North Carolina: Jen Mangrum Plans to Unionize Teachers for AFT

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2023 //
19

Jennifer Mangrum is an intrepid warrior for public schools. She ran for public office twice, first challenging the most powerful man in the General Asembly, then ran for state commissioner of education and nearly won. She’s now signed on with the AFT to organize a state teachers’ union. Jen Mangrum is fearless.

Long odds don’t discourage Jennifer Mangrum.

Mangrum, an associate professor of teacher education at UNC-Greensboro, ran unsuccessfully against the state’s most powerful Republican, state Senate leader Phil Berger in 2018.. She followed that long-shot effort with an unsuccessful run in 2020 for North Carolina superintendent of public instruction, where she drew 48 percent of the vote.

Now the Democratic go-getter is embarked on a new mission: She wants to unionize the state’s public school teachers.

“I couldn’t make politics work. After both losses, I felt discouraged,” Mangrum, a former teacher, told me this week. ”But I had teachers reaching out to me saying, ‘Can you help me with this?’ “

As one person, she can’t help them all, but maybe a union could.

After two years of pushing unionization as a volunteer, Mangrum has taken a part-time, paid consulting role with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the nation’s second largest teachers union with 1.7 million members. Her job is to explore the union’s potential to organize a significant share of the state’s 94,000 public school teachers.

“We have members across the state,” Magnum said. “Two years ago we didn’t have any.” Just how many, she wouldn’t say, but she allowed that it’s more than 100.

The North Carolina Association of Educators, an affiliate of the National Education Association, currently advocates for teachers and other school employees, but it is an association, not a union.

The need for united action is clear. North Carolina’s average teacher pay ranks 34th nationally and 46th for beginning teacher pay. In K-12 spending in 2022, North Carolina ranked 45th.

Along with low pay and lack of resources, teachers have endured disrespect by the Republican-controlled General Assembly. They’ve been accused of indoctrinating students with progressive values and told how to teach about the role of race in the nation’s past and present. Extra pay for teachers with master’s degrees and other higher degrees was eliminated a decade ago.

But there are obstacles to translating teachers’ frustration and anger into unionizing. The highest barriers are that North Carolina is a right-to-work state – workers can’t be compelled to join a union or pay dues in a unionized workplace – and state law bars collective bargaining by public employees.

In addition, the legislature’s beating down of teachers has weakened their will to fight back. Many are leaving teaching – the state had more than 4,400 teacher vacancies at the start of the last school year. Older teachers are counting down to retirement and don’t want to join an uphill struggle. Others are intimidated by school boards and administrators and fear losing their jobs if they join a union…

Once union chapters take root, Mangrum said, the next move would be to push for legislation allowing collective bargaining. Teachers in Virginia achieved that goal in 2020, ending the state’s prohibition on collective bargaining for local government workers.

Nationally, union organizing is growing. Given the abuse of North Carolina’s teachers, it’s time that that power came here. If Democrats regain control of the legislature, organized teachers may be able to turn North Carolina from a right-to-work state to one where teachers – and their students – regain the right to thrive.

Go, Jen, Go!!

Categories Courage, Democracy, Elections, Teachers, Unions

Big Donors to DeSantis Are Waiting to Give Money Until He Stops His Extremism

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2023 //
35

Some of the billionaires who have funded Ron DeSantis in the past are now withholding their millions because they think he is too extreme. Some don’t like his six-week abortion ban. Others are not pleased that he’s demonizing gays and drag queens. Haven’t they been paying attention? Mean is his brand. Also he looks like a loser.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

TALLAHASSEE — GOP megadonors who invested in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as an alternative to Donald Trump for president are having serious second thoughts about continuing to back a candidate who political analysts say is looking like a bad bet.

Among them are: A Las Vegas aerospace business and hotel owner who has spent part of his fortune looking for proof of extraterrestrials. An NFL team owner and mall developer whose bribery conviction was pardoned by President Trump. An investment broker whose firm suffered fallout from the Silicon Valley Bank failure.

