Mideast: Deal to Exchange Some Hostages for Prisoners Seems Near

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
4

David Ignatius wrote in The Washington Post about a possible release of a significant number of hostages seized on October 7 from Israel. The youngest is a 10-month-old baby.

TEL AVIV — Israel and Hamas are close to a hostage deal that would free most of the Israeli women and children who were kidnapped Oct. 7, according to a high-ranking Israeli official. The agreement could be announced within days if final details are resolved, he said.

“The general outline of the deal is understood,” the Israeli official explained in an interview Monday, requesting anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject. The tentative agreement calls for Israeli women and children to be released in groups, simultaneously with Palestinian women and young people held in Israeli prisons.

Israel wants the release of all 100 women and children taken from Israel, but the initial number is likely to be smaller. Hamas has indicated it is ready to release 70 women and children, according to a statement by one of its officials on the group’s Telegram channel cited by Reuters on Monday. The number of Palestinian women and young people who might be released is unclear, but an Arab official told me last week that there were at least 120 in prison.

A temporary cease-fire of perhaps five days would accompany the exchange of hostages and prisoners, the Israeli official said. This truce would allow safe travel for the Israeli captives. It could also permit more international assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and should ease the humanitarian crisis there, the Israeli official explained.

President Biden voiced strong U.S. support for a hostage deal in a call Sunday expressing personal “appreciation” to the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, whose nation has acted as mediator with Hamas. “The two leaders agreed that all hostages must be released without further delay,” a White House statement said.

A temporary cease-fire of perhaps five days would accompany the exchange of hostages and prisoners, the Israeli official said. This truce would allow safe travel for the Israeli captives. It could also permit more international assistance to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and should ease the humanitarian crisis there, the Israeli official explained.

President Biden voiced strong U.S. support for a hostage deal in a call Sunday expressing personal “appreciation” to the emir of Qatar, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, whose nation has acted as mediator with Hamas. “The two leaders agreed that all hostages must be released without further delay,” a White House statement said.

U.S. officials hope a hostage-release agreement and temporary truce could reduce the international uproar surrounding the war. Israel won’t agree to end its campaign to destroy Hamas’s military power. But officials here recognize the need to assist Palestinian civilians whose situation has become desperate.

U.S. officials hope a hostage-release agreement and temporary truce could reduce the international uproar surrounding the war. Israel won’t agree to end its campaign to destroy Hamas’s military power. But officials here recognize the need to assist Palestinian civilians whose situation has become desperate.

Israel wants confirmation that its people held captive, each identified by name, are being released as it exchanges the Palestinian prisoners. This process of verification is one of the details that officials were still negotiating Monday.

Israel’s negotiation with Hamas has been conducted indirectly through Qatar, where Hamas’s political leadership is based. Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani outlined the mediation effort in an interview with me last Wednesday in Doha. The next day, he met with CIA Director William J. Burns and David Barnea, director of Israeli intelligence service Mossad, to discuss the framework that now appears to be near a final package.

Mossad has worked closely with Qatar and the CIA in shaping the deal. Israeli officials appreciate Qatar’s help, but they want the Qataris to exert their influence on Hamas to release its captives, rather than just mediate. Egypt has also played a helpful role in encouraging the negotiations and pressuring Hamas, Israeli officials believe.

Release of Israeli women and children would be a first step toward what Israel insists must be freedom for all hostages in Gaza. The high-ranking Israeli official said that a total of 240 to 250 hostages are being held. Most of them are Israeli citizens, including some dual nationals who are also citizens of the United States, Germany and other countries. About 35 are non-Israeli foreigners, most of them Thais who were working in Israel, the official said.

The Israeli official said his government is committed to freeing all the hostages, including roughly 90 male civilians and a smaller group of soldiers, whom Hamas probably sees as the most valuable. “We want as many as possible, as quickly as possible, and no one stays behind,” the official stressed.

Hamas has told the Qataris that its operatives seized only Israeli soldiers, but the Israeli official said this claim is false. Hamas holds the “vast majority” of the hostages, including a small number of dead bodies that were taken into Gaza by the terrorists, the Israeli said. Some hostages are kept by other groups, in disparate locations, but Hamas has the power to negotiate for nearly all of them, he argued. One smaller group called Palestinian Islamic Jihad holds about 35 captives, and a militia known as the “shabiha” and other smaller groups hold a few dozen more, the high-ranking Israeli said.

The hostages are a bitter, daily reminder for Israelis of the agony of the Hamas terrorist attack on Oct. 7. The Israel Defense Forces formed a special task force, headed by retired Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, to coordinate activities to free them, according to Israeli news reports.

“Bring them home” is a national passion for Israel. Pictures of the captives line the main entry hall at Ben Gurion Airport, to remind arriving passengers of the hostages’ plight. In the border towns and kibbutzim where many of them lived, their names and faces are displayed in vivid banners.

