Leonie Haimson: The Myth of Accountability Under Mayoral Control

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2024 //
7

Leonie Haimson is a tireless advocate for better public schools and reduced class sizes. She leads a small but powerful organization called Class Size Matters. I am a member of her board (unpaid, of course, as she is).

CSM is powerful because Leonie is tireless. She attends meetings of the City Council, the Panel on Education Policy (I.e., the Board of Education); she testifies at City Council hearings and goes to Albany to testify when the education committees meet. She finds lawyers to work pro bono and files lawsuit to seek more funding for the schools. She works with parent groups to support or oppose the latest decision by the mayor. She meets with elected representatives. She writes op-Ed’s for the local press. She almost single-handedly collapsed Bill Gates’ inBloom, which hoped to collect personally identifiable information about every student in every state. She scrutizes the budget of the NYC public schools, even more intensely than those who are paid to do it. She once blocked a bad deal that saved the city $600 million, by exposing the sordid record of the contractor.

The elected officials in Albany are now considering whether to renew mayoral control of the public schools. Michael Bloomberg persuaded the Legislature to give him control soon after he was elected in 2001. He promised all sorts of miraculous improvements. He would be accountable, he said.

Leonie testified recently at a hearing on mayoral control and explained that mayoral control did not increase accountability. In fact, it decreased accountability. No one listened to parents. One of Bloomberg’s chancellors (his second, who lasted only 90 days) mocked parents who expressed their grievances at a public hearing.

The mayor hired a lawyer with no experience in education to be the schools’ chancellor. He did not trust educators and surrounded himself with people from the corporate sector.

The mayor had a majority of appointments on the city’s “Panel on Education Policy,” a toothless replacement for its Board of Education. When the members of the Panel threatened to reverse one of his decisions, he fired the disobedient appointees on the spot and replaced them with others who served his wishes.

The mayor could do whatever he wanted, regardless of the views of teachers, parents, students, communities. Beloved public schools that served the neediest of students were closed and replaced with small schools that did not accept the neediest of students. He opened scores of charter schools that were free to reject or exclude students they did not want, then crowed about their test scores. (Now a private citizen, Bloomberg continues to give hundreds of millions to charter schools; no big deal for him, as his assets exceed $60 billion).

Leonie stands on a solid foundation of knowledge, experience, and persistence. Sometimes I think she wins battles because the electeds don’t want her to pester them anymore.

She is the undisputed champion of reduced class sizes.

More power to her!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Corporate Reform, Courage, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, History, Klein, Joel, New York City

Beware Deep Fake Videos! Protect Our Democracy!

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2024 //
18

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed (or not) that I never mention artificial intelligence. I think it’s ominous. I don’t like simulations of real people. I don’t like technology that can write even better than most humans. I prefer to deal directly with humans, not fakes.

Artifial intelligence may be deployed as a deceptive weapon in the upcoming elections.

2024 is a crucial year in our politics. On the ballot in the primaries and in the general election will be candidates who are offering theocracy, dictatorship, or democracy. They will use AI to woo and confuse voters.

New Hampshire blogger and former state senator Jeanne Dietsch has posted a warning about deep fake videos. The video she posts is titled “This Is Not Morgan Freeman.” The face is Morgan Freeman, the voice is Morgan Freeman. But it is not Morgan Freeman.

She also offers a warning about the three factions that are competing in New Hampshire.

She writes:

Elected officials no longer act as individuals. They vote as teams. In NH we have three types of teams:

  • “LIBERTY” CANDIDATES who do not believe in majority rule or public services. They want to privatize education, public lands and government services. They believe the only behaviors that should be illegal are theft and bodily harm. People may make fentanyl, pollute the water supply, sell body parts, or do anything else on their private property. That includes corporations that want to buy up state forests to lumber or entire swaths of housing to rent.
  • FASCIST & THEOCRATIC CANDIDATES also want to replace democracy with minority rule. Unlike liberty candidates, they want stricter laws set by a dictator or by religious leaders. Their goal is to control society, as in Putin’s Russia or a Christian version of Iran.
  • PRO-DEMOCRACY CANDIDATES may disagree on how large government should be and many other issues. However, they will stand up against those who support lawlessness or dictatorship. They will ensure we regularly hold fair elections. They believe in the rule of law.

Political parties no longer define the teams in this state. Undeclared voters outnumber either party by a third. In 2020, the “liberty” team temporarily took over the NH House Republican Caucus. Even though they were a minority of the 400 House members, they controlled the agenda. Pro-democracy legislators in both parties were powerless.

The story in DC is similar. The functions of the American republic are being held hostage by a small minority.

Will we fall for the deep fakes? Will we be deceived by AI? Or will we protect our democracy?

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Courage, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Read

Haaretz: A Surprising Effort to Build Bonds Between Arabs and Jews

By dianeravitch
January 21, 2024 //
6

Haaretz is an Israeli newspaper that is an invaluable source of news and opinion. It harshly criticizes the Netanyahu government and publishes articles critical of the war in Gaza. I began subscribing after the October 7 attacks by Hamas because I wanted to read the news firsthand from an Israeli source, especially one that did not parrot the government’s line. I have not been disappointed. The articles about Netanyahu are far more scathing than anything I read in the American media. And there are sometimes inspiring stories of Jews and Muslims who together seek understanding and peace. The following is one of those stories. This group—Standing Together— has participated in anti-war demonstrations. May they prosper.

