Michael Tomasky: Does Joe Biden Have “Absolute Immunity?” If He Does…

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
19

Michael Tomasky came up with an interesting thought. Writing in The New Republic, he speculated on what Joe Biden could accomplish if the Supreme Court rules that Presidents have absolute immunity for anything they do in their official capacity. Time for Dark Brandon!

During last week’s oral arguments in United States v. Trump, it sure sounded like there might be five Supreme Court justices willing to conclude that a president should indeed have lifetime immunity from legal reprisal for official acts committed as president. This prospect is terrifying because it would hand a President Trump a nearly blank check to do anything he wants—to the Constitution, to his political opponents, to the executive branch—and there will be no way to stop him unless 67 votes emerge in the Senate to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors and remove him from office, which seems a near impossibility, given Republicans’ excessive fealty to and fear of the man and his movement.

But then it occurred to me over the weekend: Well, wait a second. Donald Trump isn’t president. Joe Biden is. And if presidential immunity for official acts were to apply to a future President Trump, would it not also apply to current President Biden?

Of course it would. And I hope that fact has them doing some thinking in the Biden White House. Democrats should drive the point home to Republicans and the nation that two can play this game.

What “official acts” might Biden undertake once Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh, and possibly John Roberts declare him to be above the law? Well, let’s have some fun here.

Let’s start with the Supreme Court itself. Biden could wake up one day and announce that the court should have 13 members, or 15, and he could set about appointing the new associate justices and doing his best to ram them through the Senate, offering Joe Manchin trillions in economic development for West Virginia to secure the retiring senator’s support, between now and Election Day.

Politically risky? Sure. But maybe not as politically risky as most pundits would assume—and not nearly as costly to the republic as the things Trump is contemplating doing. Remember, the Constitution calls for no set number of justices. Biden would be within even his pre-immunity rights to try to change it. Two polls came out last fall asking respondents whether they’d favor court expansion, and the affirmative view prevailed in both: It was 54-46 in one, and 44-35 (with 22 percent having no opinion) in the other. That looks like a winnable political fight to me.

Biden would need only to make two arguments. Number one, this court delegitimized itself when it took away a half-century-old right, the right to a safe and legal abortion, in the Dobbs ruling. Every one of the justices who voted to strip that right away from women vowed in his or her confirmation hearing about their deep respect for precedent. They all lied. Number two, this very court gave me the power to do this! I’m only doing what this very Supreme Court just ruled a president was within his rights to do.

Okay. We all know Biden is not going to do that. He’s too respectful of tradition, and Democrats are too fearful of the right-wing noise machine, which would kick into an unprecedented outrage gear if Biden actually tried to make use of the tools the Supreme Court just handed him.

But here’s my point. If this court were to give presidents a grant of immunity for official acts, Biden should most certainly use the occasion to play some hardball. Make some threats about what he might do with this power. Get the American public thinking about some things they just don’t think about enough, leading public opinion in the direction of reforming aspects of our democratic system that badly need reform.

Take the Electoral College. Democrats have won seven of the last eight presidential elections, in popular vote terms, but this archaic and reactionary system that was put into place to give presidential candidates from slaveholding states an advantage has helped elect two Republicans who lost the popular vote.

I don’t think Biden should just unilaterally end the Electoral College—although, if he had immunity for all official acts, he could certainly give it a whirl, let conservatives bring a civil lawsuit, and see what his new 13-member Supreme Court thinks of the idea.

Less audaciously, he could certainly find some legal way to put an end to all these MAGA-driven attempts to seat alternate electors in states whose outcomes they dispute, which they did in seven states in 2020 and by all accounts are preparing to do again this year. Yes, the GOP-led House would impeach him, but so what? There’d never be 67 votes in the Senate to convict. And as with court expansion, if it were clear that he had really won the disputed states, public opinion would be on Biden’s side, and he’d have pushed the Overton window dramatically in the direction of eventual abolition of the Electoral College.

Okay, this, too, is a little out there for Biden. More seriously, he could use an immunity grant to issue a series of rulings and orders that would be aimed toward two ends: one, shoring up some of his policy decisions against the inevitable Trump reversals should Trump be elected, and two, preemptively making it harder for Trump to do some of the things that the infamous Project 2025 pledges he will do.