Those donors and others, including hedge fund managers, real estate developers and insurance executives, helped fuel the Never Back Down PAC that is providing the bulk of resources for the DeSantis campaign.

Six months ago, DeSantis’ fortunes looked bright. But since he announced his candidacy he has sunk in the polls, as Donald Trump’s numbers rise despite three federal indictments against him.

The moral of the story is that you can’t succeed by running to the right of Trump.

Gallup’s Mohamed Younis on Favorability of Presidential Candidates

Government and politics |

Categories Accountability, DeSantis, Education Industry, Elections, Funding

Conservative Law Professors: Trump Cannot Run for President Because He is an Insurrectionist

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2023 //
39

Two conservative law professors, experts in constitutional law, maintain in a law review article that Trump is barred from running for president again because he participated in an insurrection. The article created a media sensation.

William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis, both members of the Federalist Society, wrote an article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in which they maintain that Trump violated Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment by engaging in an effort to overthrow the Constitution.

The New York Times wrote:

Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.

The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long articleto be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

He summarized the article’s conclusion: “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”

Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment says:

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.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Elections, Trump

North Carolina: Voucher Schools Get Tax Dollars with No Rules or Accountability

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2023 //
3

Public Schools First North Carolina posted the following critique of the state’s newly expanded voucher program. Before it passed, the parent-led group projected that costs would soar to $550,000,000 annually, as a result of removing income limits. Instead of “saving poor kids from failing schools,” vouchers have become a way to subsidize the tuition of students from middle-income and upper-income families who never attended any public school.

Should teachers have some type of educational background or teaching license?

Should schools that receive public dollars provide transparency for how those dollars are spent?

Should North Carolinians expect to know how well students in schools funded by tax dollars are learning?

Should we have some assurance that our tax dollars are not being used to discriminate against groups of students and/or parents?

Should the governing body (i.e. school board) of each district be elected to represent the community it serves and held accountable by voters/taxpayers?

Whether your answer to these questions is yes or no, the degree to which schools actually have policies in place or are regulated in a way to address these questions depends entirely on whether they are traditional public schools, charter schools or private schools, even though all of them may be funded by our tax dollars.

With a massive NC private school voucher program expansion in the proposed House and Senate budgets, it is worth examining which policies apply to which schools and how much the public knows about the schools they’re funding. Although more than 70% of the U.S. population lives in households without a school-aged child, having a well-educated citizenry affects everyone, so accounting for how tax dollars are spent is important.

The NC Department of Administration Division of Non-Public Education registers and monitors both conventional private schools and homeschools. Each year, the division publishes a report containing the publicly available information on private schools. It’s a thin, three page report with minimal information: number of students by school, county, and year, number and percentage of school by type (i.e. independent or religious), and number and percentage of students by sex (i.e. male or female). Taxpayers funding school vouchers see no budget on how their money is being spent and there are no public meetings or ways to the public to give input on schools procedures or policies.

No information is provided by these private schools about student achievement or population subgroups such as special education, English learner, race, ethnicity, or family income status. Lacking any such data, it’s difficult for the public to know whether students are learning or if schools are discriminating against students or families.

In fact, although voucher-accepting private schools are required to administer an achievement test each year, they are allowed to select the test, be in charge of how it is administered and the results are not made publicly available. So the public is left with no objective measure of whether students are learning anything at all.

Traditional public schools and charter schools are required to follow the state standard course of study and show the assessment results, but voucher-receiving private schools have no curriculum guidelines at all. In fact, they could even operate under an “unschooling” philosophy while accepting public tax dollars.

In traditional public schools, 100% of the teaching staff must have a license or be working toward one to provide instruction to our children. In charter schools, the requirement if that just 50% of the teacher must be certified, and in private schools the requirement drops to 0%. Teachers do not to be certified nor do they have to even have a college degree.

Traditional public schools and charter schools must also provide a minimum of 185 days (or 1,025 hours) of instruction across at least nine months. Private schools have no minimum days or hours of instruction. They are simply required to provide some instruction across nine months in a given year. Private schools are also allowed to determine their own policies and procedures for handling excessive student absences, including the maximum number of days a student may be absent and remain enrolled. Compare this to the requirement we place on public schools for students attendance and related retention policies.