It begins:

“You’re not alone,” said the Jewish woman to the Arab woman. Shedding tears, the two Israelis, who were meeting for the first time, embraced. The scene played out in the modest Lod apartment of the Arab woman, Isra Abou Laban Oudi. She’s a single mother, and her 3-year-old son, Tareq, scampered merrily among the 14 strangers, Jews and Arabs, who were guests in his home.

From the beginning of the school year, Oudi says, her son, who speaks only Arabic, had attended a municipal Hebrew-speaking preschool. After October 7, when the children returned to school, Tareq too was happy to reunite with his friends after what had been a two-week break. However, Oudi says, when she heard him speaking Arabic, his teacher hit him and demanded he not use “that language.”

Oudi filed a complaint with the police, which is still under examination, but since then, for some weeks, Tareq hasn’t been going to nursery school. The teacher, who denies hitting Tareq and claims that she only scolded him, also filed a complaint with the police, alleging that Oudi was accusing her falsely. She is still employed in the preschool.

The whole situation left Oudi feeling helpless and very much alone. That is, until the solidarity encounter that took place in her home, when members of Standing Together – an Arab-Jewish social movement that seeks to advance a beneficent, egalitarian society in Israel through joint grassroots activity – came to show their support.

Three days after that visit, Oudi and her toddler son attended an event organized by the movement in the nearby city of Ramle which, like Lod, has a mixed population. There, in a banquet hall that had no banquets to host, Arabs and Jews were working side by side to prepare food packages for Jewish, Muslim and Christian families whose source of livelihood had been truncated because of the war.

Oudi and her son did not join in the activity of Standing Together (“Omdim Beyahad” in Hebrew) by chance. It’s part of the “recovery plan” that the movement recommends for people who have been hurt by racism: to transform the affront into constructive activity. “It gives people the strength to translate the hurt into joint activity, restores a renewed sense of control and also brings us new and highly motivated members,” explains Omri Goren, 24, who oversees the movement’s activity in the Ramle-Lod area and also heads its student division.

After the volunteers finished packing all the food products, and just before the care packages were dispatched to addresses across the city, the 30 volunteers gathered in a dialogue circle. Goren asked them to introduce themselves and describe how they were feeling at this tense time.

One man, an Arab, related that his wife was frightened about the war’s implications for Israel’s Arab citizens and had gone abroad with one of their children, while another son, an electrical engineer, had been fired from his job because of “the situation.” A Jewish man sitting next to him said that for three decades he had been the proprietor of a store in Ramle where Jews, Christians and Muslims shopped, and that he had warm, close relations with all of them. “We are like brothers,” he said. “There is respect and genuine love. I am proud to be a Ramle resident who has friends in Ramle.”

A Jewish woman told the others that her niece was killed on October 7, and that she was worried about the shared future in Israel. “And that’s why I am here.”

Although many may be surprised – though the movement’s leaders are not among them – demand for Standing Together’s message of solidarity and vision of a shared future has been on a constant rise since the war started. Those who thought that the uptick in mutual suspicion between Arabs and Jews is causing the fragile fabric of Israeli society to unravel, is invited to take part in the movement’s activity and discover that they are wrong.

Standing Together, which was founded in 2015 and espouses values of equality, peace, social justice and socialism (and in normal times, is involved in environmental, educational and social issues, in a number of different campaigns), is currently gathering momentum. Its membership is growing daily. The purple color associated with the movement, and its newly minted slogan, “Together we will get through this,” can be seen in more and more places in both the real and online worlds. Most of the new joiners are young people, Arabs and Jews, the movement’s directors note. Since October 7, a dozen joint Arab-Jewish groups, dubbed “solidarity guards,” have been established across the country, joining the eight already active branches. Eleven student chapters have also been created, besides the nine that previously existed…

Tamar Asadi is someone who joined the movement in the wake of October 7. Asadi, 28, is from the village of Deir al-Asad, in the country’s north. She’s a homeroom teacher for 12th-graders at a Jewish high school in the area, where she’s worked for the past six years. She too says she has been “very worried” since the start of the war. “I also knew some people at the [Nova] party and in the Gaza border communities, and in general I was concerned about what would happen,” she says.

“In the social media,” she continues, “all the posts were dark and frightening, and suddenly I saw a purple-colored post, which said something about partnership, in both Hebrew and Arabic. I felt like someone had thrown me a lifebelt of grace. I wrote to the people behind the post, who were from Standing Together, to ask whether the movement had a branch in Deir al-Asad.

“They said they didn’t, so I decided to take the initiative and set up a solidarity guard of Arab and Jewish communities in the Galilee. Within hours, we had 350 new members. We held our first meeting via Zoom, and the feeling was so good that we decided to continue with a face-to-face meeting.”

Asadi continues: “We invited everyone to us, to the community center in Deir al-Asad. One of the people who came, from Kibbutz Tuval [nearby], apologized for having to leave early, because he had guard duty at the kibbutz – ‘to protect us from you,’ he said – and everyone laughed. I haven’t stopped talking about that remark, and I understood how important what we are doing in Standing Together is.

“Since then, my activity has only picked up momentum. We visited joint medical teams of Arabs and Jews at health-care facilities; we paid a solidarity visit to Maayan Sigal-Koren, five of whose relatives were abducted from Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak, two of whom are still being held in Gaza; I invited friends for an encounter at my place, which left me very emotional; and much more.

