Texas: Biden Administration Sues Gov. Abbott Over His Razor Wire Blockade of Rio Grande

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
56

Governor Greg Abbott deployed 1,000 feet of buoys and razor wire on the border with Mexico to deter immigrants. Many migrants have been seriously injured by the razor wire, but Governor Abbott feels that as a Christian, it’s right to inflict maximum pain on immigrants from Mexico. The Biden administration is suing Abbott because he did not ask for approval before obstructing an international border.

The U.S. Justice Department sued Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday after he refused to remove a wall of buoys in the Rio Grande.

The move was expected after Abbott made clear to President Joe Biden in a letter earlier in the day that he would not remove the barriers and blamed the White House for making him have to take action on the border.

“The fact is, if you would just enforce the immigration laws Congress already has on the books, America would not be suffering from your record-breaking level of illegal immigration,” the Republican wrote.

The U.S. Justice Department had given Abbott until Monday to commit to removing the buoy barrier that they say he has illegally deployed into the river to block migrants. The agency filed the civil lawsuit with the U.S. District Court in the Western District of Texas.

The Justice Department says Abbott violated the federal Rivers and Harbors Act, which requires the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ approval before any barriers can be placed in any navigable water in the United States. Abbott and the Texas Department of Public Safety, which has overseen the project, did not get prior approval from the Army Corps of Engineers.

“This floating barrier poses a risk to navigation, as well as public safety, in the Rio Grande River, and it presents humanitarian concerns,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said in a statement announcing the suit. “Additionally, the presence of the floating barrier has prompted diplomatic protests by Mexico and risks damaging U.S. foreign policy.”

In his letter Monday, Abbott denied that anything Texas has done has violated the Rivers and Harbors Act. And the governor argued that the buoy barrier the state is putting in the river is deterring migrants from entering the Rio Grande.

The threat of legal action comes after a Texas DPS officer sent emails to a supervisor warning of injuries that Abbott’s Operation Lone Star has caused migrants. He detailed finding a pregnant woman having a miscarriage tangled in the state’s razor wire, doubled over in pain. He also described a 4-year-old who girl passed out from heat exhaustion after she tried to go through the razor wire and was pushed back by Texas National Guard soldiers, and a teenager who broke his leg trying to navigate the water around the wire and had to be carried by his father….

Customs and Border Protection has warned internally that Abbott’s use of concertina wire is making it harder to reach at-risk migrants and increasing the risk of drownings. An administration official said Monday that agents are now having to cut through multiple layers of razor wire to respond to medical emergencies. They said that in one week alone, Border Patrol agents reported encountering dozens of migrants with injuries, including broken limbs.

“President Biden’s plan to manage the border through deterrence, enforcement, and diplomacy after the Title 42 public health order lifted has led to the lowest levels of unlawful border crossings in over two years,” said Abdullah Hasan, White House assistant press secretary. “Gov. Abbott’s dangerous and unlawful actions are undermining that effective plan and making it hard for the men and women of Border Patrol to do their jobs of securing the border. The governor’s actions are cruel and putting both migrants and border agents in danger.”

Categories Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Texas

The Hartmann Report: Trump’s Plans Are Alarming

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
23

A few days ago, the New York Times published a description of the policies envisioned by Trump’s inner circle. The goals is to take control of independent agencies and to strip the independence of federal civil servants. Thom Hartmann wrote here about those plans and their danger to democracy.

Earlier this week, The New York Times published a partial exposé of Trump’s plans for his second administration. It involved basically turning America into Russia or Hungary, where the president becomes the singular center of federal power, eclipsing Congress and the Courts.
For example, the Times writes:

For example, the Times writes:

“Mr. Trump intends to bring independent agencies — like the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies, and the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces various antitrust and other consumer protection rules against businesses — under direct presidential control.”

How would this play out? The FCC has power over the internet, as well as all broadcast media in America; it’s how the Trump administration killed Net Neutrality and gave the giant Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the legal right to track everything you do and sayon the web right down to the last keystroke of your posts and your every email.

Thus, President Trump could mandate that any media critical of him — including online media like Daily Kos, Raw Story, or Common Dreams— must be heavily “regulated,” just like in Russia and Hungary. And he could do this in the first weeks of his presidency, to tamp down the ability to organize protests around his other fascist policies.

Taking over the Federal Trade Commission would allow him to do all kinds of favors for his CEO and billionaire backers, bringing industry behind his Fascism, just as happened in the early years of Nazi Germany.

In addition, Trump has already proclaimed his intention to turn the FBI, IRS, and DOJ into weapons against his political enemies. Just like Putin and Orbán.

Lest you think Trump doesn’t have plans to take on the “fake news” media and “liberals” he regularly lambasts, consider what he reposted on his Nazi-infested social media site just three days ago:

“If you fuck around with us, if you do something bad to us, we are going to do things to you that have never been done before.”

