Mental Health Professionals Speak Out about Trump

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
37

Jay Kuo interviewed John D. Gartner, psychologist and psychotherapist, who leads a group called Duty to Warn. The group consists of mental health professionals who are concerned about Trump’s cognitive decline. Gartner told Kuo: there are increasing signs the former president is heading fast down the road toward dementia. 

I’m offering excerpts from this fascinating interview.

Kuo asks, Gartner answers:

We hear a lot about Biden’s age and gaffes, to the point where most Americans cite Biden’s age but not Trump’s as a big issue for the election, even though they are only three years apart. Based on what you and other experts have observed, why are you sounding the alarm about Trump, but not about Biden?

I call it the “double lie.” Pathologizing Biden’s normal aging is the first lie. Normalizing Trump’s dementia is the second. The sorts of small lapses we’ve seen in Biden are part and parcel of normal aging. Forgetting names and dates doesn’t make us seniors less competent. What we lack in memory we more than make up for in judgment, experience, and wisdom. Other cultures revere their elders, but America in 2024 mocks and devalues theirs. The problem isn’t old people in government—the dreaded “gerontocracy.” It’s age-ism.

Joe Biden’s calling the current president of France by the old president of France’s name is like me calling my youngest daughter by my oldest daughter’s name, which I do all the time. When I get together with my fellow senior citizens, the topic of forgetting often comes up. Sure, I forget names and even appointments sometimes. But I’m a better psychologist now than I’ve ever been. I actually pity the patients who had the young Dr. Gartner. He didn’t know anything, and, honestly, I can’t even imagine why anyone paid him. I would argue that Biden, too, has objectively performed well at his job, despite, or maybe even because, of his age. Don’t judge us senior citizens by how fast we walk, or if we stumble over a name or two. Judge us by our performance.

And hello. Forgetting the name of the president of France isn’t the same as thinking Obama is president or that Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi are one person. Can we introduce a sense of proportion and some common sense here?…

Here are some of Gartner’s examples of Trump’s strange language in public:

Trump shows formal signs of disordered speech we typically see only in organically impaired dementia patients:

A) “phonemic aphasia”

Trump uses non-words in place of real words, that usually include a fragment of the actual word. For example saying “mishuz” instead of missile, or “Chrishus” instead of Christmas. You can look at supercut reels assembled by Ron Filipkowski on Twitter, The Daily Show, and now by the Democratic House Judiciary Committee, as well. Both Chairman Nadler and Rep. Swalwellshowed their own supercuts of Trump’s cognitive decline at the Hur hearings, to counteract Hur’s partisan slur about Biden’s “poor memory.”

To demonstrate how pervasive these errors are, I present this long but far from exhaustive list of Trump’s phonemic aphasias:

“President U-licious S Grant” (For Ulysses S. Grant)

“space-capsicle” (for space capsule)

“combat infantroopen”(for combat infantry)

“sahhven country”(for sovereign country)

“renoversh” (For renovations)

“Anonmmiss” (for anonymous).

“transpants” (for transplants)

“lawmarkers” (for lawmakers)

“supply churn” (for supply chain)

“Rusher” (for Russia)

“raydoh” (for radio)

“Liberal-ation (for liberation”)

“benefishers” (for benificiaries)

“con-ducking” (for conducting)

“stat-tics, suh-tic-six” (for statistics)

“crimakle” (for criminal)

“armed forsiva” (for armed forces)

“internate” (for Internet)

“transjija” (for transition)

“stanktuary” (for sanctuary)

That last example took place during Trump’s State of the Union Address, just to contrast that with the SOTU we just witnessed. In recent rallies in GA, NC, and VA over the course of just a few days Trump evidenced more examples:

“We have becrumb a nation”

“All comp-ply-ments” to Joe Biden.

“I know Poten.”

“He can’t cam-pay. He can’t campaign.”

“We will expel the wald-mongers.”

But of course, this is exactly what we should expect. As he deteriorates, these deficits will make themselves apparent more and more often. Now he can’t get through a rally without an example. Cornell psychologist Harry Segal speculated Trump may be “sundowning” and hence most vulnerable to going off the rails at night-time rallies.

Some have argued that Trump’s impaired speech could be an articulation problem, rather than a brain problem. Some have argued he could be slurring from a variety of causes, from loose dentures to drug toxicity (indeed many have speculated that Trump might be abusing or even snorting Adderall or some other stimulant.)