“Standing Together gives me a place to be who I am,” she explains, “along with the hope I have been searching for for a long time. My activity in the movement is also a message to my students. They see an Israeli homeroom teacher, an Arab woman, a Muslim, a Palestinian, who on the one hand identifies with Israel, yet is not ashamed of her [Arab] identity. The change has to come from the public. Our generation is confused about its identity, and is sad and fearful, but Arab society is behaving with solidarity, dignity and empathy at this time – not only out of fear, but mainly because of a shared destiny.”

Sigal-Koren, a resident of Kibbutz Pelekh, in the Misgav region, describes the solidarity visit that movement members paid her as “the most powerful and most hopeful I have experienced since all this started. The encounter touched me in a way that no other meeting in this period has,” she tells Haaretz.

The Standing Together activists asked Sigal-Koren how they could help her and other families of the captives, and suddenly it occurred to her to that the campaign being conducted online and via posters and billboards calling for the captives’ release should be translated into Arabic too. That was in fact speedily done with the aid of members of the solidarity squad. Sigal-Koren was subsequently invited to tell her story at a meeting of Standing Together in the Arab town of Nahaf. Speaking before an audience of 300 Arabs and Jews, she called for the return from Gaza of her uncle, Fernando Marman, and Louis Har, her mother’s partner (her mother, Clara, was released on November 28).

Since that hellish Saturday, the movement has conducted more than a hundred activities, including joint conferences for Arabs and Jews in Hebrew and Arabic in Tamra, Nazareth, Abu Ghosh, Lod, Jerusalem, Be’er Sheva, Tel Aviv and other venues. They have visited hospitals to meet with wounded soldiers and speak to Jewish and Arab medical teams; cleaned out public shelters; sent food packages and other things to families whose source of income has dried up; monitored cases of racist violence in Israel; and made solidarity visits like the one in Oudi’s home.

One of their significant actions is the setting up of an emergency hotline, offering assistance to anyone who’s been harmed by racism or requires physical accompaniment in order to get to their place of work, the local clinic – or the police station in order to file a complaint about racism. The hotline, which operates seven days a week, has taken hundreds of calls from people whose cases are in various stages of treatment.

The hotline is currently being staffed by 90 volunteers, says Oded Rotem, their coordinator. Many more wanted to join, he notes, but the movement has declared a hiatus on accepting new volunteers, as it’s unable to meet the pace of training.

* * * 

Some 700 people showed up for Standing Together’s Haifa conference, held on November 4. Not unusually in these parts, the event took place only after an alternative was found to the original location, which they were forced to abandon following pressure by right-wingers. At the event, Sally Abed, who directs the movement’s resource development team, spoke about her mother, who works for the northern district of the National Insurance Institute (social security administration), which deals with the social-welfare needs of bereaved families and the families of the Gaza hostages. She related how, after a hard day of emotionally draining work, her mother comes home, turns on an Arabic news channel and sees what is being perpetrated against members of her family in the Gaza Strip.

“We’re told that we have to take a side,” Abed said. “But that choice inevitably denies the humanity of the other side. I refuse to have my humanity robbed. I refuse to be deprived of my Israeliness,” she declared, to the applause of the audience. After the meeting, Abed was approached by an elderly Jewish man wearing a kippa, who had tears in his eyes. Embracing her, he said, “Thank you, this is the first time I’ve breathed since October 7. You made it possible for me to feel pain for the other side and to feel like a human being again.”

The story continues. I hope you are able to open the link and finish reading. Standing Together is a candle in the darkness, an effort to bridge differences and build an awareness of common humanity. It has 5,000 members at present, with another 2,000 who join their activities. May their candle create light and hope.

Categories International

“Democracy” Weighs In on Controversy in Atlanta About Fani Willis and Prosecutor

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
59

There has been a heated debate on the blog about charges that District Attorney Fani Willis was romantically involved with prosecutor Nathan Wade. Defendants’s lawyers suggest the case should be thrown out or the entire prosecution team be replaced. Clearly, the public needs to know more about what happened before reaching judgment. As Nikki Haley has said repeatedly about Trump, “wherever he goes, chaos follows.” That may be why he’s been so successful in the courts in more than 3,500 cases—evasion, delay, chaos.

Our reader “Democracy” added this insight:

Here’s more on the Fanni Willis “scandal” from today’s NY Times, and other media, along with some comments from me:

“the bombshell accusations have rocked the criminal case — one of four Trump faces this year as he also seeks a second term in the White House. Trump blasted Willis and Wade over the allegations again on Friday, calling the prosecutors ‘the lovebirds’ and accusing them of targeting him ‘to ENRICH themselves, and to live the Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous!’ In posts on his social media platform, Trump called for the prosecutors to ‘face appropriate consequences’ and for charges against him to be dismissed.”

•• It’s rather rich for Trump to be ridiculing ANYONE about trying to enrich himself, and it’s the height of hypocrisy for Trump to be demanding “appropriate consequences” for Fanni Willis when he is doing everything he can to try and evade accountability for himself.

“Roman’s motion argues that Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade violated the state bar’s rules of professional conduct, the county code regarding conflicts of interest and, possibly, federal law. It calls for the case against Mr. Roman to be dismissed, and for Mr. Wade, Ms. Willis and Ms. Willis’s entire office to be disqualified from the case.”

•• Whether or not Fanni Willis violated any code of professional conduct remains to be seen, and it seems that a pretty good case can be made that she did not. But, yeah, optics matter. Still, there is a STRONG legal case AGAINST Mr. Roman that is completely UNRELATED to WIllis taking a private trip or two with Mr. Wade.