Although state law does prohibit private schools from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin, with no tracking mechanism in place to show that they comply or not making it a toothless requirement. And to date, state law does not require voucher-receiving private schools to follow other federal non-discrimination laws such as the Americans with Disabilities Act or Title IX. (See our report for more information), yet they would receive public tax dollars.

In contrast to the absence of private school data, the NC Department of Public Instruction makes extensive and detailed data available about student achievement, demographics, and school finances for traditional public schools and some data about charter schools. The public can find out how many students achieved a passing score on state tests, what a school or district’s demographic make-up looks like and how it has changed over time, whether students fall into special needs categories, how many disciplinary actions occurred in a given year, how much money was spent on teachers and textbooks versus facilities, and answers to just about any other question one can ask about schools. There is full transparency for tax dollars at work with public schools. Annual public audits of the financial books is required by state law and available to the public.

Traditional public school leadership is also open to public scrutiny, as the past few years have highlighted. Traditional school boards must conduct some public meetings and provide an opportunity for public comment. Not so for charter and private schools – there is no public input required or allowed.

In addition, all traditional public school board members must live within their school district and have to be elected by registered voters. These elected board members represent the communities they serve where all citizens, whether parents or not, can vote in school board elections. However, only 50% of charter school board members must reside in North Carolina and elections are not required. There are no residency or election requirements for private school board members along with no requirement that their governing boards even be shown publicly.

All North Carolinians deserve to know whether their tax dollars are being spent responsibly to create a better community for everyone. Comparing requirements between traditional public schools and private schools reveals stark differences. When tax dollars are being spent to support private schools, the public needs accountability to prevent financial fraud and poor student outcomes.

More transparency for how voucher-receiving private schools use their public funds would also help legislators make more-informed budget and policy decisions and evaluate the value of the money spent. Transparency and meaningful data are important requirements when hard-earned public tax dollars are funneled to unaccountable private schools, the same information we expect from publicly funded public schools.

Isn’t it curious that many of the same people who demanded strict accountability for public schools insist on no accountability for voucher schools?

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Funding, North Carolina, Religion, Separation of church and state

Hechinger Report: State Takeovers of School Districts Have a Poor Track Record

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2023 //
5

Steven Yoder writes in the Hechinger Report about the state takeover of the Houston Independent School District and the dismal record of state takeovers.

Houstonians see the takeover as the vengeful punishment of a Democratic district by a mean-spirited Republican governor. Takeovers typically don’t improve academic performance. They stifle the democratic voices of Black and brown citizens. Given the research, it’s the silencing of democracy that is the purpose of takeovers.

Yoder writes:

On June 1, the TEA took over Houston’s school district, removing the superintendent and elected board. Critics say it’s an effort by a Republican governor to impose his preferred policies, including more charter schools, on the state’s largest city, whose mayor is a Democrat and whose population is two-thirds Black or Hispanic. In other districts where state-appointed boards have taken over, academic outcomes haven’t improved. Now red-state governors increasingly use the takeovers to undermine the political power of cities, particularly those governed by Black and Hispanic leaders, according to some education experts.

The state took over HISD because one school—Wheatley High School—had been failing for years. But before the takeover, Wheatley improved its test scores, and no school in HISD was failing. But the state took control of the state’s largest district anyway.

At least three studies have found that takeovers don’t increase academic achievement. The latest, a May 2021 working paper by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia, looked at all 35 state takeovers between 2011 and 2016. “On average, we find no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits,” the researchers concluded.

Takeovers are premised in part on the idea that improving school board governance improves test scores. But the 2021 paper concluded that may be wrong: “These results do not provide support for the theory that school board governance is the primary cause of low academic performance in struggling school districts,” the researchers wrote.