The next few days will be delicate, as Israelis hold their breath waiting for the first group to be freed and united with their families — and worrying about those who will remain captive. After the pause, the brutal reality of the war will resume — and the Biden administration will remain torn between its support for Israel and its growing concern about the plight of Palestinian civilians.

Categories Accountability, International

Heather Cox Richardson: Trump Embraces Fascist Language and Policies

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
29

Heather Cox Richardson points to Donald Trump’s plain-spoken fascism. Believe him.

She writes:

In a speech Saturday in Claremont, New Hampshire, and then in his Veterans Day greeting yesterday on social media, former president Trump echoed German Nazis.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day [sic] we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Racists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream…. Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

The use of language referring to enemies as bugs or rodents has a long history in genocide because it dehumanizes opponents, making it easier to kill them. In the U.S. this concept is most commonly associated with Hitler and the Nazis, who often spoke of Jews as “vermin” and vowed to exterminate them.

The parallel between MAGA Republicans’ plans and the Nazis had other echoes this weekend, as Trump’s speech came the same day that Charlie Savage, Maggie Haberman, and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported that Trump and his people are planning to revive his travel ban, more popularly known as the “Muslim ban,” which refused entry to the U.S. by people from some majority-Muslim nations, and to reimpose the pandemic-era restrictions he used during the coronavirus pandemic to refuse asylum claims—it is not only legal to apply for asylum in the United States, but it is a guaranteed right under the Refugee Act of 1980—by claiming that immigrants bring infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

They plan mass deportations of unauthorized people in the U.S., rounding them up with specially deputized law enforcement officers and National Guard soldiers contributed by Republican-dominated states. Because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doesn’t have the space for such numbers of people, Trump’s people plan to put them in “sprawling camps” while they wait to be expelled. Trump refers to this as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump’s people would screen visa applicants to eliminate those with ideas they consider undesirable, and would kick out those here temporarily for humanitarian reasons, including Afghans who came here after the 2021 Taliban takeover. Trump ally Steve Bannon and his likely attorney general, Mike Davis, expect to deport 10 million people.

Trump’s advisors also intend to challenge birthright citizenship, the principle that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen. This principle was established by the Fourteenth Amendment and acknowledged in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision during a period when native-born Americans were persecuting immigrants from Asia. That hatred resulted in Wong Kim Ark, an American-born child of Chinese immigrants, being denied reentry to the U.S. after a visit to China. Wong sued, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court agreed. The children of immigrants to the U.S.—no matter how unpopular immigration was at the time—were U.S. citizens, entitled to all the rights and immunities of citizenship, and no act of Congress could overrule a constitutional amendment.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Trump immigration hardliner Stephen Miller told the New York Times reporters. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

In addition to being illegal and unconstitutional, such plans to strip the nation of millions of workers would shatter the economy, sparking sky-high prices, especially of food.

For a long time, Trump’s increasingly fascist language hasn’t drawn much attention from the press, perhaps because the frequency of his outrageous statements has normalized them. When Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016 referred to many Trump supporters as “deplorables,” a New York Times headline read: “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P.* Pounces.” Yet Trump’s threat to root out “vermin” at first drew a New York Timesheadline saying, “Trump Takes Veterans Day Speech in a Very Different Direction.” (This prompted Mark Jacobs of Stop the Presses to write his own headlines about disasters, including my favorite: “John Wilkes Booth Takes Visit to the Theater in a Very Different Direction.”)

Finally, it seems, Trump’s explicit use of Nazi language, especially when coupled with his threats to establish camps, has woken up at least some headline writers. Forbes accurately headlined yesterday’s story: “Trump Compares Political Foes to ‘Vermin’ On Veterans Day—Echoing Nazi Propaganda.”

Republicans have refused to disavow Trump’s language. When Kristen Welker of Meet the Press asked Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel: “Are you comfortable with this language coming from the [Republican] frontrunner,” McDaniel answered: “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” Others have remained silent…

The Right’s draconian immigration policies ignore the reality that presidents since Ronald Reagan have repeatedly asked Congress to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, only to have Republicans tank such measures to keep the hot button issue alive, knowing it turns out their voters. Both President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas have begged Congress to fund more immigration courts and border security and to provide a path to citizenship for those brought to the U.S. as children. They, along with Vice President Kamala Harris, have tried to slow the influx of undocumented migrants by working to stabilize the countries from which such migrants primarily come.

Categories Elections, Fascism, Trump

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Is Trump Our Mussolini?

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
24

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of History at New York University who specializes in European history, especially Italy, and authoritarianism. On her blog Lucid, she has chronicled Trump’s flirtation with authoritarianism, and she now sees him openly endorsing it.

She writes:

Former President Donald Trump REALLY does not want you to call him a Fascist. Being compared to old-school dictators such as Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini makes him and his handlers crazy: he even sued CNN for defamation over this issue (a Trump-appointed judge dismissed the lawsuit). So why is he using Fascist rhetoric?