On the former, for example, the Biden administration could undertake a number of administrative moves on the civil rights and labor fronts to make it harder for Trump to undo what Team Biden has done. And on the latter, Biden can find a way to make it basically impossible for Trump to implement his so-called Schedule F plans, under which Trump would give himself the authority to fire more federal workers and replace them with lackeys. And that’s just for starters. With immunity for official acts, Biden could preemptively defang a lot of what promises to be undemocratic and authoritarian about a Trump second term.

Of course, the Supreme Court might not even issue a ruling on immunity. It might just remand it back to the Washington, D.C., appeals court that ruled in February that Citizen Trump was not immune from prosecution—that is, the high court’s real intent may just have been to delay the prosecution of Trump on January 6 insurrection charges, not to shield him from prosecution.

But I hope we’ve all learned by now never to underestimate the cynical perfidy of this court majority. They may well limit presidential immunity, thinking they’re helping Trump remake the country in his fascist fashion. They’ll calculate that the old institutionalist Biden would never use his new powers in the closing months and weeks of his term. It would be delicious to see him prove them wrong.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Trump

Jan Resseger: How Book Bans and Censorship Are Hurting Children

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
7

Jan Resseger explains how young people are injured when adults censor what they read and teach them inaccurate history.

She writes:

Public schools, which serve more than 50 million of our nation’s children and adolescents are perhaps our society’s most important public institution. Unlike private schools, public schools guarantee acceptance for all children everywhere in the United States, and they protect the rights of all children by law. And unlike their private school counterparts, public schools are also required to provide services to meet each child’s educational needs, even children who are disabled or who are learning the English language.

Today’s culture war attacks on public education drive fear of “the other” and attempt to frighten parents about exposing their children to others who may come from other countries, from other cultures, from a different race or ethnicity, from a different religion, or from a gay or lesbian family.

The idea of insulating children is, however, counter to the whole philosophical tradition that is the foundation for our system of public schooling.

More than a century ago, education philosopher John Dewey declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself,” (The School and Society, p. 5)

For Dewey, however, educating all children together without insulating them was important as more than an abstract principle. Dewey believed that the experience of school was itself a way of learning to live in a broader community: “I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life… I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects… the school as a form of community life… I believe that… the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought.” (My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897)

A hundred years later, in 1998, the political philosopher Benjamin Barber defended the idea of public schools as a microcosm of the community: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity.  If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness.”( “Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p.231).

And in the same year, another philosopher of education, Walter Feinberg explained that in public school classrooms students should learn to tell their own stories, to listen and respect the stories of others, and through that process prepare for democratic citizenship: “That there is an ‘American story’ means not that there is one official understanding of the American experience but, rather, that those who are telling their versions of the story are doing so in order to contribute to better decision making on the part of the American nation and that they understand that they are part of those decisions. The concept is really ‘Americans’ stories.’” (Common Schools: Uncommon Identities, p. 232) (emphasis in the original)

Today, of course, the culture wars attacks on public education seek to reshape the curriculum, silence controversial discussion, and ban books.

Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham explains that well-funded advocates for reshaping school curricula—including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Council for National Policy and a number of dark money groups—are spending millions of dollars to fan the fears of parents by supporting local advocates in organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The goal is to agitate against overly “woke” public school curricula and to frighten parents by telling them that teachers are frightening children by including the nation’s sins as well as our society’s virtues as part of the American history curriculum, and by encouraging children to listen to the voices of people who have traditionally been marginalized.  There is, however, no evidence that our children have been personally or collectively frightened when they learn about slavery as the cause of the Civil War or when they learn about gender identity as part of a high school human sexuality curriculum. Accurate and inclusive curricula and open class discussion where all voices are heard and considered are essential for truly public education.

