Arkansas Supreme Court Furious at Judge Who Called Its Gun Ruling “LOCO”

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2024 //
6

By now, there are countries that warn their citizens to be careful about visiting the United States because of the widespread availability of guns.

Recently the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled that lawyers could bring guns into courthouses, though not into the courtroom.

The high court of Arkansas remanded its ruling to a judge who opposed it and told him to reach a different decision. The lower court judge called the decision LOCO, and the state Supreme Court removed him from the case.

Debra Hale-Shelton reported in the Arkansas Times:

Remember Circuit Judge Morgan “Chip” Welch‘s order that questioned the sanity of a recent Arkansas Supreme Court ruling allowing attorneys to carry guns in courthouses? It turns out the thin-skinned Supreme Court justices don’t like judges questioning the sanity of their rulings, even when there’s good reason to do so.

But on Monday, the Supreme Court ordered Welch removed from the case. The order came days after Welch nicknamed the high court’s order “Lawyer/officer-of-the-court Carry Opinion” and repeatedly referred to it by the acronym LOCO. In Spanish, “loco” translates to crazy or insane.

The state Supreme Court’s vote to allow lawyers to tote guns in courthouses overturned Welch’s earlier decision. It then fell to Welch, as the original judge in the case, to put the higher court’s order into action.

Welch put some temporary guns-in-courthouses rules in place pending an August hearing to address safety concerns. His rules temporarily allowed guns in the Pulaski County Courthouse but only in the “common areas” on the building’s first floor and nowhere else.

In his temporary order, Welch raised numerous questions that seem pretty important. For example, how can we make sure inmates in the courthouse for their hearings don’t get their hands on these guns? We should note that the high court’s decision excluded courtrooms from the places where guns could be brought.

The Supreme Court accused Judge Welch of violating the ethics code for judges and showing bias; it called for an expedited hearing on May 23 to consider what to do about an insolent judge.

Categories Arkansas, Extremism, Guns, Safety

Gary Rubinstein: Time to Investigate Success Academy’s SPRINT Program

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2024 //
28

Gary Rubinstein has been following the evolution of Success Academy in New York City for years. it’s the largest charter chain in the state, with the highest test scores. But Gary has documented its high attrition rates and teacher turnover. Others have written about its penchant for pushing out students it doesn’t want. Success Academy is often held up as a model for the accomplishments of charter schools. But other charter chains are dropping the harsh “no excuses” discipline of SA.

In this post, Gary writes about another SA practice that is problematic.

He writes:

About four months ago I received an unusual DM in my Twitter account. Though over the years several different Success Academy parents have reached out to me, this was from someone who claimed to be either a current employee or a former employee. They used an anonymous name and to this day, I have no idea who this person is. But they reached out to me because they had a story to tell and felt, I guess, that I was the best person to tell it to.

Over the months they have provided various internal Success Academy documents, screen shots from internal Success Academy message boards, and so much information about what is truly going on at Success Academy, that I have no reason to doubt their authenticity.

Much of the information was about chaos that is going on behind the scenes at Success Academy. Like how they are struggling to convince elementary students to remain at Success Academy for middle school and to convince middle school students to remain at Success Academy for high school. I even got to see an internal document with talking points to tell families in order to convince they to stay.

The document had the title “Grade 4 Teacher Selling & Persuading Talking Points” and began with the words: “Framing: Unfortunately, over the years we see that after all the hard work of our elementary school teachers and schools, some of our 4th graders leave us and end up attending failing middle schools. We cannot let this happen. And so for the first time really we want to invest our scholars in the “why” behind SA’s magical middle schools. We want our scholars and parents to make truly informed choices about the next leg of their educational journey.”

I had already known based on enrollment numbers that Success Academy was having trouble getting families to continue to trust them after all the years of shady practices, but my source says that things are very dire, especially in the Brooklyn high school, which nearly had to be shut down for low enrollment.

I got a lot of other good insider information from my source. Their description of the morale of the staffs at several of the schools and the extreme turnover definitely made me feel bad for the teachers there but even worse for the students who have to endure such instability. The picture was worse than I had expected. But still I didn’t get what I considered to be a ‘smoking gun’ — something that the school was doing that was illegal.