If you’ve read the news lately, you’ll know that Trump went to New Hampshire on Veterans Day and delivered a news-making speech that included a “pledge” to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”

As I argued in a recent Lucid essay, violence is now Trump’s brand. To that end, he conjures existential threats to the nation from non-White immigrants and an expanding cast of internal enemies, calls the thugs who are in prison for assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6 “political prisoners,” and praises autocrats such as Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin who depend on propaganda, corruption, and repression to stay in power.

All of this is part of his effort to re-educate Americans to see violence as justified, patriotic, and even morally righteous.

But to get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the “black parasites of the nation” in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.

As a historian of autocracy with a specialization in Italian Fascism, the use of the “vermin” image got my attention. Mussolini used similar language in his 1927 Ascension Day speech which laid out Fascism’s intention to subject leftists and others to “prophylaxis” measures to defend the Italian state and society from their nefarious influences.

By the time Il Duce delivered this landmark address, the dictatorship had been in place for two years, and opposition politicians and the press were in prison or had gone into exile. That did not stop him from talking about killing “rodents who carry infectious diseases from the East: the East that brings us lovely things, such as yellow fever and Bolshevism.”

Mussolini loved to make jokes in his speeches to Parliament, and this one elicited laughter —or so says the official transcript. He is speaking about actual rats but, as the Bolshevism comment makes clear, also about Communists. “We remove these individuals from circulation just like a doctor does with an infected person,” he concluded chillingly about leftists and other targeted categories of people.

Trump’s recent comment about undocumented immigrants “polluting the blood of our country” is in the same vein, as are the ideas circulating among his 2025 advance team to deport millions of immigrants and “quarantine” others in massive camps.

Typically, Trump and his advisors took exception to being called out for deploying Fascist rhetoric, resorting to threats that simply strengthened the case against them. As the Washington Post reported, Trump’s campaign spokesman Steven Cheung had this to say about those (like me) who make such comparisons: “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”

Only later did Cheung apparently realize that using Fascist language was unhelpful and claimed that he meant to say their “sad, miserable existence” instead of their “entire existence” —whatever that means.

Some will note that Trump includes Fascists as well as Communists among the “vermin” to be “rooted out” of America. This is classic authoritarian doublespeak. He has to set himself up as the bearer of freedom against all forms of tyranny, even as he signals to left and right-wing autocrats that he will be their staunch ally if he manages to win his “final battle” and return to the White House.

“When two irreducible elements are locked in a struggle, the only solution is force,” Mussolini said on Jan. 3, 1925, as he declared the start of dictatorship in Italy. America may never become a one-party state on the classic Fascist model, but Trump and his GOP enablers carry forth this Fascist mentality. We must take their speech seriously as declarations of intent to wreck American democracy and engage in persecution on a large scale as part of that process.

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Disruption, Elections, Fascism, Trump

Politico: House Republicans Want Deep Cuts to Education Funding

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2023 //
4

Political parties show their true colors when they offer a budget. Republicans, who control the House of Representatives just showed that they don’t care about funding education. They especially don’t care about funding schools attended by poor kids. They want to slash Title I—the most important federal funding for poor kids—by 80%. Remember that the next time that Republicans cry crocodile tears for poor kids.

Politico reported:

HOUSE TAKES UP EDUCATION FUNDING AS SHUTDOWN LOOMS: As House leaders wrangle votes for a stopgap measure to head off a shutdown at the end of the week, House Republicans are also turning to longer-term appropriations for education programs. The House is set to consider on the floor this week Republicans’ education funding bill that would make deep cuts to federal education programs, including drastic reductions to aid for low-income schools.

— What’s in the bill: The GOP bill to fund the Education Department for the 2024 fiscal year would provide $67.4 billion of new discretionary funding, a reduction of about 15 percent compared with 2023. But the bill would also rescind more than $10 billion of funding for K-12 education that was already approved by Congress, bringing the overall cut to the Education Department to about 28 percent from fiscal 2023.

— Among the most drastic proposed GOP cuts would be the $14.7 billion reduction to federal spending on low-income school districts under Title I, an 80 percent reduction. Democrats say that funding level would translate into 220,000 fewer teachers in classrooms across the country.

— The bill also includes policy riders that would block a slew of Biden administration education policies, such as its overhaul of Title IX rules and new student loan repayment program known as SAVE. The bill would also end the administration’s safety net program that eliminates most penalties for borrowers who miss their monthly payment for the next year.

— The GOP’s top-line funding levels for education won’t survive negotiations with the Democrat-led Senate and White House. A bipartisan proposal by Senate appropriators calls for keeping overall spending on education at roughly the same level as 2023. Biden’s budget requested a 13.6 percent increase.

