Billy Townsend on Chris Rufo’s Inflated Credentials

By dianeravitch
January 9, 2024 //
60

Billy Townsend is a Florida blogger who specializes in exposing grifters, especially in education. He calls his blog “Public Enemy #1.” He served on the Polk County school board and has been relentless in pursuing the scams perpetrated by Governor DeSantis and former state Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran, now president of New College, a position for which he is uniquely unqualified. Someone on Twitter noted recently that the university presidents appointed by DeSantis won’t have to worry about plagiarism charges, because few if any of them have ever published a peer-reviewed article or book.

Chris Rufo is the attack dog of the far-right, who literally manufactured and sold a public panic attack over “critical race theory,” a concept debated in law school classes. As a result of his publicity campaign, any teaching about race and racism in American schools became suspect, enabling some states to suppress honest discussion of those subjects. Most recently, Rufo hounded Harvard’s President, Claudine Gay, until she resigned over charges of plagiarism.

Townsend writes here about Rufo’s inflated academic credentials:

In the least surprising revelation ever, Christopher Rufo does not have a Masters of Arts degree from Harvard, as he once claimed in his Manhattan Institute bio. He has, instead, a Master of Liberal Arts (MLA) from Harvard Extension School.

Indeed, this anti-woke grifter is continuing to misstate his educational credentials, even after very very quietly correcting one aspect of his misstatement — as I’ll show you in a moment.

As anyone who remotely follows Rufo knows, this is the kind of credential misstatement he would summon the New York Times to pursue if the person doing the misstating was black or a woman. And the useless NYT would dutifully obey. I’m sure they will find a way to avoid this particular misstatement.

But Rufo’s fellow trustees can and should confront him with this at the next meeting.

Rufo claims undergraduate achievement he did not earn

Harvard instructs graduates of Harvard University Extension School to spell out “Harvard University Extension School” on resumes and bios because its sees a meaningful distinction between “Harvard University Extension School” and Harvard’s traditional graduate schools…

Selectivity of admission is the core difference in these Harvard graduate programs. It’s a lot easier to get into “Harvard University Extension School” than traditional Harvard.

Thus, Rufo’s conflation of degree credentials claims a level of achievement in admission that he did not earn.

It misrepresents the quality of Rufo’s undergraduate performance, suggesting that it was strong enough to earn admission to Harvard’s highly selective graduate schools. It was not.

Rufo’s misleading claim dilutes Harvard’s brand, which is why Harvard cares about how graduates claim this credential, I suspect. I’ve posted Harvard’s direction in how to refer to the extension school below.

The “never admit” grifter admits to something

Is this a big deal? Rufo, a bombastic Bad Ken 99.9 percent of the time, seems to think so. He very very quietly acknowledged that his Manhattan Institute bio misstated his education credential by very very quietly having it altered.

In doing so, Rufo violated the #1 tenet of the modern “conservative” and “anti-woke” grifts — the #1 tenet of Rufoism: always loudly refuse to admit or acknowledge anything damaging to the grift. And yet, here Rufo is admitting….

Billy Townsend goes on to portray Rufo’s bio—before and after—on the Manhattan Institute website, where he is a senior fellow. And he shows that Rufo’s misleading claim to am MA at Harvard persists on the New College website, where DeSantis named him as a trustee as part of the governor’s plan to turn the progressive liberal arts college into the Hillsdale of the South.

Townsend writes:

Ride it while it lasts, Chris

Ironically, considering the time and effort I’ve spent on these two Rufo articles, I’m thoroughly uninterested in him. He’s just another grifter, a little farther down the grift value chain than young Austin Hurst, who I introduced you to earlier today.

But they’re essentially the same person — lazy bros trolling for rich guy money by owning the libs. Rufo’s need to overstate both undergrad and grad school credentials is a pretty good example of that.

Rufos, like Zieglers, always come and go. This one will too.

Townsend then quotes a Harvard document explaining how graduates of the Harvard Extension School should refer to their degrees, advice that Rufo ignored until he was caught.

I urge you to open the link to read the material I did not reproduce here. It’s fascinating.

Billy Townsend, by the way, is a graduate of Amherst College, whose admission standards are as rigorous as those of Harvard.

Categories Accountability, Character, Cheating, Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Fraud, Hypocrisy

Jamelle Bouie: Trump is a Sore Loser

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
18
Portrait of Jamelle Bouie
Jamelle Bouie

This post by Jamelle Bouie appeared in his newsletter, which I subscribe to. I left out his latest recipe and the list of articles he’s reading now. If you subscribe to the New York Times, you can subscribe to his newsletter for free.

