Orlando Sentinel: President of University of Florida Cashed In on Staff and Consultants

By dianeravitch
August 17, 2024 //
8

Shortly after Senator Ben Sasse left the U.S. Senate, he accepted the presidency of the University of Florida. Silas Morgan of the Orlando Sentinel relied on reporting by the student newspaper, the Independent Florida Alligator, to describe how former Senator Sasse upped the budget for his office by millions of dollars.

The University of Florida’s student newspaper reported Monday that former university president Ben Sasse spent millions of the school’s money to hire GOP political allies.


Sasse, a former Republican U.S. Senator from Nebraska, gave several one-time Senate staff members and other GOP officials lucrative remote positions at UF, according to records obtained by the Independent Florida Alligator.


Among the Senate staffers who joined him at UF are his former chief of staff, Raymond Sass; his former communications director, James Wegmann; his former press secretary, Taylor Silva; and three other former staffers. Both Sass and Wegmann worked remotely from the Washington D.C. area.


Sass’ salary, at $396,000, was more than double his Senate salary. Wegmann’s new position at UF earned him $432,000, while his predecessor in the position had made $270,000.

The hirings contributed to a $4.3 million increase in presidential salary expenses, part of a tripling of his office’s spending compared to what his predecessor, Kent Fuchs, spent during his last year in office, the Alligator reported. Sasse’s office employed more than 30 staff members, while Fuchs had fewer than 10.


Sasse also hired former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, who worked remotely from Nashville, in a newly-created position that paid a starting salary of $367,500 and U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham’s former scheduler, Alice James Burns, who also worked remotely and was paid $205,000.


A report obtained by the Alligator says Sasse spent over $20,000 flying his employees to UF between April 29 and July 29. The only hire who lives in Florida received a $15,000 stipend to relocate to Gainesville.


UF hasn’t responded to requests from the Alligator for a complete log of Sasse’s travel expenses. His travel expenses rose to $633,000 over his first full fiscal year, more than Fuchs spent on travel in eight years.

He also spent $7.2 million on consulting contracts, nearly two-thirds of which went to consulting giant McKinsey and Company, where he used to work as an advisor on an hourly contract. This amounts to more than 40 times what Fuchs spent on consulting in eight years.

Sasse abruptly resigned at the end of July, citing his wife’s failing health. The Alligator says the university did not respond to questions about what would happen to the hires now that Sasse is gone. Fuchs has returned as interim president until the UF Board of Trustees can hire a permanent replacement for Sasse.


Sasse’s hiring by the Board in 2022 resulted in the UF Faculty Senate passing a no confidence resolution in Sasse’s presidential search process due to transparency issues. Legislation passed by Florida’s GOP-controlled legislature earlier in 2022 made records relating to public university presidential searches exempt from Florida’s open public meetings and public records requirements.

His appointment by the board of trustees also generated controversy among parts of the student body, especially the LGBTQ+ community, for political positions Sasse had taken while in the Senate.

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Reform, Florida, For-Profit, Funding, Higher Education

Dan Rather: Elon Musk Pushes Lies and Fake News

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
7

Dan Rather warns about the danger of one-man control of a major social media company. He had Elon Musk in mind. Musk is supporting Trump, and he is using Twitter, his personal megaphone, to help Trump and smear Harris.

I have been locked out of Twitter since mid-July, because Twitter says I am underage. Really! So I am no longer influenced by Musk propaganda. But millions of other people are.

Rather writes on his blog “Steady”:

Imagine having the ability to instantly lob information, true or not, to millions of people across the globe. Elon Musk, the owner of X (formerly known as Twitter), has that ability. One would hope that with that power would come responsibility. In a perfect world, the owners of social media companies would be fair-minded and objective. Alas.

For all the talk of social media reform after 2016 and the Facebook fiasco when misinformation ran rampant across that platform, it now appears that Musk has decided not only to support the Republican candidate for president but to personally help spread misinformation about voting and the election.

Plus, in 2024, Musk has more powerful tools than Facebook ever imagined eight years ago. Artificial intelligence is coming into its own, and the dangers it presents to our democracy are profound.