But all those competing explanations are disproven by one fact. Trump commits these aphasic errors in his written posts, as well, proving the problem is in his brain, not his articulation. 

For example, he recently posted:

“Joe Buden DISINFORMATES AND MISINFORMATES”

B) “Semantic aphasia”

Semantic aphasia is using a real word, but in a way that doesn’t correspond to its meaning. For example, when Trump referred to the “oranges of the investigation.” Another example would be “midtown and midturn elections.” Recently, when apparently trying to say “three years later,” Trump said:

“Three years, lady, lady, lady.”

More recently Trump said at a rally:

“We’re going to protect pro-God…”

In mid-sentence he goes blank and looks at the ceiling. When he reboots, the words he uses to complete the sentence don’t make sense:

“…context and content.”

C) Complete loss of all verbal language

Like an infant sometimes, Trump just makes sounds:

“Gang boong. This is me. I hear bing.”

Until finally, he is reduced to silence. 

“Saudi Arabia and Russia will re-ve-du. Ohhh…”

Trump’s face went blank, followed by a sigh, and a silent pause while he looked at the ceiling.

D) Tangential Thinking

Trump evidences “tangential thinking” where he drifts from one unrelated thought fragment to another, and sometimes tries to “confabulate” them into a story. But the narrative is literally incoherent. When the press describes Trump’s speeches as “rambling,” they are gaslighting us with a euphemistic word that normalizes the grossly abnormal. Trump regularly degenerates into

incomprehensible strings of words.

Just recently outside a New York courtroom, Trump declared:

“We can’t have an election in the middle of a political season. We just had Super Tuesday. And we had a Tuesday after Tuesday already.”

Other examples would be:

“We are an institute in a powerful death penalty. We will put this on.”

“I could tell you about aircraft carriers, where they use electric catapults. They couldn’t go to the steam, which works better for about 1/100th the price, you know? The electric catapult, you know that story? I could tell you about the elevators on a tremendous carrier, the Gerald Ford, and they decided not to use hydraulic like the John Deere tractor, they decided to use magnets, ‘we’re gonna use magnets!’ to lift up the elevators with seven planes.”

In a recent string of rallies in GA, SC, and VA he said:

“They say I’m cognitively impaired. I’m not cognitively.”

“They don’t want illegal immigrants knocking on their front door and saying I’m going to use your kitchen. And I’m going to use your bedroom and there’s not a damn thing. And that’s the nice ones, okay?”

“They raided my house in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, they raided. With no raid, they had no reason to do so.”

Some of his utterances are incomprehensible for a different reason. They suggest Trump is so disoriented he’s occupying a different reality than everyone else. 

For example:

“They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high-level interference against Joe Biden’s top and only political appointment. A guy named me. A guy named me.”

At a recent rally, he said: 

“Biden beat Barack Hussein Obama. Ever heard of him?”

Biden never beat Obama. So we have to conclude that Trump is confused about basic reality, and living in a different reality that changes unpredictably. When a confused patient is evaluated in an emergency room, a standard psychiatric question to determine if a patient is disoriented is:

“Who is President of the United States?” 

If you get that wrong the most probable explanations are dementia, psychosis or drug toxicity, and most probably you’d be admitted for observation in any case.

From Diane: since writing this post, I saw this clip of Trump speaking about the border. Please watch it.

It’s a tweet from Republicans Against Trump.

Donald Trump on the border crisis:

“People are pouring over. It’s sort of known as Steak Mountain. Steak Hill. Snake. Snakes…a lot of snakes…rattlesnakes…”

Categories Accountability, Health, Language, Trump

South Carolina: Charter Fraud and Profits!

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
3

Carol Burris writes here about a charter scandal in South Carolina. Carol is the executive director of the Network for Public Education.

She writes:

Last week, an excellent investigative report on a for-profit-run charter chain appeared in South Carolina’s Post and Courier. Entitled How a Florida principal with a controversial history became a SC charter school kingpin, it was written by Hillary Flynn and Maura Turcotte. These reporters put extraordinary care and diligent research into the piece.  I know because, over the course of a year, Flynn would call me from time to time for insight into the for-profit charter world. There is no transparency in South Carolina. You need FOIAs to determine which schools in the state are even run by for-profits. Here is a summary of what they found. 

 

Pinnacle, a Florida for-profit corporation, has three charter schools in South Carolina. 