Robert Samuels’ When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Culture Wars profoundly explains the damage wrought by book banning, Samuels, a Washington Post reporter and his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, had just won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction last fall when they were invited to a Memphis high school to discuss their new book, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  Samuels describes why he wanted to share his book with the Memphis high school students: “I had once been told that the answer to anything could be found in a book… One day, during my senior year, I was browsing an airport bookstore when I saw Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography, “Ready for Revolution.” A whole chapter was devoted to Bronx (High School of) Science, which he had also attended. I was riveted. It started with an officer hassling him on the street, only to be stunned when Carmichael shows him a book with the school’s logo. Although our time there was separated by four decades, we both had the same confusion upon discovering that white classmates had grown up reading an entirely different set of material….  We were both surprised by how little dancing there was at white classmates’ parties. ‘It was at first a mild culture shock, but I adapted,’ he wrote. I, too, had to learn to adapt, to not be so self-conscious about getting stereotyped because of my speech, my clothes, my interests. It was the first time I had ever truly felt seen in a book that was not made for children.”

Samuels and Olorunnipa received a call just before their Memphis visit warning them they could not read from the book and that the school could not distribute copies to students. And during their visit, it became evident that students’ questions had even been carefully edited by their teachers.  Then, in the weeks after the visit, the Memphis-Shelby County school staff and event sponsoring organization stepped all over themselves trying to apologize to Samuels and Olorunnipa.  It became evident that school staff had been frightened and intimidated by school district regulations; the penalties were severe while the rules themselves remained unclear.

Samuels describes what happened: “(T)he spokesperson for the school district e-mailed… to apologize for the miscommunication and misinformation ‘surrounding your recent visit’… (She) defended prohibiting the book itself, on the ground that it was not appropriate for people under the age of eighteen… (She) then admitted that no one involved in the decision had actually read it. The district’s academic department didn’t have time… A staff person in the office searched for it in a library database, noting that the American Library Association had classified it as adult literature.” There was one positive result of the whole fiasco:  with a donation from Viking Books, the publisher, a Memphis community development group, promised any student from Whitehaven High School a free copy of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Philosophers of education, academic researchers, educational psychologists, and the students in America’s classrooms all tell us that young people are hurt when the school is forced to remove the books that tell students’ own stories.

Young people are made invisible when state laws suppress accurate teaching about all the strands of the American story including slavery, and what happened during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. Children who are gay or lesbian learn that they should withdraw and hide when the words that describe them are banned. Experts also tell us that the other children in the classroom are not frightened when, for example, a classmate shares the challenges his or her family faced as immigrants trying to find a place to feel welcome.

Please open the link and finish reading this important article.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Racism

Good News! Connecticut Eliminates Religious Exemptions for Vaccines

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
20

In recent years, religious freedom has been used to undermine public schools and public health. This trend damages communities and endangers children. In the following post, an authority praises Connecticut for eliminating the religious exemption for vaccination.

Dr. Paul Offit is a pediatrician who specializes in infectious diseases and vaccines. He is currently  the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes a blog where he warns about the dangers of refusing to vaccinate against diseases.

He wrote:

On February 13, 2024, National Geographic published a book I wrote called, TELL ME WHEN IT’S OVER: AN INSIDER’S GUIDE TO DECIPHERING COVID MYTHS AND NAVIGATING OUR POST-PANDEMIC WORLD. For the past few months, I have been writing about various issues discussed in that book.

Between January 2020 and March 2024, the CDC reported 338 cases of measles in 30 US states and jurisdictions. These outbreaks were consistent with a CDC survey showing that more parents are choosing non-medical vaccine exemptions, such as religious or philosophical exemptions, for their school children. Connecticut, however, is standing up to those who, in the name of religious freedoms, are putting children at unnecessary risk.

In 2000, the United States eliminated measles, the most contagious of the vaccine-preventable diseases. Success centered on the enforcement of school vaccine mandates that have existed in all 50 states since 1981. Unfortunately, during the past few years, legislative efforts by anti-vaccine groups have made it easier to opt out of vaccines for non-medical reasons. As a consequence, immunization rates among school children have dropped and measles has come back.

In Connecticut, on the other hand, immunization rates have risen for two straight years, exceeding pre-pandemic levels. During the 2022-2023 school year, more than 97 percent of Connecticut kindergartners were vaccinated against measles, up from 95.7 percent the year before and 95.3 percent the year before that. Why? The answer can be found in a 2021 law that eliminated the state’s religious exemption to vaccination.