Musk has recently released an AI chatbot, which, if you don’t know, is basically a computer that can simulate a human conversation. Musk named his Grok, and within hours of President Biden bowing out of the race, it created a post that read: “The ballot deadline has passed for several states for the 2024 election,” naming nine states: Alabama, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. The message suggested that Kamala Harris had missed the filing deadline to get on the ballot in those states.

This is 100% false and was shared with millions of users on X.

Secretaries of state in five of the nine states have written a letter to Musk urging him to “immediately implement changes” to Grok. I’m not holding my breath.

When Grok was launched late last year, Musk called it the anti-“woke” chatbot — his characterization. He said he wanted the AI search assistant to “answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.” Those other AI systems, powered by OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft, are specifically designed to avoid controversial topics.

But it’s not just Grok that is pushing out lies. Musk himself reposted a manipulated version of Harris’s first campaign video. It featured an altered voice track that sounds just like Harris. In it “she” says she didn’t “know the first thing about running the country” and that she is the “ultimate diversity hire.” Musk tagged the video as “amazing” and didn’t include a disclaimer. His post has garnered 135 million views, so far. It has not been taken down.

Talk about strange bedfellows. Over the years, there has been no love lost between Musk and Donald Trump. As recently as May, Trump was a vociferous and vocal proponent of the oil and gas industry. Remember the Mar-a-Lago get-together where he promised to end Biden’s green energy initiatives, including his electric vehicle policies, in exchange for $1 billion in campaign contributions?

Apparently Musk and Trump have mended some pretty tall fences. For his part, Musk has promised lots of cash to the pro-Trump America PAC. Maybe Trump didn’t get what he asked for from his oil and gas friends.

The Musk-backed America PAC is already helping Trump in swing states. The PAC’s website is tricking people into sharing personal data. The site promises to help people register to vote, but when a user enters a zip code in a battleground state, after also giving their name and phone number, they are directed to a page that says “thank you.” They are then asked to “complete the form below.” But there is no form. And there is no redirection to a voter registration site.

In exchange, Trump now thinks electric vehicles are “incredible.” What a shocker. At a rally in Georgia on Sunday, Trump told his supporters, “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So, I have no choice.”

The Michigan secretary of state is investigating Musk and the PAC. “Every citizen should know exactly how their personal information is being used by PACs, especially if an entity is claiming it will help people register to vote in Michigan or any other state,” a spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said.

In 2022, President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University about the dangers of artificial intelligence, foreseeing that “regulation has to be part of the answer” to combating online disinformation. His closing thought is a reminder that AI can be a help as well as a hindrance — but that it can’t exist in a vacuum.

“The internet is a tool. Social media is a tool. At the end of the day, tools don’t control us. We control them. And we can remake them. It’s up to each of us to decide what we value and then use the tools we’ve been given to advance those values,” Obama said.

For all intents and purposes, social media has become our town square — but unlike most communities, it has no sheriff, and it very much needs one. In his or her absence it is up to us, social media’s users, to be wary consumers.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Harris, Kamala, Media, Propaganda

Ohio: Cost of Vouchers Soars to $966 Million a Year—from $124 Million

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
8

Ohio adopted a voucher program. Then another and another. There are five different voucher programs. The Republicans who control the State Legislature hate public schools, so they eventually decided to make vouchers universal. They removed the income limit so that every family could obtain vouchers.

The cost of vouchers yearly went from $124 million last year to $966 million this year—and it may go even higher.

Do Ohioans really want to underwrite the tuition of every student who chooses to enroll in nonpublic schools?

You will not be surprised to read that the vast majority of students who use vouchers are already students in private and religious schools.

Poor kids are not being “saved” by vouchers. Affluent families are getting a subsidy from the states. Many private schools have raised their tuition in response to the new voucher money.