Why did Governor Abbott and State Commissioner insist on taking control of HISD? Because they could. Because they are vengeful and arrogant. Because they know nothing about research. Because it’s amusing for a hard-right conservative like Abbott to grind down a district that didn’t vote for him. Because Mike Morath was never an educator and knows nothing about how to improve schools.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Democracy, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Houston, Texas

Robert Hubbell: Paradise Is Burning

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2023 //
33

Robert Hubbell writes one of the best blogs around. He is consistently on target with his observations. In this post, he grieves for the people of Hawaii and sees the inevitable link to climate change. I find it hard to believe that there are people who refuse to accept the reality of climate change, as unbelievable as the fact that some people are vaccine deniers. They are all too often the same people.

Paradise is burning. My wife and I are heartsick over the loss of life and destruction of communities and habitat in Hawaii. To the many readers of this newsletter in Hawaii, we hope you and your families, homes, and communities are safe. When you are able, please send a note letting us know that you are okay.

The destruction in Hawaii from wildfires is unprecedented. The fires are the product of long-term changes in weather patterns and land management practices. They are part climate change, part natural disaster, and part man-made accelerant. The effects are devastating and should be shocking to all Americans. The loss of life is tragic. As I sat in a roadside café and watched video of the fires in Hawaii, the news feed running across the bottom of the newscast said, “Florida under first state-wide heat advisory.”

While paradise burns and a state known for heat and humidity experiences an unprecedented heat advisory, you would think that all Americans would treat the emergency as a five-alarm fire. Instead, the opposite is happening—at least among Trump’s MAGA base.

Florida has approved the use of course materials from the conservative organization PragerU to teach (read: indoctrinate) Florida students about the “climate change hoax.” As described in the report I heard today, PragerU wants to combat the notion allegedly being “peddled by climate activists” that the climate crisis threatens our existence. Instead, PragerU claims that climate change is natural, and the evidence is inconclusive about the role of humans in accelerating global warming and extreme weather.

As usual, MAGA disinformation begins with a grain of truth and quickly veers into lies and deceit. Yes, earth’s climate has been changing for as long as the earth has existed. But our current climate crisis relates to the release of carbon into the atmosphere at unprecedented levels over the course of a single century by burning fossil fuels that took hundreds of millions of years of geologic processes to create. That is not “natural” and the role of humans in releasing greenhouse gas into the atmosphere is not open to debate, nor is the effect of that gas on global climate.

Like many MAGA positions that can be simultaneously maddening, disheartening, and dangerous, MAGA climate denialism contains the seeds of its own defeat. Most Americans recognize the threat of human-caused climate change, but younger voters are especially motivated by the issue. As we move toward a critical election for our nation (and the world) in 2024, Democrats should make fighting the climate crisis a prominent part of their messaging. That messaging has the twin virtues of being an area where Joe Biden has exceled and one in which MAGA disinformation is being disproved before our very eyes as we watch our earth—our paradise–burn.

To all in Hawaii, you are in our hearts.

Categories Environment, Hawaii

Leonie Haimson: Reducing Class Size Is a Powerful Reform

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2023 //
18

Matthew Chingos and Ariella Meltzer of the Urban Institute published an essay predicting that New York City’s class-size reduction plan is likely to benefit white and Asian students most, thus adding to the inequities in the school system.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, has been fighting for class size reduction for years. She responds here to the Chingos paper.

Haimson writes:

Comments on paper by Matthew Chingos and Ariella Meltzer, “New Class Size Mandate May Reduce Education Equity in New York City”

The primary claim made in this paper is that lowering class size would inequitably benefit white and Asian students rather than Black and Hispanic students, who tend to have lower class sizes already in NYC public schools.

However, several points appear to undermine that claim:

  1. As much research shows, Black and Hispanic students as well as students in poverty tend to gain twice the benefits in terms of increased learning and non-cognitive skills from smaller classes compared to their peers. Thus class size reduction is one of only a very few reforms that have been proven through rigorous research to narrow the achievement/opportunity gap and represents a key driver of education equity;
  2. Only 8% of high-poverty NYC schools already comply with the class size caps in the law, according to the Independent Budget Office;
  3. The estimates in this paper in Table A2 project that Black students would see their class sizes reduced on average to 16.7 students per class, the smallest class size of any group, with Hispanic, low-income, and students with disabilities second at 17.3, a highly equitable outcome. English language learners would come next at 17.4. In short, all high-needs groups would receive smaller classes than non-low income students ( t 17.6), White students (at 17.7) or Asian students (at 18 students per class).
  4. Finally, the paper’s findings also show that English language learners students at the elementary school level are more likely than non-ELLs to have large classes even now, and thus would likely gain substantial benefits from class size reduction as well.