Immunization rates of 95 percent or higher are required to provide herd immunity against measles. When rates drop, which is true in many states that now offer either religious or philosophical exemptions, measles comes back. The most dramatic example being an outbreak in Philadelphia in 1991 that centered on two fundamentalist churches that refused vaccines. During a three-month period, measles virus infected 1,400 people in the city and killed nine. All the deaths were in young children.

On its face, the phrase “religious exemptions to vaccination” is a contradiction in terms. All religions teach us to care about our children and our families and our neighbors. Choosing to put our children and those with whom they come in contact at risk is the opposite of a religious act. Further, about 9 million people in the United States, because they are on immune suppressive therapies for their cancers or transplants or autoimmune diseases, can’t be vaccinated. They depend on those around them for protection. Do we have a responsibility to love our neighbor?

Amy Pisani, a Connecticut resident, and head of the national group Vaccinate Your Family, praised the hard work required to counter the efforts of anti-vaccine groups to overturn vaccine mandates. “From the top down, we have incredibly supportive legislators,” said Pisani. “And when you have government agencies that are supportive at that level, it allows our public health officials to do their job.” As measles cases rise this year, and will no doubt return next winter, parents in Connecticut can feel more comfortable that state health officials and legislators have their backs.

Standing in stark contrast to efforts to protect children in Connecticut are those in Mississippi. In July 2023, Mississippi, which had up to that point only offered medical exemptions, became the most recent state to offer a religious exemption to vaccination. More than 2,000 parents immediately chose to exempt their children. The effort was not spearheaded by a religious group, but rather a virulent anti-vaccine group called Informed Consent Action Network. The lawyer who headed that effort paradoxically declared, “Freedom wins again.” Freedom to catch and transmit potentially deadly infections. Hardly a victory for children.

Categories Accountability, Connecticut, Ethics, Health, Science

Jonathan V. Last: Biden Won the War on Crime!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

Jonathan V. Last writes for The Bulwark, a website for Never Trumper Republicans that has some of the best writing on the current state of politics. In this post, Last explains that Trump presided over a period of crime “American carnage,” Trump called it), but crime has dropped during Biden’s term in office.

Last writes:

Remember the bad old days when people lost their minds about the crime wave Joe Biden had unleashed on America with his woke whatever-whatever policies?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

There was so much of this. 

Well I’ve got some great news for you: Joe Biden has won the war on crime.

Here’s a headline from the WSJ that Heather Mac Donald might want to see: Homicides Are Plummeting in American Cities.

And this isn’t a one-time drop. It’s an acceleration of a trend that began in 2023.

How many stories have the Washington Examiner and the WSJ op-ed page written about these facts?

I’ll let you guess. But wait—there’s even more good news.

The “Biden crime wave” was always proffered in bad faith because the “crime wave” appeared in 2020, while Donald Trump was president: 2020 saw the largest rise in the murder rate in American history.

Now just because Biden inherited a problem doesn’t mean he gets a pass on its existence. When you’re president, you’re supposed to solve everyone’s problems, not just the ones that crop up during your administration.

And here’s the data: All crime is down under Biden, with one exception.

Violent crimes like murder and rape? Down. Property crimes like burglary and theft? Down. Crime in cities? Down. Crime in rural areas? Down.

The lone exception is that car theft in metropolitan areas has gone up. That’s it.

Like the man said: Take the W.

In Donald Trump’s final year in office the murder rate rose by 30 percent, which was the largest jump in U.S. history. Over Joe Biden’s last 16 months, we’ve had the biggest drop in the murder rate in U.S. history.

You are better off now than you were four years ago.

Categories Accountability, Biden, Data, Elections, Fraud, Hoax, Safety, Trump

Should Librarians Be Jailed for Handing Out a Banned Book?

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

This article in The Washington Post by Hanna Natanson and Anymita Kaye provides a national review of states that are trying to stop book censorship and protect librarians and states that not only ban books for sexual and racial content but threaten jail time for librarians who dispense such books. The state-by-state descriptions on the legal status of librarians is valuable. Open the link if you can to see where your state ranks and what actions it is taking to protect or threaten librarians.

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.
“I would like to be optimistic,” Lee said. “But having been in my position for the last few years … I don’t know, it really feels like it’s been forever. And I am worried the book banners are just going to be emboldened.”