Ohio also has many charter schools. Typically they get worse academic results than public schools. Some have been mired in financial scandals. The most notorious charter scandal involved an online for-profit school called The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). Over two decades, it collected $1 billion from the state. Its owner contributed to politicians. It had big-name speakers at its graduation ceremonies, like the Governor and, on another occasion, Jeb Bush. It has the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation. When the state auditor asked ECOT to return $67 million due to phantom students, it declared bankruptcy.

Categories Education Industry, Funding, Ohio, Vouchers

Texas: The Fight Against Vouchers Continues

By dianeravitch
August 16, 2024 //
10

Texas Governor Greg Abbot said last year that voucher legislation was his top priority. Was it because Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass gave him $6 million to vouchers through the legislature? A score of Republicans from rural districts voted against vouchers. They knew that their district schools would be crippled by vouchers. Although Governor Abbot called multiple special sessions, although he offered bribes and threats, the rural Republicans defied him and said no to vouchers. The people who taught in their local public schools were their sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles, children and friends.

So Governor Abbot took Jeff Yass’s $6 million and used it to fund extremist Republicans who would vote for vouchers, putting their local public schools at risk.

Many of the Yass extremists won, paving the way for Abbot to win his vouchers.

Democrats are challenging Abbot’s puppets in November, the ones that Jeff Yass paid for.

The Pastors for Texas Children have not given up the fight.

Their leader Charles Foster Johnson post the following on Twitter:

As we write this, we are in the hearing room with our pastors. We are told the committee will hear testimony tomorrow, too.

 This written testimony by PTC Trustee Bill Jones is superb! It is a sterling example of what effective written testimony is. It is not too late for you to submit written testimony. You may do so here.   

#######

 I am Bill Jones, a resident of Collin County for the past 37 years. My state representative is Jeff Leach. I have three grandchildren in Frisco ISD and one in Allen ISD. My daughter is a schoolteacher in Frisco ISD and formerly taught for many years in Plano ISD. Both of my children grew up in Plano ISD schools. I am a trustee of Pastors for Texas Children, where I have served since 2013, and a member – since 2004 – of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, where I serve on the Christian Advocacy Committee.

 With respect to your August 12 hearing on “educational opportunity” proposals, I testify to oppose any bill that would transfer public taxpayer funds to private entities. Public taxpayer funds should go ONLY to public schools that benefit all, not to private schools that benefit only a privileged few. Any bill that would give public funds for the support of private schools would drain funds from our children’s and grandchildren’s neighborhood public schools, which are already gravely underfunded.

 Any claim by voucher proponents that vouchers benefit the underprivileged is an outright lie. The vast majority of parents who would take advantage of vouchers – as has been the case in other states – are those whose children are already in private schools. They go to parents who are able to afford the private school tuition, and the voucher is merely a supplement to reduce their expense. Voucher amounts are never even close to sufficient for those who cannot afford private schools in the first place. They benefit the well-to-do.

 Above all, I do not want my tax money to go to support someone else’s religious indoctrination any more than I want the tax money of those of other faiths to support mine.

 In addition, private schools are not accountable to the state – their teachers do not have to be certified; their curriculum is not subject to oversight; and they are free to refuse applications from, for example, special needs children, which they almost always do. Public schools, on the other hand, are required to meet state standards, and they must take ALL children, including those with special needs. We should not be further draining them of the resources needed to serve children of every type of need, every faith, every color, every ethnic background.

Voucher plans, no matter what name or euphemism is attached to them, are bad policy, hurting our children and grandchildren, and the dedicated public servants – schoolteachers, principals, superintendents, and other staff – who serve them.

Please vote against any bills that provide public taxpayer funds for the support of private schools.

Donate to PTC

PO Box 471155, Fort Worth, Texas, 76147

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Elections, Texas, Vouchers

Lawrence O’Donnell: Wake Up, Reporters! Do Your Job

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
24

Lawrence O’Donnell appears nightly on MSNBC at 10 pm EST. I love his show because he is so smart.

This episode is a must-watch.