Its creator and owner, Michael D’Angelo, is a former Florida charter school principal who was fired from a for-profit chain. He then moved to another charter, where he wrote himself reimbursement checks with no invoices and got fired again.

 

Undeterred by his previous failures, D’Angelo tried to open several charter schools in Florida. Despite being told he did “not have the competency to operate a charter school,” he found an accountant, created a for-profit charter management company, and headed to South Carolina to open Gray Collegiate Academy.

 

When Pinnacle’s school got into trouble with the South Carolina Public Charter School District for noncompliance, Pinnacle went shopping for a new authorizer for its charter school. A Christian college, Erskine College, stepped in. It later accused Pinnacle of fraud. Then, two Pinnacle Schools moved to another Christian College, Limestone College, for authorization. Authorizers receive substantial fees from the schools, a bonanza for cash-strapped colleges. 

 

The process of authorizer shopping, a common practice in states like Ohio and Michigan with large for-profit sectors, is a glaring loophole in the system. The authorizer, who stands to gain substantial fees from the schools, can provide a new lease of life to a shady charter school. A South Carolina Senate bill aims to curb this practice, but it faces fierce opposition from the charter lobby. The National Alliance of Public Charter Schools even lobbied to ensure that states with multiple authorizers are privileged when getting big CSP grants, further exacerbating the issue of authorizer shopping.

 

Meanwhile, Pinnacle plans to open two more schools, serving as additional cash cows for D’Angelo and his friends.

 

You can read the excellent investigative reporting on Pinnacle here. While you must register with the paper to see it, it is not behind a paywall. Kudos to Flynn and Turcotte. 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Scandal, South Carolina

Peter Greene: How to Ease the Burden of Teachers Who Are Overworked

By dianeravitch
April 17, 2024 //
43

Peter Greene was a classroom teacher for 39 years, and he knows that teachers are overworked. There are not enough hours in the day for them to meet all their obligations. He considers in this post what to do. He certainly does not think that AI or scripted curriculum is the answer.

He writes:

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there’s not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn’t part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn’t even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work– Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers’ plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I’ve always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there’s never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn’t bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let’s be honest–being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them–that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can’t simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There’s also resistance because the “let’s give teachers a break” argument is used by 1) vendors with “teacher-assisting” junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of “teacher-proof” programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope (“any dope” constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn’t popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there’s the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, “We’ll just have teachers do that” as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won’t be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she’s in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don’t have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we’ve come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals–

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That’s for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we’d like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren’t can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you’re doing the job. I don’t want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching

Arizona: How Democrats Could Overturn the Abortion Ban of 1864

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
7

Ray Stern of The Arizona Republic reports that the two houses of the legislature are so closely divided that Democrats would throw out the 1864 ban on abortion with the help of only a few Republicans. Even Trump crony Kari Lake is embarrassed by the 1864 ban.

Arizona Democrats, aided by a pair of Republicans in each chamber of the Legislature, appear to have the votes to pass a bill repealing the state’s 1864 abortion ban.

Almost anything is possible with a vote of 31 out of 60 in the state House, or 16 out of 30 in the state Senate.

Lawmakers say they expect to see a vote on the repeal when they return to work on Wednesday, even though the Legislature’s leaders don’t want it. The process almost started last week but stalled when Republicans didn’t get behind it.

Republicans hold one-seat majorities in the House and Senate, but Democrats can reach a majority with help from a few Republicans. Rules normally require that bills get heard by committees and move along the process according to set timelines, but a majority of members can vote to waive the rules.

The public reaction against the 1864 ban has been so intense that some Republicans might vote to overturn it. But there may be some Democrats wondering if they should take the issue off the table before November.

Categories Arizona, Elections, Extremism, Gender, Health

Nebraska: Pro-Voucher Legislators Try to Kill Referendum (Because They Know They Will Lose)

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
5

Nebraska voucher advocates are trying to head off a referendum because they know they will lose. Senator Lou Ann Linehan has introduced a bill intended to fund vouchers and block a referendum, thus preventing Nebraskans from voting on whether they want vouchers.

Senator Linehan is working with Betsy DeVos’s advocacy group American Federation for Children.

Of course, they don’t want to let the public decide! Vouchers will lose!