— But the vote on making deep cuts to funding for schools could put some moderate House Republicans in a tough spot and hand Democrats some election-year messaging fodder.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Education Reform, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Poverty, U.S. Department of Education

“In Texas, the Only Good Voucher Bill Is a Dead One”

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2023 //
8

The Houston Chronicle published a stunning editorial denouncing the voucher legislation that Governor Abbott demands. Abbott has called four special sessions of the Legislature, and so far rural Republicans have blocked vouchers. Now the Governor threatens to run a candidate in the primary against every Republican who opposes vouchers. Why the pressure? To satisfy two billionaires.

The editorial board writes:

In March, when Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed the state’s new school voucher program into law, she repeated several talking points that advocates use to justify using taxpayer dollars to subsidize private school tuition.

“We’ve seen how the status quo condemns Arkansans to a lifetime of poverty,” said Sanders. “We’re tired of sitting at the bottom of national education rankings.”

Arkansas tried to avoid the pitfalls of some other states’ voucher programs. Participating private schools would have to select a standardized test to use — a small measure of, if not accountability, at least transparency. Likewise, the schools must prove they are accredited or working toward accreditation. And the state set eligibility requirements that should have helped target funds toward the neediest students, including those in foster care, enrolled in failing public schools, experiencing homelessness or living with a disability.

But in the first annual report on the program since its launch, the state found that of the more than 4,700 participants, nearly all were either new students enrolling in kindergarten or existing private school students.

The promise of transforming the lives of poor students trapped in failing public schools hasn’t materialized. Instead, the state has taken on significant new costs to fund both existing public school students and voucher recipients.

SPECIAL SESSION: School vouchers, border bills fall short as Gov. Abbott calls fourth session

From what we can see, Texas lawmakers — whom Gov. Greg Abbott called abruptly back into special session Tuesday for the fourth time this year — have worked to craft school voucher bills that also seek to avoid some of the worst abuses seen in other states. Bills have included some degree of required testing, fraud guardrails, effective enrollment caps and prioritization for lower-income students and those with disabilities. There have also been sweeteners for folks planning to stay in public schools: an increase in the per-student allotment and one-time teacher bonuses, among others. As voucher bills go, the House version proposed last special session was one of the most palatable around.

It still wasn’t good enough for Abbott, who continues to push for a more universal program.

And it isn’t good enough for us, either. Because there is no such thing as a good voucher bill. Not the bill passed by the Senatethat would create $8,000 vouchers nor the one that, for the first time this year, made it through the House committee Friday that would offer students $10,500 annually to attend private schools. Even seemingly benign or narrowly tailored bills have a way of ballooning in cost and generating underwhelming results.

Not only have wide-scale voucher programs largely failed to produce resounding academic improvements for participants, states have consistently seen the programs benefit existing private school students, whose parents most likely could already afford the tuition. They don’t really benefit the struggling public school students often used to sell them.

In Arkansas, restrictions meant to target students with disabilities have been almost meaningless after the state lowered its standards for approval. Investigative reporting there revealed that some of the 44% of students who were granted vouchers based on disabilities had as little as a doctor’s note worth of documentation. Here in Texas, the current House version — an omnnibus school spending bill with education savings accounts wedged inside like a booby trap waiting to spring — makes clear that students who are currently in private schools would still be eligible for the voucher.

TOMLINSON: Texas school vouchers would be financially ruinous, fundamentally unfair or quite likely, both

Then there’s the price tag. The estimated price of the Senate’s voucher program put forward in the previous session was $500 million for the first year.

But buyer beware, that’s just the first year. What voucher advocates want is a foot in the door. And within two or three budget cycles, the number of participants will soar and — more than likely — all those careful (or not so careful) restrictions meant to narrow the program would disappear.

“They’re telling you you’ve got an interest free payment: You can sign up to get vouchers for the next, say, two, three budget cycles. And then the price tag really comes due,” said Josh Cowen, a policy analyst and professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He has been following voucher bills — often nearly identical ones — working their way through state legislatures and sees a cautionary tale in Arkansas.

While some districts may feel the loss of public funding, the real threat, Cowen explains, is that this program will end up helping existing private school families. Meaning the state — and you, dear taxpayer — will be on the hook for two systems.

There are many reasons to oppose vouchers: They don’t guarantee academic improvements; they’ve been shown to increase segregation; they don’t protect the legal rights of students with disabilities in private schools that can discriminate against them; they use public dollars to support private and often religious instruction.

Lawmakers can nip and tuck to address some concerns. But there’s not much they can do to make vouchers less economically disastrous or to slake the thirst of deep-pocketed, pro-voucher advocates pouring in buckets of dollars. Those Wilks and Dunn types aren’t funding this because they want to help low-income students escape failing public schools. They want a universal program that undoes the power of the public school as a secular, accountable, publicly funded institution.

CARTOON EXPLAINER: Austin’s the new Kremlin! A guide to vouchers and puppet masters Wilks and Dunn.