He wrote:

…It’s for good reason that the results of the 2016 presidential race shocked, surprised and unsettled many millions of Americans, including the small class of people who write about and interpret politics for a living. There was a strong sense, in the immediate aftermath of the election, that journalists were woefully out of touch with the people at large. Otherwise, they would not have missed the groundswell of support for Trump.

One inadvertent consequence of this understandable bout of introspection was, I think, to validate Trump’s claim that he spoke for a silent majority of forgotten Americans. It was easy enough to look at the new president’s political coalition — disproportionately blue-collar and drawn almost entirely from the demographic majority of the country — and conclude that this was basically correct. And even if it wasn’t, the image of the blue-collar (although not necessarily working-class) white man or white woman has been, for as long as any of us have been alive, a synecdoche for the “ordinary American” or the “Middle American” or the “average American.”

You may remember the constant discussion, while Trump was in office, over the effect his chaos and corruption might have on voters. Would they care? Where this “they” often meant the blue-collar voters associated with Trump’s victory. And if they didn’t care, could we say with any confidence that the American people cared?

They did!

What’s been lost — or if not lost then obscured — in the constant attention to Trump’s voters, supporters and followers is that the overall American electorate is consistently anti-MAGA. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016. The MAGA-fied Republican Party lost the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump lost the White House and the Republican Party lost the Senate in 2020. In 2022, Trump-like or Trump-lite candidates lost competitive statewide elections in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania. Republicans vastly underperformed expectations in the House, winning back the chamber with a razor-thin margin, and Democrats secured governorships in Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin, among other states. Democrats overperformed again the following year, in Kentucky and Virginia.

“Since 2016,” wrote Michael Podhorzer, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., in a post for his newsletter last summer, “Republicans have lost 23 of the 27 elections in the five states everyone agrees Democratic hopes in the Electoral College and the Senate depend on.”

He continues:

When Trump was sworn in, Republicans held four of those five states’ governorships, and six of the ten Senate seats. Moreover, Republicans defied history by losing nearly across the board in those states last year, the only time anything like that has happened to a Party running against such an unpopular president in a midterm.

Too many commentators have spent too much time fretting over Trump’s voters — and how they might react to the effort to remove the former president from the ballot — and not enough time thinking about the tens of millions of voters who have said, again and again, that they do not want this man or his movement in American politics.

Because 2016 was not the only election that mattered. Trump’s voters are not the only ones who count. There’s been no shortage of critics of the disqualification effort who have asked us to consider the consequences for American democracy if Trump’s supporters believe he was cheated out of a chance to run for president a third time. It’s a fair point. But I think we should also consider the consequences for American democracy if the nation’s anti-MAGA majority comes to believe, with good reason, that the rules — and the Constitution — don’t apply to Trump.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: If Trump Is Not an Insurrectionist, What Is He?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
55

Jamelle Bouie is one of the best opinion writers at the New York Times. In addition to reading his regular columns, I subscribe to the newsletter he writes, where he shares ideas, tells you what he is reading and what he is cooking.

In this post, he wrote persuasively about why Donald Trump is an insurrectionist and should not be allowed to run for the office he defiled.

Bouie wrote:

Last month the states of Colorado and Maine moved to disqualify Donald Trump as a candidate in the 2024 presidential election, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. In response, Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene on his behalf in the Colorado case, and he has appealed Maine’s decision.

There is a real question of whether this attempt to protect American democracy — by removing a would-be authoritarian from the ballot — is itself a threat to American democracy. Will proponents and supporters of the 14th Amendment option effectively destroy the village in order to save it?

It may seem obvious, but we should remember that Trump is not an ordinary political figure. And try as some commentators might, there is no amount of smoke one could create — through strained counterfactuals, dire warnings of a slippery slope or outright dismissal of the events that make the Trump of 2024 a figure very different from the Trump of 2020 — that can obscure or occlude this basic fact.

In 2020, President Trump went to the voting public of the United States and asked for another four years in office. By 51 percent to 47 percent, the voting public of the United States said no. More important, Trump lost the Electoral College, 306 to 232, meaning there were enough of those voters in just the right states to deny him a second term.

The people decided. And Trump said, in so many words, that he didn’t care. What followed, according to the final report of the House select committee on Jan. 6, was an effort to overturn the result of the election.

Trump, the committee wrote, “unlawfully pressured state officials and legislators to change the results of the election in their states.” He “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.” He “summoned tens of thousands of supporters to Washington for Jan. 6,” the day Congress was slated to certify the election results, and “instructed them to march to the Capitol” so that they could “‘take back’ their country.’” He even sent a message on Twitter attacking his vice president, Mike Pence, knowing full well that “a violent attack on the Capitol was underway.”

