Scott Maxwell: Florida Digs in Deeper on the Good Side of Slavery

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
12

Scott Maxwell is an excellent columnist for The Orlando Sentinel. He brings us up to date on Florida’s efforts to promote the bright side of slavery.

He writes:

Every week lately, Florida seems to make more headlines for trying to turn public schools into a political war zone. The two latest examples:

The Sentinel revealed the Florida Department of Education has hired a new political operative who’s working with the book-censoring Moms for Liberty — and won’t say how many of your tax dollars the state is paying him or even why.

Also, the state has approved new classroom videos made by a guy who admits his goal is “indoctrination.”

One video features a cartoon version of Christopher Columbus telling kids that, while slavery might not be great, “being taken as a slave is better than being killed.” Another tells students that one of the most important things kids “need to know” about slavery is that “White men led the world in putting an end to the abhorrent practice.”

White men as saviors is quite the top-line takeaway on slavery.

The Orlando Sentinel first broke the news about the new hire, revealing that the state had hired Terry Stoops, a guy who pushed GOP education policies in North Carolina, to lead its newly created Office of Academically Successful and Resilient Districts.

The office title sounds like gobbledygook. But what are Stoops’ job responsibilities? And how much are you, as a taxpayer, paying him? Well, the state wouldn’t answer either question.

Even Florida’s online employee-salary database somehow omitted Stoops.

But emails obtained by the Florida Freedom to Read Project — which is leading the fight against classroom book-banning and censorship — showed that Stoops seemed to be working as a state liaison to right-wing crusaders.

In one email, Stoops wrote a Volusia County school board member to say: “We would be happy to meet with the Conservative Coalition of School Board Members as a group to explore ways that our efforts may align.”

In another, he told Orange County school board member Alicia Farrant, a Moms for Liberty member leading Central Florida’s in-school book-banning crusade: “I just wanted to pass along a note to thank you for serving on the board and standing up for families.”

Just for argument’s sake, let’s say you think it’s a swell idea for government to use tax dollars to push a political agenda. What excuse could you possibly have for hiding from taxpayers how many of those dollars you’re using and for what allegedly public purpose?

In normal times, that secrecy would be big news. But that revelation was eclipsed by the even more disturbing news that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education department had also decided to welcome videos into classrooms from a guy who admits his goal is indoctrination.

As the Miami Herald reported, the Department of Education said it had concluded that the controversial PragerU program “aligns to Florida’s revised civics and government standards” and “can be used as supplemental materials in Florida schools at district discretion.”

If you’re not familiar with Prager, you should first know that PragerU is an actual university in the same way Dr. Dre is an actual doctor. It’s not. Instead, it’s the creation of conservative radio show host Dennis Prager who freely admits his goal is to indoctrinate kids.

Just last month, at a Moms for Liberty event, Prager said that when critics say to him “you indoctrinate kids,” he responds that is true. “That’s a very fair statement,” he said. “But what is the bad about our indoctrination?”

In Florida, where DeSantis often decries the evils of indoctrination, we’re again reminded that every accusation is often a confession.

I encourage you to watch some of the PragerU videos for yourself.

In one video, a cartoon version of Columbus tells kids who ask about his support of slavery: “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?”

That’s quite a bar you’ve set for yourself, cartoon Chris. And for the kids.

Another video — “A Short History of Slavery,” narrated by conservative pundit Candace Owens — tells kids: “Here’s the first thing you need to know: Slavery was not ‘invented’ by White people.”

Yes, that’s actually “the first thing” PragerU thinks kids need to know about human captivity. Not how slavery destroyed generations of lives to help slavemasters enrich themselves. Or that, heaven forbid, that was wrong. But that White folks didn’t pioneer the system.

So were the harsh realities of human captivity at least the “second thing” kids need to know about slavery? Nope. According to PragerU and Owens, who is Black, the second-most important thing kids should know is that “White people were the first to put an end to slavery.”

So one of PragerU’s top two lessons on slavery is basically: Yay, White people!

Bizarre? Yes. Yet it seems to work well with the new Florida curriculum standards you read about last week — the ones that tell teachers to stress the “personal benefit” some slaves received in terms of learning job skills. And also with the laws GOP legislators passed that instruct educators to censor discussion about “systemic racism” and to sanitize history lessons that might upset some children’s parents.

The Freedom to Read organization is suggesting Florida families use the state’s new “parental rights” law to opt-out of PragerU’s indoctrination.

But it seems like it might be simpler to, oh, I dunno, maybe just not indoctrinate?

Maybe just teach history like it really happened, warts and all.

And maybe be fully transparent with taxpayer money and public positions.

Unfortunately, that all seems like too much to ask.

smaxwell@orlandosentinel.com

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, History, Lies, Racism

NPE: Charter Lobby Wants Your School!

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
11

The Network for Public Education sent out the following notice to its 350,000 members. Join NPE so you can be on our mailing list (no cost to join). The charter lobby wants your public school.

Dear Diane,In a rare moment of candor, Nina Rees, the President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said that her organization’s “personal goal” is to make all public schools “like charter schools” that would be “schools of choice.”