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians — the first such wave in the country, said John Chrastka, director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.

Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law, The Post found. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last three years across 10 states.

Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children. Some books’ “sole purpose is sexual gratification,” said West Virginia Del. Brandon Steele (R), who introduced a bill that would allow librarians to be prosecuted for giving obscene titles to minors.
“It is strictly about pornography,” Steele said. “On that limited basis, this isn’t going to have the chilling effect people think it’s going to.”

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color…

The protective library laws being pushed around the country run the gamut: From increasing funding to adding school librarians to campuses to forbidding “discrimination” in choosing which books to stock…

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

The law protects children and doesn’t harm librarians unless they’re doing something awful, bill sponsor Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) said at the time: “If they don’t knowingly violate [the law], they’re free and clear.”

Seventeen states are weighing some version of this measure, The Post found. That comes after at least eight states enacted such laws between 2021 and last year, although two were later vetoed and one was blocked by the courts.

The Post could not find an instance in which a librarian has been charged under these laws. But Peter Bromberg of the Utah Library Association pointed out several recent cases in which police were called to schools or launched investigations over books — in Missouri, Texas and South Carolina…

Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”

White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.”

Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Biden Sends $16 Billion to Texas for Clean Energy and Infrastructure: No Gratitude!

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
12

Texas is represented by some loathsome public officials (looking at you, Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick, and Senator Ted Cruz). They have denounced President Biden in every imaginable way. Yet the Biden administration is sending $16 billion to Texas for clean energy and infrastructure. Texas Republicans voted against the legislation but they will gladly take the dollars and the new jobs. (All the red states are getting funds from Biden’s bills that they opposed, while taking credit for them.) And they will continue to insist that climate change is a hoax.

Chris Tomlinson writes in The Houston Chronicle:

Delivering reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity wouldn’t be difficult if officials in Austin and Washington worked together. The challenges are not technological or economic; they are about setting priorities.

Pablo Vegas, chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, promised a new approach to grid planning on Tuesday, promising to better track the growing demand for power from industry.

“We need to accelerate aspects of our planning processes and be able to look further into the future, anticipate what’s coming, because it still takes three to six years to build transmission,” Vegas said.

The Legislature ordered ERCOT to start considering long-term proposals to add load to the grid rather than relying only on finalized plans. The new approach makes demand forecasts look much, much larger but also less reliable because not all proposed projects come to fruition.

President Joe Biden, meanwhile, is offering Texans billions of dollars to fortify the electric grid, reduce electricity bills and cut greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday, the administration promised to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines.

The Environmental Protection Agency also gave $249.7 million to the Texas Solar For All Coalition and  $156.1 million to the Clean Energy Fund of Texas this week to provide solar energy equipment to low-income communities.

The EPA has also granted $104 million in federal funds to 19 Texas school districts to purchase 288 electric school buses. The EPA grants are part of the $16 billion the federal government has committed to clean energy projects in Texas that have created 23,000 jobs.

The money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act, which Texas Republicans vehemently opposed. The massive investment in energy and manufacturing is intended to grow the economy while fighting climate change.

Past investments led Waaree Energies to invest $1 billion in a solar panel manufacturing facility near Houston, creating 1,500 jobs. San Antonio has committed $30 million to build, with federal help, the largest municipal onsite solar project in Texas. Diligence Offshore Services announced in August it would invest $1.23 billion to open an offshore wind support and manufacturing facility off the coast of Port Arthur.

Climate change, though, is still missing from Vegas’ and ERCOT’s lexicon. He’s happy to talk about the growing electricity demand from artificial intelligence and fossil fuel facilities but never mentions the residential demand during climate change-driven extreme weather. That’s what causes record-setting peaks that can trigger outages.

Nationwide, weather caused 80% of the power outages since 2000, and the frequency of blackouts has doubled in the past decade, according to data collated by research nonprofit Climate Central. Texas experienced the most weather-related outages, and the pace is accelerating.

Improving the grid to meet growing industrial electricity demand is quite different from building a system that can withstand a changing climate. Adding more power generation and transmission lines is not enough when facing stronger hurricanes, larger wildfires, colder winter storms and hotter summers.