As a bonus, here is Robert Reich wondering why the media doesn’t report honestly about Trump’s dementia.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Media, Trump

The New Republic: Tim Walz Is the Best Antidote to the Poison and Lies of FOX News

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
45

I don’t know how any self-respecting journalist could work for FOX News. It offers a good job in a competitive industry, but why sell your soul to the devil? I have recently seen tweets by Megyn Kelly, viciously attacking Kamala Harris, and every time I do, I remember Trump saying of her in 2016, after the first GOP debate, that she had blood coming out of her orifices. Yet still she is his sycophant.

In The New Republic, Thom Hartmann writes that Tim Walz may be the perfect antidote to FOX’s vitriol. If you want to reprogram family members, introduce them to Tim Walz. He is a good man, a decent man, not a FOX liar.

Hartmann writes:

All across America families are in mourning: Their parents and grandparents, particularly the men in their lives, have been stolen from them by the right-wing hate and rage machine.

Jen Senko produced a movie—The Brainwashing of My Dad—about losing her own father to Fox “News”; it was also made into a book of the same title. She’s been a guest on my radio show a few times, and her story is one replicated across America millions of times. Her father—a totally normal Midwestern guy—began watching Fox “News” when he retired, and within a year had become withdrawn, bitter, angry, and filled with hate.

Jen and her family staged an intervention and locked Fox out of Dad’s TV with the child lock option built into her cable system; within a few months, back to watching normal TV news like CNN, MSNBC, and the BBC, Dad made a full recovery from the temporary mental illness Murdoch’s infamous hate machine had thrown him into.

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s vice presidential pick, is America’s intervention against the mind poison that Trump, Fox “News,” and right-wing hate radio have infected our nation with.

He’s a normal guy, who joined the Army National Guard right out of high school at 17, rising to the rank of Commander Sergeant Major and becoming a top advocate for America’s veterans during his decade in Congress.

He used the G.I. bill to go to college, getting his master’s degree and going on to teach high school social studies. He coached his school’s football team, taking it to the state championships for the first time ever.

He smiles. His students love him, as does his family. He’s a normal guy. He’s the father everybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family wishes they had. He’s the grandpa everybody who’s lost one to Fox “News” wishes could sit down with their own and set him straight.

He carved butter at the state fair. He helped start his school’s first gay-straight alliance back in the 1990s when homophobic hate was still widely accepted; he said the coach doing so would be a powerful statement of support. He loves his country, his community, his family, and his nation.

No purchased bone-spur X-rays for Tim Walz; he embodies the very definition of patriotism that I grew up with in the Midwest. He reminds me of my own dad, who joined the Army at 17 to go fight Nazis in World War II, an echo of the past that most Americans recognize.

His contrast with Trump’s infidelities, con jobs, and constant angry bitterness is a sunlight-like disinfectant for our body politic. He shows up J.D. Vance—with his creepy obsessions with women’s genitals and birth rates and fealty to his billionaire patrons—for the weird guy that he is. He even highlights jokes about Vance, saying: “I can’t wait to debate the guy. That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.”

Trump and Vance are riding a wave of hate, fear, and bigotry made acceptable and even viral by a multibillion-dollar media machine that emerged from the Reagan years.

To steal the minds of America’s grandparents, President Reagan fast-tracked citizenship for Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch in 1985 so Murdoch could legally purchase U.S. media properties; Reagan ordered the Federal Communications Commission to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, and Republicans in Congress later gutted the Equal Time Rule.

In this, Reagan knew what he and the GOP were getting: Murdoch had by that time already flipped both Australian and British politics toward the hard right using frequent and lurid stories featuring crime by minorities.

Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times), former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”

Fox and Murdoch’s power in Australia came, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.

It’s the same here. When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6 coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.

Text messages released by Congresswoman Liz Cheney and the committee that investigated the January 6 attempt to overthrow our government show that the network’s top prime-time hosts were begging Trump to call off his openly racist and murderous mob while at the same time minimizing what happened on the air.

Even worse, revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.

Along with its relentless attacks on America’s first Black president, Fox’s support of Trump’s Big Lie helped tear America apart and set up the violence and deaths on January 6—while also making billions for Murdoch and his family.

Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely no liberal (he was a White House adviser to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:

Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.

While Biden press secretaries Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox “News” did.