If Ms. Rees and her charter trade organization have their way:

  • Children would enter a lottery to attend their neighborhood school.
  • There would be an appointed private board, not an elected school board.
  • Teacher tenure and bargaining rights in most states would disappear.
  • The school could shut down based on test scores, enrollment, or even the private board’s whim. 25% of all charters shut down in their first 5 years. 
  • In most states, the school could be managed by a for-profit corporation.

All of the above are the characteristics of charter schools. Every district in the nation would be a New Orleans–where schools open and close, and citizens have no voice in school governance.

That is why NPE fights so hard each year to ensure that the National Alliance does not get the funding increases it lobbies for from the federal Charter School Programs (CSP). We are so pleased to share the good news below.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Network for Public Education

Another Reason Not to Live in Florida: Toxic Water

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
37

The Orlando Sentinel published a series of investigative reports about a shocking scandal: for years the ground water in Seminole County was poisoned by toxic chemicals, and the public did not know. The Sentinel published a four-part series, which I highly recommend. It’s a shocking story of political neglect.

Toxic Secret: Our series about 1,4-dioxane in Seminole water

Here is the series:

This is an excerpt from part four.

The Fulmer family dogs died two by two.

Tasha slipped away in 2004 and Rocky passed with cancer three years after. They were Rhodesian ridgebacks. Alan and Patricia Fulmer and their children took in another pair as puppies, Zipporah and Ariel. They would succumb to cancer.

In 2018, the city of Sanford tested their well water and soon came back with results.

“They said don’t drink it, don’t cook with it, don’t brush your teeth with it, don’t bathe in it, don’t touch it,” Patricia Fulmer said, recalling that moment. “It was really scary.”

The Fulmers were blindsided repeatedly.

First, when they learned a chemical called 1,4-dioxane, deemed likely to cause cancer, was in their drinking water coming from their private, household well at a high concentration.

Then they found out officials had known for years that the chemical, linked to hazardous pollution at a former Siemens factory in Lake Mary, was contaminating the underground water supply – the Floridan Aquifer – in all directions around their home just south of Sanford.

The third shock was when Patricia Fulmer was diagnosed with a malignant tumor, adding to the stress of their two daughters coping with chronic illnesses and the passing of a fifth pet, Dunder, a miniature pinscher.

In 2021, they sold their home to a developer and moved away.

The former house of Alan and Patricia Fulmer on a bulldozed lot at the corner of H.E. Thomas Parkway and Cherry Laurel Drive in Sanford, photographed Tuesday, April 11, 2023. The house is located northeast of the former Siemens-Stromberg factory at 400 Rinehart Road in Lake Mary. The Fulmers moved away several years after learning that 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen detected at the former factory site, had contaminated their water well. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel)

The former house of Alan and Patricia Fulmer on a bulldozed lot at the corner of H.E. Thomas Parkway and Cherry Laurel Drive in Sanford, photographed Tuesday, April 11, 2023, days before the home was demolished. The house is located northeast of the former Siemens-Stromberg factory at 400 Rinehart Road in Lake Mary. The Fulmers moved away several years after learning that 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen detected at the former factory site, had contaminated their water well. (Joe Burbank/Orlando Sentinel

*****

“It all began making sense,” said Patricia Fulmer, whose family has been firm in requesting a measure of privacy as they confront medical struggles and worries about their exposure to 1,4-dioxane. “It’s just so wrong.”

Her reaction has precedent in Florida. Some of the state’s most harrowing pollution episodes played out in stages: anxiety over exposure followed by distrust of officials for silence about a known threat.

1,4-dioxane was in use across the U.S. by the 1970s. The Siemens factory, making telephone network components, had been cited by the Florida Department of Environmental Protection the time it closed in 2003 for shoddy handling of hazardous chemicals.

There may be no way to learn when and at what strength 1,4-dioxane first invaded drinking water in Seminole County, but its presence was confirmed in the tap water of Sanford and the county’s Northwest Service Area in 2013 and in Lake Mary’s water in 2014.

Factory owners, including Siemens Corp. and General Dynamics, have denied liability for toxic pollution at the Lake Mary manufacturing site, but stated in 2017 that contaminants “may have been the result of historical activities at the Former Facility.”

‘You have the right to know’

The Fulmers were not alone in the dark.

Of the tens of thousands of residents and workers of Lake Mary, Sanford and Seminole County also exposed, it’s difficult to know how many have been made aware of the 1,4-dioxane they were consuming in drinking water.

It’s likely to be a very low percentage, judging from people well positioned to have learned of such a contamination of the Floridan Aquifer.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Environment, Florida

EdNext: Republicans Debate If Accountability Should Be Required for Vouchers

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
20

Caroline Hendrie, a veteran journalist who wrote for many years at EdWeek, wrote an overview of the implementation of vouchers (or “Education Savings Accounts“) in states that have endorsed “universal” access, removing almost all limits on access to them. Vouchers for rich and poor alike. As Josh Cowen has written in many articles, most students who use vouchers never attended public schools. And those from public schools who use vouchers are likely to do less well academically than the peers they left behind. No longer do you hear that vouchers will “save poor kids from failing public schools” because they don’t. In red states, they are a gift of public funds to families who happy to collect $6,000-$10,000 to underwrite their private school tuition.

Hendrie explains that voucher fans fall into two camps: On one side are those who want voucher families to restrict their use of public funds only to authorized expenditures, like tuition, tutoring, computers, school supplies. On the others are parents who say they want no restriction on what they purchase.