There will be challenges for sure, to ensure that lowering class size doesn’t drain more experienced teachers from the neediest schools, but this could be avoided by targeting high-poverty schools first for class size reduction, as the law requires.

In addition, there are several studies that suggest that class size reduction may lower teacher attrition, especially at the highest-poverty schools, so that in the long run, the effort may lead to a more effective, stable, and experienced teaching force over time.

Our questions are these:

  1. Why cite the IBO cost estimates of 17,700 additional teachers needed, of $1.6 to $1.9 billion annually while relegating DOE’s far lower estimates of 9,000 new teachers at $1.3B to a footnote? Did the authors decide one estimate was more authoritative than the other, and if so why?
  2. The authors also cite an early School Construction Authority estimate of $30B-$35B for capital expenses, yet the SCA has admitted that this was “a back of the envelope” estimate and now has been omitted from the DOE’s July version of their draft class size plan, as compared to the earlier version submitted in May.

1. https://classsizematters.org/research-and-links/#opportunity

2. https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/how-would-the-new-limits-to-class-sizes-affect-new-york-city-schools-july-2023.pdf

3. See https://3zn338.a2cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/FAQ-7-myths-6.5.22-update.pdf and https://3zn338.a2cdn1.secureserver.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Summary-of-Class-Size-Reduction-Research-NY-updated.pdf

4. May version posted here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gv9DZ6aENexWyzozVWV0SwhnlXLVVJ2a/view July version here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_BOYliiFZ5U7Q3q8gN6JRRIHgIf9j_Vp/view

Categories Accountability, Class size, Class Size Matters Org, Education Reform, New York City

Harold Meyerson: Bidenenomics Is Working Faster Than Expected

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2023 //
13

Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect writes that many people think that government works slowly and is outpaced by business efficiency. But, he writes, Biden’s infrastructure plans are starting at a fast clip.

America’s industrial renaissance is happening faster than almost anyone anticipated.

Meyerson writes:

It is a lie universally acknowledged as truth that the government is slow, that if you want something done quickly, you turn to the private sector.

Of course, there are a plethora of instances in which government is slow. Consider, for instance, the efforts of the National Labor Relations Board to compel companies to pay workers whom they’ve illegally fired for trying to unionize. Lawbreaking companies can drag this out for years. Of course, that’s because, beginning with the Taft-Hartley Act 75 years ago, companies and their handmaidens in Congress and the courts have stripped the NLRB of the power to enforce this law expeditiously. When the government is slow, that’s often because powerful private-sector actors have slowed it down to their own advantage.

But sometimes, government can be more swift and effective than its critics can even imagine, as the implementation of the three signature pieces of Biden administration/Democratic Congress legislation is now demonstrating. The Infrastructure Act, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act have spurred the economy, which grew by 2.4 percent in the last quarter, well beyond anything the private sector could have accomplished by itself, and in less time than establishment economists thought possible. America is building factories again: The spending on factory construction is up by 76 percentfrom last year. Business spending on all forms of infrastructure—not just factories but also transportation equipment, software, and the like—is up by 56 percent. Through the magic of Keynes’s multiplier effect, government subsidies and outlays of roughly $300 billion on such projects have led to an increase in business investment of an additional $500 billion. And bolstering all this investment is the consumer purchasing power that has resulted from Biden’s initial stimulus legislation, which ended the COVID recession much more quickly than any recession in American history and yielded near record-low unemployment and levels of labor force participation not seen in many years.

