that not only do most folks want to vote to restore abortion rights, but that hundreds of thousands would crawl across broken glass to find and sign a petition. 

When I was gathering signatures in rural Missouri, one woman was waiting for us as we set up the petition, signed it, and then texted her Bible group to remind them to come by and sign it. Yes, her Bible group.

And the language is clear. We were able to take out extremist language that could have confused voters. Here is the language as it will be presented on the ballot in November: Missouri Ballot Measure.

Rural folks are ready to regain access to abortion.

The protest photo above was taken in 2019. But, in rural spaces, we have been fighting much longer. People in my part of the state haven’t had access to abortion for over a decade. The only functioning clinic in the state was in St Louis and that is a 5-hour drive for folks in NW Missouri. We’ve been dealing with a lack of access for much longer than most realize. 

Even more than having abortion on the ballot? We have other initiatives to legalize sports betting and raise the minimum wage and guarantee paid sick leave. These three initiatives will bring out folks who may not vote regularly…these initiatives could be game-changers themselves by increasing turnout which is usually good for Democrats.

More than that? We have Harris at the top of the ticket and we have a pro-choice woman running to be governor in Missouri. Crystal Quade will be tasked this November with beating Mike Kehoe, our current Lt Governor, but don’t think that it can’t be done. 

Quade is a current legislator and the Minority Leader in the House. She is a proud working-class woman who has fought for Missourians by arguing for funding public schools, fighting for abortion rights and union wages, and feeding kids. 

On the other hand, Mike Kehoe voted to sell off Missouri farmland to foreign governments and for union-busting Right to Work legislation. Kehoe believes in “school choice” measures that drain public schools of funding that is then sent to private religious schools. He is also in favor of the current abortion ban.

While serving in the Missouri Senate, Kehoe backed abortion restrictions and claimed that he “voted for every pro-life, every sanctity of life bill since I’ve been in the Senate.” 

During his tenure, he voted to pass restrictions on abortion, like HB 400 in 2013, which “would require a doctor to be physically present when an abortion-inducing drug is first administered.” That bill restricted abortions, particularly in rural areas where doctors are not readily available. Additionally, in 2014, Kehoe voted to pass HB 1307 to increase the waiting period for abortions from 24 hours to 72 hours. 

So, here’s the thing…we have a chance to change Missouri in November. I don’t know that we can flip enough seats to defeat the supermajorities in the House and the Senate, but I know we can elect Crystal Quade if we all work together. And that’s exactly what we did to get the signatures to put abortion on the ballot in the first place.

It was hard work — we did it. We can elect Harris and Quade with an education campaign, engaged voters, including young voters, and an increased turnout. This is hard work. This can be done.

Everywhere I look, people are excited. Whether I’m at Walmart or Ace Hardware or Casey’s, there is hope. People, even rural people, are filled with optimism. And I’m not going to act like that is normal. Excitement and hope are sometimes hard to find in rural progressive politics, but it’s all I hear and see. 

Eyes are bright and people aren’t whispering about it. Look around…this is what democracy looks like.

~Jess

Categories Elections, Gender, Health, Missouri

A Former Student Describes Tim Walz’s Character

By dianeravitch
August 18, 2024 //
5

Doug Vose was a student in Tim Walz’s classroom many years ago. He says he votes Republican more often than Democratic. The one thing he feels strongly about is the character and authenticity of Mr. Walz.

He wrote in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

The idea that “all politics is local” has been more of a theory than a reality when it comes to presidential election cycles.

This idea, however, has taken on a new meaning for me and fellow former students of Tim Walz as news of his announcement as Kamala Harris’ vice presidential running mate led national news cycles last week.

Of particular interest for me — and I imagine for others who’ve sat in his classrooms over the years — has been the GOP’s strategy to paint Walz as an extreme coastal liberal who, if given his way, would love to pull the country into communism.

(Chuckle.)

As a 30-something who’s voted for the other guys more often than Walz’s party, I might have a unique POV on presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign painting Walz this way.

We all remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001. I happened to be in U.S. history class at Mankato West High School when Walz poked his head in.

“They’ve just hit the Pentagon,” he said, turning to the TV in the corner of the classroom.

“Pay attention,” he told us. “You’re watching history, and your generation is going to remember this day forever.”

And of course, we did.

In the days and weeks that followed, Walz helped students of all kinds cope with their feelings about that horrible day. Students, faculty and friends gravitated to Walz to crystalize their feelings of fear, anger, hostility and sadness. After all, Mr. Walz was an Army National Guard officer, understood the minutiae of global geopolitics, but more than anything — he was a good man.