A topic that this insider kept returning to was something that, at first, I didn’t have much interest in. It is well known that Success Academy used to not have a very high percent of students requiring special education services. My sense was that Success Academy did not want many students requiring special education services because those students would require attention which could take away resources from their test prep gaming system. But my insider often returned to something that really seemed to bother them, and it is about the way that Success Academy identifies students for special education services. The program is called SPRINT.

The way most schools work, a special education referral is initiated by a parent or sometimes a teacher in consultation with a parent and the school administration which might include guidance counselors and social workers will start the process. As a parent of a student who was diagnosed with various learning issues, I know that this is a very difficult time for a parent when they learn that their child qualifies for special education services.

But the way it works at Success Academy is unlike anything I’ve ever heard of at any school before. And according to the insider, many people who work for SPRINT or who used to work for SPRINT feel that they are working for a corrupt division of a corrupt organization. Whether what the SPRINT team is doing is illegal or just immoral or neither will be up to state investigators to decide if they ever have the desire to check into this, but this is the little that I understand about it.

According to my insider, the SPRINT staff are given quotas of special education referrals that they have to meet each week. It is something like five referrals per week. I don’t have all the details, but this is a big numbers game where referrals are driven by these quotas. If this is true and this team is pressured to find students to refer, this would mean that some students and their families go through the arduous referral process unnecessarily.

I asked the insider why would Success Academy want to inflate their special education numbers. The insider wasn’t sure about the motive. They felt it might have had to do with finances as having more special education students enables them to hire more teachers for ICT classes. But they weren’t certain about the motive, just the fact that special education referrals are done to fulfill quotas and not driven by what parents or teachers are noticing.

I asked the insider what the harm is from over referring for evaluations. Isn’t it better to have too many referrals and some students are denied services than to have too few and have students who would qualify but who never get evaluated? The source admitted that it is hard to pinpoint exactly what the malicious intent is but made it seem like this whole SPRINT quota system was very shady. Like they were gaming the system to get some students to qualify for services even if they really didn’t need them. But even if getting supports for student who might not need, the issue is that Success Academy seems to be doing this from a business point of view and not to truly help struggling students.

I know all this is kind of vague and my insider is going to wonder why I didn’t include more of the specific details of the color coding for the different levels of referrals. But they made it clear that to meet these quotas the staffers on the SPRINT team have to be very aggressive. In order for a team to make five referrals a week, they have to hound the families and if the families are resistant they have to step up the pressure. The insider even says they were encouraged once to call ACS on a family that would not agree to go through the referral process.

For sure there is a lot more detail to be filled in on this story. If you are working for SPRINT right now and are having trouble sleeping at night because of it, feel free to reach out to me, I can help you out.

Here is a post on an internal Success Academy message board from an actual employee:

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Harlem Success Academy, New York City

Thom Hartmann: Will the Billionaires Destroy Our Society?

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2024 //
23

Thom Hartmann uses this post to illustrate the malign influence of concentrated wealth. Billionaires are giving generously to Trump in hopes of keeping their taxes low and their power intact. He urges us to organize against this threat to our democratic aspirations.

He writes:

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Rightwing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war. 

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things, from a strengthened social safety net to a cleaner, safer environment to quality, free education, that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight yearsago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. …  So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, andThis Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs. 

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said: 

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war. 

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media.
— They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens.
— They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage.
— They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism.
— They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.”
— They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory.
— And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging rightwing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie. 

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England. 

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly: 

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility…” 

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes: 

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.” 

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states: 

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich. 

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all: 

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.” 

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law. 

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world. 

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs. 

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism. 

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to actually raise taxes on rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

Categories Billionaires, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Greg Olear: “Casablanca” Has a Message for Us Today

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2024 //
27

When I was in college, I remember classmates going to the local art-movie house to see “Casablanca,” and laughing about how many times they had seen it. I had never seen it, but since then have seen it many times, at least a dozen times.

My partner and I recently decided to introduce our 17-year-old grandson to classic movies. The first one we chose was “Casablanca.” (The second was Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane.”) That was a few months ago. Recently “Casablanca” was playing on Turner Classic Movies, and I was going to skip it but was immediately drawn in and watched to the end. It never grows stale. Then I saw this column by Greg Olear, who explains why the film speaks to us and remains fresh.