In the face of this violence, Trump “refused repeated requests over a multiple hour period that he instruct his violent supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, and instead watched the violent attack unfold on television.” He did not deploy the National Guard, nor did he “instruct any federal law enforcement agency to assist.”

Trump sought and actively tried to subvert constitutional government and overturn the results of the presidential election. And what he could not do through the arcane rules and procedures of the Electoral College, he tried to do through the threat of brute force, carried out by an actual mob.

Looked at this way, the case for disqualifying Trump through the 14th Amendment is straightforward. Section 3 states that “No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

As the legal scholar Mark A. Graber writes in an amicus brief submitted to the Colorado Supreme Court, “American jurists understood an insurrection against the United States to be an attempt by two or more persons for public reasons to obstruct by force or intimidation the implementation of federal law.” There was also a legal consensus at the time of the amendment’s drafting and ratification that an individual “engaged in insurrection whenever they knowingly incited, assisted or otherwise participated in an insurrection.”

We also know that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not aim or intend to exclude the president of the United States from its terms. In 1870 the Republican-controlled Senate refused to seat Zebulon Vance, the former Confederate governor of North Carolina. It strains credulity to think that the same Republicans would have sat silent if the Democratic Party had, in 1872, nominated a former Confederate leader for the presidency.

Under a plain reading of Section 3 — and given the evidence uncovered by the Jan. 6 committee — Trump cannot stand for the presidency of the United States or any other federal office, for that matter.

The real issue with disqualifying Trump is less constitutional than political. Disqualification, goes the argument, would bring American democracy to the breaking point.

In this line of thinking, to deny Americans their choice of presidential candidate would destroy any remaining confidence in the American political system. It would also invite Trump’s allies in the Republican Party to do the same to Democrats, weaponizing Section 3 and disqualifying candidates for any number of reasons. Disqualification would also give far more power to the courts, when the only appropriate venue for the question of Trump is the voting booth.

But these objections rest on a poor foundation. They treat Trump as an ordinary candidate and Jan. 6 as a variation on ordinary politics. But as the House select committee established, Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it were nothing of the sort. And while many Americans still contest the meaning of the attack on the Capitol, many Americans also contested, in the wake of the Civil War, the meaning of secession and rebellion. That those Americans viewed Confederate military and political leaders as heroes did not somehow delegitimize the Republican effort to keep them, as much as possible, out of formal political life.

What unites Trump with the former secessionists under the disqualification clause is that like them, he refused to listen to the voice of the voting public. He rejected the bedrock principle of democratic life, the peaceful transfer of power.

The unspoken assumption behind the idea that Trump should be allowed on the ballot and that the public should have the chance to choose for or against him yet again is that he will respect the voice of the electorate. But we know this isn’t true. It wasn’t true after the 2016 presidential election — when, after winning the Electoral College, he sought to delegitimize the popular vote victory of his opponent as fraud — and it was put into stark relief after the 2020 presidential election.

Trump is not simply a candidate who does not believe in the norms, values and institutions we call American democracy — although that is troubling enough. Trump is all that and a former president who used the power of his office to try to overturn constitutional government in the United States.

Is it antidemocratic to disqualify Trump from office and deny him a place on the ballot? Does it violate the spirit of democratic life to deny voters the choice of a onetime officeholder who tried, under threat of violence, to deny them their right to choose? Does it threaten the constitutional order to use the clear text of the Constitution to hold a former constitutional officer accountable for his efforts to overturn that order?

The answer is no, of course not. There is no rule that says democracies must give endless and unlimited grace to those who used the public trust to conspire, for all the world to see, against them. Voters are free to choose a Republican candidate for president; they are free to choose a Republican with Trump’s politics. But if we take the Constitution seriously, then Trump, by dint of his own actions, should be off the board.

Not that he will be. The best odds are that the Supreme Court of the United States will punt the issue of Section 3 in a way that allows Trump to run on every ballot in every state. And while it will be tempting to attribute this outcome to the ideological composition of the court — as well as the fact that Trump appointed three of its nine members — I think it will, if it happens, have as much to do with the zone of exception that exists around the former president.

If Trump has a political superpower, it’s that other people believe he has political superpowers. They believe that any effort to hold him accountable will backfire. They believe that he will always ride a wave of backlash to victory. They believe that challenging him on anything other than his terms will leave him stronger than ever.