Tim and Gwen Walz were our faculty advisers for the Mankato West High School newspaper that fall, and in the wake of 9/11 the students on staff quickly pivoted to a big presentation outlining the pros and cons of retaliation in the Middle East for our next edition. A microcosm of our nation in those few weeks, the classroom was full of strong and often divided feelings. What would we say, and how would we say it?

Walz jumped in as he almost always did with student groups — from newspaper to yearbook to the burgeoning Gay-Straight Alliance that we’ve heard so much about in recent days. He challenged students to develop an informed point of view, to consider the value of empathy and to prescribe a path forward for our generation.

These were tough topics for everyone, and “Mr. Walz” served as our conscience.

In those days before his political career launched, it was very difficult for us to ascertain his political leanings. We knew he served at home and abroad in the Army National Guard. We knew he was a gun owner and perhaps the best shot of anyone we knew. We also knew that he was tremendously passionate about equal rights for everyone.

The idea that he’s a coastal liberal was as laughable then as it is now.

Since Walz has been in the governor’s office here in Minnesota, he has continued to stick to his principled approach.

He has been quite fairly criticized for Minnesota’s continued high state income taxes relative to our neighbors. Following widespread riots and looting in 2020, crime became a central issue for Minnesotans entering the 2022 gubernatorial election.

True to his history, though, Walz did not apologize for his convictions or his policies. He told Minnesotans if you don’t like sub-2% unemployment rates, if you don’t want to support a woman’s right to choose, and if you don’t like the way he commanded the National Guard during those fraught days in 2020, go ahead and vote for the other guy.

Walz won by almost 8 percentage points.

So, don’t be fooled by the easy smile and cheesy Dad jokes. When the chips are down and things get hard, this guy sticks to his convictions.

He doesn’t move his support to whichever group yells his name the loudest. He doesn’t take the politically easy route. He actually believes the things that are coming out of his mouth, whether you agree with him or not. When he’s not on TV talking, he is working to make his policies reality.

Walz digs in.

It’s the reason why for years students sought his counsel about hard things when he was a teacher at Mankato West; it’s why he was able to turn the First Congressional District blue for a decade, and it’s why he ran successfully to the right of a DFL-endorsed candidate to win the Democratic nomination for governor in 2018.

Memo to the Trump 2024 team from a dormant Republican and a Mr. Walz student:

Make the campaign about the Trump tax policy. Make it about China. Make it about the border.

Make it about anything other than leadership, decency and competency.

Because if you don’t, and this becomes a character debate, you’re way out of your league.

Doug Vose is a 2004 graduate of Mankato West High School and has been a software sales executive in the private sector for more than 15 years. He lives in Eden Prairie.

Categories Character, Elections, Ethics, Minnesota, Teachers, Walz, Tim

Tim Walz Comes Home to Nebraska Today!

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
28

I watched Tim Walz speak to a crowd in his home state of Nebraska, and he was wonderful.

I encourage you to watch this good, decent man. He knows that what matters most in our leaders is their character and their values. He has them.

The above link is for Tim Walz’s speech.

If you want to watch the whole event, including his introduction by his wife Gwen, open this link. If you are a teacher, you will love her call-out to teachers, and the crowd roaring “TEACHERS! TEACHERS! TEACHERS!”

Categories Character, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Joy, Trump, Vance, J.D., Walz, Tim

Trump Insults Veterans Again

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
34

Trump has repeatedly sneered at soldiers and veterans. He avoided service in Vietnam by getting five draft deferments from a podiatrist who rented a storefront office in Queens from Donald’s father. Fred Trump Sr. asked for a favor and he got it, according to the foot doctor’s daughters.

According to one of his chiefs of staff, General John Kelly, Trump called fallen soldiers “suckers” and “losers.” He couldn’t understand why they served. What was in it for them? He mocked Senator John McCain, who spent five years in a prison camp after his plane crashed in Hanoi. Trump said he didn’t like soldiers who had been captured.

His latest insult occurred recently. While he was President, he conferred the Presidential Medal of Freedom on friends, allies, professional athletes, and contributors. Among them were Congressman Jim Jordan, Rush Limbaugh, Orrin Hatch, and Edwin Meese. One recipient was Miriam Adelson, wife of the late casino mogul, Sheldon Adelson. The Adelsons were one of the biggest funders of his campaigns. Miriam is Israeli-born, and she is passionate in her support for Israel.