He writes:

Dear Reader,

The first time I saw Casablanca was in 1992, at the Key Theatre, a now-defunct arthouse cinema on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, at a special theatrical release celebrating the film’s 50th anniversary. The most recent time I saw Casablanca was last night. In between, I’ve seen it probably two dozen times. On each viewing, I notice something I hadn’t seen before, walk away with something new.

Casablanca is often described as a romance—and it is. Bogart and Bergman are one of the all-time Hollywood pairings, and, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” is probably the film’s best known line. The conflict in romances derives from the insurmountability of the obstacle, on what is keeping the two lovers apart: Romeo and Juliet are the teenage kids of two families in a blood feud; Harry and Sally don’t want to risk their friendship for a romantic engagement that might not work out; Tom Hanks lives in Baltimore and Meg Ryan lives in Seattle. The obstacle in Casablanca, which I will not spoil, is realistic, tragic, and completely insurmountable. It is a riddle that cannot be solved, a problem that has no solution, like how to fix the United States while the Senate exists.

But Casablanca is not just a romance. It is a drama. It is a war film. It is a buddy movie, replete with some of the sharpest comic dialogue ever written. It is a heist picture—we don’t see the two German couriers murdered on the train, we don’t see the letters of transit stolen from them, but the rush to obtain those two documents animates one of cinema’s greatest plots. It is an exploration of how to deal with heartbreak and loss. It is a story about sacrifice and courage and redemption and standing up to tyranny. It is an allegory for a world that, when it was made in 1942, was very much still at war—and, as such, is an overtly political film. Casablanca contains multitudes.

When I first watched the movie, I was more concerned with the romantic content. I loved Rick, loved his café, loved his white tuxedo jacket and his gruff manner and how he threw the best party but always held himself at a remove. But it is impossible to watch Casablanca in 2024 and not focus on the Nazis.

The first action we see in Casablanca is a violent police crackdown. And not just any violent police crackdown. This part of North Africa is controlled by unoccupied France, the German rump state based in Vichy. A prominent Nazi is coming to town, and the local authorities are detaining all the potential rabble-rousers—the usual suspects, as it were—who might not welcome the Gestapo’s jackbooted presence in French Morocco. One fellow is menaced by the police, who shoot and kill him when he tries to resist arrest; when they search his body, they find he is carrying leaflets for Free France.

If the film were made today, this scene would have been shot on location, in Casablanca or a city that could reasonably pass as Casablanca, and the terror of the crackdown would be amplified in one of those grandiose action scenes that modern movies often open with. But the film was produced in 1942. It was shot on a soundstage in Hollywood. The danger is cloaked behind old-timey cinematic production. No matter. The opening distinctly shows brutal, Nazi-aligned cops using unnecessary force, shooting and killing an agent of the Resistance: an anti-Fascist.

Similarly, the first time we see Rick—after we meet Captain Renault, the French prefect of police, and Major Strasser, the Nazi big wheel—he is alone at a chess board in the casino part of the club. His first lines of dialogue are directed to an arrogant Nazi—an official at Deutsche Bank, no less!—whom he bars from entering the inner sanctum:

—Your cash is good at the bar.
—What? Do you know who I am?
—I do. You’re lucky the bar’s open to you.

Rick owns and manages the café, and he is a good boss. He supports his employees, reassuring Emil after the house loses 20,000 francs, and keeping everyone on the payroll when the police shut him down. But he keeps himself aloof. “I stick my neck out for no one,” he says when the police arrest Ugarte. “I’m the only cause I’m interested in,” he tells Ilsa. But this is a false front, a defense mechanism. He doesn’t want his heart broken again. He is, as Victor Laszlo astutely observes, a man trying to convince himself of something he doesn’t really believe.

At 17 and a half minutes into the movie, Ferrari, criminal overlord and owner of the Blue Parrot, remarks to Rick that “isolationism is no longer a practical policy.” That line may as well have been spoken to the entire country. Rick and Sam, his friend and piano player, are the only Americans in Casablanca, and as such, represent the United States. The staff and clientele at his club come from everywhere: Carl is an anti-Nazi German, Sascha is Russian, Emil and Yvonne are French, Abdul is Moroccan, Berger is Norwegian, and so on. In that sense, the café is a microcosm of Europe. (In real life, many of the supporting actors are European war refugees who had escaped the actual Nazis—including the astonishingly good actor who plays the Gestapo’s Major Strasser, Conrad Veidt, who fled his native country with his Jewish wife when Hitler came to power.) 