Most of this is false. But to the extent that it is true, it has less to do with the missed shots — to borrow an aphorism from professional sports — than it does with the ones not taken in the first place.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Lies, Republicans, Trump

Yes! The Supreme Court Should Disqualify Trump from Appearing on the Ballot

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2024 //
36

I wrote a few days ago that Trump should not be removed from the ballot even though he unequivocally plotted to overturn the election he lost and provoked an insurrection against the orderly transfer of power. I was wrong. For me, it was a close call: I wanted him to lose convincingly at the hands of the voters; I predicted he would lose by 10 million votes in 2024.

But it should not have been a close call. Trump should not be allowed to run again. He violated his oath of office. I was persuaded I was wrong by the many comments by readers on this blog, by reading the new insider books by Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson, and by continuing to read other opinions, like that of Jamelle Bouie, whose columns will follow this one today.

Trump was exactly the kind of office-holder described in Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In the lower federal court in Colorado, Judge Sarah B. Wallace ruled that Trump engaged in insurrection on January 6, 2021, but concluded that the President of the U.S. was not an “officer” as defined in the amendment. This was a bizarre conclusion, and the Supreme Court of Colorado ruled by a vote of 4-3 that Trump should not be allowed to run for President because he did take an oath to support the Constitution, he served as the highest officer of the nation, and he did engage in an insurrection against the Constitution to which he swore an oath. It’s no more complicated than that.

The Supreme Court will review that decision.

Trump continues to tell the Big Lie. Despite the fact that he lost 60 court decisions, including decisions by judges he appointed, including two decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court; despite the fact that his own Attorney General and his White House Counsel told him he lost, he continues to lie.

Trump continues to praise the insurrectionists. He has promised to pardon all of them who were convicted and sent to prison. He calls them “patriots” even though they defiled the U.S. Capitol, the seat of our government, and threatened the lives of Trump’s Vice President Mike Pence and the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and violently attacked police officers.

The members of Congress escaped the chamber where they were counting the electoral vote only minutes before Trump’s devoted followers broke through the doors. Had they broken through only five minutes sooner, there might have been a bloodbath, a massacre of our elected representatives. Some “patriots”!

Judges should not reach a decision based on fear of Trump’s mob.

Either the Constitution means what it says or it means whatever a politically appointed group of justices decide it says in contravention of the words themselves.

Either “no man is above the law” or only one man—named Donald Trump—is above the law.

Trump betrayed Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. He betrayed his oath of office. He incited, provoked, and engaged in an insurrection against the Constitution and the government that he swore to support.

Donald Trump should be removed from the ballot.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Justice, Lies, Propaganda, Republicans, Trump

Mary L. Trump: Why Does “Meet the Press” Love MAGA?

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
55

Mary L. Trump is Donald’s niece, the daughter of his older brother. She is the author of the best-selling tell-all about her family and her uncle: Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She wrote this article after watching Elise Stefanik bulldoze Kristen Welner on “Meet the Press.”

Shameful… Today, Elise Stefanik used NBC’s Meet The Press as her MAGA bullhorn, and “journalist” Kristen Welker just let her get away with it. But we now have tools to fight back.Read on. 👇

Become Paying Supporter Now

I could only watch the clips in short bursts, because each was worse than the last… one of the most egregious (and dangerous) displays of journalistic incompetence I’ve ever seen.

Elise Stefanik Called Jan 6 Insurrections… What??

Elise Stefanik, an opportunistic traitor desperately angling to be Donald’s VP pick with every lie she spews, declared those convicted of January 6 crimes to be “hostages”.

”I have concerns about the treatment of January 6 hostages,” Stefanik stated.

Welker’s response? Crickets. 🦗 No demand for an explanation, e.g. Who is holding them hostage? How is holding people accountable for crimes a hostage situation?

At least Welker could have shown Stefanik this chart from the NY Times:

As former GOP Comms Director Tara Stetmayer (and guest of my latest Deep Dive) put it so eloquently, “No journalist should ever allow any of these MAGAs to call Jan 6th justly-prosecuted thugs, ‘hostages’. What an affront to our rule of law.”

Planning the Next Coup

Welker asked, “Will you certify the results of the 2024 election, no matter what they show?”

Stefanik responded with obfuscation and lies about the 2020 election, before admitting she will NOT certify the election, unless – in her eyes – “it’s constitutional. What we saw in 2020 was unconstitutional.”

Welker pushed back briefly, citing that even two firms hired by Donald said there was NO evidence of election fraud, and Donald’s own officials said it was the most secure election in history. Two points for sanity.

But then Welker allowed Stefanik to negate it all by simply saying, “The American people understand it was not a fair election.” 

And the response from Welker? No follow up. No pushback. Just the classic dreadful tactic used by incompetent journalists… basically, ”Let’s move on.”