Some want to use carrots to lure lawmakers. Others prefer a stick, threatening to primary out those rural Republicans who have stood up time and again for their communities and against vouchers. There’s a reason this is so hard. It’s clear that, after decades of bipartisan rejection, Texans don’t want this voucher scheme.

So why are we on the verge of passing it, of making the same mistake as Arkansas and other states?

State Rep. James Talarico, D-Austin, said it best amid the marathon testimony that opened the latest special session: “All this for one man and two billionaires.”

Only Abbott, Wilks and Dunn will benefit if bipartisan opposition crumbles. Texas public schoolchildren and taxpayers will lose.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Courage, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Rural Schools, Texas

Texas: Gov. Abbott Calls 4th Special Session to Offer Bribes for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2023 //
2

The Texas legislature is reconvening for a fourth special session, where Governor Gregg Abbott will twist arms and offer bribes, all in hopes of getting Republican votes for vouchers in the House. Rural Republicans have steadfastly opposed vouchers because their districts don’t want them or need them. Will they resist his bait again? In the election just concluded, Governor Abbott awarded a $13 billion property-tax cut to homeowners, but not a penny to raise teachers’s salaries. Texas has a $33 billion surplus due to the rising price of oil and gas, but nothing for public schools unless they agree to fund religious schools with public money.

Edward McKinley of The Houston Chronicle reports:

As the fight over school vouchers drags on to another special session, the Texas House’s top education policymaker has been thrust into a Frankensteinian role: trying to breathe life into the once-dead bill by melding it with stacks of loosely related education policies and members’ pet priorities.

Thursday was set to give the first glimpse of whether Rep. Brad Buckley’s creation will live when his committee began a public hearing for the controversial package. Gov. Greg Abbott called lawmakers back to Austin this week for renewed negotiations after the Texas House never took up his priority plan to subsidize private education with public dollars.

“I’ve been striving to strike the right balance between the viewpoints of those that support parental choice, and those that are just as passionate about our public schools,” Buckley, R-Salado, said at the start of Thursday’s hearing.

Besides giving families approximately $10,500 to spend on private school tuition or expenses, Buckley’s House Bill 1 would give public school teachers, nurses, counselors and librarians a $4,000 raise and lift the base level of per-student funding by more than $500, a significant jump but one that falls short of amounts requested by education groups. It would also create automatic future public school funding increases tied to inflation.

Capitol insiders see the grab-bag approach as a way to entice hesitant members who may be willing to get on board with vouchers in exchange for the right mix of concessions. 

For instance, the bill boosts per-student funding for smaller school districts, which could appeal to rural members or Democrats who support charter schools. The bill also creates funding for fine arts programming favored by Rep. Ken King, R-Canadian, a longtime voucher opponent who’s recently been working behind the scenes to broker a deal on vouchers.

READ MORE: What ‘Friday Night Lights’ shows about one rural Republican’s resistance to private school vouchers

Rep. Harold Dutton – a Houston Democrat who opposes school vouchers but has said he would be open to negotiations – said two measures he pushed for previously are included in the catch-all voucher bill: funding for an early literacy program and one for teacher residency.

Still, he said on Tuesday those tweaks won’t be enough.

“The Legislature has spoken on this issue,” Dutton said. “From my standpoint, this has gotten to be less about students and less about bills and more about Abbott. And that’s a losing proposition for me.”

The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Other components in Buckley’s latest bill are aimed at making changes favored by public school teachers, including making it easier for schools to rehire retirees and increasing a statewide merit-based pay program. Public schools would see a dramatic increase in special education funding and several tweaks to Texas’ labyrinthian system of school finance formulas. Under the proposal, the controversial A-F accountability system used by the state to grade public school districts would also be put on hold amid complaints that it doesn’t accurately capture a school’s performance.

Even charter schools would see benefits, including a boost to their per-student funding through changes to state formulas and quintupling the dollars for new buildings from $50 million to $300 million. The Texas Charter School Association is neutral on the bill despite those boons, spokesman Brian Whitley said on Tuesday. Although the group has long pushed for increased facility funding, Whitley said it doesn’t have a public position on vouchers.

Bob Popinski, senior director of policy for Raise Your Hand Texas, a research and advocacy group that supports public education, said it’s not unusual for school finance bills in Texas to become grabbags of related policies.

“Everyone is trying to get their provisions in there to fix a perceived or real problem,” he said, which is typical when the Legislature opens up the state’s school finance system to changes. 

The House committee, comprised of members picked by Speaker Dade Phelan over the summer to “develop a workable roadmap for legislation in the House,” is expected to ultimately vote on the bill by the end of the week. If it wins support, the proposal would then be considered by the full House – where it may be met with some pitchforks.