It is no accident that the action in Casablanca takes place over three days in early December, 1941—just before Pearl Harbor. Rick, like the U.S. in the late fall of 1941, preferred to remain neutral. But ultimately, like the U.S., he is drawn into the fight—and his presence ultimately helps the good guys prevail.

Perhaps the film’s most rousing scene is when the orchestra, with its brass instruments, overpowers the Germans singing patriotic songs at the piano, with a stirring rendition of “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem. In 1992, I chalked it up to Hollywood schlock; now, I recognize the scene’s awesome power: music becomes the field of battle. Even Yvonne, last scene flirting with a handsome Nazi, is moved to tears:

But the film is not all doom and gloom. Casablanca rewards us with sharp dialogue and genuinely funny moments. When Victor Laszlo arrives at Rick’s, he orders drinks, only to have his orders upgraded and put on someone else’s tab, which annoys him; it’s a running joke that he can’t pay for his own drink. Carl’s aside with the couple practicing their English before leaving for America is comic gold. And as Captain Renault, Claude Reins drops one-liner after one-liner, in a remarkably modern performance—not least of which the famous “I’m shocked, shocked” scene.

When Rick sits down for his interrogation by the Nazis, he is asked his nationality. “I’m a drunkard,” he says dryly—and it looks like the men at the table are genuinely laughing, as if the line was ad-libbed. But Renault immediately supplies the rejoinder: “And that makes Rick a man of the world.”

We learn that what causes Rick’s moral paralysis is his heartbreak. Ilsa Lund—the wife and traveling companion of the Resistance leader Victor Laszlo, who has just arrived in town—is, improbably, the woman who broke his heart. The chances of them meeting again like this are a million to one, which Rick alludes to in yet another famous line: “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

During their confrontation later in the film, Ilsa accuses him of, basically, nurturing a grievance: “You want to feel sorry for yourself, don’t you? With so much at stake, all you can think of is your own feelings. One woman has hurt you, and you take your revenge on the rest of the world. You’re a coward and a weakling.” She may as well be addressing Elon Musk, or any one of a thousand other alt-right Twitter incels.

But by then, Rick has already started to change. Precedents are being broken. He’s having a drink with customers now. He’s involving himself in politics more overtly. This is made clear in the scene with the Bulgarian refugee, Annina. She is, Rick observes, underage and should not be at the bar. But she seeks him out. She wants to be reassured, without explicitly saying so, that if she has sex with Captain Renault, he will honor his promise and let her and her husband leave for America. This is dark, dark stuff, concealed by the soft lighting and the beautiful actress:

Oh, monsieur, you are a man. If someone loved you very much, so that your happiness was the only thing that she wanted in the world—but she did a bad thing to make certain of it—could you forgive her?

Rick replies with a punch to the gut: “No one ever loved me that much.”

But this is not true, although he doesn’t realize it yet. Ilsa did love him that much. And he is sufficiently moved by Annina to arrange for her husband to win at roulette, securing enough money to finance their visas—much to the delight of the staff.

The first time I saw the movie, I knew what the last line was, so I had some idea of the ending, but I didn’t know anything else. Twenty minutes from the end, Rick gives Victor Laszlo the letters of transit. Renault emerges from the shadows to arrest him. And I remember thinking, “Holy shit! How the hell are they going to resolve this?” I wasn’t the only one. Even the screenwriters didn’t know, well after production began. All they did was devise the best ending of all time.

[This is a good time to stop reading, if you haven’t seen the movie, because spoilers are coming.]

We think Rick and Ilsa will take the letters of transit and leave. Ilsa thinks that, too. But that’s not what happens. Once at the airport, Rick informs Renault that Ilsa and Victor will be the ones leaving. This surprises Ilsa, Renault—and the audience. But this is Rick putting away his personal grievance for the greater good. This is him atoning for the sins of the past. This is also him entering the fray, as Laszlo tells him on the tarmac, in a line I use in the intro to my podcast: “Welcome back to the fight. This time, I know our side will win.” That line is spoken in December of 1941—for all we know, Japanese planes are bombing Pearl Harbor as Laszlo’s plane flies to Lisbon. If Rick represents America, this is America entering the war. And, remember, the movie came out in 1942! “Our side” winning was not a sure thing.