No, Ms. Welker. Stefanik just admitted on live television she will attempt another coup after the election if Biden wins – and she will use a string of lies to create her own “facts” to justify her treason. 

Now is NOT the time to move on. Grill Stefanik and other Republicans who continue to lie, obfuscate, and gaslight the American people. Demand evidence. Call out the lies. Force them to disprove officials and independent firms that declared 2020 the most secure election in history. 

Show your audience that the person calling these this traitors “hostages” has zero integrity. Don’t just hand her a fucking bullhorn.

But Kristen Welker will continue to give MAGA the bullhorn.

Here’s why:

Corporate Media vs Substack

Stefanik and right-wing politicians choose to be interviewed by people like Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd for a reason. 

Truth seeking is not high on the priority list for most corporate journalists who see getting clicks as their goal. Corporate media only cares about ratings. 

Insanity sells; negativity sells; and LIES sell. The more viewers these MAGA guests bring, the more ad revenue comes in… enriching both media executives and their advertisers – all at the expense of facts, justice, and American democracy. 

But now, you have an alternative.

The Substack community only serves one person – you. 

From Joyce Vance, to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, to my work here – you have a place where MAGA is called out for their lies – with facts, analysis, and powerful tools that inform your friends & family during a critical election year. 

You can count on me, for one, to do ANYTHING to get out the truth, and thus help get lying traitors like Elise Stefanik and my uncle out of power… no weekends off.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Lies, Media, Trump

Study: Trump’s Favorite COVID Remedy Was Deadly

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
62

Politico reports on a new European study of the efficacy of hydroxycholoroquine, a drug recommended to the public by President Trump at the height of the pandemic. Note: Neither he nor his family took that drug. Instead they received FDA-approved vaccinations. .

Politico EU reports:

Nearly 17,000 people may have died after taking hydroxycholoroquine during the first wave of Covid-19, according to a study by French researchers.

The anti-malaria drug was prescribed to some patients hospitalized with Covid-19 during the first wave of the pandemic, “despite the absence of evidence documenting its clinical benefits,” the researchers point out in their paper, published in the February issue of Biomedicine & Pharmacotherapy.

Now, researchers have estimated that some 16,990 people in six countries — France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Turkey and the U.S. — may have died as a result.

That figure stems from a study published in the Nature scientific journal in 2021 which reported an 11 percent increase in the mortality rate, linked to its prescription against Covid-19, because of the potential adverse effects like heart rhythm disorders, and its use instead of other effective treatments.

Researchers from universities in Lyon, France, and Québec, Canada, used that figure to analyze hospitalization data for Covid in each of the six countries, exposure to hydroxychloroquine and the increase in the relative risk of death linked to the drug.

As President, Trump recommended the drug and said, “What do you have to lose? Take it.”

Categories Health, Lies, Science, Stupid, Trump

Thom Hartmann: How Reagan’s Tax Cuts Expanded Inequality

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
21

One of the most memorable books I have read is The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They argue that the happiest societies are the ones with the most equality. If this is true, and the authors persuaded me that it is, then our economic policies should aim to reduce income inequality and wealth inequality. But we have gone in the other direction, with government policy increasing inequality. Lobbyists for the 1% have funded political campaigns to lower their taxes, gut unions, and protect inherited wealth. Their campaigns on the surface are about culture war issues (abortion, drugs, race, gay rights), but what they are really promoting are tax cuts for the rich.

Thom Hartmann posted this chapter from his book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream.

He writes:

As productivity continued to rise, due to increasing automation and better technology, so too would everyone’s wages. Or so went the theory.

The glue holding this logic together was the then-top marginal income tax rate. In 1963, just before the Time article was written, the top marginal income tax rate was 90%. What that did was encourage CEOs to keep more money in their businesses: to invest in new technology, to pay their workers more, to hire new workers and expand.

After all, what’s the point of sucking millions and millions of dollars out of your business if it’s going to be taxed at 90% (or even the 74% that President Lyndon Johnson lowered it to in 1966)?

According to this line of reasoning, if businesses were suddenly to become way more profitable and efficient thanks to automation, then that money would flow throughout the business—raising everyone’s standard of living and increasing everyone’s leisure time, from the CEO to the janitor.

But when Reagan dropped that top tax rate down to 28%, everything changed. Now, as businesses became far more profitable, there was a far greater incentive for CEOs to pull those profits out of the company and pocket them, because they were suddenly paying an incredibly low tax rate.

And that’s exactly what they did.

All those new profits, thanks to automation, that were supposed to go to everyone, giving us all bigger paychecks and more time off, went to the top.