Like Florida, the states of Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah have all enacted laws this year that would open ESAs—sometimes after a multiyear phase-in—to most if not all school-age children in their states. Those four followed Arizona and West Virginia, which started implementing similar universal programs in 2022.

That wave plus other legislative action in 2023 brought to 13 the number of states with one or more education savings account programs funded directly from state revenues. In addition, Missouri has an operating ESA program paid for through tax credits.

Amid this growth, controversies have flared over ESA implementation—most notably but not exclusively in Arizona.

Critics complain that voucher money has been spent on non-education expenses, like swimming pools, kayaks, bbq grills, greenhouses, chicken coops, pianos, pizza ovens, and trampolines.

But parent groups have advocated for maximum flexibility, in which parents get a debit card and are free to purchase whatever they want, with no oversight.

Of course, vouchers create new for-profit opportunities. A company named ClassWallet has emerged to provide financial services to voucher states.

In 2019, Arizona contracted with the company ClassWallet to facilitate ESA transactions on its online spending-management portal. ClassWallet is also used by ESA programs in Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

On its website, the Florida-based ClassWallet lists its offerings:

ClassWallet is a digital wallet with an integrated eCommerce marketplace, automated ACH direct deposit, and reloadable debit card with pre-approval workflows and audit-ready transaction reporting. ClassWallet reduces overhead costs, saves valuable time, and better visibility and control for decentralized purchases.

Save Our Schools Arizona, which led the campaign to stop voucher expansion in 2018, is convinced that the state’s new commitment to universal vouchers will prove harmful to public schools, where most students are enrolled.

Save Our Schools Arizona, which advocates for public schools and opposes the 2022 ESA program expansion, argues that ongoing disputes over implementing the broader program prove it has become, as the organization’s executive director, Beth Lewis, puts it, “too big to succeed.”

Lewis said that the program is “wide open” for fraud. “It is interesting to watch my taxpayer dollars be used to build a garden in everybody’s backyard, when my public school can’t afford one,” she said. “It’s just this unspoken rule of, if you see it in a public school, then it’s approvable.”

Other states should view Arizona’s move to universal eligibility not as a model but as a cautionary tale, Lewis argues. She sees evidence of that happening in states such as Arkansas and Iowa, where newly passed laws call for incremental, multiyear expansions before getting to universal eligibility.

“I think they looked at Arizona and saw that this is a complete disaster and is not serving families well,” Lewis said. “There’s no way to ensure transparency. And they said, ‘Well, at the very least, we need to phase this in.’”

School-choice advocates tend to defend Arizona and see its uneven expansion process as par for the course when states try something different to promote educational freedom.

The last thing the choice lobby worries about (if ever) is the well-being of public schools, even though they enroll the vast majority of students in the state.

Categories Accountability, Deregulation, Disruption, Education Industry, Extremism, Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, School Choice, Vouchers

Paul Offitt: The Real RFK Jr. and Dr. Fauci

By dianeravitch
August 4, 2023 //
38

Paul Offitt is a Professor of Pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This post appeared on his blog “Beyond the Noise.”

On July 5, 2023, RFK Jr. appeared on Lex Fridman’s podcast, which boasts more than 3 million listeners. Regarding Fauci, Kennedy said, “He’s done a lot of things that I think are really bad for humanity. I think he is a genuinely bad human being.” In The Real Anthony Fauci, which has sold more than 1,000,000 copies, RFK Jr. claimed that Dr. Fauci is a figurehead for an elite cadre of wealthy insiders, dark money, and corporate interests. Kennedy’s vitriol invites a comparison of the careers of these two men.

Anthony Fauci was born on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York. His father owned a pharmacy; his mother and sister worked the register; Tony delivered prescriptions. Fauci attended Holy Cross, later earning his medical degree from Cornell Medical School. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was born on January 17, 1954. His father was Senator Robert F. Kennedy, and his uncle was President John F. Kennedy. RFK Jr. graduated from Harvard University in 1976, later earning his law degree from the University of Virginia.

Both men would eventually head organizations with the word “Health” in the title. After completing his medical residency in 1968, Dr. Fauci joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a clinical associate in the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In 1984, he was appointed director of NIAID. In 2011, after a stint as an environmental lawyer, RFK Jr. created and headed an organization called Children’s Health Defense.

During his tenure at NIAID, Dr. Fauci: (1) developed treatments for several previously fatal autoimmune diseases, later recognized as among the most important advances in the previous 20 years; (2) described the mechanisms by which human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) caused AIDS; (3) developed treatments to restore the immune competence of AIDS sufferers; (4) supervised the work of Barney Graham and Kizzmekia Corbett among others that led to the development of mRNA vaccines to prevent COVID; and (5) helped create and design Operation Warp Speed, which delivered mRNA vaccines that have saved the lives of about three million Americans. For these efforts, Dr. Fauci received the Lasker Award, the highest award for medical research in the United States.