(Also: Rick told Victor that the letters of transit were not for sale at any price. At the end, he refuses to take Victor’s money—which both makes the comment about the letters not being for sale true, and also continues the running joke about Laszlo not being able to pay for his own drinks.)

The Resistance leader and his wife get on the plane. The plane taxis out to the strip. And then, the Nazi big wheel shows up! After warning him to put down the phone, Rick shoots and kills him. Renault explains how “unpleasant” this is going to be. “I’ll have to arrest you, of course.”

The plane takes off, heading for Lisbon. The couple makes it out of Casablanca. Rick wins his 10,000 franc bet with Renault. Then the police show up. And watching the movie, we prepare for Rick’s impending arrest. “Major Strasser has been shot,” Renault tells his charges. And there is a long, dramatic pause, before he delivers yet another of the film’s famous lines: “Round up the usual suspects.” With those five words, he lets Rick go free.

Renault—an unscrupulous lech who “blows with the wind,” a “poor, corrupt official” who exploits his authority by bedding desperate refugee women—has found his own way back to the light. He, too, is back in the fight. And he and Rick leave together, bound for the French garrison at Brazzaville, and adventures to come, and a continuation of what is already a beautiful friendship.

Watching the film again last night, there was something else I realized about Casablanca. No one wants to be in Morocco. Everyone wants to go to America. The word is spoken countless times: America, America, America. Rick is American but can’t go back to America, although he desperately wants to. America is the symbol of freedom, of safety, of security, of respite from the Third Reich. The entire black market of French Morocco revolves around guarantees of safe passage to America. It’s taken as a given that America is the land of the free. 

But now, somehow, 82 years after the release of Casablanca, this is no longer a given. Nazis are again on the rise—only this time, they’re not in Europe or North Africa but here, in America, among us. What would those supporting actors who fled the Third Reich have made of that? What would Rick have thought?

While helping dress his wound, Rick asks Victor if he thinks what he’s fighting for—that is, democracy, freedom, anti-fascism—is worth it. I leave you with Laszlo’s response: “You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”

The fundamental things apply, as time goes by.

Categories Creativity, Democracy, History

Rightwing Group Uses Hidden Camera to Humiliate Educators

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2024 //
10

Newsweek reports that a rightwing group called “Accuracy in Media” or AIM has been surreptitiously filming educators as they explain how they evade state laws banning discussions of “critical race theory” and other controversial topics.

Their goal appears to be to smear public schools and educators, which advances the privatization agenda.

One educator talks of how a ban on teaching critical race theory could be skirted. Another boasts of how parents can be “tricked” over what goes in the school syllabus.

Both were recorded on hidden cameras by a conservative group that has been releasing videos periodically on the internet—and noting the fact that the videos have sometimes caused concerned parents to flood school board meetings.

As school battles take a central role at the grassroots of America’s culture wars over race, gender, language, COVID-19 rules and more, the group is going all out to draw attention to what progressives are saying, sometimes prompting accusations of unethical behavior with its recordings made under false pretenses….

“We’ll keep doing it until school officials stop lying. Public school administrators are not entitled to a monopoly on deception,” AIM President Adam Guillette, who joined from Project Veritas three years ago, told Newsweek…

AIM has been focusing largely on schools.

In January, it released a tranche of hidden-camera interviews. In Ohio, for example, there has been a so-far unsuccessful effort to ban the teaching of critical race theory and transgender issues to schoolchildren.

Critical race theory (widely known as CRT) is an academic framework based on the idea that there is systemic racism in U.S. institutions. It has become a hot issue for conservatives, who say it is divisive, while progressives say the controversy was stirred up by the right…

Progressives similarly take issue with conservative efforts to stop the teaching of young children about transgender issues in the name of child protection, saying that by doing so the LGBTQ community is being targeted.

Guillette says that AIM’s cameras recorded school employees suggesting that they’ll teach whatever they like, regardless of what laws are passed.

In one video, Matthew Boaz, the executive director of diversity, equity and inclusion for Upper Arlington Schools says to undercover AIM activists: “You can pass a bill that you can’t teach Critical Race Theory in a classroom, but if you didn’t cover programming, or you didn’t cover extracurricular activities, or anything like that, that message might still get out. Oops! There will be a way.”