“On Saturday morning, Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment, who has been vocal in supporting the Georgia prosecution, called on Mr. Wade to step down, saying that the recent allegation of an affair ‘had become a distraction.’ ”

•• That’s the WHOLE point of this sordid nonsense, is it not? To cause a distraction from the fact that Trump AND his accomplices tried to steal the electoral votes in Georgia away from Mr. Trump by throwing out the verified, certified election results. Also, if in fact Wade were to resign, wouldn’t THAT be a legitimate end to the issue?

“For years, Mr. Wade was a regular at county Republican breakfast meetings, and he served for a time as a delegate to the county convention, said Jason Shepherd, who chaired the Cobb County Republican Party at the time…In 2016, during one of his unsuccessful attempts to run for Cobb County superior court judge, he was supported by Ashleigh Merchant — the lawyer who filed the motion this month on Mr. Roman’s behalf that seeks to have him removed from the Trump case. The motion questions Mr. Wade’s qualifications. But in a Facebook post in the midst of his judge’s race, she praised him for his extensive résumé…’Nathan has practiced in every area of the law that appears before the Superior Court bench,’ she wrote.”

•• Ahem…

Let’s rehash here. As PBS News Hour reported two short days ago,

“Trump and Roman were indicted by a Fulton County grand jury in August along with 17 others. They’re accused of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to try to illegally overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. Four of those charged have already pleaded guilty after reaching deals with prosecutors. Trump, Roman and the others who remain have pleaded not guilty…Roman was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign and also had worked in the White House…Prosecutors say he helped coordinate an effort to contact state lawmakers on Trump’s behalf to encourage them to ‘unlawfully appoint presidential electors.’…He is also alleged to have been involved in efforts to have Republicans in swing states that Trump lost, including Georgia, meet on Dec. 14, 2020, to sign certificates falsely saying Trump had won their states and that they were the electors for their states. He was in touch with local Republican officials in several states to set up those meetings.”

And yet Roman (and Trump, and a whole cast of other weirdos), think that private “dating” or a few private trips somehow create an act of immense impropriety that should THROW OUT legally obtained indictments for subverting the 2020 presidential election returns in the state of Georgia, thereby disenfranchising every single voter who cast a ballot for Mr. Biden.

This is beyond stupid, is it not?

Michael Roman’s attorney, Ashleigh Merchant has asked not only that Fanni Willis and Nathan Wade BE REMOVED from this case but also that ALL CHARGES against Roman BE DROPPED.

Here are some other cases where Ashleigh Merchant demanded that charges be dropped. Take a peek.

2017: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-supreme-court/1862249.html

2021: “In addition to Matthews’s admission that he stabbed Young, his cell phone records and his knowledge of information about the crime scene that the police had deliberately withheld from the public supported a finding that he was present when the crime occurred. Evidence found in his home and in the adjacent dumpster, including the set of steak knives that matched the knife blade found on Young’s body, Young’s debit and credit cards, and the cap that one of the men using Young’s debit card was wearing just after the murder, also connected him to the crimes. The evidence was legally sufficient to authorize a rational trier of fact to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Matthews was guilty of malice murder and possession of a knife during the commission of a crime.”

“Count 6 of the indictment charged Matthews with knowingly taking without consent a Bank of America Visa debit card, which was “issued to Adrianne Young as cardholder and from whose possession the said card was taken.” A rational trier of fact could find beyond a reasonable doubt that Matthews was guilty of financial transaction card theft from the evidence presented, including evidence that debit cards and a credit card belonging to Young were found in the dumpster adjacent to Matthews’s residence, that Young’s purse was missing from the crime scene, and that Matthews attempted to use Young’s debit card within an hour of her murder.”

https://casetext.com/case/matthews-v-state-2093

2022: https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ga-supreme-court/2162540.html

2023:  https://casetext.com/case/kim-v-state-60

Kind of makes one wonder.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Georgia, Justice, Trump

Trump Rants and Blames Nikki Haley for January 6 Insurrection

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
24

At a campaign event, Trump went into a manic rant about his enemies. He blamed Nikki Haley for the January 6 insurrection!

On the blog Meidas Touch:

Here’s an excerpt of Trump’s bizarre statements:

Trump: You know, by the way, they never report the crowd on January 6th. You know, Nikki Haley, Nikki Haley Nikki Haley, you know, they did you know, they destroyed all of the information, all of the evidence, everything deleted it, destroyed all of it. All of it because of lots of things, like Nikki Haley is in charge of security. We offered her 10,000 people.

The crowd quieted in complete and utter confusion as Trump rambled on about Haley.

Trump was confusing Haley with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, repeating yet another debunked conspiracy theory.

This is the latest in a series of troubling mental lapses from the former president, adjudicated rapist, and current criminal defendant.

Donald Trump recently has repeatedly claimed he’s beating Barack Obama in the polls, insisted that you need voter IDto buy bread, said Jeb Bush sent American troops to the middle east, bragged that he calls corn ‘non-liquid gold,’ and said that Joe Biden started World War II, among other cognitive lapses.

And then there’s this tweet by Republicans Against Trump, showing the randy old guy signing the T-shirt of a pretty young woman, writing directly on her breasts. The caption is “Can you imagine how the media would react if Biden or any other candidate did this?” But Trump does it, no big deal.