ERCOT’s planning will remain flawed until officials start preparing for more polar vortexes like 2021’s Winter Storm Uri, rain events like Hurricane Harvey and heat waves like last summer’s.

Transitioning to clean energy and building resilient generation plants and transmission lines offer huge economic opportunities. BlackRock, the world’s largest financial manager, says the world spent $1.8 trillion on the energy transition in 2023 but will need to spend $4 trillion annually by the mid-2030s.

Vegas never mentions climate change because the Republican elected officials who oversee him call it a hoax. Texas will never chart a strong economic course until we have a governor, lieutenant governor and speaker who recognize the greatest threat yet to human prosperity….

Categories Biden, Economy, Elections, Environment, Funding, Republicans, Texas

Florida: Behind the Duelling Decisions About Abortion

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2024 //
18

Since the Florida Supreme Court released dual decisions about abortion, there’s been some confusion. Five of the seven justices were appointed by DeSantis.

One decision upheld a fifteen-week ban on abortion, with the understanding that it would be superseded on May 1 by a six-week ban, already signed into law by Governor DeSantis. A six-week ban is the equivalent of a total ban, since few (if any) women realize they are pregnant at that point. The ban was approved by a vote of 6-1.

The second decision allowed a referendum this November that would guarantee the protection of abortion rights in the state constitution. This decision was approved by a vote of 4-3.

Are these two decisions in conflict? Well, yes. And there is a catch. The state constitution includes a guarantee that “all natural persons’ have a right to life and liberty.” Are fetuses “natural persons?” Some of Florida’s Supreme Court justices think so.

Our reader Democracy espies a scheme behind the scene:

In the oral arguments over the Florida abortion amendment to the state constitution, the chief justice of the Florida Supremes – Carlos G. Muñiz – asked specifically about fetal rights. As Bloomberg reported,

“Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos G. Muñiz asked during Feb. 7 oral arguments on an amendment that would protect abortion in the state whether the Florida Constitution’s guarantee that all ‘natural persons’ be ‘equal before the law’ can apply to fetuses. Muñiz questioned whether justices must first decide this before determining whether the proposed amendment protecting abortion until fetal viability was misleading.”

Meredith L. Sasso, a DeSantis appointee, raised the issue of fetal rights in voting NOT to allow the amendment on the ballot.  Renatha Francis, another DeSantis appointee, did the same.

Jamie R. Grosshans, ALSO appointed by DeSantis, wrote the opinion finding that in Florida privacy does NOT apply to abortion, also said this when voting AGAINST the abortion amendment’s placement on the ballot:

“The voter may think this amendment results in settling this issue once and for all. It does not.”

Is it too cynical to believe that the Florida Supreme Court would approve a referendum that they intend to invalidate?

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Gender

Tom Ultican: One Cheer for NCLB…But Not From Me!

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2024 //
39

Tom Ultican has noticed a strange phenomenon on billionaire-funded websites, particularly The 74: Praise for the justly-reviled No Child Left Behind.

Teachers hated it because of its warped emphasis on standardized test scores. Students hated it because they were cheated of a real education, they lost civics, the arts, and recess, and the tests assumed more importance than they deserved.

But Ultican writes, Chad Aldeman of The 74 is nostalgic for the good old days of NCLB.

Neoliberals joined with libertarians to “reform”public education. Their tools were big money and propaganda distributed by media outlets like The 74, support by The Walton family (EIN 13-3441466) and Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866). This year, regular columnist for The 74, Chad Aldeman, is trying to claim that lifting No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school accountability sanctions is responsible for the public school testing “data decline”.

In a recent article in The 74, Aldeman complained of widening achievement gaps in Indiana, but Ultican can’t find the source of Aldeman’s data.

Ultican notes that NCLB interrupted a long period of academic improvement.

From 1970 to 1992, America’s schools showed slow but steady improvement in education-testing outcomes but since the era of standards, testing and accountability, improvement basically stopped. Education, run by billionaires and politicians instead of educators, failed to improve testing outcomes.