Upper Arlington Schools did not respond to Newsweek’s emailed request for comment. An automated message from Boaz’s email said “I have requested leave and will be away from my office and email”.

Guillette wouldn’t say who he and others at AIM pretend to be when speaking to their subjects. “It would be a lot more difficult if they knew our tactics. I can confirm that the camera was not behind the salt shaker,” he said.

That said, a day after the AIM video hit the Internet, an email sent to parents from Upper Arlington Interim Superintendent Kathy Jenney said, in part, “We know the video was recorded with a hidden camera and under false pretenses by a man and woman who claimed to be interested in enrolling a student. The couple guided the conversation to focus on the topic of critical race theory.”

The video dropped in mid January, and at the following school board meeting about 40 people spoke on the matter, about 15 of whom were upset about what they had seen while the rest were there to support Boaz….

Open the link to read the article in full.

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Categories Accountability, Censorship, Cruelty, Disruption, Ethics, Extremism, Privatization, Racism

Why the British Don’t Like Trump: His Character, Not His Politics

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
27

Writing in the London Daily, Nate White explains why the British don’t like Donald Trump. It’s not his politics; the Brits have elected conservative politicians repeatedly. It’s him they don’t like: his character, personality, and essence.

White writes:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief. 

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever. I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman. But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. 

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers. And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. 

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead. There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless – and he kicks them when they are down.

So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think ‘Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy’ is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:

• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and mostly are.

• You don’t need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man. 

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss. After all, it’s impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.

And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: ‘My God… what… have… I… created?’ If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Categories Character, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Hypocrisy, Ignorance, Stupid, Trump

Sarasota: Christian Ziegler “Prowled” Bars to Find Female Partners to Bring Home to Bridget

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
30

The Daily Beast posted startling news from a Sarasota police report. The Ziegler power couple sought out women for their threesomes. Bridget Ziegler was a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and an outspoken critic of LGBTQ+; Christian Ziegler was chairman of the state GOP. They liked threesomes.

Newly released documents say Moms For Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler and her GOP chairman husband went “on the prowl” in Sarasota bars to find women to have sex with.

Text messages quoted in a Sarasota Police Department (SPD) memo that was obtained by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune revealed how Ziegler sent her husband, Christian, hunting for a third sexual partner at local bars and directed him to send photos of possible hits. She allegedly told him to pretend to take pictures of his beer while photographing the women so he wouldn’t get caught sneaking pictures of them…

The Zieglers, a local power couple in Florida Republican politics, were at the center of a sex abuse scandal after a woman alleged that Christian had raped her while she was involved in a three-way relationship with the pair. They were both ousted from their respective positions at the Florida GOP and the conservative Leadership Institute, although charges were never formally issued. Bridget Ziegler also faced a barrage of attacks for her “hypocrisy,” since she had taken a very public anti-LGBTQ+ stance but had engaged in sexual relationships with women.

Wary of what further revelations would cause for their torpedoed reputations, Bridget Ziegler had sued to keep the records kept by SPD and the State Attorney’s Office sealed from the public. That case is pending in Sarasota County, court records show.

I received this article from my friend James Harvey late last night. He remarked on the hypocrisy of some of the Christian Right’s moral leaders. There was Jerry Falwell, his wife Becki, and a 20-year-old pool boy. There was the president of the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, George C. Roche III, who led the college for nearly three decades. He allegedly had an affair with his daughter-in-law over 19 years; she committed suicide. Hundreds, thousands of religious leaders—the people who are supposed to teach us about morality and ethics—have been accused of pedophilia (google “pastors or priests or rabbis accused of pedophilia” or “sex abuse”).

Hypocrites.

Categories Ethics, Florida, Hypocrisy, Lies

New York Times: Justice Alito Flew an Upside-Down U.S. Flag, a Trump Symbol, at His Home After 2020 Election

By dianeravitch
May 18, 2024 //
21

Judges and justices are supposed to be impartial arbiters of conflicting claims. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is not. The New York Times reported that an upside-down flag flew in front of Justice Alito’s home after the 2020 election. That symbolism was adopted as a protest by Trump’s zealous and disappointed fans. Alito was one of them. He blamed his wife, as if he had no decisions about what flag was flying in his front yard. How can he be expected to rule impartially on cases about that election?