Suddenly, the symmetry in the productivity/wages chart broke down. Productivity continued increasing, since technology continued improving, and revenues and profits kept increasing with it.

But wages stayed flat.

And, again, since greater and greater profits could be sucked out of the company and taxed at lower levels, there was no incentive to reduce the number of hours everyone had to work.

In the 1950s, before that Time magazine article predicting the Leisure Society was written, the average American working in manufacturing put in about 42 hours of work a week. Today, the average American working in manufacturing puts in about 40 hours of work a week. This means that even though productivity has increased 400% since 1950, Americans in manufacturing are working, on average, only two fewer hours a week.

If productivity is four times higher today than in 1950, then Americans should be able to work four times less, or just 10 hours a week, to afford the same 1950s lifestyle when a family of four could get by on just one paycheck, own a home, own a car, put their kids through school, take a vacation every now and then, and retire comfortably.

That’s the definition of the Leisure Society: 10 hours of work a week, and the rest of the time spent with family, with travel, with creativity, with whatever you want. And if our tax laws and our corporate anti-monopoly laws that restrained the worst corporate bad behavior had stayed the same as they were in 1966, we might well be either working 10 hours a week for around $50,000 a year in income, or working 40-hour weeks for over $200,000 a year.

But all of this was washed away by the Reagan tax cuts. Those trillions of dollars that would have gone to workers? They went into the estates and stock portfolios of the top 1%. Combine this with Reagan’s brutal crackdown on striking PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization) members that kicked off a three-decades-long assault on another substantial pillar of the middle class—organized labor—and life today is anything but leisurely for working people in America.

More Unequal than Rome

Instead of leisure, working people got feudalism.

From 1947 to 1981, all classes of Americans saw their incomes grow together; as a result of the Reagan tax cuts, that era ended and a new era of Reaganomics began. Since then, only the wealthiest among us have gotten rich from economic boom times.

Today, workers’ wages as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time low. Yet, corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high.

The top 1% of Americans own 40% of the nation’s wealth. In fact, just 4 Americans own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined, and they pay lower taxes than anybody in the bottom half of American families economically.30

Walmart, Inc., the world’s largest private employer, personifies this inequality best. It’s a corporation that in 2011 gained more revenue than any other corporation in America. It raked in $16.4 billion in profits. It pays its employees minimum wage.

And the Walmart heirs, the Walton family, who occupy positions six through nine on the Forbes 400 Richest Americans list, own roughly $100 billion in wealth, which is more than the bottom 40% of Americans combined. The average Walmart employee would have to work 76 million 40-hour weeks to have as much wealth as one Walmart heir.

Through some interesting historical analysis, historians Walter Scheidel and Steven Friesen calculated that inequality in America today is worse than what was seen during the Roman era.31 Thus the top 1%, just like the Roman emperors, got their Leisure Society, and they’ve used their financial power to capture the US government to protect their Leisure Society.

Categories Accountability, Economics, Elections, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Funding

The Teacher Who Inspired Philly’s First Female Mayor

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2024 //
7

If you are or ever were a teacher, this story will make you happy and proud of your profession. Kristen A. Graham, a veteran education reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, interviewed the teacher who opened up a new world for Cherelle Parker, the new Mayor of Philadelphia.

Graham writes:

When Cherelle Parker stood outside her Mount Airy polling place on Election Day, speaking emotionally about how she rose to the brink of becoming Philadelphia’s 100th mayor, she shouted out the village that got her there: her single, teenage mother, her political godmothers.

And Jeanette Jimenez, her high school English teacher.

“She was the one who told me that my life was a real live textbook case study on how you turn pain into power, and she told me to write about it,” Parker said. That encouragement from her teacher helped Parker — who endured poverty and trauma during her childhood in West Oak Lane — win a citywide oratorical competition and start down a path that would culminate in her being elected the city’s first female mayor.

A reflection in Black literature

Stuffed in a corner of a jam-packed room on the second floor of Jimenez’s Bella Vista home is a time capsule of Parker’s high school years.

Here’s a poem the future mayor handwrote on now-yellowing loose-leaf paper, “I Dream a World.” Here are photographs. There’s the 1990 Parkway yearbook, in which Parker proclaims in the quote next to her photo that she wants “to help Black men and women of the future to unite and remember one nation under the groove.”

She first met Parker in the late 1980s at the Parkway program, an innovative Philadelphia School District high school model with campuses spread around the city.

Jimenez, Inquirer columnist Steve Lopez wrote in 1990, “believes there is a creative way to reach every student, no matter how poor the performance, how bad the attitude, how difficult the home life.” Every young person wants to learn, Jimenez believed, then and now.