Biden has sometimes been compared to Franklin Roosevelt for his efforts to renew and expand the kind of social insurance and worker empowerment initiatives that FDR undertook. I’d argue that it’s the scope, speed, and success of his public investments that most resemble Roosevelt’s. Facing the actual prospect of mass starvation in the winter of 1933-1934, FDR’s public-works program managed to employ three million Americans—in a nation of 130 million—in just 60 days. The defense spending that began in 1940 in response to the very real threat of the fascist control of all Eurasia built an army that then ranked 39th in the world in size into one that was the world’s largest by 1944, at which time the nation’s production of planes, ships, and tanks exceeded the combined total of all other nations’.

Learning not just from Roosevelt’s successes but also from the failure of the Obama administration to highlight the projects that its stimulus spending had created, Biden and Democrats are now volubly touting the projects that their own stimulus programs have engendered, many of which are already springing up. Given the public’s skepticism about the effects and durability of this economic revival, and the Republicans’ insistence that no such revival exists, Biden & Company know they will have to keep making this case straight through November of next year.

That said, can we acknowledge that Bidenomics is not only successful but speedy? Yes, we can.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Categories Accountability, Biden, Creativity, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Funding

Rather and Kirschner: Our Fragile Freedoms

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
37

Dan Rather and Eliot Kirschner write a blog on current events called “Steady.” We are reminded about how much we miss Dan Rather on the news. In this post, they write about Trump’s latest indictment.

They write:

In an era of unprecedented upheaval, it is difficult to find suitable context and perspective for the latest indictment of Donald Trump.

After all, this isn’t the first indictment he has faced, or even the first in federal court. It isn’t the first time we have had to grapple with his moral failings, the unleashing of political violence, or the degradation of our constitutional order.

Much of what is in the document made public on Tuesday we knew before. We saw it unfold on TV. We read the reporting of its aftermath. We heard the gripping public testimony in front of the bipartisan House Select Committee that investigated the insurrection of January 6.

It wasn’t even that the indictment was a surprise. For a long time, the investigation has been in the public consciousness. After Trump announced that he had been told he was a target, it was mostly a matter of when, not if.

It is important to keep in mind that this latest indictment does not charge Trump with arguably the gravest potential crimes, like insurrection or sedition, even though many who watched in horror the events leading up to and cresting on January 6 think it obvious he is guilty of both.

Randall Eliason, a former chief of the fraud and public corruption section at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, argued in a New York Times opinion piece titled “What Makes Jack Smith’s New Trump Indictment So Smart” that the special counsel wisely chose to limit the scope of the case (and the number of defendants) to just Trump despite the six other unnamed but easily identifiable co-conspirators. Smith did this, the piece points out, in order to proceed quickly to trial and yield the best chance at conviction. “Although it might have been psychologically gratifying to see Mr. Trump charged with sedition, the name of the legal charge is less important than the facts that will make up the government’s case,” Eliason wrote.

In other words, Smith decided not to try to prove too much; keep the charges few and based on what facts he believes are most likely to convince a jury — and whatever part of the public may be open to persuasion.

Let us stop for a moment to ponder these facts and the narrative they tell. They are chilling, but we must remember the Department of Justice will have to prove them in a court of law. Trump is presumed not guilty until and unless he is proven otherwise. He has every right to mount a vigorous defense. It’s probably best for the country that his lawyers fight hard and smart. The more thoroughly this case is adjudicated, the more its conclusion is likely to be strengthened by the process.

But in reading the indictment, all who love and care for our precious republic and its democratic traditions should feel a deep shudder of fear that we were driven to such a precipice. The writing itself is not fancy — no stacking of dependent clauses or diving into a thesaurus in search of adjectives. Reading the introduction aloud, it almost has the syncopation of a children’s picture book, even if the story it tells is one of horror:

The Defendant, DONALD J. TRUMP, was the forty-fifth President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020.

The Defendant lost the 2020 presidential election.

Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power.

So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.

These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.

But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.

The Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.

He was also entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means, such as by seeking recounts or audits of the popular vote in states or filing lawsuits challenging ballots and procedures.