On Thursday he said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom–awarded to civilans for outstanding achievements–was “much better” than the Congressional Medal of Honor–awarded to soldiers for outstanding service to their country.

Michael Gold of The New York Times wrote this story:

Former President Donald J. Trump on Thursday described the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which honors civilians, as being “much better” than the Medal of Honor, because service members who receive the nation’s highest military honor are often severely wounded or dead.

Mr. Trump’s remarks follow a yearslong series of comments in which he has appeared to mock, attack or express disdain for service members who are wounded, captured or killed, even as he portrays himself as the ultimate champion of the armed forces.

At a campaign event at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., billed as a discussion about fighting antisemitism, Mr. Trump recounted how he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Miriam Adelson, the Israeli-American widow of the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Ms. Adelson, who attended the event, is among his top donors.

“It’s actually much better, because everyone gets the Congressional Medal of Honor, that’s soldiers, they’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets, or they’re dead,” Mr. Trump said, using a common misnomer for the military award. “She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman.”

Standing in front of six American flags, Mr. Trump added that the honors were “rated equal.”

Brian Hughes, a Trump campaign spokesman, said that Mr. Trump’s comments referred to “how it can be an emotionally difficult experience to give the Congressional Medal of Honor to veterans who have been wounded or tragically killed defending our country, as he proudly did when he was commander in chief.”

But Mr. Trump’s remarks drew swift criticism from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans, who argued that he has exhibited a pattern of disrespect toward military service members that has made him unfit for command.

“Donald Trump knows nothing about service to anyone or anything but himself,” a spokeswoman for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, Sarafina Chitika, said, adding that his comments “should remind all Americans that we owe it to our service members, our country, and our future to make sure Donald Trump is never our nation’s commander in chief again.”

Mr. Trump’s remarks also threatened to undermine efforts by his Republican allies to attack the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, over his military record. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, who spent four years in the Marine Corps, has accused Mr. Walz of leaving the Army National Guard to avoid being deployed to Iraq and of exaggerating his service record to claim falsely that he had served in combat…

Mr. Vance on Friday defended Mr. Trump, telling reporters at a campaign event in Milwaukee that the former president was a “guy who loves our veterans and who honors our veterans.” Though he acknowledged he had not heard Mr. Trump’s full remarks, Mr. Vance characterized them as compliments for Ms. Adelson that were not “in any way denigrating those who received military honors.”

Mr. Trump, who never served in the military, has faced bipartisan blowback over his posture toward service members and veterans throughout his political career. While campaigning for president in 2016, he disparaged the record of Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator who was held prisoner for more than five years during the Vietnam War.

“He’s not a war hero,” Mr. Trump said then, adding, “I like people who weren’t captured.” Republicans, many then wary of Mr. Trump, immediately rushed to Mr. McCain’s defense.

Mr. Trump also during that campaign fought with the family of Humayun Khan, a slain Muslim-American soldier, after Mr. Khan’s father spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2016 and railed against Mr. Trump for smearing the character of Muslims. Mr. Trump argued the family had “no right” to criticize him, and the squabble led top Republicans to voice their solidarity with Mr. Khan’s family.

During his 2020 campaign, Mr. Trump was forced to defend his support for American troops after The Atlantic reported that he privately called American soldiers killed in combat “losers” and “suckers,” setting off a political firestorm.

Democrats highlighted the reported comments as evidence of his contempt for those who serve, and left-leaning veterans groups condemned him.

Mr. Trump has vigorously denied he made those remarks. But John F. Kelly, a retired four-star general who was once Mr. Trump’s White House chief of staff, confirmed the former president’s comments disparaging veterans. And at the time, people familiar with Mr. Trump’s private conversations said that he has long expressed scorn for those who served in Vietnam as not being smart enough to have gotten out of it, as he did through a medical diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels.

In a statement to CNN last year, Mr. Kelly cast Mr. Trump as “a person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family — for all Gold Star families — on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.”

Mr. Kelly’s statement came days after Mr. Trump suggested in a social media post that Gen. Mark A. Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed for treason over calls he made to Chinese officials to reassure them of the nation’s stability after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by a mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters.

Mr. Trump’s comments about military troops and veterans became an issue earlier this year during the Republican primary, after he insinuated that the husband of one of his rivals, Nikki Haley, accepted a deployment to Africa with the National Guard to escape her. The Haley campaign attacked Mr. Trump’s “anti-veteran record” and distributed an open letter from dozens of veterans that condemned his statements.