They have been done before, just not here in the US.

And the fact that not one single currently elected Republican stood up and called this fascist rhetoric what it is tells us that the next GOP president need not be Trump for this nation to fall from democracy to fascism: strongman authoritarianism is now the governance model the Republican Party and the “conservative” movement have fully embraced.

Please open the link to finish reading.

Categories Elections, Extremism, Fascism, Politics, Trump

Politico: Campus Towns Vote Overwhelmingly Democratic

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
13

Politico wrote recently about the powerful impact of campus towns. They typically vote Democratic, and they have a large impact on state elections. It’s long been known that education is a factor in voting. The most educated counties vote Democratic, and the least educated vote Republican.

Politico wrote:

Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers.

No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than anywhere else in the state. And the Democratic margin of victory that delivered control of the nonpartisan court to liberals was even more lopsided than usual — and bigger than in any of the state’s other 71 counties.

The margin was so big that it changed the state’s electoral formula. Under the state’s traditional political math, Milwaukee and Dane — Wisconsin’s two Democratic strongholds — are counterbalanced by the populous Republican suburbs surrounding Milwaukee. The rest of the state typically delivers the decisive margin in statewide races. The Supreme Court results blew up that model. Dane County alone is now so dominant that it overwhelms the Milwaukee suburbs (which have begun trending leftward anyway). In effect, Dane has become a Republican-killing Death Star.

“This is a really big deal,” said Mark Graul, a Republican strategist who ran George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign in Wisconsin. “What Democrats are doing in Dane County is truly making it impossible for Republicans to win a statewide race.”

In isolation, it’s a worrisome development for Republicans. Unfortunately for the larger GOP, it’s not happening in isolation.

In state after state, fast-growing, traditionally liberal college counties like Dane are flexing their muscles, generating higher turnout and ever greater Democratic margins. They’ve already played a pivotal role in turning several red states blue — and they could play an equally decisive role in key swing states next year.

One of those states is Michigan. Twenty years ago, the University of Michigan’s Washtenaw County gave Democrat Al Gore what seemed to be a massive victory — a 60-36 percent win over Republican George W. Bush, marked by a margin of victory of roughly 34,000 votes. Yet that was peanuts compared to what happened in 2020. Biden won Washtenaw by close to 50 percentage points, with a winning margin of about 101,000 votes. If Washtenaw had produced the same vote margin four years earlier, Hillary Clinton would have won Michigan, a state that played a prominent role in putting Donald Trump in the White House.

Name the flagship university — Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, among others — and the story tends to be the same. If the surrounding county was a reliable source of Democratic votes in the past, it’s a landslide county now. There are exceptions to the rule, particularly in the states with the most conservative voting habits. But even in reliably red places like South Carolina, Montana and Texas, you’ll find at least one college-oriented county producing ever larger Democratic margins.

The American Communities Project, which has developed a typology of counties, designates 171 independent cities and counties as “college towns.” In a combined social science/journalism effort based at the Michigan State University School of Journalism, the ACP uses three dozen different demographic and economic variables in its analysis such as population density, employment, bachelor’s degrees, household income, percent enrolled in college, rate of religious adherence and racial and ethnic composition.

Of those 171 places, 38 have flipped from red to blue since the 2000 presidential election. Just seven flipped the other way, from blue to red, and typically by smaller margins. Democrats grew their percentage point margins in 117 counties, while 54 counties grew redder. By raw votes, the difference was just as stark: The counties that grew bluer increased their margins by an average of 16,253, while Republicans increased their margins by an average of 4,063.

Back in 2000, the places identified as college towns by ACP voted 48 percent to 47 percent in favor of Al Gore. In the last presidential election, the 25 million who live in those places voted for Joe Biden, 54 percent to 44 percent.

Many populous urban counties that are home to large universities don’t even make the ACP’s “college towns” list because their economic and demographic profiles differentiate them from more traditional college counties. Among the missing are places like the University of Texas’ Travis County, where the Democratic margin of victory grew by 290,000 votes since 2000, and the University of New Mexico’s Bernalillo County, where the margin grew by 73,000 votes. The University of Minnesota’s Hennepin County has become bluer by 245,000 votes.

North Carolina offers a revealing snapshot of a state whose college towns have altered its electoral landscape. Five of the state’s nine counties that contain so-called college towns have gone blue since voting for George W. Bush in 2000. Back then, the nine counties together netted roughly 12,000 votes for Bush, who carried the state by nearly 13 percent. Twenty years later, those numbers had broken dramatically in the opposite direction — Biden netted 222,000 votes from those counties. He still lost the state, but the margin was barely more than 1 percent.