As head of Children’s Health Defense, RFK Jr. has also been involved in COVID vaccines, publicly stating that they were “the deadliest vaccines ever made.” In July 2020, to dissuade African Americans from being vaccinated, Kennedy claimed that “people with African American blood react differently to vaccines than people with Caucasian blood; they’re much more sensitive.” When baseball legend Hank Aaron died at 86 of natural causes, Kennedy called it part of a “wave of suspicious deaths among the elderly following administration of COVID vaccines.” In 2021, Kennedy debuted a propaganda film targeting African Americans called Medical Racism: The New Apartheid, which claimed that COVID vaccines were “just one huge experiment on Black Americans.” For these efforts, RFK Jr. was kicked off Instagram, videos of his vaccine interviews were removed from YouTube, and Children’s Health Defense was kicked off Facebook.

Both men were also involved in the public health of developing countries. Dr. Fauci was the main architect of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which is estimated to have saved 20 million lives in Africa. For this work, Dr. Fauci was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. RFK Jr.’s work in the developing world focused on the Pacific Island nation of Samoa. In July 2018, two nurses in Samoa prepared a measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for two 12-month-old children. Instead of diluting the vaccine powder in water, they inadvertently diluted it with a muscle relaxant. Both infants immediately stopped breathing and died as a result. One nurse tried to cover up her error by taking the empty bottle of the muscle relaxant home after retrieving it from the garbage. Both were later sentenced to five years in prison.

RFK Jr. seized upon the story as proof that the MMR vaccine was deadly, spending months highlighting the two deaths on Facebook. After it had become clear that the MMR vaccine hadn’t caused the infant deaths, RFK Jr. visited Samoa, appearing alongside prominent local anti-vaccine activists and meeting with senior officials. Influenced in part by RFK Jr., the Samoan government suspended its measles vaccination program for 10 months. Immunization rates plummeted from 74 percent in 2017 to 31 percent in late 2018, precipitating a massive outbreak of measles. Between September and December 2019, at least 5,700 people suffered measles and 83 died, most of the deaths were in children less than four years of age.

On November 19, 2019, in the midst of the measles outbreak, RFK Jr. wrote a 4-page letter to the Samoan prime minister, stating, “To safeguard public health during the current infection and in the future, it is critical that the Samoan Health Ministry determine, scientifically, if the outbreak was caused by inadequate vaccine coverage or alternatively, by a defective vaccine.” Fortunately, no one was listening to RFK Jr. anymore. The Samoan Health Ministry launched a vaccination campaign in late November 2019 and, within five days, had immunized more than 17,000 people. The outbreak subsided.

Anthony Fauci and RFK Jr. do share one thing in common. Both attended Jesuit high schools. Dr. Fauci attended Regis High School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. RFK Jr. attended the Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Maryland. Both were taught the Jesuit philosophy “to be men for others.”

Categories Extremism, Health, Science

Florida Bans AP Psychology Course Because of Gender Issue

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
39

Leslie Postal of the Orlando Sentinel reports that the Florida Depatment of Education has banned the College Board’s AP Psychology course because it includes the study of gender and sexual identity. In Florida, these topics are not permitted in the state’s schools and colleges. Florida believes that if no one teaches gender or sexual identity, students will agree they don’t exist, and eventually they will disappear.

Postal writes:

Florida will not allow public school students to take Advanced Placement psychology because the course includes lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity, topics forbidden by the state, the College Board said Thursday.

If so, that would mean that a week before school starts in many districts, about 5,000 Central Florida students and about 27,000 statewide may not be able to take a class they signed up to tackle in the 2023-24 school year.

“We are sad to have learned that today the Florida Department of Education has effectively banned AP Psychology in the state by instructing Florida superintendents that teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law,” the College Board said in a statement.

The organization runs the 40-course AP program, which aims to offer high school students introductory college courses. Last school year, nearly 27,000 Florida students took AP psychology, which has been offered in the state since 1993.

“This element of the framework is not new: gender and sexual orientation have been part of AP Psychology since the course launched 30 years ago. As we shared in June, we cannot modify AP Psychology in response to regulations that would censor college-level standards for credit, placement, and career readiness.”

In May, Florida asked the College Board to review all its courses to make sure they comply with Florida law, which because of new laws and rules, prohibits teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity as well as certain race-related topics.

According to the College Board, the Florida Department of Education told school superintendents they could offer AP psychology only if lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity were omitted. But the College Board said those are part of the class and, if deleted, the course will not be able to carry the AP designation.

In June, the College Board told the state it would not alter the AP psychology course, which had been taught at 562 Florida high schools.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Florida, Gender

Yes, There Is a Free Lunch, for Kids

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
13

The Lever reports that Michigan is the sixth state to guarantee free lunch for all public school students. At the same time, House Republicans seek to ban free lunches because there might be “fraud.” For example, little Johnny might swipe a second sandwich. Iowa, as we read earlier, has limited the number of items that may be purchased with food stamps. What is it with these Republicans? Why do they children and poor adults to go hungry? Why do they want to weaken child labor laws so teens can work dangerous jobs?

There Is Such A Thing As A Free Lunch

This week, Michigan became the seventh state in the country to guarantee free lunch for every public school student in grades pre-K through 12. The $160 million program is included in the state’s School Aid Budget,which passed in June with bipartisan support. The program will serve 1.2 million students, an estimated 283,000 of whom are food insecure, and offer two free meals a day.