His efforts to change the outcome in any state through recounts, audits, or legal challenges were uniformly unsuccessful.

Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election result.

What follows that in the indictment is a story we all saw unfold in real time, laid bare in a double-spaced legal document. There is also a lot to read between the lines. Even former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr, who enabled many of Trump’s worst instincts and misled the American public about Trump’s fitness for office, told CNN he thinks prosecutors have more evidence than what they have shared thus far. He called the indictment “very spare” and added, “I think there’s a lot more to come and I think they have a lot more evidence as to President Trump’s state of mind.”

Be that as it may, these 45 pages comprise one of the most consequential pieces of writing in American history. It does not have the earth-shattering rhetoric of our Declaration of Independence, the poetry of Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” or the urgent morality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But it is a clear statement at one of the most pivotal intersections in our nation’s narrative; that autocracy and the fomenting of political violence to subvert the peaceful transfer of presidential power is not only anathema to our values — it is illegal.

History is riddled with “what ifs.” We are left to ponder what the worst outcomes might have been if things had turned out differently, from our own revolution, to World War II, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. January 6 should be added to that list.

As bad as it was, it could have been (and came close to being) much worse. And that reality bursts forth from this indictment. According to what is written in the indictment, violence was expected by Trump and his co-conspirators. They understood that their schemes to steal an election would almost certainly plunge the nation into chaos. That was the plan.

In the end, their plot was unsuccessful, but the danger has not receded. Trump is running for president. At this point he is the favorite, by far, to win the Republican nomination. And that means he could win reelection. That result would likely usher in chaos, greater and deeper division than even what we now have. It could very well end the country as we know it.

That may sound to some to be hyperbole, but by any reasonable analysis, that is a lesson to be learned from this indictment. And that is what Jack Smith hopes to prove in federal court. One can make a credible argument that this is one of (if not THE) most consequential criminal cases in American history.

A former and potentially future president is accused of trying to destroy the United States. His own vice president is a key witness. You couldn’t make this up. But this is the reality of what we face. Democracy is always fragile and must be fought for to survive. A free people must constantly be on alert and working to preserve their liberty.

At the birth of our nation, Benjamin Franklin is said to have quipped that the Framers had produced “a republic, if you can keep it.” Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, spoke of how the Civil War was a “test” of whether a nation “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal … can long endure.” We, the people, can take nothing for granted.

This concept of the United States of America, still relatively new in human history, is impossible to maintain without the continual peaceful transfer of power at the top. That is what this new indictment is about.

In his first inaugural address as governor of California in 1967, Ronald Reagan spoke eloquently of this truth:

“We are participating in the orderly transfer of administrative authority by direction of the people. And this is the simple magic of the commonplace routine, which makes it a near miracle to many of the world’s inhabitants. This continuing fact that the people, by democratic process, can delegate power, and yet retain the custody of it. Perhaps you and I have lived too long with this miracle to properly be appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation.”

This is what is at stake for the generations alive today. It is an epic battle that will now take place in federal court as well as at the ballot box.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Fraud, Freedom

Jeff Bryant: What the New York Times Overlooked in Reporting About N.C. Turncoat Tricia Cotham

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2023 //
7

When newly elected Democratic legislator Tricia Cotham flipped parties earlier this year, her switch had a profound effect on North Carolina politics and it was national news. Her change from Democrat to Republican gave the Republican Party a super-majority and enabled them to override the Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes. It also cleared the way for Republican plans for vouchers and abortion.

The New York Times reported that she was wooed by Republican leaders before the election, meaning she ran as a Democrat knowing that she would switch after the election because of GOP promises to her.

But seasoned journalist Jeff Bryant, who lives in North Carolina, writes that the Times’ reporters missed the real story, which was right in plain sight. Cotham was bought by the charter industry.

Bryant writes:

A July 30, 2023, headline in the New York Times promised to give readers an “inside” story about why North Carolina lawmaker Tricia Cotham changed her political allegiance from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in April and handed conservatives a veto-proof majority in the state House. But the ensuing story shed little new light on what motivated her decision to flip and overlooked how her deep dive into the right-wing networks promoting charter schools was likely instrumental in steering her change in political leanings.