There’s no single factor driving the college town trend. In some places, it’s an influx of left-leaning, highly educated newcomers, drawn to growing, cutting-edge industries advanced by university research or the vibrant quality of life. In others, it’s rising levels of student engagement on growing campuses. Often, it’s a combination of both.

What’s clear is that these places are altering the political calculus across the national map. Combine university counties with heavily Democratic big cities and increasingly blue suburbs, and pretty soon you have a state that’s out of the Republican Party’s reach.

None of this has gone unnoticed by the GOP, which is responding in ways that reach beyond traditional tensions between conservative lawmakers and liberal universities — such as targeting students’ voting rights, creating additional barriers to voter access or redrawing maps to dilute or limit the power of college communities. But there are limits to what those efforts can accomplish. They aren’t geared toward growing the GOP vote, merely toward suppressing Democratic totals. And they aren’t addressing the structural problems created by the rising tide of college-town votes — students are only part of the overall phenomenon.

There is more, and it’s all encouraging to those who hope for a Democratic surge. Keep reading.

Categories Democrats, Elections, Higher Education, Republicans

Michael Hiltzik: “No Labels” Is a Front to Protect the 1%[

By dianeravitch
July 25, 2023 //
28

Michael Hiltzik is my favorite columnist at the Los Angeles Times. In this post, he exposes the emptiness behind the “No Labels” platform. The possibility that No Labels will run a third party candidate in a Trump v. Biden race seems likely to elect Trump by drawing independent votes away from Biden. If ever there was an election where a third party is not needed, it’s 2024.

Hiltzik writes:

Presidential campaigns start earlier and earlier these days, and so too do pleas that politics in the U.S. would be so much more effective if we could, in the words of Rodney King, “all just get along.”

So here comes the purportedly centrist political group No Labels, which recently released a 72-page political manifesto entitled “Common Sense,” in an overt echo of Thomas Paine.

“Most Americans are decent, caring, reasonable, and patriotic people,” declares the document’s preamble. “Instead, we see our two major parties dominated by angry and extremist voices driven by ideology and identity politics rather than what’s best for our country.”

There’s a clue right there to the “both-sides-ism” of this fake party. Who are the “angry and extremist voices” on the Democratic side? No one like Greene, Boebert, and Gaetz.

No Labels says it may back a third-party candidate for president next year unless President Biden seems to be running well ahead of Donald Trump. That sounds more like a threat than a promise.

The politician the group has been most assiduously promoting lately is Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). Manchin has demonstrated his centrist bonafides by doing things such as killing an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, an anti-poverty program of proven effectiveness, and blocking initiatives for renewable fuels in favor of protecting coal and other fossil fuels (he’s an investor in the coal industry).

That might tell you all you need to know about No Labels, but there’s more. The organization doesn’t disclose its donors, but Mother Jones has reported that they include private equity investors, a natural gas billionaire and real estate and insurance industry figures.

The best window into No Labels’ approach is its “Common Sense” policy document, which boasts of providing “a clear blueprint for where America’s commonsense majority wants this country to go.”

Would that were so. In the flesh, the document is an agglomeration of misinformation, platitudes and premasticated nostrums.

The document tends to make its points by listing problems and saying, in effect, “something must be done”—but doesn’t give many specifics about what that something would be. It makes assumptions about what is desired by “commonsense Americans” (whoever they are) without actually showing that its assumptions are valid.

Housing? “Building more homes in America will make housing more affordable for Americans,” says No Labels. No kidding? So what are you going to do about it? The policy document doesn’t say, beyond endorsing a couple of federal tax credit proposals in Congress that on the gonna-happen scale are a “not.”

On some issues, No Labels merely tries to split the difference between two sides, never mind that one side may be right and the other wrong. Abortion? No Labels calls for a “compromise” between the belief that “women have a right to control their own reproductive health and our society’s responsibility to protect human life.”

That word salad gets us nowhere, skating glibly over the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs. Wade, as played out in states where stringent antiabortion statutes have had devastating consequences for the health of pregnant women and their access to medical care. If that’s the best that No Labels can offer, why does the organization exist at all?

Social Security? No Labels calls its fiscal condition “a textbook example of how leaders kick the can down the road in a manner that makes a foreseeable problem even harder to solve for the next generation.” This is a textbook example of balderdash.

“The longer Washington waits to fix Social Security,” No Labels says, “the harder it will be to do so.” The truth, as the political geniuses behind No Labels surely understand, is just the opposite. The closer the deadline, the easier it is to come together for a solution.

No Labels bases its argument on the fact that if Congress defers a decision on shoring up the program’s finances, the solutions will require more stringent benefit cuts or tax increases than they would today. But acting now would mean reducing benefits or raising taxes long before that’s necessary, and possibly more than will be necessary.