The national push for free lunches has been surprisingly controversial. Republicans intent on cutting the social safety net at every turn have even directed their ire at hungry kids. The Republican Study Committee, a policymaking group for conservative House lawmakers, went so far as to declare banning universal school meals a 2024 priority, suggesting that it would allow “widespread fraud.”

Michigan’s expansion of universal free school meals follows California, Maine, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont — and represents a heartwarming investment in public education after years of defunding.

Categories Democrats, Fraud, Funding, Health, Hypocrisy, Michigan, Poverty

Houston: Miles Seeks Approval to Hire Uncertified Principals and Teachers

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
15

Mike Miles is asking the Texas Education Agency to allow him to recruit uncertified teachers, principals, and deans. This move follows the Broadie playbook that education experience doesn’t matter. Broadies are known for their love of TFA. Miles may be reaching even lower since uncertified teachers do not require a college degree.

Houston ISD is seeking board approval this month for a waiver from the Texas Education Agency to hire uncertified deans and assistant principals for the next three years.

This follows the district asking for state approval to have an uncertified superintendent and uncertified teachers.

HIRING HUNDREDS HISD to seek TEA approval to hire uncertified teachers to fill classroom vacancies

The HISD Board of Managers is set to meet Thursday evening for a work session, where they’ll discuss the agenda for the board’s regular Aug. 10 meeting. Next week, the board is expected to vote on whether to approve an application for a certification waiver to employ assistant principals and deans without a certification through the 2025-2026 school year.

To be an assistant principal in Texas, an educator must have a certificate as an administrator, assistant principal, mid-management administrator, principal or superintendent.

Texas no longer issues an assistant principal certification, but the requirements for a principal certification in Texas include a master’s degree, a valid classroom teaching certificate, two years of teaching experience, and completion of a principal educator preparation program and two principal certification exams.

According to the TEA, districts can request a teacher certification waiver for someone to serve as a principal or assistant principal if an education does not currently hold a state certification. The request needs board approval before it is submitted to TEA for review and approval.

The board’s Thursday agenda also includes the topics of teacher vacancies and teacher certification waivers. In addition to a waiver for principals and deans, the district is seeking to waive Texas certification requirements for teachers to reduce vacancies on campuses before the school year begins.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Deregulation, Education Industry, Houston, Principals, Teacher Shortage, Teachers, Texas

Washington Post Asks Eight Left-Leaning Columnists About Biden

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2023 //
167

I enjoyed reading this candid conversation among left-leaning columnists at the Washington Post about Biden’s candidacy. The conversation was moderated by Chris Suellentrip, the politics opinion editor of the Post.

What do you think?

President Biden is 80 years old and is running for a second term, more or less unopposed, in the Democratic primary. So I gathered a group of our left-leaning columnists for a conversation over email and asked: How do you feel about that?

Has Biden failed to be a “bridge” to a new generation of leaders, as he pledged to be in 2020? Should he have declared himself “one (term) and done,” like a college basketball star? Should the party have held a competitive primary instead of clearing the field, as is traditional for an incumbent president? Is the fascination with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s not-gonna-happen campaign a sign of nervousness about Biden 2024 in some portion of the Democratic primary electorate? And will you change your mind about any of these things if someone other than Donald Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee?

Dana Milbank: If hand-wringing translated into votes, Democrats would never lose an election. I find their fretting over Biden’s age tedious — and probably exaggerated by the disinformation from the right portraying him as drooling and senile. The wandering speeches, the gaffes and the other traits people now assign to his advanced age are the same traits I observed when covering him in the 1990s.

As a Gen Xer, sure, I would have preferred if Biden had offered himself as a one-term anti-Trump savior and cleared the way for a new generation. But a competitive primary would only have turned him into Carter ’80. It’s also just as likely that a decision not to run for reelection would have had the effect of anointing Kamala D. Harris, who by virtue of being a woman of color would make it easier for Trump to foment a 2016-style backlash of racism and misogyny.

Would all this change if Trump (or Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) isn’t the GOP nominee? Well, sure. I suppose if Asa Hutchinson were the nominee it wouldn’t matter as much whom the Democrats put up, because he wouldn’t pose the same existential threat to American democracy. But I’m not yet declaring victory for Hutchinson.

Jennifer Rubin: So Biden is 80. Live with it. He’s certainly sharp enough to have solidified and expanded NATO, snookered Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in the debt ceiling negotiations and racked up as impressive a first-term domestic record as any incumbent in memory. If inflation is less than 3 percent and job growth is still strong on Election Day, Biden will have pulled off the near-impossible soft-landing (with Fed Chair Jerome H. Powell as his co-pilot).

Paul Waldman: Of course Biden’s age is a concern, even if at the moment it’s only a theoretical one. The presidency is an extraordinarily demanding job, and it would have to be a pretty unusual 86-year-old (the age Biden would be at the end of a second term) who could handle it. But we haven’t yet seen any evidence of age having an effect on Biden’s decision-making or his energy. There are occasions when he appears old in public — a shuffling gait, a momentary inability to find the word he’s looking for — but that’s not the same as him not being able to perform the job.

For all the talk of building a bridge to the next generation, Biden was never going to serve one term and step down. He spent half a century trying to get to the Oval Office, and he won’t leave it voluntarily.

Perry Bacon Jr.: I am not thrilled that Joe Biden is running for a second term.