Categories Elections, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: Trump Is a Loser

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
24

I am falling in love with Jamelle Bouie. I love his mind. I love his writing. I love his insights. I read his personal blog (to which I subscribe via The New York Times), and here is a recent article in a special opinion section that cheered me up.

We frequently hear that Donald Trump represents a large and significant number of Americans, each attracted to him for several different reasons, none of which are that mysterious.

There are supporters attracted to his doctrinaire commitment to social conservatism, even if he himself is a libertine. There are supporters attracted to his belligerent hostility toward a broad variety of perceived cultural enemies. There are supporters attracted to his open cruelty toward and contempt for various racial and religious others. And there are supporters who simply think he’ll get them a good deal in foreign and domestic affairs — whatever that actually means.

Again, it’s not that complicated.

What is less frequently heard on the lips of political commentators is the fact that, while large and significant, Trump’s following is not a majority. Not even close. In fact, by any measure, Trump has been a unique electoral loser for the Republican Party.

His ceiling in national elections — having been twice on the presidential ballot — seems to be somewhere between 46 percent and 47 percent of the voting public. In 2016 that was enough, thanks to the Electoral College, to put him in the White House. In 2020 it wasn’t.

Just as significant is the fate of the most explicitly Trump-aligned candidates — the so-called MAGA Republicans whom President Biden condemned in his 2022 address on the state of American democracy. They are also electoral losers. The Republican Party, thanks to Trump’s influence, has lost or severely underperformed in three consecutive national elections, as well as a large number of special and off-year elections.

None of this means that he and his closest allies are somehow doomed in November. But it does seem as if there is a national political majority that is, if nothing else, consistently hostile to Trump or Trump-like figures and will vote to keep them out of office.

There has been an endless parade of analysis of the Trump or MAGA voter. Perhaps it’s time to focus on the views of this actual silent majority, whose members don’t attend rallies or make a show of their political commitments but whose votes have powered the Democratic Party to an unusual six-year run of electoral victories.

In Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter today, he compares Trump to George Wallace, and concludes that he is the heir apparent to Wallace. He describes two biographies of Wallace that he read recently and ends: A final thought:

Wallace was a smart, clever and intellectually agile man. We are probably lucky that our demagogue, dangerous as he is, lacks those particular attributes. Even so, if Wallace has a legacy in national politics, it is very clearly Trump.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Politics, Trump

Michael Meltsner: After Section 3 Comes Section 2

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
30

In case you have not read the Amendments to the Constitution lately, you will learn something new in this post. Michael Meltsner wrote in The American Prospect that Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment is as important as the well-discussed Section 3 (which says that a person who has taken the oath of office and engaged in an insurrection may not run for federal office). As I hope you know, Amendments 13, 14, and 15 were written in the aftermath of the Civil War and were meant to abolish slavery, guarantee equal rights to all Americans, and establish the right to vote.

Here is Section 2:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.

Meltsner wrote:

Attention in recent days has been paid to the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling that Donald Trump can be barred from the presidential ballot for participating in an insurrection as ordered by Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Maine’s secretary of state has also ruled Trump out. But under the radar, a separate case involving that amendment has been working through the courts, which would be just as impactful for the outcome of the 2024 elections.

About a year ago, I reported in the Prospect on a pending lawsuit filed on behalf of a citizens group by former Department of Justice lawyer Jared Pettinato. The suit asks that the Census Bureau be required to enforce Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, enacted in 1868 to strip congressional representation from states that disfranchise voters. The text applies to general methods states adopt that keep people from voting and is not limited to racial discrimination. The proportional loss of congressional representation would also reduce the votes that states would get in the Electoral College.

The Section 2 case is now moving toward resolution. Briefs have been filed, and oral argument is expected shortly before the court of appeals in Washington, D.C.

Cases involving the two constitutional provisions of the 14th Amendment have major differences and striking similarities. Neither has been authoritatively interpreted.

On a structural level, enforcing Section 2 for the first time would conceivably sanction and thus potentially eliminate the web of restrictions and hurdles that keep substantial numbers of citizens from casting a vote. Some states would lose representatives, and electoral votes, to states that make it easier to vote. In contrast, the Section 3 insurrection issue is individualized, dealing only with a former president whose misdeeds are unique in American history.

But in both cases, the courts are being asked to render decisions that could change the political balance of power, outcomes that involve judicial intervention similar to the much-criticized Bush v. Gore decision that determined the presidency in 2000.

Finally, the odds are that the Colorado case will be reversed by the Supreme Court, while the future of the citizens group challenge under Section 2, while a long shot, is far from settled.

In the Section 2 case, a trial court decided that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing, in large part because they hadn’t sufficiently shown that specific states would certainly lose and gain seats. But Pettinato’s complaint alleges at least one concrete disfranchisement scenario (and others are obvious).

Wisconsin’s 2011 voter ID law prevented 300,000 registered voters who lacked identification from casting a ballot, according to U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman. This finding was accepted as true on appeal, and should be accepted as true at this stage of the Section 2 litigation. As 300,000 registered voters is approximately 9 percent of Wisconsin’s total registrants, the complaint reasons that Wisconsin should lose 9 percent of its representatives, equal to one member of Congress and one electoral vote. Another state would gain that representative.

It may be significant that DOJ lawyers have now injected a new defense in their brief in the court of appeals, a move that often signals a belief that the theory relied on in the lower court is ultimately unpersuasive.