After the 2020 presidential election, as some Trump supporters falsely claimed that President Biden had stolen the office, many of them displayed a startling symbol outside their homes, on their cars and in online posts: an upside-down American flag.

One of the homes flying an inverted flag during that time was the residence of Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in Alexandria, Va., according to photographs and interviews with neighbors.

The upside-down flag was aloft on Jan. 17, 2021, the images showed. President Donald J. Trump’s supporters, including some brandishing the same symbol, had rioted at the Capitol a little over a week before. Mr. Biden’s inauguration was three days away. Alarmed neighbors snapped photographs, some of which were recently obtained by The New York Times. Word of the flag filtered back to the court, people who worked there said in interviews.

While the flag was up, the court was still contending with whether to hear a 2020 election case, with Justice Alito on the losing end of that decision. In coming weeks, the justices will rule on two climactic cases involving the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, including whether Mr. Trump has immunity for his actions. Their decisions will shape how accountable he can be held for trying to overturn the last presidential election and his chances for re-election in the upcoming one.

“I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Justice Alito said in an emailed statement to The Times. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Judicial experts said in interviews that the flag was a clear violation of ethics rules, which seek to avoid even the appearance of bias, and could sow doubt about Justice Alito’s impartiality in cases related to the election and the Capitol riot.

Categories Democracy, Elections, Extremism, Justice

Carol Burris: New Data Show that Charter Schools Increase Segregation

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
10

Carol Burris former teacher, former principal, now executive director of The Network for Public Education, writes in The Progressive about the segregative effects of charter schools.

Burris writes:

As we approach the seventieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, a crucial question arises: Why are our nation’s schools experiencing increased segregation despite progress in neighborhood integration? A new study by Sean Reardon of Stanford University and Ann Owens of the University of Southern California provides a startling answer—more than half of the blame is due to the expansion of charter schools.

While the courts’ lifting of desegregation orders played a role, the researchers’ analysis reveals that segregation would be approximately 14 percent lower if not for the expansion of charter schools. 

In an article on the report, Laura Meckler of The Washington Post provided the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina as an example. Researchers scored segregation on a scale of 0 (matching district demographics) to 1.0 (complete segregation). In 1971, following a court-ordered desegregation plan, the district’s segregation score fell to 0.03. In 1991, it remained low at 0.10. Today, there are more than 30 charter schools in the district, and the district’s 2022 segregation score has risen to a whopping 0.44.

As the Network for Public Education, of which I’m the executive director, and dozens of national and local organizations reported to the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, North Carolina’s education department aided and abetted the expansion of “white-flight” charter schools using money it received from a grant program. One of the schools that received funding was a former white-flight private academy, Hobgood Academy, which is now a charter. Other grants went to North Carolina charters in disproportionately white suburbs of Charlotte that were attempting to self-segregate their schools from the more racially diverse Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. 

And, as we demonstrated in our recent report, the expansion of right-wing charter schools like the Cincinnati Classical Academy, which received a federal grant to expand, increases segregation with website messaging that encourages the enrollment of white children from conservative families, resulting in racially imbalanced student demographics.

Do we see the same increases in segregation resulting from public school choice? Although the Reardon and Owens study did not explore that specific question, a separate study recently released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA indicates that public magnet schools are far less segregated than charter schools.

The report, written by Ryan Pfleger and Gary Orfield, examined more than 100 districts and compared the student demographics of their charter and magnet schools. The findings were clear: The charter sector has a higher proportion of intensely segregated schools than the public magnet sector, and this gap is widening over time.

According to the study, “the proportion of intensely segregated charter schools, with less than 10 percent white students, increased from 45 percent to 59 percent from 2000 to 2021. A different trend was observed for magnets. The share of magnets that were intensely segregated was nearly the same in 2000 and 2021: 34 percent and 36 percent.”

If we hope to heal the racial, socio-economic, and political divides in our nation, public schools in districts with policies designed to increase integration among schools and within schools offer our best hope.

Unfortunately, charter schools, whether by chance or, in some cases, by design, are erasing the gains made by those who bravely fought for integration seventy years ago.

Categories Education Reform

Georgia: Students Demand Fully Funded Public Schools, Not Vouchers!