His approval ratings are significantly lower than Bill Clinton’s, George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s were at this stage of their presidencies, midway through their third years in office.

They are very similar to Trump’s numbers. In polls of a potential 2024 matchup, Biden is effectively tied with Trump. Biden would be the favorite against Trump (and probably DeSantis). But that’s because of how unpopular those two Republicans are, not Biden’s political strength.

I think the driving factor here is Biden’s age. People just feel like he is too old. I personally don’t see any evidence that Americans shouldbe worried about his health or mental capacity. But I hear concerns about his age all the time from people in my life who aren’t partisan Democrats. This concern about age shows up in basically every poll.

I think an incumbent Democratic president with Biden’s record who wasn’t 80 years old would be more popular and therefore have a better chance in next year’s election. And while I don’t think just any Democrat under age 80 (or 70) who was the party’s presumptive nominee would be polling better than Biden is against Trump, I think many younger Democrats would be stronger candidates in a 2024 general election.

For example, it seems pretty clear that if Democrats could agree, without a primary, that the party’s 2024 ticket would be Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (Mich.) as president and Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (Ga.) as vice president, that would be stronger electorally than Biden-Harris. Or say, Sens. Cory Booker (N.J.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.). What I mean is a ticket with a White person and a person of color, a man and a woman, two people who are generally in the mainstream of the party ideologically — and no one over age 70.

But there is no magic way to skip a primary, of course!

Ruth Marcus: Riffing off of how Perry phrased it, I wish Biden did not have to run for a second term. He is too old. No, he is not the drooler of overheated GOP imaginings, but he has slowed down, obviously and measurably. And 80 is too old, period, for the demanding job of the presidency. Let the torch be passed, etc.

Except for this: Biden needs to run. He (and Democrats) are correct about that assessment. If he were to have announced that he was stepping aside, the internecine warfare that would have erupted over Harris, the heiress apparent, versus everyone else, would have torn the party apart, or risked doing so, and opened the door too wide to risk a Republican president being elected.

And not just Trump. He is the biggest, most existential risk, and the primary driver of my “Biden must run” mentality. I used to believe Trump was a singular threat, and that there would not be Trumpism without Trump. But that was wrong. The forces he has unleashed are powerful and dangerous, and exist even in his absence from the scene. From my point of view, the risk to the Supreme Court alone is enough to justify doing whatever it takes to maximize the chance of a Democrat being elected (which means: Biden, Biden, Biden).

Eugene Robinson: Look, we all wish that Biden were, say, 60 instead of 80. But is there a younger Democrat who could have beaten Donald Trump in 2020? I doubt it. And is there a younger Democrat who could beat Trump in 2024? Maybe. I like Perry’s ticket of Whitmer and Warnock. But I don’t like the idea of taking another existential gamble with our democracy. If Trump is the GOP nominee, which seems likely, this will almost surely be another close election. We don’t have landslides anymore; and no matter how queasy Republican voters might be about four more years of Trump’s insanity, we should expect most of them to support their party’s nominee. It is unwise to count on the justice system to bail the nation out. On Election Day, Biden will be 82 and Trump will be 78. The “age issue” should be de minimus.

And, not incidentally, Biden has been a highly effective president who has instituted policies, at home and abroad, that I support. A president with his record deserves a second term — and congressional majorities to go along with it.

Greg Sargent: Improbably, Biden has been the guy with enough appeal to the middle needed to both beat Trump and to pass (parts of) a historically progressive agenda (bringing Bernie Sanders into the tent) while recasting it to the electorate (including affluent suburbanites who supposedly lean right economically) as sensible moderation. Biden seems uniquely well-positioned to not just beat Trump again but also to cement a broad, center-left ideological consensus with paradigm-shifting durability.

As for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., historically there have always been candidates who tap into disaffected pro-insurgent constituencies in the Democratic Party (Bill Bradley, Howard Dean, etc.). Kennedy represents a particularly ideologically heterodox and unbalanced version of this. It’s hard to imagine his support, such as it is, says anything meaningful or predictive about eventual support for Biden.

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Early in the administration, I thought Biden wouldn’t seek a second term. He would find it appealing, I thought, to declare that he had achieved what he promised when he decided to run in the first place. He saved the country from a Trump second term, defended democracy, solved a bunch of big problems, restored the country’s standing abroad, notched a number of bipartisan victories and created an opening for a better kind of politics. Call it the Cincinnatus Option. He would spend the rest of his term being more praised than damned, the Republicans would have less interest in attacking him, and his popularity would go up because a lot of Americans (with their instinctive mistrust of politicians) would admire someone who could walk away from power.

That still sounds pretty good to me, but it’s not what happened. The reason it didn’t is, as Greg suggested, that Biden might be the only Democrat who can sit atop the various factions of the Democratic Party and bring them together.

If you ask yourself why Democrats are united behind Biden, why only cranks are running against him, it’s because Democrats across their various divisions agree that now is not the time for ideological Armageddon, which is what would happen if Biden stepped aside. And anyone who claims that a tough primary would be good for Biden should consider history. When they were incumbents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush were all weakened by primary fights (against Ronald Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan, respectively), and they all lost in the general election.