In every state referendum on school vouchers, they have always been defeated. The public wants public tax dollars to go to public schools! The public does not want to subsidize the tuition of students who attend private and religious schools. In every state that has vouchers, most are claimed by students who already attend non-public schools. Worse, as Michigan State’s Josh Cowen has demonstrated, students who leave public schools with vouchers fall far behind their public school peers.

And of course, vouchers drain funding from public schools, attended by the vast majority of children.

From: Brooke @ Stand For Schools<info@standforschools.org>
Date: Mon, Apr 15, 2024 at 5:05 PM
Subject: The Fight Continues: LB 1402

Dear Friend,

 LB 1402, Senator Linehan’s private school voucher bill, passed through general and select file debate last week. With that, LB 1402 could become the first bill in Nebraska’s legislative history to overturn a law with a referendum on the ballot for November, bypassing your right to vote. 

We urge you to please contact your Senatorand tell them NO to LB 1402 and to let Nebraskans vote on public funds to private schools in November!  

Contact Your Senator!

Instead of sending public dollars to private schools, which are under no obligation to serve all children, tell your Senator you support the public schools that 9 out of 10 Nebraska students attend, and so should they.

Contact your Senatorand tell them NO LB 1402 and that you support public education!

Contact Your Senator

Thank you for your continued support of Stand For Schools and Nebraska public education! 

 The Stand For Schools Team  

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Categories Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fraud, Nebraska, Vouchers

Investors in Trump Stock Blame Its Decline on Libs

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
18

Drew Harrell of The Washington Post published a sad article about the Trump devotees who have put their life savings into his DJT stock offering and have no concerns about its value or its future. They are so certain that he is a financial genius that they expect the stock to soar, once the “liberals” stop depressing its market price.

Jerry Dean McLain first bet on former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social two years ago, buying into the Trump company’s planned merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, at $90 a share. Over time, as the price changed, he kept buying, amassing hundreds of shares for $25,000 — pretty much his “whole nest egg,” he said.

That nest egg has lost about half its value in the past two weeks as Trump Media & Technology Group’s share price dropped from $66 after its public debut last month to $32 on Friday. But McLain, 71, who owns a tree-removal service outside Oklahoma City, said he’s not worried. If anything, he wants to buy more.

“I know good and well it’s in Trump’s hands, and he’s got plans,” he said. “I have no doubt it’s going to explode sometime.”

For shareholders like McLain, investing in Truth Social is less a business calculation than a statement of faith in the former president and the business traded under his initials, DJT.


Even the company’s plunging stock price — and the chance their investments could get mostly wiped out — doesn’t seem to have shaken that faith. The company has lost $3.5 billion in value since its public debut last month.

As a business, Trump Media has largely underwhelmed: The company lost $58 million last year on $4 million in revenue, less than the average Chick-fil-A franchise, even as it paid out millions in executive salaries, bonuses and stock.

And in two years, Truth Social has attracted a tiny fraction of the traffic other platforms see, according to estimates from the analytics firm Similarweb — one of the only ways to measure its performance, given that the company says it “does not currently, and may never, collect, monitor or report certain key operating metrics used by companies in similar industries.”

But for some Trump investors, the stock is a badge of honor — a way to show their devotion beyond buying Trump merchandise, visiting Trump golf courses or donating to Trump’s presidential campaign….

Trump Media has boasted that it has benefited from a flood of “retail investors” — small-time and amateur shareholders betting their personal cash. Its merger partner, Digital World Acquisition, said its shares were bought by nearly 400,000 retail investors, and Trump Media’s chief executive, Devin Nunes, told Fox News anchor Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that the company had added over 200,000 new ones in the past couple of weeks.

“There’s not another company out there that has retail investors like this,” said Nunes, who this year will receive a $1 million salary, a $600,000 retention bonus and a stock package currently worth $3.7 million…

One investor said “the recent drops in share price have been the result of “stock manipulation” from an “organized effort” to make the company look bad. There’s no proof of such a campaign, but Schlanger is convinced. “It’s got to be political,” he said, from all the “liberals that are trying to knock it down…”

After the billionaire media mogul Barry Diller called Trump Media a “scam” stock bought by “dopes,” one account, @Handbag72, claimed to have bought more shares, arguing Diller didn’t “get it” or was “at risk of [losing] $$$$.” The next day, the account shared a 2021 blog post from the investing forum Seeking Alpha saying Truth Social could be worth $1 trillion in the next 10 years.