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At first, Parker — whose mother died when she was 13, whose father was not a presence in her life, who was raised by her grandparents — was skeptical of Jimenez, who had a reputation for giving a lot of homework, and making students read a lot of books. At Parkway, students could choose which classes they took, and Parker shied away from Jimenez.

Parker was “spunky,” a standout in pink jumpsuits and long fingernails, Jimenez remembers. And, eventually, Parker was curious enough about what was happening in Jimenez’s classroom to find out more. Kids in Jimenez’s classes took so many trips to libraries and plays and elsewhere that Jimenez kept a permanent stash of tokens for their ventures.

“We acted out all the plays before we went,” Jimenez remembers. “The kids loved the opera more than the prom.”

It felt as if there were “sunshine coming out” of Jimenez’s room, Parker told the Daily News in 1990, and eventually, she wanted to “walk toward the light.”

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Jimenez had a vast classroom library. Parker began to dig in.

“I never said, ‘You can’t do that, you have to read Shakespeare,’” Jimenez said.

Jimenez had Shakespeare available, but she alsohad works by Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison and Sonia Sanchez. Although the district had banned The Color Purple at one point, Jimenez put into kids’ hands books in which they saw themselves.

It was For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf, by Ntozake Shange, that sparked a love of literature, of Black authors, Parker told The Inquirer in 1990.

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“She saw herself as the protagonist in those books. It’s what made her think she could do this,” said Jimenez, referring to Parker’s rise to power.

She made Connie Clayton cry

Parker had a loving family who did the best they could with limited resources, but her life was complicated, Jimenez said.

“She had a grandfather who was very sick that she took care of,” said Jimenez. “She needed somewhere else to go, physically and emotionally and mentally.”

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She found that, partly, in literature and in Jimenez.

“She calls me her white mother,” said Jimenez, who is still vigorous, voraciously intellectual and amusing at 81.

Jeanette Jimenez, a retired teacher who taught at Philadelphia's Parkway Center City High School, among other schools, in her South Philadelphia home.
Jeanette Jimenez, a retired teacher who taught at Philadelphia’s Parkway Center City High School, among other schools, in her South Philadelphia home.Read moreJessica Griffin / Staff Photographer

Parker set her sights on the Philadelphia School District’s Black History Oratorical Contest.

Her first speech was “decent,” Jimenez said, “but it wasn’t good enough for me to put in the contest.”

Parker “was furious. I said no, and she didn’t take the no. She said, ‘I’m getting there,’” Jimenez said.

That “no” made Parker buckle down to write a speech that not only won the 1990 citywide competition, but also made then-Superintendent Constance E. Clayton weep.

Parker called it “Native Daughter,” a play on Richard Wright’s Native Son, and wrote about how Black literature inspired her to rise above her difficult life circumstances.

“I, Cherelle Parker, was a child that most people thought would never succeed,” a teenaged Parker wrote. “You know? They almost had me thinking the same thing.”

She won $1,000 and a trip to Senegal, but she also won something more: the attention of powerful adults, including City Councilmembers Augusta Clark and Marian Tasco, both of whom eventuallynourished her the way Jimenez did.

Parker initially hadn’t given much thought to college, but Jimenez and others encouraged her. Jimenezeven took Parker on a visit to Lincoln University to make sure she gained admission.

“I wasn’t chancing it, with kids, you never know if they are going to follow through,” said Jimenez. “We just sat at Lincoln because I thought they were the ones that would take her fastest.”

Know your audience

Jimenez grew up in South Philadelphia, raised by her Russian immigrant father, a photographer and architect. She graduated from Little Flower High School and Temple University, where fellow student Bill Cosby would practice jokes at Mitten Hall.

She thought she knew some things about teaching when she began working in Philadelphia, at Barratt Junior High in South Philadelphia. She was a white teacher teaching the Edgar Allen Poe poem “Annabel Lee,” describing a beautiful woman to her Black students as blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Her teacher colleague Lenore Johnson enlightened her.

“She said, ‘Have you looked at your audience?’ There was no course that taught you, know your audience,” Jimenez said.

It was a mistake she did not repeat. Throughout her career, at Barratt, and at Parkway, and at Bartram High, Jimenez responded to student interests, teaching about writing and literature and life in ways that kids responded to. Sometimes, that meant using rap to reach students. Sometimes, that meant stopping mid-lesson to ask her students whether they were bored, and course correcting if they were.

Retired from teaching nearly 25 years, Jimenez is still keenly interested in teaching and learning. She’s trying to pick up Russian, and she thinks it’s vital to discuss matters of race and institutional racism, and she worries about how social media is distorting people’s world views. She thinks small class sizes are necessary, and knows that if she were still teaching, she’d be using the recent Barbiemovie as a tool to explore contemporary issues.