Tim Walz is the antidote to the Fox “News” poison that is now so widely imitated across the right-wing media ecosystem, stealing the hearts and minds of millions. He’s America’s everyman, a welcome dose of sanity, and a wake-up call about how badly our country has been damaged by billionaire-funded right-wing hate.

So let the dad jokes begin!

As Liz Gumbinner points out, Seth Meyers’s head writer, Sal Gentile, summarized it brilliantly on X: “Tim Walz will expand free school lunches, raise the minimum wage, make it easier to unionize, fix your carburetor, replace the old wiring in your basement, spray that wasp’s nest under the deck, install a new spring for your garage door, and put a new chain on your lawnmower.”

And God willing and we all show up to vote, he’ll soon be vice president of the United States.

Categories Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Goodness, Lies, Walz, Tim

North Carolina: Republican Candidate for State Superintendent is an Extremist and Crackpot

By dianeravitch
August 15, 2024 //
2

CNN reported that Michele Morrow, the GOP candidate for State Superintendent of Schools in North Carolina, filmed a video on January 6 urging Trump to “put the Coonstitution to the side” and use the military to stay in power. Morrow was in DC for the January 6 rally but she says she never entered the Capitol.

In a deleted Facebook livestream she filmed from her hotel room, Morrow called for mass arrests of anyone who helped certify the 2020 election. “And if the police won’t do it and the Department of Justice won’t do it, then he will have to enact the Insurrection Act,” said Morrow. “In which case the Insurrection Act completely puts the Constitution to the side and says, now the military rules all.”

Morrow was at the Capitol as the attack occurred, according to public videos reviewed by CNN that show her in a restricted area on the northwest side of the Capitol. CNN has seen no evidence that Morrow entered the Capitol building that day or that she engaged in violence, and she was not charged with any crimes.

In March’s Republican primary, Morrow defeated the incumbent North Carolina Superintendent of Public Instruction, a job that manages the state’s $11 billion budget for K-12 public schools and helps set education priorities and implement curriculum standards.

That same month, CNN’s KFile reported Morrow had previously called for the public execution of Barack Obama and the death of Joe Biden and other prominent Democrats in comments on a since-deleted X account.

“I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in a since-deleted post from May 2020 about Obama. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”

Morrow home-schooled her children. She previously lost a local school board election. She is running now to take control of the education of all the children in North Carolina.

A terrifying prospect.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Elections, Extremism, Fascism, North Carolina, Privatization, Trump

The Rescue of Four Children in the Amazon: A Good Read

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
6

I enjoyed reading this story about the frantic efforts to find four young children who survived a plane crash in the Amazon. The adults on the small plane were killed, including their mother. They were found after 40 days of wandering. How they were found and how they survived makes a good story.

Categories Childhood

Paul Krugman: Are Immigrants Taking Jobs Away from the Native-Born?

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
44

Every so often, someone writes in to say that immigrants are hurting the economy, and in particular, they are taking jobs away from native-born workers. Sometimes they quote economist Paul Krugman, who writes a regular column for The New York Times, to make their point. See, they say, even Paul Krugman agrees with me.

But not so fast. Krugman recently wrote this column, where he takes the opposite view.

He wrote:

On the eve of the 2020 election Donald Trump, in a post on the platform formerly known as Twitter, told voters that “This election is a choice between a TRUMP RECOVERY or a BIDEN DEPRESSION.” Not quite. Since President Biden took office, the United States has gained 15.7 million jobs.

Trump, however, has been dismissing the good news on employment, claiming that all the job gains are going to illegal immigrants. In my most recent column I addressed his further claim that immigration has had a devastating effect on Black workers. (It hasn’t.)

What is true, however, is that a lot of recent employment growth has involved immigrants. But have their job gains come at the expense of the native-born?

No. But how do we know that? And how should we think about the effect of recent immigration on jobs?

Before I present numbers, there are three qualifications to consider.

First, while we have monthly estimates for employment that distinguish between native-born and foreign-born workers (although they don’t separate out the undocumented), these numbers aren’t adjusted for seasonal variation. Rather than try to roll my own seasonal adjustment, I’ll just use 12-month averages, which are good enough for current purposes.