It’s amazing that, given the central role courts construing constitutional texts play in our public life, the terms of operationalizing the 135 words of Section 2 have never been settled in over 150 years. The few lawsuits brought under its terms have almost all found ways to avoid enforcement. Only one case, which I filed in the 1960s when I was first assistant counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, had a different and unusual outcome. In that case brought by a group led by feminist and civil rights leader Daisy Lampkin, the judges unanimously took remedying disfranchisement by enforcing Section 2 seriously, but stayed their hand because they supposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 might make enforcing it unnecessary.

Regardless of the outcome in the court of appeals, the Supreme Court will be asked to decide whether the Constitution’s explicit remedy for disfranchisement has life or should be ignored. The Court has many tools that can be used to continue the tradition of nonenforcement. Standing to sue doctrine allows avoiding decisions on the merits; but with respect to Section 2, continued use of it in case after case amounts to saying that what the Constitution says doesn’t matter. For a judiciary that roams across the scope of American life in its decisions, such an outcome can only be seen as random, and thus really political, decision-making. And deciding the Section 3 case to allow Trump back onto the ballot while avoiding a decision in the Section 2 case would have clear political overtones.

Plus, failing to recognize the vitality of Section 2 will surely raise the specter of hypocrisy, as conservative justices have often looked to the original understanding of constitutional texts to justify decisions, an approach that would bring the 1868 disfranchisement remedy to the present day.

Here is another view of Section 2: https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14/annotation12.html#

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Elections, History, Justice

John Thompson: Oklahoma’s State Chief Clings to Failed Reforms

By dianeravitch
January 20, 2024 //
8

John Thompson, a historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, reviews the stalemate in education in the Sooner State. The cause: a state superintendent who will not abandon failed reforms.

He writes:

As School Superintendent Ryan Walters ramps up his attacks on public education, resisting his false, rightwing agenda has become Oklahoma educators’ top priority. While we need to unite and put the school reform wars of the last two decades behind us, the lessons of corporate reforms must be remembered. As Walters puts the doomed-to-fail, test-to-punish No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (NCLB) “accountability” mandates on steroids, I’ve tried to be as diplomatic as possible in reminding educators how and why data-driven, competition-driven “reforms” did so much damage. Reading the Tulsa World editorial, “Current Public Accountability Systems Always Leaving Kids Behind” by Bixby Superintendent Rob Miller, brought me back to a time when I was one of many educators trying to reason with corporate school reformers. Then I read Peter Greene’s “VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around?, and I was reminded of the history of so many Oklahoma administrators failing to push back against the Billionaires Boys Club.

My favorite memories of Rob Miller was when he pulled no punches in telling legislators the hard truths about NCLB. Miller is still candid about it, illustrating education’s “gap between those who make policy and those who suffer the consequences.” Research made it clear that “standardized tests are unreliable indicators of school quality,” and “nothing more than an elaborate sorting and labeling system.” Non-educators dismissed the experience of teachers, concluding they were “just falling back on excuses about student poverty, adverse childhood experiences, teacher shortages and unstable families.”

Miller recounts the loss of “recess, music and arts, field trips, class discussions and reading books for pleasure when we need to get these kids proficient at bubbling correct answers on multiple-choice tests.” He then writes:

Who cares if a 10-year-old learns to hate school because he’s been retained in third grade and his days are now filled with worksheets, practice tests and repetitive drill-and-kill curriculum in place of projects, puzzles and hands-on activities which nurture his natural curiosity and develop thinking skills? Suck it up, kid!

In my experience, the overwhelming majority of education leaders knew that test-driven accountability would inevitably lead to “tedious, time-wasting, high-pressure, spirit-killing, highly scripted instructional programs.” But few would go on the record about the harm done by focusing on test scores, as opposed to improving learning. And few of them were as eloquent as Miller when standing up for students.

Then, I read Peter Greene’s summary of what I believe was the worst of the worst corporate reform mandate, Value Added Models (VAMS). When the Billionaires Boys Club” saw the way that NCLB wasn’t working, they blamed Baby Boomers for accepting “Excuses!” and targeted individual educators, using invalid and unreliable algorithms to punish and replace veteran teachers with 23-year-olds they could train. I will always love President Obama, but his Race to the Top was even more destructive than NCLB. Virtually every educator and student above 2ndgrade were held accountable for increased “outputs.”

Greene first explained the inherent flaws in VAMS, doing an intensive analysis of the model’s flaws for teacher evaluation, and surveys documenting teachers rejecting them. He also wrote:

We used to talk about this a lot. A. Lot. But VAM … has departed the general education discussion even though it has not departed the actual world of education. Administrators still brag about, or bemoan, their VAM scores. VAM scores still affect teacher evaluation. And VAM scores are still bunk.

And that leads to what may be the most disturbing aspect of Greene’s piece for states like Oklahoma. He reviewed a range of studies around 2014 and 2015 that made the overwhelming case for abandoning the use of VAMs for accountability purposes. Since Ryan Walters has said he’s been consulting with the architects of the Houston IDS regarding a plan for taking over the Tulsa Public Schools, the most relevant and frightening research Greene cites for Oklahoma document the destructive role that VAMs played in Houston.

Reading Superintendent Miller’s and Greene’s work makes me, once again, rethink my efforts to persuade administrators and politicians to reject test-driven accountability. I worry that education leaders will revert back to the “culture of compliance,” and obey Walters’ demands. I keep remembering the time when one of the nation’s top experts, John Q. Easton of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, came to Oklahoma City and explained why it is impossible to improve schools without first building trusting relationships, and warning about untrustworthy accountability metrics. Afterwards, in the parking lot where administrators were more likely to feel free to speak their minds, the OKCPS’s top researchers agreed, but warned that the new types of tests resulting from NCLB (with Criterion Based Tests replacing Norm Referenced Tests) would completely corrupt our data.