Soon after it was launched March 26 on NASDAQ, the stock reached $79. By last Monday, it had fallen to $26.61, after news broke that DJT intends to issue millions of additional shares, which would dilute the value of the original shares.

Bibles, sneakers, perfume, wine, steaks, now stocks. Trump will keep selling, and his cult will keep buying.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Hoax, Trump

New Hampshire: GOP Leadership is Determined to Crush Public Schools, Ignore Hungry Children

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
3

New Hampshire reporter Garry Rayno says that the state legislature has its priorities upside down. Writing at IndepthNH.org, Rayno describes a Republican state government led by “moderate” Governor Chris Sununu that’s determined to destroy public schools while expanding vouchers eventually to cover all students’ private school tuition, including the children of the richest residents. Sununu appointed a homeschooling parent, Frank Edelblut, as the State Commissioner of Education. Edelblut is hostile to public schools and eager to divert funding from them.

The Republican legislature refused to renew a program to feed hungry children. As Rayno notes, they are “pro-life,” but don’t care much about living children.

Rayno writes:

From the new proposed rules for education minimum standards to alternative education opportunities, the state legislature and the executive branch appear to have their priorities upside down.

Call it culture wars, call it the war on public education or whatever you want, but much more attention is being paid to about 3 or 4 percent of the state’s school-age students — mostly in private and religious schools or home-schooled — while about 24 percent of public school students with food insecurity do not receive the same attention.

While there is ample evidence a hungry student is not a student fully focused on his or her studies, and is less likely to succeed academically than those who aren’t hungry when they come to school, the House last week by the slimmest of margins, said the food insecure kids could go hungry in this, one of the wealthiest per-capita states in the country.

House Bill 1212 supporters were willing to trim the cost by reducing the income cap from 350 percent of the federal poverty level to 250 percent or about $17 million annually from the Education Trust Fund instead of $50 million.

But that failed to induce enough Republican support to take the bill off the table where a near party line vote had put it, effectively killing it for this year.

The Republican majority also did not want to spend $150,000 of federal pandemic money to hire a coordinator to help about 1,500 homeless students who do not qualify for state homeless services because they do not live with their parents.

Many of the 1,500 students are in the LGBTQIA+ community.

Many of the same people who did not want to spend state or federal money to feed the hungry and help the homeless children and youths favor greater restrictions on abortions or are “pro-life.”

What they are saying with their votes, is we want you to have babies whether you want them or not or whether you can afford them or not, but once they are born, you’re responsible for taking care of them with no help from us.

Pro-life may not be the best term for anti-abortion proponents who voted not to feed the hungry children nor help find them a place to live…

Yet this week two public hearings will be held on bills to expand the eligibility for the Education Freedom Account program now in its third year, and every year well over its budgeted appropriation.

The bill would increase the income cap for the program from 350 percent of the federal poverty level to 500 percent which is $156,000 for a family of four and $102,000 for a parent and child household based on federal 2024 figures.

The current rate would limit family income to $109,200 for a family of four and $71,540 for a family of two.

The cost of the program since its inception has steadily increased from $8.1 million the first year, to $15 million the second and $25 million for the current school year.

The bill barely passed the House and the House Finance Committee chair waived fiscal review of the increase although many more students would be eligible — well above 50 percent of the families in New Hampshire and greatly increasing the cost, but bill proponents did not want to give Democrats another shot at killing the bill.

The money for the program comes from the Education Trust Fund which also provides the adequacy grants to public schools and the larger grants to charter schools, along with special education, building aid and other educational activities…

The bill will increase the income threshold from 350 percent to 400 percent with the threshold for a family of two $81,760 and a family of four at $124,800.

Reaching Higher Education estimates this increase will bring the cost for next school year to $53.4 million.

That is about a quarter of the current surplus in the Education Trust Fund.

The ultimate goal for supporters of the EFA program is universal eligibility or having no income cap so every family in the state would be eligible which would cost $90 million to $100 million if all the students in private or religious schools and homeschool programs sought and received some grants.

About 10 states have universal or near universal voucher programs, but the two states that have attracted the most attention because of their impact on state budgets have been Arizona and Ohio and both have gone well over estimated costs as they have here in New Hampshire.

The program is bankrupting Arizona and the Democratic governor is trying to limit its reach, but the Republican-controlled legislature has refused to go along.

Ohio faces a lawsuit over its program claiming it is hurting public schools while the vast majority of the new participants are students already in private or religious schools or homeschooling programs.  