Mr. Trump met with Ms. Adelson on Thursday to reconcile with her after he insulted her over text messages sent by an aide at the end of July. When he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom to her in 2018, the White House cited her work supporting “Jewish schools, Holocaust memorial organizations, Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and Birthright Israel, among other causes.”

The Presidential Medal of Freedom, established by President John F. Kennedy, is intended to honor people who have “made an especially meritorious contribution” to national security, world peace or “cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” A president may unilaterally bestow the award.

The Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest commendation for valor in combat, is awarded to a soldier who exhibited “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” that went “beyond the call of duty” and involved “risk of life,” according to the Department of Defense. Being wounded or killed is not a requirement for receiving the medal, which is awarded only after approvals throughout the military chain of command.

Categories Education Reform

Thom Hartmann: Scams, Corruption and the Election

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
6

Thom Hartmann encourages readers to beware of political scams right before the elections. The economy is cooling off. Why isn’t the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates? Is it because the chair of the Federal Reserve is a Republican? Did you know about Trump’s increase in wealth during his presidency? I don’t agree that Trump wants to get elected to make money; I think he wants to stay out of jail. But we may both be right.

He writes:

—  Is the Fed Chair “trying to get Donald Trump elected” by keeping rates high? The anti-corruption watchdog group Revolving Door Project is claiming that lifetime Republican and former commercial banker Jerome Powell, now the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is “trying to get Donald Trump elected.” Fully two months ago, Powell noted that “this is no longer an overheated economy” and “the labor market appears to be fully back in balance.” Yesterday’s jobs numbers — lower than expected new jobs (144,000) and a jump in unemployment to 4.3% — suggest the economy is on the verge of tipping into recession, an event that Trump yesterday pointed out and proclaimed is happening because of “Kamalanomics.” The Project’s Executive Director Jeff Hauser was explicit: “That Powell’s Fed still refuses to lower interest rates—after Trump said that rates shouldn’t be lowered before the election—raises questions about the central bank’s independence. Whether the Fed keeps rates high or brings them down, one of two presidential candidates will benefit. While lower rates would provide much-needed economic relief to the American people, Powell has instead chosen to stick it to the people and give an electoral boost to Trump.” Senator Elizabeth Warren yesterday called on the Fed chair to “cancel his summer vacation” and “lower interest rates now.” The warnings signs are flashing bright red — with worldwide declines in stock market indexes — and if Powell and the Fed don’t lower interest rates at least a half point within the next few weeks, it’ll be safe to conclude that Hauser is exactly right in his diagnosis of this situation. 

— Did Egypt give a $10 million bribe to Trump? The Washington Post published a blockbuster report yesterday, detailing how the Egyptian government pulled together $10 million in cash in 2016 right after Donald Trump sought out Egyptian dictator El-Sisi and promised him a presidential visit (which he fulfilled) right after his inauguration. The Department of Justice found out about it in 2019 and the FBI began an investigation, but Attorney General Bill Barr — one of the most publicly corrupt senior government officials in modern history — put the kibosh on the investigation. As a result, nobody knows if or how the money was delivered to Trump, although right around the time it would have been delivered Trump took the unusual step of putting exactly $10 million of his own money into his campaign. Saudis and Russians own large parts of Trump Tower and multiple nations funneled millions to Trump by booking blocks of rooms in his DC hotel and then just leaving them empty. Forbes estimates that Trump’s businesses brought in $2.4 billion during his four years as president; hundreds of millions of that came from foreign governments and from his charging the Secret Service and our US government a small fortune for their stays at Trump properties around the world. His entire presidency, it turns out, was a giant grift; no wonder he wants back into office. 

— Senate Republicans tell us who they are. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan increased child tax credits in a way that lifted an estimated 30 million children out of poverty, cutting the US child poverty rate in half. They expired last year, and legislation to reinstate them passed the House with roughly equal votes from both Democrats and Republicans. Iowa Senate Republican Chuck Grassley famously opposes help to poor families, saying “passing a tax bill that makes the president look good mailing out checks before the election, means he could be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” Senate Republicans got the message and killed the bill on Thursday afternoon, keeping child poverty in America at a higher level than any other developed nation in the world.

Republicans say that the child tax credits are an effort by Democrats to buy votes. Maybe they are but when they were in effect, they cut child poverty rates in half. That’s reason enough for both parties to support them.

Categories Cruelty, Economy, Elections, Fraud, Republicans, Trump
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