For sure, Times journalists Kate Kelly and David Perlmutt are correct in reporting Cotham’s actions as having profound impacts in a purple state, but they erred in adopting an unlikely storyline about who and what lured her to jump.

As I’ve previously reported, Cotham’s own explanation for her party switch strains credibility. And just because Republican officials encouraged her to run in 2022—the Times article’s supposed big reveal—doesn’t mean they, or the Democrats with whom she had purportedly grown disenchanted, were the only, or most important, actors who mattered in her decision.

Yet Kelly and Perlmutt chose to amplify that narrative rather than delve more deeply into Cotham’s legislative record and the business associates she cultivated in the years she was out of office, from 2016 to 2022.

As I reported, Cotham’s split from the Democratic Party first became evident toward the end of her legislative tenure from 2007 to 2016. At the end of that period, Cotham had already decided to leave the North Carolina House to seek office in Congress. But she was soundly drubbed in the Democratic primary contest and returned to Raleigh, perhaps facing joblessness.

It was at that time that Cotham, who had voted strictly the Democratic Party line on legislation related to charter schools, chose to buck her party’s majority to join with just four other Democrats to vote for the creation of the Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD, whose name was eventually changed to Innovative School District (ISD), was created to take charge of low-performing schools and hand them over to charter school management companies.

But Kelly and Perlmutt either didn’t look back that far into Cotham’s legislative record or didn’t believe that vote was important. “In office, Ms. Cotham had criticized charter schools, but now her firm supported private investments in the public school system and charter schools,” was their open-and-shut assessment.

Nor did they bother to note to whom that vote would have mattered the most—Oregon billionaire John Bryan, who not only bankrolled the lobbying effort to enact the ASD/ISD but also founded the Challenge Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for charter schools, operates a firm that builds charter schools, and started a charter school management company called TeamCFA.

Bryan has also been described as “a national figure in libertarian circles when it comes to charter schools” and a donor who “contributes heavily and regularly to conservative causes.”

Cotham’s vote for the ISD preceded a series of career opportunities for her, which the Times article mostly ignored.

The first, beginning in 2017, was a stint at McGuireWoods Consulting, a highly influential lobbying firm whose clients include a long list of organizations closely associated with the charter school industry and right-wing school choice advocacy, including at least one organization funded by the Challenge Foundation. McGuireWoods was also the lobbying firm pushing the bill to create the ISD.

The second in Cotham’s series of business opportunities, which Kelly and Perlmutt did report on, came in 2019 when she was hired to lead Achievement for All Children. Achievement for All Children, the reporters noted, was picked to “turn around” Southside-Ashpole Elementary, a “foundering public school” in the state.

But what Kelly and Perlmutt left out of their reporting was that Achievement for All Children was a charter management company previously led by Tony Helton, who, as I reported, had previously worked for Bryan’s firm TeamCFA. Also, they completely left out the fact that Southside-Ashpole was under the control of the state because it was a school—the only school—incorporated into the ISD.

While Kelly and Perlmutt noted Cotham’s years as a lobbyist included a business relationship with C. Philip Byers, whom the article called “a major donor to state Republicans” and “president of a company that built charter schools,” the reporters didn’t mention that the company he led (Challenge Foundation Properties) was part of Bryan’s Challenge Foundation enterprises.

Cotham’s ties to right-wing individuals and organizations promoting charter schools don’t stop there, as my article reported. But wouldn’t it stand to reason that if Kelly and Perlmutt were to examine all the various possible influencers in Cotham’s decision to switch parties, then focusing on the billionaire in the room would make the most sense?

Further, reporting that Cotham’s switch to the Republican Party was mostly because of her changing relationships with fellow legislators, on both sides of the aisle, as the Times article suggests, trivializes a matter of huge import in a state that figures to be pivotal in the 2024 elections. It also overlooks the growing influence of the big money behind the charter school industry in American politics and its destructive force in the Democratic Party.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Categories Education Reform
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