An alliance of Democrats and rural Republicans in the House have long blocked any bill containing a voucher plan, and those members show no public sign of budging en masse. They contend vouchers would divert money from public schools and say the money would amount to a taxpayer-funded discount for families already attending private schools. 

If the bill falls short in a climactic House vote, it would be a major thumb in the eye of the governor and could spell the end of his efforts to pass a voucher program with this Legislature. 

Phelan has said he’s “hopeful” a bill could pass, describing it as “maybe the most difficult piece of legislation in the history of the state of Texas.”

“My members need to vote their districts. They need to represent their districts, as they’re elected,” he told Hearst Newspapers in an interview earlier this week.

Although the Senate has already passed a handful of voucher bills this year, the cost of the latest proposal could become a problem if it continues to grow, said Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston.

The Legislature is $6 billion away from reaching a spending limit set in the state Constitution. Lawmakers could vote to exceed the threshold, but that would set a new, higher floor for future spending and would be a difficult vote for fiscally conscious members.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, Texas, Vouchers

Jan Resseger: The Governor‘s Takeover of Education Is Hurting Ohio’s Schools

By dianeravitch
November 13, 2023 //
12

Recently, there has been a trend in states with a supermajority of Republicans in the Legislature to seize the reins of power in every realm. First, they gerrymander the state to assure that the other party has no chance to win control. Then they strip power where Democrats exercise any authority. In North Carolina, the Republican Legislature removed power from the Democratic governor. In Wisconsin, the Republican Legislature followed suit. In Ohio, with a Republican Legislature and Governor, the Governor took control of education away from the mostly elected State Board of Education.

The Ohio State Board resisted. It even sued. But a judge ruled that the governor had the authority to take control of education policy away from the State Board, even though voters gave those powers to the State Board in 1953.

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy provided the context:

Judge rules that state level governance of education can return to the Governor’s office, notwithstanding that Ohioans, in 1953, transferred education governance from the Governor’s office to the State Board ofEducation via a constitutional amendment.

Article VI, section 4 was added to the Constitution in 1953 by the citizens of Ohio. At that time, the governance of education was embedded in the governor’s office. Ohioans passed a constitutional amendment to have education governed with the same model as used at the local level—citizens elected on a non-partisan basis to govern school districts. Local districts were not and are not now governed by other governmental jurisdictions—mayors, city councils, county commissions, township trustees.

In Ohio’s current political climate, the will of the people is summarily disregarded, even though the Ohio Constitution states that “all political power is inherent in the people.” (Article I, section 2) Notwithstanding this powerful constitutional safeguard for the folks, a Senate leader in Ohio recently said publicly, “We kinda do what we want…”

The Court, in other words, overturned the will of the voters and the state constitution.

Jan Resseger, who lives in Ohio, describes the evisceration of the State Board of Education.

She writes:

Education Week‘s Libby Sanford recently covered the education governance battle in Ohio, where the legislature just seized control of public education standards and curriculum by eviscerating the power of the Ohio State Board of Education and moving control of the state’s public schools under the political control of the governor and his appointees.

Sanford explains how the leaders of Ohio’s gerrymandered, supermajority Republican legislature folded the school governance takeover into the state budget after the legislature had failed on its own to enact the the plan to gut the power of the State Board of Education: “(T)he Republican-led Ohio state legislature passed a two-year budget that included a provision converting the Ohio Department of Education, led by a superintendent chosen by the State Board of Education, into the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, led by a director appointed by the governor. The budget also… includes a requirement that schools adopt a state-approved reading program by the next school year and a ban on the use of the three-cueing method in literacy instruction. The move changing how education is overseen in The Buckeye State strips the 19-member State Board of Education—of which 11 members are elected and eight are appointed by the governor—of its powers to… set academic standards and set frameworks for school curricula, limiting the board to decisions on teacher disciplinary and licensure cases and disputes over school boundaries.”

According to the provisions of a 1953 state constitutional amendment, Ohio’s state board of education will continue to exist but will lack any power to control significant policy. Its members will continue to appoint a state superintendent of public instruction, but that individual will serve as a mere advisor to the governor’s appointee who will control the state’s primary public education governance and operations.

In Ohio, two members of the State Board and another parent, on behalf of their children enrolled in public schools, along with the Toledo Board of Education filed a lawsuit to block the governor’s seizure of the powers of the state board. A judge has allowed the takeover to move forward, however, while the case makes its way through the courts. On November 3, 2023, plaintiffs’ attorneys submitted a brief in support of the plaintiff’s objections to the magistrate’s decision.

Sanford examines the political takeover of Ohio’s public schools in the context of a broader national trend among legislatures and governors to introduce partisan bias into governance of an institution that has historically been protected: “(T)he state (Ohio) isn’t the first to make a move of this kind… (E)specially over the past few years, lawmakers and state leaders have taken more aggressive action on state education policy, enacting laws that limit what teachers can talk about in the classroom, greatly expanding school choice, and requiring that schools notify parents when their children seek to use pronouns or names that don’t align with their sex assigned at birth.”