Then, we had an agreement with MAPS for Kids volunteers that the OKCPS would be clear in telling teachers that their job was teaching to state standards, not standardized tests. When NCLB was implemented, however, I was in the meeting where top administrators recalled years of ridiculous mandates and then jolted us all by saying the district had no choice but to expand high-stakes testing. I was the only one who pushed back. A smart, sincere, veteran administrator replied, “John, I always say you don’t make a hog bigger by weighing it. But this is politics. We have no choice.”

On the state level, I joined an informal committee with superintendents trying to draft NCLB policies that would be less destructive. I was tasked with studying the Ohio standards. Because it was then a swing state, Ohio was granted the most freedom to get around the most destructive accountability mandates. The thought was that NCLB’s worst aspects would not survive the 2004 elections, so we sought to kick the ball down the field until evidence-based policies returned!?!?

So, I kept trying to be diplomatic, bridging differences with both – corporate reformers who would not reconsider their ideology-driven mandates and educators who felt they had to comply with those mandates. On one hand, unity is more important when our democracy – not just public education – faces existential threats. On the other hand, discussing these historic facts could be a unifying force. After all, so many of today’s teachers and parents have experienced the damage done by test-driven, competition-driven schooling. I suspect that many of them would appreciate a discussion of the history of those failures.

The 21st century is full of hard truths about the way that the holistic instruction students need for a better future was undermined. And then came Covid, and then came the Moms for Liberty. Reading Rob Miller and Peter Greene, and the science they present, is convincing me that I also must learn from failures to openly oppose corporate school reforms, in addition to fighting back against fanatics like Ryan Walters.

By the way, Walters just announced his plan to create a “one-stop shop” for teacher training, development and financial services. He unexpectedly ended the state’s relationship with:

The three organizations, which have wide membership throughout the state are the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA), the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration (CCOSA) and the Oklahoma Public School Resource Center (OPSRC). In a news release, Walters said without providing examples that the three organizations “work in tandem with national extremist groups that seek to undermine parents, force failed policies into the schools, and work against a quality education in Oklahoma.”

The Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administration responded, “Last year, over 5,400 educators attended CCOSA’s professional development events to serve those members, focusing on topics such as school finance, special education law and teacher evaluations.” The OPSRC did not reply, but apparently, Walters broke ties with them because they hired a former district superintendent, April Grace, who was his Republican opponent for state superintendent. Before education leaders try to cooperate with Walters in order to avoid his full fury, they should remember that the OPSRC is funded by the Walton Family Foundation and other philanthropies that support corporate school reforms! That’s one more reminder that revenge, not school improvement, is his focus.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Teachers, VAM (value-added modeling)

“Democracy“: A Yale Historian Speaks Out About the Changes in the Republican Party

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2024 //
81

A new commenter on the blog ssserted recently that real scholars don’t express their views about current events. Our reader “Democracy” here excerpts a recent article by a genuine scholar, David Blight of Yale University. Professor Blight is an eminent scholar of African American history, who recently edited a volume of Frederick Douglass’s writings for the Library of America. The following excerpt cited was published in the New York Review of Books.

Incidentally, the Washington Post reported that Trump responded to Nikki Haley’s concern about his age by saying that he took a mental test of 35-40 questions where he was shown a picture of a giraffe, a tiger, whale, and he correctly identified the whale. It sounds like a test for little children or non-English speakers.

Democracy wrote to the blog:

David Blight, historian from Yale, recently called Trump woefully “ignorant” about history, and, in essence a liar.

But Trump IS the current Republican Party, and here’s Blight on that:

“Changing demographics and 15 million new voters drawn into the electorate by Obama in 2008 have scared Republicans—now largely the white people’s party—into fearing for their existence. With voter ID laws, reduced polling places and days, voter roll purges, restrictions on mail-in voting, an evisceration of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a constant rant about ‘voter fraud’ without evidence, Republicans have soiled our electoral system with undemocratic skullduggery…The Republican Party has become a new kind of Confederacy.”

“This new Confederacy is regional and rural. It knows what it hates: the two coasts, diverse cities, marriage equality, certain kinds of feminism, political correctness, university ‘elites,’ and ‘liberals’ generally. It is racial and undemocratic. It twists American history to its own ends, substituting ‘patriotism’ for scholarship and science. It has weaponized ‘truth’ and rendered it oddly irrelevant. It has brought us almost to a new 1860, an election in which Americans voted for fundamentally different visions of a proslavery or an antislavery future.”

Republicans: The New Confederacy

You can see all of this in Trump’s words and actions, and it’s parroted in turn by his minions, and his supporters, and by his lawyers.

Trump has proved himself to be a serial liar, racist, misogynist, and seditious traitor to the Constitution and the republic. The Republican Party is his enabler.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Ignorance, Racism, Republicans, Trump

Daily Yonder: Public Colleges in Rural Areas Are Cutting the Humanities

By dianeravitch
January 19, 2024 //
39

I believe that a liberal arts education is the heart and soul of what it means to be an educated person. No matter what job or career or profession you aim for, you are not educated unless you have studied history, literature, the arts and sciences. These are the studies that prepare you for citizenship and for a full life. Can you understand the world if you know little about history? Can you understand political debates about medicine and health if you never studied science? Are you prepared to understand the breadth and depth of the human spirit if you have never learned about art and music?