Does Biden’s age create challenges? Of course. Especially against anyone other than Trump. At the margins, Biden’s age could cost him votes, and the margins matter. My hunch is that Biden’s camp will try to find subtle ways of making his age at least a partial asset by stressing his seasoning, wisdom, experience, etc. It won’t be easy, but they have to do some of this. His camp also made a mistake by not lifting up Harris early on and trying to turn her into an asset. They have realized this and are working on doing that now. Biden’s age means more voters will be looking at her as a possible successor, and her favorability ratings need to go up.

Rubin: It’s a relief to have an empathetic, decent human being in the White House. While it is fashionable to pine for someone new and young, with our democracy still frightfully fragile and with war raging in Europe, I don’t think a younger governor or senator would be a better choice. Biden can pass the baton in 2028. Maybe with age comes some old-fashioned sense of propriety, civic virtue, common courtesy and, dare we say, dignity. I’ll take it.

Milbank: I think the Biden-is-too-old theme is itself a demonstration that we’re all forced to live in a world shaped by disinformation from the right. We’ve been hearing from Fox News since the 2020 campaign (when Biden was hidden in his “basement”) about Biden’s “cognitive decline” and his struggle to “string two sentences together.” He has been routinely described since then as “senile,” as a man with “obviously declining mental faculties” who is “a cognitive mess, and he has no idea that today is Wednesday.” During the debt ceiling fight, Kevin McCarthy offered to bring “soft food” to the White House for Biden. After the debt deal, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) marveled that “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants.”

There’s every reason to believe this “senile” old coot will outwit his Republican opponent in ’24.

Sargent: Democrats have won or outperformed in the last three national elections. Yet we’re still constantly running down rabbit holes into debates about why Dems suck so much at politics and how Trump continues to outfox them among working-class voters.

Democratic struggles with some working-class constituencies are real, but some proportion is in order here. MAGA continues to alienate a majority of the country.

Robinson: I’ve had a couple of occasions to spend extended periods of time with Biden, including a long chat on Air Force One, and I can attest that whatever else anybody thinks about him, he’s not senile. And I’ve seen him turn a scheduled quick half-hour of meet-and-greet with supporters into an hour-plus marathon, at the end of a long day, that exhausted aides half his age.

Dionne: Without formally breaking with either Clinton or Obama, Biden has moved the party’s policymaking past the consensus that influenced those earlier administrations. His appointments have given the party’s progressive wing a strong voice in areas such as labor rights, civil rights, trade and antitrust, even as he has kept the party’s more middle-ground legislators and voters on his side — by, for example, refusing to challenge the Federal Reserve’s efforts to contain inflation (even if the administration devoutly hopes it lets up on rate increases).

And the president’s economic record turns out to be very good. Inflation has come down much faster than Biden’s critics expected, and the country has so far avoided the recession many of those detractors predicted. It’s a long way between now and November 2024, but at least for now, Biden has the better of the economic argument.

The age issue is obviously one of the right’s favorite talking points, but from my own encounters, I share Gene Robinson’s view that a picture of Biden as some sort of doddering old guy is flatly wrong. Biden is especially sharp when he turns to U.S. foreign policy and makes a persuasive case that the United States is now in a much stronger position in the world, partly because it is building alliances across Asia to contain China’s power. Foreign policy won’t decide the next election, but voters who have a sense of security are more likely to support the incumbent.

But realism requires coming to terms with the age issue anyway. Like it or not, Biden’s age will be brought into play whenever he makes a miscue or garbles a sentence or stumbles or looks less forceful — even if whatever is going wrong has nothing to do with his age. Beneath the surface, the Biden forces know it’s something they have to struggle with, not because of what Fox News commentators will say but because of conversations among not particularly ideological voters over back fences and in neighborhood cafes.

Bacon: If the Democrats’ only potential options for the 2024 ticket were: 1) Nominate Biden without a real primary; 2) Conduct a primary in which Harris would likely win without any serious challenge; 3) Conduct a primary in which Harris carried the Black primary vote overwhelmingly but lost to someone with a heavily White base (say Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg), I can see why the party kind of informally opted for No. 1. After all, Harris wasn’t a great candidate in 2019, few Black voters backed Buttigieg in that primary and Biden has the electoral advantages of being White, male and the incumbent president.

But I suspect there were two other potential outcomes, if Biden had announced in January that he was not seeking a second term: 4) Harris wins against a crowded primary field and in doing so demonstrates she is a strong candidate for a general election, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016; or 5) Harris runs but another candidate (say, Whitmer) builds a broad coalition and decisively defeats her in the primary.

So I am frustrated that Democrats are running a candidate who in my view is too conciliatory and centrist in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, but also a candidate whose centrism and conciliation isn’t being rewarded by centrist/independent/swing voters with more approval and support. Biden’s age makes his reelection really dicey — something voters keep saying in poll after poll but the Democratic Party has decided to ignore.

All that said, Biden has been fairly good on policy and would be much better than any of the Republicans running. So I will be voting for him next November without any hesitation. I think he has been a better president than Clinton or Obama. He has been less centrist and cautious than I expected. He has embraced the progressive thinking that emerged from 2013 to 2020, instead of being stuck in old ways. He has appointed some great judges, most notably Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. He has also been very pro-labor and more skeptical of big business than other modern presidents.