Sanford interviews Jeffrey Henig, a professor of education and political science at Teachers College, Columbia University, who identifies Ohio’s insertion of politics into the governance of the state’s public schools as part of a growing trend across the states.  He calls the move, nonetheless, “a high-risk proposition.” Henig explains: “(A)t the start of the 20th century, around two-thirds of states elected their chief school officers. By 2010 that number had dropped to less than 30 percent. Many states, like Ohio, gave the power to choose a state school officer to state boards, while others gave that power to the governor. ‘The general story is there’s been this long, slow shift in formal authority… but more recently governors getting more directly involved.”

Citing examples like Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida and Governor Kim Reynolds in Iowa, Henig hopes that perhaps the new trend will run its course: “Public education can be a hot potato issue… You can get your hands burned by being too closely involved… General-purpose politicians will realize that education isn’t a sure winner for them and succumb to the pressures, many of which are legitimate, to make their mark in other areas of domestic policy rather than stick their noses right in the middle of these swirling waters of culture wars.”

As a citizen in Ohio who values public schooling, I hope Henig is correct. The danger for our children of inserting politics and ideology into the public schools has become clearer not only through the insertion of culture war bias into state legislation, but also as lobbyists pressure politicians to adopt ideology-driven education theories and even specific curricula from think tanks with known political biases. Ohio is an example. Dee Bagwell Haslam, whose family owns the Cleveland Browns, is a major contributor to the campaigns of Ohio’s Republican politicians. She also serves on the board of Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd.  Dee Haslam has lobbied Governor Mike DeWine and the Ohio Legislature to promote one of ExcelinEd’s priorities: the Science of Reading. In this year’s state budget, the Ohio Legislature mandated that all Ohio public schools will adopt the Science of Reading as their sole reading curriculum.

In Schoolhouse Burning, his excellent exploration of the history of public education, Derek Black, an attorney and professor of constitutional law, describes the reasons why, in the period immediately following the Civil War, the authors of many of the state constitutions created state boards of education that would be independent and resistant to political meddling in public schools’ standards and curriculum:

“States… guarded against the politicization of education by vesting constitutional authority in the hands of education professionals (or at least people solely focused on education)… Following the Civil War, state constitutions increasingly established a state superintendent and/or state board of education. Doing so ensured that the individuals entrusted with administering education and setting various education policies would not be wedded to any geographic or political constituency. They were to act on behalf of all the state’s children and exercise their best judgment, hopefully devoid of the normal politics of the state house. And unlike the heads of transportation, agriculture, commerce, and police, for instance, these education officials would not serve at the pleasure of the governor or legislature.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 220-221)

Categories Corruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Ohio, Privatization, Republicans, School Choice, Unions

Florida: How Koch Industries Closed a Mill, Laid off 500+ Workers, and Got in Line for a Tax Break

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
6

Some stories are too outrageous to be true, and yet they are. This is one of them, as reported by Jason Garcia on his blog “Seeking Rents.”

Koch Industries owns a major pulp mill in Taylor County, Florida, where one of five people lives in poverty. Koch recently announced that it was shutting down the mill and laying off all of its 500+ workers. At the same time, the closed mill might receive a large tax break because some of its machinery was damaged by a hurricane. This is not helpful to the workers who will be unemployed but will be a nice gift to Koch Industries, a multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Always annoying to see our tax dollars flow to needy billionaires, instead of laid-off workers.

Garcia, a journalist who exposes corporate corruption, writes:

In mid-September, just three weeks after Hurricane Idalia tore through Taylor County in North Florida, the tiny community suffered a second disaster.

The company that operates a large pulp-and-fiber mill in the area — a 69-year-old factory known locally as the “Foley mill” that has long been one of the region’s most important employers — announced that it would shut the facility down and lay off all 500-plus people who work there.

It’s a devastating blow to Taylor County, a timber-dependent community with a shrinking population of fewer than 22,000 people where one-in-five families live in poverty. A report by the University of Florida estimates the Foley mill closure will lead to the loss of approximately 2,000 jobs in total, including the truckers and loggers who supply the mill with slash pine.

And now Florida might hand a farewell tax break to the fleeing company — which is part of Koch Industries, the global conglomerate led by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch.

The potential tax break for Koch Industries is included in a roughly $420 million hurricane aid package that Florida’s Republican-controlled state Legislature is expected to approve this week, during a four-day special session in Tallahassee.

The same tax-break legislation meant to ease the damage wrought by Hurricane Idalia showers benefits on another multi-billionaire.

Garcia writes:

The problem is that most of the timberland in this particular area is owned by one person: Billionaire investor Thomas Peterffy, one of the 100 wealthiest people in the world, according to Forbes.