Sound familiar.

As one Texas state senator said when Gov. Greg Abbott was pushing for school vouchers, “it is nothing but a subsidy for the wealthy.”

And there are the new rules for the state’s minimum standards for public schools.

Two public hearings were held in the past two weeks and the proposed rules were universally trashed by almost everyone testifying causing state Board of Education chair Drew Cline to chastise those focusing on the rules presented to the board in February while a newer, updated version will come before the board soon, although that updated proposal is not available to the public.

The rules are aimed at clarifying and adding details to the state’s competency-based education model, but they also have been criticized for lowering the existing minimum standards, removing limits on class size, making many standards optional and not mandatory, and no longer requiring certified teachers and professionals.

Other concerns were the proposal would do away with local control, a hallmark for public education in the state, and move toward privatizing education and away from what one person called the great equalizer “public education.”

Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut proposed bills in the last few sessions that would have eliminated many current standards to focus only on the core areas of English, math and science, but without much success with the legislature.

Many saw the plan as a way to lower the state’s share of the cost of education and to make public school alternatives more attractive to students and parents.

Say what you will about Edelblut and his opinions about public education, he is tenacious.

The state is at a crossroads that will determine what public education will be for the next decade and on whether or not the state is willing to take care of its most vulnerable so they can fully participate in that education.

The end of the 2024 session and ultimately the next election should provide a vision of the future for New Hampshire and its children.

Garry Rayno may be reached at garry.rayno@yahoo.com.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Childhood, Cruelty, Disruption, Education Industry, New Hampshire, Students, Vouchers

SAVE THE DATE: The Ravitch Lecture at Wellesley Is April 18, This Thursday!

By dianeravitch
April 16, 2024 //
12

All are welcome to a very important lecture at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Admission is free. Join me!

The speaker is a pioneer of critical race theory.

Professor Soo Hong, chair of the Education Department at Wellesley, released the following announcement.

We are thrilled to announce that our 2024 Ravitch Lecture in Education will be presented by Professor Patricia Williams ’72, University Distinguished Professor of Law and Humanities at Northeastern University. Professor Williams’s talk is titled, “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History.”

This is a topic that feels relevant now more than ever. 

The lecture will be held on Thursday, April 18, 4:30 PM in Jewett Auditorium. Please share the details of this event widely!

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Description of “Burying the Bodies: Book-Banning and the Legacy of Anti-Literacy Laws in Constructing Erasures of History” 
We live in an oddly contradictory moment: politicians who position themselves as supporters of “absolute” freedom of speech simultaneously enact laws that restrict access to books about race, gender, or critical theory, and seek to constrain conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There have always been “culture wars” in America—it is not surprising that conversations about traumatic histories and contested historical perspectives might be fractious. In a civil society, we commit to arguing our way to consensus, however noisily or uncomfortably, and even if it takes generations. But it is the mark of an uncivil—or authoritarian—society when we find ourselves without the right to speak, hear, write, publish, dissent, or share common space even in our disagreement. The First Amendment rightly allows us to curtail speech that poses an “imminent threat of physical harm.” But recent “anti-woke” laws banish from public spaces books and ideas that merely might inspire “shame,” “guilt,” or “discomfort.” This lecture will ponder the conceptual chasm between those two notions of constraint upon speech. What power imbalance, what uses of force are rationalized in erasing whole histories from collective contemplation? What civic dispossession is enacted when certain lives or lived narratives are discounted as intolerable, unknowable–whose mere recounting is silenced as illegal?

Wellesley Logo

Soo Hong

The lecture will be taped and available online at a later time.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read, Racism

James Talarico: “There Is Nothing Christian About Christian Nationalism”

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2024 //
12

This is a beautiful statement by James Talarico, a Democratic member of the State Legislature of Texas.

I wish I had the time to transcribe it. The video is on Twitter. It is also here. I hope you can see it.

A brief paraphrase:

Jesus called on us to love our neighbors.

Not just our Christian neighbors.

Not just our straight neighbors.

Not justour male neighbors.

Not just our white neighbors.

Not just our rich neighbors.

All our neighbors.

Categories Religion, Texas

Florida: Ex-Judge Lambastes Supreme Court for Ignoring State Constitution

By dianeravitch
April 15, 2024 //
16

Barbara Pariente served on the Florida Supreme Court for more than twenty years and is now retired. She was astonished by that court’s recent decision to approve a six-week ban on abortion, because the state constitution explicitly protects privacy rights, which unquestionably—until now—included abortion decisions.