I think not. Oddly, it seems to me, cutting the humanities is an elitist path, a decision that students in rural areas don’t need or deserve a full education that tends to their mind, their heart, and their soul.

Sadly, The Daily Yonder reports, public colleges and universities in rural areas are slashing courses and majors in the humanities, favoring instead the courses that prepare students for jobs and careers.

Part of the decision is based on declining enrollments, but the state budget for piublic higher education is being cut even wen the stat’s coffers are overflowing. Governors prefer to cut taxes—income taxes or property taxes—rather than invest in the future of their state.

Elaine C. Povich of Stateline reports:

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Taya Sullivan, 20, is a freshman at West Virginia University, double majoring in neuroscience and Spanish. She also has a campus job in a linguistics lab, building on her majors and earning money she needs to continue her studies.

Next semester, both her Spanish major and her job will be gone.

Sullivan has been caught up in the university’s decision to eliminate its foreign language majors. The school is axing 28 majors altogether, ranging from undergraduate languages such as French and Russian to graduate majors in math and higher education. It also is cutting 12% of its professors.

Administrators say they’re responding to a budget shortfall, declining enrollment, flagging student interest in humanities courses, and pressure from parents who want their kids to be prepared for good-paying jobs after graduation.

“Are we going to revert back to ‘normal?’ No, we will have a new normal,” said West Virginia University President Gordon Gee in an interview with Stateline. “We are going to be much more oriented toward listening to the people who pay our bills — parents, students, legislators and others. And they very much want to see universities, particularly land grant institutions like ours, become engines of creativity and economic development.”

Many lesser-known public colleges nationwide have begun cutting back on the humanities, but West Virginia University is the “tip of the spear” for flagship state universities, Gee said.

Similar reductions are only expected to grow across the country, particularly in rural areas where campus budgets are lower, enrollments are more likely to be falling, and where the pressure for career-oriented majors may be greater. But critics argue that such changes in emphasis will sap states of intellectual firepower, leaving them with fewer leaders and citizens who are well-rounded.

In West Virginia, the cuts have prompted student demonstrations, a faculty resolution and objections from some lawmakers. Gee is unmoved.

“The budget [deficit] was only an accelerant; it’s change or die,” he said. “We are the first to jump off the cliff. I could make a living from calls from other university presidents to ask, ‘How are you doing it?’ We are having to change. We can no longer be everything to everyone. We’ve got to make choices.”

Other state universities, especially rural ones, are making similar choices. Missouri Western State University has eliminated dozens of majors and minors including English, history, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, art, Spanish and French. Eastern Kentucky University shut theater programs and economics. The State University of New York at Potsdam is also cutting degree programs, including in art history, dance, French, Spanish and theater.

More cuts could be coming. The Board of Regents for the University of Kansas system announced in June it is reviewing proposals to eliminate programs at the six state universities. The review is meant “to ensure that programs meet student demand, improve student affordability, support Kansas communities and help meet the state’s workforce needs.” A decision is expected in 2024 on which programs to cut or consolidate, said Matt Keith, spokesperson for the Kansas Board of Regents.

Humanities courses such as languages, history, arts and literature are particularly vulnerable nationwide. Schools are more inclined to emphasize business, science, math and technology studies, which could lead to more high-paying jobs.

Students also appear to be turning away from the humanities: Data from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percentage of bachelor’s degrees conferred by four-year institutions in the humanities dropped from 16.8% of all degrees in the 2010-11 school year to 12.8% in 2020-2021.

State budget reductions and schools’ funding shortfalls also have contributed to cuts, particularly in rural states. State spending on higher education fell in 16 of the 20 most rural states between 2008 and 2018, when adjusted for inflation, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research and policy institute that advocates for left-leaning tax policies.

Higher education funding per student declined by more than 30% in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania during that period. In Kansas, it went down by nearly 23%.

State budget problems accounted for some of the reductions, but in other cases lawmakers preferred to spend available dollars on roads or K-12 education.

Even when state budgets were flush following a huge outlay of federal funds during the Covid-19 pandemic, many states, including West Virginia, opted for tax cuts rather than investments in higher education. In March, West Virginia Republican Governor Jim Justice signed a law immediately reducing the income tax by an average of 21.25%…

WVU English professor Adam Komisaruk, who also directs graduate studies in the English department, says the larger question is what state universities want to be.

“Is our mission as a university simply to respond to market forces and popular prejudice, and to make educational decisions based on supply and demand? Or are we committed to providing a robust and diverse exposure to modes of thought that will allow our students to become knowledgeable, responsible, ethical engaged members of society?

“If we want to run a vocational training program, fine. But you can’t pretend you are a liberal arts full institution committed not only to our land grant mission to serve the people of the state but also committed to modern ideas of liberal education and broad-based knowledge. You can’t have it both ways.”

Rural students can be particularly affected by university cuts, said Andrew Koricich, executive director for the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges and an associate professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. As West Virginia is a mostly rural state, a higher proportion of its students come from rural areas.

“A lot of states are shifting more toward looking at higher education not just as a public good but as a cost-benefit calculation. Then it becomes a value judgment whether rural students deserve the same education as urban institutions and students,” Koricich said.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Creativity, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Funding, Higher Education, Rural Schools
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