Jimenez treasures mementos from Parker’s years as her student, but it’s not just relics of the mayor-elect that she keeps. There are the writings of a student who went on to become a college professor, the young woman Jimenez helped realize her dream of becoming a welder — now she’s a SEPTA supervisor.

“What I’m proud of is those people that I had that became their own true selves,” said Jimenez.

She counts Parker in thatcategory.

“My hope is that Cherelle will run the city as I run my classroom,” said Jimenez.

Jimenez is confident that Parker picked up the most important lessons she instilled in all her students: Everyone can learn. Know your audience. Find ways to inspire them. Value people’s authentic voices. Work hard.

“She has a great soul, a good brain, and the sense to surround herself with good people,” Jimenez said.

Categories Education Reform

Is Trump the Messiah?

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2024 //
77

Donald Trump released a video portraying himself as a savior made by God to save the world. “God made Trump.”

If it weren’t so serious, it would be hilarious as he talks about how hard he works, from Dawn until past midnight. It was widely reported that he stayed in his residence until noon every day to watch FOX. That was known as “executive time.”

Categories Elections, Fraud, Religion, Trump

Mercedes Schneider: U.S. Education Suffers from a Bizarre, Bipartisan Love of Standardized Testing

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2024 //
30

Mercedes Schneider is heartened by the signs of disillusionment with standardized testing, which has been federally mandated since 2002 and which has enjoyed bipartisan support. Nothing seems to shake the bipartisan obsession with standardized testing.

She writes:

I am encouraged by the recent kerfluffle over the almighty standardized overtesting that is occurring across America as such is featured in this December 03, 2023, Politico piece,“‘A Bizarre Coalition’: Red and Blue States Weigh Big Changes to Testing Requirements.”

The piece focuses on goings-on surrounding “strict standardized testing and graduation requirements” in Florida, New York, and Louisiana.

If one offers even a cursory consideration of the legislative novelties foisted upon America’s K12 classrooms in recent decades, the red-and-blue “bizarre coalition” noted in the Politico title is not all that bizarre. Indeed, “coalition” of red and blue has introduced a lot of chaos into American education, including the pinnacle test-and-punish legislation, No Child Left Behind (the reauthorization of which was abandoned by Congress in 2007 because by then NCLB was seen as a political liability).

Red and blue also stood behind Common Core. Republican lawmakers were for it until they were against it, but former Florida governor and 2015 presidential hopeful Jeb Bush held onto Common Core but avoided calling it by its “poisonous” name on the 2015 campaign trail. “Rebrand” became the name of the game. Both national teachers unions accepted money from the Gates Foundation to promote it, then turned. Regarding Common Core backlash, Democratic secretary of ed Arne Duncan blamed “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

And charter schools: Still bipartisan despite rampant fraud and waste of underregulated taxpayer money (including embezzlement, wire fraud, corruption, graft, and scandal after scandal).

So, yeah, the “bizarre ” as it concerns modifying state standardized overtesting comes in the form of surprise at officials’ once sold on standardized testing even considering scaling back the testing.

The supposed reason for common standards and the NCLB-reworked, appendaged testing was to make students “ready for college and careers” and to make the US “globally competitive.”

Obama’s Race to the Top was little more than federal funding doled out for a Common Core fizzle.

Of course, at the official release of Common Core in June 2010, no one saw a pandemic coming ten years down the road, and it takes no test scores to know that the US has exceeded expectations for 2023 as concerns the state of our post-pandemic economy. And here is another important point: Nations worldwide must balance international competition with international cooperation.

It must be both.

I have yet to read any expert research crediting standardized testing in schools as contributing to post-pandemic economic recovery, for better or worse, for that matter.

I suspect that some of the Republican softening on standardized testing might reflect the rift in the party as moving away from the education agenda preferences of the likes of George and Jeb Bush. What’s fashionable now is the far-right purge of library books.

The library book purge central force is facing its own bad press as the Florida Republican power couple, Christian and Bridget Ziegler, are apparently living lives that are making the morality policing of Moms for Liberty, group that the Zieglers fiscally and politically enabled, difficult to carry off.

You know you’re in a bad spot when the phone video of you (top-ranking conservative fire-breather) having sex with a woman who is not your wife (but whom your wife also had sex with in a previous three-way) is the best way you have to counter the rape charge brought by that woman. And you stiff-neckedly refuse to resign from your conservative perch. And so does your wife.

Now that’s bizarre.

Please open the link to finish the post.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing
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