Second, many experts believe that the standard numbers, based on the Current Population Survey, underestimate the recent surge in immigration. I’ll note where this makes a difference, but it doesn’t change the overall picture.

Finally, when you’re looking at recent job growth, it matters what you choose as your starting point. Biden inherited an economy still depressed by the effects of Covid-19, and some of the job growth on his watch reflected a recovery from that depressed state. It arguably makes more sense to compare the current economy with the economy on the eve of Covid. I’ll do it both ways, looking at both job growth since 2020 and job growth from the prepandemic year 2019.

OK, here we go. First, let’s compare average employment in the 12 months ending in June 2024 with employment in 2019 and employment in the pandemic year 2020.

Since 2020 there have been large increases in employment of both native- and foreign-born workers, but much of that reflected recovery from the pandemic slump. Compared with the prepandemic economy, job gains have been much smaller, especially for the native-born. So immigrants have accounted for most job growth — perhaps more than the chart says, if immigration has been understated — although not all of it.

The question, however, is whether the jobs immigrants have taken would have gone to native-born workers if immigration had been lower.

Well, if immigrants were stealing our jobs, we’d expect to see a sharp rise in unemployment among the native-born. We don’t. The unemployment rate among native-born workers is near a historic low.

But some anti-immigrant crusaders argue that unemployment is only low because immigrants have driven native-born Americans entirely out of the labor force; you’re only counted as unemployed if you’re actively seeking a job.

Indeed, the share of native-born adults in the labor force — employed or unemployed — has fallen slightly since 2019.

But this was both predictable and predicted, not because of immigration but as a result of the aging of the native-born population. Congressional Budget Office projections published in January 2020 — when nobody knew that either the pandemic or the immigration surge were coming — had already forecast a decline in the labor force participation rate as baby boomers retired.

So the near stagnation of native-born employment isn’t a demand-side issue, in which people aren’t working because they can’t find jobs. It is instead a supply-side issue, in which people aren’t working because they’ve reached retirement age. We’ve been able to achieve large increases in overall employment only because working-age immigrants have been coming to America. If we didn’t have the immigrants, we wouldn’t have the jobs.

What about the impact of immigration on wages? A few decades ago many economists, myself included, believed that immigrants with low levels of formal education were in effect competing with native-born workers who also lacked degrees. But most labor economists now believe that immigrants don’t do much head-to-head competition with native-born workers; they bring different skills and take different jobs. And the past few years, with elevated immigration, have also been an era of exceptional growth in wages for the worst paid.

So none of these negative claims about the effects of immigration hold up. But are there important positive effects? (Aside from the benefits to the immigrants themselves, which can be really large — I am very glad, for multiple reasons, that my grandparents left the Russian Empire.)

There’s a good although not ironclad case that immigration has helped limit inflation in recent years. Normally, as Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, recently noted, immigration is more or less neutral in its effects on inflation: Immigrants expand supply, but they also contribute to demand. In the aftermath of the pandemic, however, the huge sums spent on aid pumped up demand; this burst of demand was easier to accommodate without sustained inflation because immigration made it possible to achieve rapid growth in employment.

In the longer run, the big story is fiscal. Adult immigrants tend to be working age, which means that they will spend years paying taxes before they become eligible for Medicare and Social Security, which constitute a large part of federal spending. And while this point is a bit brutal, undocumented immigrants are especially good for the budget, because they pay payroll taxes (which are collected by employers) without being eligible for future benefits.

So, no, immigrants aren’t taking our jobs. Everything that happens in the economy hurts someone: There are no doubt some places where immigrants have driven up housing costs, or where native-born Americans or legal immigrants have faced increased job competition. But the scare stories don’t match the facts.

To see Krugman’s nifty graphics, taken from the Buteau of Labor Statistics, please open the link.