It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Peterffy owns Florida’s Big Bend. He purchased more than 500,000 acres in the region about eight years ago — an enormous tract of land that was believed the largest contiguous piece of undeveloped property in private hands east of the Mississippi River.

Property records show that Peterffy owns about 380,000 acres in Taylor County alone, through his company, Four Rivers Land & Timber. That’s more than half the land in the entire county. And virtually all of it is in timber production.

And while there’s little doubt that Peterffy’s timber lands were hit hard by Hurricane Idalia, a land baron worth an estimated $25.3 billion probably doesn’t need help from taxpayers to deal with it.

To be clear: I’m not suggesting that Florida lawmakers drew up these tax breaks specifically to help Koch Industries or Thomas Peterffy — both of whom have been big donors to DeSantis during his time as governor.

But it is reasonable to ask, as Garcia does, why tax breaks are being doled out to billionaires who don’t need the money, while there are so many people in Taylor County who do.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Economy, Education Reform, Ethics, Florida

Valerie Strauss: Voters Give “Moms for Liberty” a Well-Deserved Whupping

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
4

Valerie Strauss reviews the local school board elections in several states, where the self-described “Moms for Liberty” were widely rejected. Despite their misleading name, most voters understood that they have an agenda to ban books, demonize teachers, and harass teachers and administrators with demands for censorship. Voters didn’t want more of the same.

Strauss writes:

In 2021, the right-wing “parents rights” Moms for Liberty claimed victory in 33 school board races in a single county in Pennsylvania — Bucks — saying that it had helped turn 8 of 13 school districts there with a majority of members who support their agenda.


Tuesday’s elections were a different story. In Bucks County, and many other districts across the country, voters rejected a majority of candidates aligned with the group’s agenda in what elections experts said could be a backlash to their priorities.
In Pennsylvania, Iowa, Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey and other states, voters favored candidates who expressed interest in improving traditional public education systems over those who adopted the agenda of Moms for Liberty, which has been at the forefront of efforts to reject coronavirus pandemic health measures in schools, restrict certain books and curriculum and curb the rights of LGBTQ students, and other like-minded groups.

“‘Parental rights’ is an appealing term, but voters have caught on to the reality that it is fueling book bans, anti-LGBT efforts, pressure on teachers not to discuss race and gender, whitewashing history, and so on,” said political analyst Larry Sabato, a politics professor at the University of Virginia and founder and director of the Center for Politics. “Parents may want more input in the schools, but as a group they certainly aren’t as extreme as many in the Moms for Liberty.”


The school board results were part of a broader wave of support for moderate and liberal candidates in local and state elections who campaigned on support for traditional public education. An election analysis conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest national teachers’ union, found that in 250 races across the country, candidates in different types of races backed by opponents of traditional public education lost about 80 percent of the time.

I read the many comments that followed Strauss’s article, and to my delight, every comment agreed that Moms for Liberty was phony and its program was to undermine freedom of students to learn and freedom of teachers to teach.

Here are a few:

Moms for Liberty is an antisemitic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, white nationalist, vaccine-ignorant, book-banning, child-endangering hate group. The sooner it lands on the ash heap of Trumpist history, the better.

Moms for Liberty really means Moms for facism and hate.

They overplayed their hand. ‘Tis the demise of so many movements. Plus, oh yeah, they are loud, obnoxious, overbearing, power-hungry, wrong-headed, and anti-American.

Sorry Youngkin..looks like your dragging on public school teachers and setting up Nazi Snitch hotlines to turn them in didn’t turn out to be your key to the WH.

Well, it seems book bans, anti-LGTBQ+ agendas, revisionist history and free speech restrictions on teachers are NOT the wave of the future.

Sod off, Klanned Karenhood. We’ve got your number.

Sounds like voters are catching on to the Minivan Taliban. Not before time.

If you want to raise your own offspring to be ignorant bigots, have at it, ladies. Can’t guarantee they will appreciate you ensuring they will never be able to compete in the real world. Meanwhile, leave the rest of us alone.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Lies, Parents, Propaganda, Teachers

ProPublica: Voters in Midland, Texas, Defy Billionaire, Pass School Bond Issue

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2023 //
3

Last week, ProPublica wrote about billionaire Tim Dunn and his efforts to defeat a $1.4 billion bond issue in Midland, Texas. Dunn ran his campaign through a Dark Money nonprofit that is staffed by his colleagues. Dunn wants a voucher program for the state and opposes new funding for public schools.

Allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.

Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.

Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.

On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.

The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

But then the voters got a chance to be heard. They said NO to Tim Dunn!

Update, Nov. 8, 2023: On Nov. 7, Midland school district voters approved a $1.4 billion bond proposal by a 56% to 44% vote, rejecting arguments against the measure from a nonprofit led by associates of billionaire oilman Tim Dunn.

Categories Billionaires, Dark Money, Democracy, Education Reform, Elections, Privatization, Texas
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