By dianeravitch
May 17, 2024 //
23

Seventeen high school students in Georgia marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision by writing an article calling on the state’s political leaders to fully fund public schools, instead of funding vouchers. They are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition.

They wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

As young Georgians, we share the belief that all children should have the freedom to pursue their dreams and that our futures depend on receiving a great education. To get there, we must equip every public school with the resources to deliver a quality education for every child, no matter their color, their ZIP code or how much money their parents make.

Unfortunately, we find ourselves in yet another moment of massive resistance to public education with increasingly aggressive efforts on behalf of the state of Georgia to privatize our public schools and return us to a two-tiered system marked by racial segregation. As public school students in high schools across Georgia, we believe that the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education is not just a cause for celebration but an invitation to recommit ourselves to the promise of a public education system that affirms an essential truth: Schools separated by race will never be equal.

Even as our country celebrates the anniversary of Brown this month, we know that our state actively worked to obstruct desegregation, which did not meaningfully take place for another 15 years. Seven years after the Supreme Court’s ruling that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was unconstitutional, the Georgia General Assembly revoked its school segregation law in 1961. Another 10 years later, a court-ordered desegregation plan finally took effect — in 1971.

In 2024, educators across Georgia, from Albany to Atlanta, from Valdosta to Vinings, from Dalton to Dublin, and everywhere in between, are working hard to provide students like us with a quality education, empowering us to build a brighter future in Georgia for all. Yet politicians in the Georgia Capitol seem dedicated to resegregating and privatizing our public schools by taking tax dollars meant to support all of the students in our communities and giving it to unaccountable voucher programs that favor the wealthiest few.

The long and shameful history of vouchers is something that politicians who forced them to become law this year don’t want us to know. In many cities, public education funding was funneled to private “segregation academies” where white children received better resources than children of color. Instead of making our public schools stronger and moving us all forward together, these politicians are defunding our public schools by more than $100 million and working to drag us backward to the days when Georgia was still resisting court-ordered desegregation.

We want our leaders to get serious about what works: fully funding our public schools so that we can improve our neighborhood schools. That’s where 1.7 million public school students in Georgia learn and grow, and where we all can have a say. Research all across the country shows that voucher programs will not improve student outcomes in Georgia, but we know what will best serve students.

Young Georgians like us need investments in our public schools so we have the opportunity to learn and thrive. Gov. Brian P. Kemp has $16 billion of unspent public funds — enough to cover the costs of funding our schools and investing in our communities. Georgia has one of the highest overall rates of child poverty in the nation. Yet our state is one of only six states that provides schools with no specific funding to support children living in poverty. By refusing to give our schools what they need, we are setting our schools and our students up for failure.

Politicians brag about Georgia’s teachers being among the highest paid in the South even though they know they have created a crisis around public education that puts our teachers, our parents and students like us in an impossible position. Right now, nearly every school district in Georgia operates with a waiver to avoid adhering to classroom size restrictions because they cannot afford to hire enough teachers. And though the American School Counseling Association recommends a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:250, Georgia mandates a counselor-to-student ratio of 1:450 students. Many schools cannot even meet that ratio because of a lack of funding. All of that is by design because politicians have refused to update Georgia’s school funding formula for nearly 40 years.

This year, as we celebrate 70 years since Brown v. Board of Education, we invite every Georgian to join us in our call for fully funded neighborhood public schools so that every Georgia student has an inviting classroom, a well-rounded curriculum, small class sizes and the freedom to learn.

The writers are members of the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition. Nia G. Batra is a sophomore at Decatur High School. Hunter Buchheit is a senior at Walton High School. Ava Bussey is a senior at Marietta High School. Keara Field is a senior at McDonough High School. Saif Hasan is a junior at Lambert High School. Jessica Huang is a senior at Peachtree Ridge High School. Shivi Mehta is a junior at the Alliance Academy for Innovation. Bryan Nguyen is a senior at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. Rhea Sethi is a senior at North Gwinnett High School. Maariya Sheikh is a senior at Campbell High School. Harrison Tran is a junior at Jenkins High School. Sharmada Venkataramani is a sophomore at South Forsyth High School. Thomas Botero Mendieta is a junior at Archer High School. Kennedy Young is a senior at Campbell High School.

Categories Bigotry, Budget Cuts, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Georgia, Inequality, Injustice, Privatization, Racism, Segregation, Students
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