Categories Disruption, Economy, Immigration

Washington Post: A Biased View of Tim Walz’s Record on Education

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2024 //
11

Laura Meckler and Hannah Natanson wrote about Governor Tim Walz’s record on education in Minnesota. In making decisions, Walz relied on his own knowledge as a veteran public school teacher and very likely on research, but The Washington Post misleadingly attributed his views to “the teachers’ union,” the bugbear of the far-right.

The article is saturated with bias against teachers unions and presents the pro-education Walz as a tool of the union, not as a veteran educator who knows the importance of public schools. Walz grew up and taught in small towns. They don’t want or need “choice.” They love their public schools, which are often the central public institution in their community.

The 2019 state budget negotiations in Minnesota were tense, with a deadline looming, when the speaker of the House offered Gov. Tim Walz a suggestion for breaking the impasse.

They both knew that the Republicans’ top priority was to create a school voucher-type program that would direct tax dollars to help families pay for private schools. House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat, floated an idea: What if they offered the Republicans a pared-down version of the voucher plan, some sort of “fig leaf,” that could help them claim a symbolic victory in trade for big wins on the Democratic side? In the past, on other issues, Walz had been open to that kind of compromise, Hortman said.

This time, it was a “hard no.”

He used his position’s formidable sway over education to push for more funding for schools and backed positions taken by Education Minnesota, the state’s teachers union of which he was once a member. His record on education will probably excite Democrats but provide grist for Republicans who have in recent years gained political ground with complaints about how liberals have managed schools.

Teachers and their unions consistently supported Walz’s Minnesota campaigns with donations, records show. And in the first 24 hours after he was selected as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, teachers were the most common profession in the flood of donations to the Democratic ticket, according to the campaign.

During the chaotic 2020-21 pandemic-rattled school year, Walz took a cautious approach toward school reopening that was largely in line with teachers, who were resisting a return to in-person learning, fearful of contracting covid.

Critics say that as a result, Minnesota schools stayed closed far too long — longer than the typical state — inflicting lasting academic and social emotional damage on students.

As a former teacher, Walz knew that teachers were reluctant to return to the classroom until safety protocols were in place.

Walz also advanced his own robust and liberal education agenda. He fought to increase K-12 education spending in 2019, when he won increases in negotiations with Republicans, and more dramatically in 2023, when he worked with the Democratic majority in the state House and Senate. He won funding to provide free meals to all schoolchildren, regardless of income, and free college tuition for students — including undocumented immigrants — whose families earn less than $80,000 per year. He also called out racial gaps in achievement and discipline in schools and tried to address them…

And as culture war debates raged across the country in recent years, Walz pushed Minnesota to adopt policies in support of LGBTQ+ rights…

In the 2022 elections, Walz was reelected, and Minnesota Democrats took control of the Senate. Democrats now had a “trifecta” — governor, House and Senate — and a $17.6 billion budget surplus.

After taking his oath of office in January 2023, Walz said Minnesota had a historic opportunity to become the best state in the nation for children and families. His proposals included a huge increase in K-12 education spending.

“Now is the time to be bold,” he said.

The final budget agreement in 2023 increased education spending by nearly $2.3 billion, including a significant boost to the per-pupil funding formula that would be tied to inflation, ensuring growth in the coming years. Total formula funding for schools would climb from about $9.9 billion in 2023 to $11.4 billion in 2025, according to North Star Policy Action. The budget also included targeted money for special education, pre-K programs, mental health and community schools.

Walz also signed legislation providing free school meals for all students — a signature achievement — not just those in low-income families who are eligible under the federal program…

In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz drew a pointed contrast between the culture wars raging in states such as Florida and the situation in Minnesota.

“The forces of hatred and bigotry are on the march in states across this country and around the world,” Walz said. “But let me say this now and be very clear about this: That march stops at Minnesota’s borders.”

Through his tenure, he repeatedly took up the causes of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.

He signed a measure prohibiting public and school libraries from banning books due to their messages or opinions, and another granting legal protection to children who travel to Minnesota for gender-affirming care.

Categories Bigotry, Character, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Freedom to Read, Funding, Health, Minnesota, Teacher Pay, Teachers and Teaching, Unions, Vouchers, Walz, Tim
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