She recently wrote in Slate:

On April 1, the Florida Supreme Court, in a 6–1 ruling, overturned decades of decisions beginning in 1989 that recognized a woman’s right to choose—that is, whether to have an abortion—up to the time of viability.

Anchored in Florida’s own constitutional right to privacy, this critical individual right to abortion had been repeatedly affirmed by the state Supreme Court, which consistently struck down conflicting laws passed by the Legislature.

As explained first in 1989:

Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision of whether or not to continue her pregnancy. We can conceive of few more personal or private decisions concerning one’s body in the course of a lifetime.

Tellingly, the justices at the time acknowledged that their decision was based not only on U.S. Supreme Court precedent but also on Florida’s own privacy amendment.

I served on the Supreme Court of Florida beginning in 1998 and retired, based on our mandatory retirement requirement, a little more than two decades later. Whether Florida’s Constitution provided a right to privacy that encompassed abortion was never questioned, even by those who would have been deemed the most conservative justices—almost all white men back in 1989!

And strikingly, one of the conservative justices at that time stated: “If the United States Supreme Court were to subsequently recede from Roe v. Wade, this would not diminish the abortion rights now provided by the privacy amendment of the Florida Constitution.” Wow!

In 2017 I authored an opinion holding unconstitutional an additional 24-hour waiting period after a woman chooses to terminate her pregnancy. Pointing out that other medical procedures did not have such requirements, the majority opinion noted, “Women may take as long as they need to make this deeply personal decision,” adding that the additional 24 hours stipulated that the patient make a second, medically unnecessary trip, incurring additional costs and delays. The court applied what is known in constitutional law as a “strict scrutiny” test for fundamental rights.

Interestingly, Justice Charles Canady, who is still on the Florida Supreme Court and who participated in the evisceration of Florida’s privacy amendment last week, did not challenge the central point that abortion is included in an individual’s right to privacy. He dissented, not on substantive grounds but on technical grounds.

So what can explain this 180-degree turn by the current Florida Supreme Court? If I said “politics,” that answer would be insufficient, overly simplistic. Unfortunately, with this court, precedent is precedent until it is not. Perhaps each of the six justices is individually, morally or religiously, opposed to abortion.

Yet, at the same time, and on the same, by a 4–3 majority, the justices—three of whom participated in overturning precedent—voted to allow the proposed constitutional amendment on abortion to be placed on the November ballot. (The dissenters: the three female members of the Supreme Court.) That proposed constitutional amendment:

Amendment to Limit Government Interference With Abortion:

No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion. 

For the proposed amendment to pass and become enshrined in the state constitution, 60 percent of Florida voters must vote yes.

In approving the amendment to be placed on the ballot at the same time that it upheld Florida’s abortion bans, the court angered those who support a woman’s right to choose as well as those who are opposed to abortion. Most likely the latter groups embrace the notion that fetuses are human beings and have rights that deserve to be protected. Indeed, Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, during oral argument on the abortion amendment case, queried the state attorney general on precisely that issue, asking if the constitutional language that defends the rights of all natural persons extends to an unborn child at any stage of pregnancy.

In fact, and most troubling, it was the three recently elevated Gov. Ron DeSantis appointees—all women—who expressed their views that the voters should not be allowed to vote on the amendment because it could impact the rights of the unborn child. Justice Jamie Grosshans, joined by Justice Meredith Sasso, expressed that the amendment was defective because it failed to disclose the potential effect on the rights of the unborn child. Justice Renatha Francis was even more direct writing in her dissent:

The exercise of a “right” to an abortion literally results in a devastating infringement on the right of another person: the right to live. And our Florida Constitution recognizes that “life” is a “basic right” for “[a]ll natural persons.” One must recognize the unborn’s competing right to life and the State’s moral duty to protect that life.

In other words the three dissenting justices would recognize that fetuses are included in who is a “natural person” under Florida’s Constitution.

What should be top of mind days after the dueling decisions? Grave concern for the women of our state who will be in limbo because, following the court’s ruling, a six-week abortion ban—before many women even know they are pregnant—will be allowed to go into effect. We know that these restrictions will disproportionately affect low-income women and those who live in rural communities.

Categories Civil Rights, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Gender, Injustice
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