The Democratic Party has moved in a more liberal direction — and Biden moved with the party. Great.

Waldman: The good news for Democrats is that, at the moment at least, they have so much going for them heading into 2024: a strong economy, a broadly popular agenda, and an opposition committed to a hateful politics that their base seems to want, but that a majority of the electorate finds repugnant.

Finally, you have the likely nomination of Trump, who cost the GOP the elections of 2018, 2020 and 2022. Everything that made people choose Biden over Trump three years ago — that Biden is a decent human being with conciliatory impulses who would govern in a responsible way — is no less true today than it was then. So for all the unease among Democrats (which Perry is absolutely right about), they’re in about as good a position as they could have hoped for.

Categories Biden, Democrats, Education Reform, Elections, Politics, Republicans, Trump

Charles Pierce: Mike Miles Brings Chaos to Houston

By dianeravitch
August 2, 2023 //
54

There is one good reason to subscribe to Esquire: to read Charles Pierce, one of the most perceptive writers of our time. Pierce writes about education on occasion, and he’s always on target. In this column, he skewers the casual cruelty of Texas Governor Greg Abbott , who seized control of the Houston public schools on the flimsiest of pretexts, and Houston’s new superintendent Mike Miles, who’s pushing his top-down ideas without regard to anyone else’s views. Miles is a military man who learned about education at the Broad Academy, where one of the central teachings was to ignore public opinion, as well as the views of local teachers.

Pierce writes:

This week, something altogether remarkable, and not in a good way, happened in the city of Houston in the state of Texas. On June 1, the state of Texas, which is wholly governed by Greg Abbott and a compliant, and heavily gerrymandered state legislature, took over the Houston Independent School District. The pretext was flimsy, as so many of Abbott’s pretexts are, where he even bothers to provide them. (That legislature again.) The decision was, well, unpopular. From Texas Monthly:

Mike Miles, the state-appointed superintendent of the Houston Independent School District, might be the most hated person in Harris County. At last week’s school board meeting—the first since Miles was officially hired—residents crowded HISD headquarters, in northwest Houston, to oppose the state’s takeover of the school district. One speaker compared Miles, who is the son of a Black father and a Japanese mother, to a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Another described the state’s recent seizure of HISD, which serves a student population that is 62 percent Hispanic and 22 percent Black—as an “act of racial violence.” Larry McKinzie, an educator and former State Board of Education candidate, appeared to make a physical threat against Miles: “Realize this: you’re safe at forty-four-hundred West Eighteenth”—the location of the board meeting—“but you’ll have to go back [home].” Not one of the 33 attendees who gave public comments had anything good to say about their new superintendent.  It was hard to gauge Miles’s reaction to the criticism, because he spent the entire public-comment period in a back room, watching the meeting on TV.

A meeting the night before this one had dissolved into chaos, so the new HISB rescheduled the meeting for the next night, using a plan that had the lovely tang of East Germany to it.

 In an apparent effort to keep order, the board allowed only 35 members of the public into last week’s meeting room, which can accommodate more than 300. The remaining 100 or so attendees were relegated to an overflow room. Several attempted to force their way into the main room, only to be turned back by armed police officers. One teacher who had registered to speak at the meeting was arrested for criminal trespassing and spent the night in jail. 

Houston officials tried to fight the takeover, and they even got it stalled for four years. But the puppet show that is the government of Texas has many fail-safe devices and they all work.

Houston leaders overwhelmingly opposed the takeover, citing HISD’s overall B rating from the state and strong financial position. In 2019 the district sued the state, delaying the takeover for four years. The legal battle ended in January, when the Texas Supreme Court—whose nine members are all Republicans—sided with the TEA. 

Miles beta-tested his sophisticatedly named New Education System in Dallas, where it proved to be a matter of long-term pain for short-term gain. This week, its implementation in Houston was widely interpreted as equally ominous. From Texas Public Media:

Librarian and media specialist positions are being eliminated at 28 campuses designated to be part of Miles’ New Education System (NES), which entails premade lesson plans for teachers, classroom cameras for disciplinary purposes and a greater emphasis on testing-based performance evaluations, among other initiatives. The libraries at those schools will continue to include books that can be read or checked out by students but are otherwise being reimagined as “team centers” where special programming will be held and disruptive students will be sent so as not to interfere with their classmates’ learning, according to HISD spokesperson Joseph Sam. The library-related changes also could be coming to the 57 schools where principals elected to be NES-aligned campuses, with Sam saying that would be determined on a campus-by-campus basis.

If this seems extreme, that’s only because it is — homogenized lesson plans, surveillance in the classroom, “special programs” for “disruptive students.” And libraries turned into “discipline centers,” which, truth be told, are not as dungeon-adjacent as their name might imply, although their name so clearly implies it that the NES folks like to call them “team centers.”

That most of the affected students will be from low-income communities of color should be obvious from jump, which means god alone knows what the NES definition of “disruptive” in practice is going to be. (In some places, “disruptive” students have drawn the attention of the local police. So maybe things are looking up.) What is also obvious is that any complaints will go into a political meat-grinder that is rigged in such an ironclad fashion that an fair outcome is nearly impossible. And around and around it goes.

Categories Accountability, Discipline, Education Industry, Extremism, Houston, Libraries, Texas
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