Alderman stated in his latest article that it is not just an Indiana problem but that “49 of 50 states, the District of Columbia and 17 out of 20 of the large cities that participated in NAEP … saw a widening of their achievement gap over the last decade.” He did not share which tests showed widened achievement gaps nor which cohorts were compared. NAEP reports on reading scores for 4th and 8th grade do not show a significant change in scoring gaps between Black and White students and comparisons in other ethnic groups also were steady.

After asking what has caused this (non-existent) achievement gap increase, Alderman posited several possible reasons: Common Core state standards (CCSS), per-pupil spending, technology and social media. He said the timing for CCSS fit but did not explain why states where CCSS was never adopted had the same problem. For per-pupil spending, he claimed that more money was getting to classrooms, which defies education-spending reports, making his claim a little shady. For technology and social media, he said other countries with similar problems, did not see testing declines … a declaration made with no evidence cited.

If this decline were real, wouldn’t the privatization of public education be the most likely culprit? Charter schools came first followed by vouchers and more charter schools. Data clearly shows that vouchers harm student-testing performance. Furthermore both charter schools and voucher schools leech money from public education budgets.

He finally made his real point, “I argue that the weakening of school accountability pressures after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed is responsible for a large portion of the drop.” Those of us, who were in classrooms and witnessed the test-and-punish philosophy damage to public education, disagree. How many great public schools were labeled “failures and closed” because they existed in low income zip codes?…

Ultican concludes:

The 74 was founded in 2015 by former CNN news anchor, Campbell Brown, along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor, Romy Drucker. Its original funding came from the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation,  Walton Family Foundation, Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Since then, it has been the vehicle for spreading the billionaire message of privatization and undermining public schools.

Some billionaires see the non-sectarian nature of public education as a threat to their dreams of a Christian theocracy. Others are libertarians that oppose free universal public education, believing everyone should pay one’s own way and not steal people’s private properties using taxation. The Neoliberals are convinced that education should be run like a business and react to market forces.

Responding to the mission of The 74, Chad Aldeman’s series of articles, like those of many of his colleagues, are pure propaganda, shaping data to support his neoliberal ideology instead of honestly reporting facts. Unfortunately this kind of fake “journalism” is flooding email boxes and web pages throughout America every day.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Failure, Indiana, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Standardized Testing

Surprise! Columbia Undergraduates Choose an Israeli as President

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2024 //
35

Columbia University emerged as the national epicenter of student (and faculty) protests against Israel in its war against Hamas. William McGurney of the Wall Street Journal reported on a notable contradiction:

Meet the surprising president-elect of the student body of the School of General Studies, one of Columbia University’s four undergraduate colleges. Her name is Maya Platek. She is a proud Israeli who once worked for the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson’s unit.

Anyone watching the goings-on at the university’s Morningside Heights campus these past two weeks might easily mistake Columbia for a wholly owned subsidiary of Hamas Inc. Ms. Platek’s election throws a wrench into the protester narratives. It signals that at least some at Columbia want students to be able to walk the campus without harassment—and life to get back to normal.

“I am always willing to listen,” Ms. Platek says, “but also very good at speaking up when I think something’s wrong.”

She isn’t shy either. Ms. Platek is a member of Students Supporting Israel, a national organization whose mission is “to be a clear and confident pro-Israel voice on college campuses.” It also aims for something Columbia plainly needs: “to reassure students who oppose the demonization of the State of Israel on campus that they are not alone.”

This isn’t Ms. Platek’s first rodeo. In October, she posted a petition onChange.org seeking to remove Joseph Massad, a Columbia professor who teaches modern Arab politics and intellectual history. She directed attention to his Oct. 8 article for an online publication called the Electronic Intifada celebrating the “stunning victory” against Israel the day before.

Mr. Massad is still there, a melancholy fact several congressmen brought up during Columbia President Nemat Shafik’s grilling two weeks ago before the House Education Committee. But Ms. Platek’s petition fleshed out what people mean when they complain that Columbia tolerates antisemitism.

In a speech captured on video a few months back, Ms. Platek spoke about Columbia students and faculty who “manipulate history in order to demonize” Jews. She made clear she isn’t intimidated.

“They choose to advocate for our removal off of this campus over our nationality,’’ Ms. Platek said. “That is discrimination. They choose to regurgitate Nazi Germany’s talking points. They choose to argue that they are righteous to advocate for our death. Wake up!”

In most of America, her objections wouldn’t be controversial. At Columbia they are bracing. They are also a refreshing counterweight to the crowds chanting “Globalize the intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”

Categories Extremism, Higher Education

D.C. Charter School Votes to Form a Union

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2024 //
9

One reason that big charter donors fund charter schools is to break the teachers’ union, whether it’s AFT or NEA. Big business has opposed labor unions since they were first organized. 90% of charters have no union affiliation, and the Waltons and DeVos-funders want to keep it that way. A few days ago, a charter school in D.C. voted to unionize. Why? Because the teachers think they need a union to bargain with the charter leadership and make sure they get due process, health benefits and a pension. They want what only unions can get.

For Immediate Release
May 2, 2024

Contact:
Kelley Ukhun
513/578-2646
kukhun@dcacts1927.com

Capital City Public Charter School in D.C. Votes for a Voice on the Job

All 200 Teachers and Other School Staff Will Be Members of 

DC Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, AFT

WASHINGTON—Teachers and all other school staff at Capital City Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., voted tonight to unionize, joining the membership of the District of Columbia Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, DC ACTS, an affiliate of the AFT.

Capital City Public Charter School has 200 employees, including teachers, instructional assistants, counselors, librarians, secretarial staff and custodians, all of whom will be represented by DC ACTS. The school educates 1,000 pre-K through 12th-grade students. DC ACTS also represents all employees at both Mundo Verde Public Charter School campuses in D.C.

“Capital City educators and other employees want to have a voice when the school makes decisions about the education of their students. They are the folks who are in the classrooms every day and who work the closest with the kids and know best what’s needed for them to thrive and excel. Only through a union can this be accomplished,” said DC ACTS Acting President Kelley Ukhun, adding that she hopes to be able to negotiate a first contract in the coming months.

Besides having a voice in decisions made about their school, Capital City employees said they want to end a “right to work”-contingent atmosphere in which every staff member was subject to annual contract renewal, making it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain staff given the precarity. Educators and staff also indicated a collective desire for better retirement benefits, a more progressive and transparent discipline procedure (including a grievance and arbitration system) and a duty-free lunch period.

Guadalupe Campos, a Capital City high school Spanish teacher, strongly supports the union.

“I believe that all workers, regardless of rank or position, deserve the opportunity to participate in decisions that affect students, our families and ourselves. United, we can create a healthy, equitable and sustainable environment for all,” she said.

Kate Lenegan, an after-school teacher, said: “I support this union because our staff is what makes Capital City great, and our students deserve the best from us.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said this labor victory reflects a growing trend of workers organizing across the country, growing the labor movement so that we can be a force that improves the lives of workers, their families and their communities.

“Whether it’s at a traditional public school or college, or whether it’s at a charter school or any other workplace, working people are seeing the value of a union as a vehicle to access a better life for themselves, their families, and the communities they serve,” Weingarten said. “That’s why the AFT has seen unprecedented organizing growth, organizing 146 new units across multiple sectors, including education, higher education, healthcare and public service since our last convention in July 2022.

Charter school educators see this, Weingarten said. The AFT represents about 7,500 educators and school staff across the country at more than 250 charter schools. More than 1,000 teachers and staff at more than 15 charter schools have organized with the AFT just since the start of the 2022-23 school year, and hundreds of those have already won strong first contracts at their schools. 

“Union membership can be transformative in the life of any working person. I am so glad the educators of Capital City have elected to join us. We are so happy to welcome them. We want working folks everywhere to know: The AFT is the home of the people who make a difference in other people’s lives. We fight for real solutions that make our workplaces and our communities safer, stronger, and more democratic, and we show up when it counts. Together, we can win the future,” Weingarten said.

The Washington Teachers’ Union, which represents educators at District of Columbia Public Schools, applauded the Capital City employees’ vote.

“All staff, whether in regular public schools or charter schools in the private sector, deserve the rights and respect afforded to them through union membership. We are all stronger together, and the WTU looks forward to working in partnership with DC ACTS as it grows with this exciting win at Capital City,” said WTU President Jacqueline Pogue Lyons.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Unions
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