And who would pay that price? No Labels says that “no one in retirement — or close to it — should face any benefit changes.” Why not? Why place the burden of benefit cuts only on the younger generation? If “fixing” Social Security is “a challenge that we can and must solve together,” how come those in their fifties or older get a free pass?

The real reason that Social Security may need more funding is that wealthier Americans aren’t paying their fair share of the payroll tax that funds most benefits. Removing the cap on the payroll tax, which exempts wage income over $160,200 (this year’s limit), would eliminate almost all the program’s funding deficit for the foreseeable future. But that, obviously, would hit the taxpayer class No Labels seems determined to protect….

No Labels calls for a deficit reduction commission to issue proposals for spending cuts and revenue increases that Congress would have to vote on as a unified package. The model here is the Simpson-Bowles Fiscal Responsibility Commission of 2010. No Labels calls its report “sensible and responsible, and dead on arrival.”

That’s a neat bit of historical revisionism. The reason the report went nowhere was that the commission itself was so split that it never got around to issuing recommendations at all. The co-chairs, the noxious former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and the conservative Democrat Erskine Bowles, traveled the country trying to sell their snake oil, with no success.

The truth was that the commission was a front for the wealthy. The Simpson-Bowles plan was a road map for cutting services and benefits for the working and middle class — including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits and disaster relief — while preserving the tax breaks that the rich valued most highly. By taking Simpson-Bowles as a model, No Labels shows us what it’s really about.

Some of the policy document’s “ideas” are based on popular mythologies and received wisdom (or really, received misinformation). Some are self-contradictory. On crime, for example, the document says, “Americans are worried about the surge of crime,” but two paragraphs later acknowledges that violent crime is “down 44 percent since the 1990s.”

What’s the solution? To No Labels, it all boils down to putting more cops on the street. “It’s a simple equation: the more cops patrolling a given community, the less crime that community experiences.” There’s no hint there that among law enforcement experts this is a heavily disputed claim.

It’s based on dubious data and a very narrow definition of “crime” — leaving out offenses such as wage theft and air and water pollution, for instance — and overlooks numerous proven approaches to reducing street crime that don’t require more cops. Nor does it recognize that in some contexts, more police leads to morecrime. But why claim to be exploring the complexity of criminal justice, when you’re just parroting the simple-minded conclusion that more cops invariably make a community safer?

On these and many other issues, No Labels is claiming to map out a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans that doesn’t really exist. No Labels says its goal is to combat political polarization in America, but the country is not, in fact, polarized. Large majorities favor abortion rights, gun control, making the rich pay their fair share in taxes, and protecting voting rights.

No Labels tries to both-sides the GOP’s allegiance to an extremist former president and its platform of eliminating abortion rights, constricting voting rights and advancing discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities and LGBTQ+ individuals. That Democratic Party policies are the polar opposites of those hardly makes it as “extremist” as the GOP. Where’s the middle ground when one side wants to expand rights and opportunities, and the other wants to destroy them?

Categories Biden, Elections, Politics, Trump

Texas: The Ethnic-Racial Profile of the Legislature

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
18

We have had a spirited discussion of the demographics of the Texas legislature. What we can say with certainty is that the legislature is dominated by white Republican men.

The state is no longer majority white. The largest single group in the state is Hispanics, at 40%. Followed by whites, at about 39%. Then Blacks, at 13%. Then Asians at nearly 6%.

But take a look at the legislature.

White men are over-represented. Women and Hispanics, as well as Blacks and Asians, are underrepresented.

No legislature will ever be a mirror of the population. The demographic trend in Texas suggests that the legislature will become increasingly Hispanic.

Categories Elections, Race, Texas

Washington Post Editorial: Alexei Navalny, a Man of Courage and Conscience

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
24

The Washington Post published the following editorial yesterday:

Alexei Navalny has spent more than 900 days behind bars — and nearly 200 in solitary confinement — for having the courage to speak critically of Russia’s despotic president, Vladimir Putin. Now, in addition to his current sentence of more than 11 years, prosecutors in a new trial have asked for an additional 20 years on ludicrous charges of “extremism.” And once again, Mr. Navalny refuses to be silenced.

Speaking at the conclusion of his closed trial in prison this month before 18 court officials — seven of whom wore black masks to hide their identity — Mr. Navalny showed he remains a powerful voice of conscience. And that is why we thought it worthwhile to share his words at length here.

“The question of how to act is the central question of humanity,” he said. “People have searched high and low for the formula of doing the right thing, for something to base the right decisions on.”
Mr. Navalny recalled the teaching of professor Yuri Lotman, who once told students, “A man always finds himself in an unforeseeable situation. And then he has two legs to rest on: conscience and intellect.”

“To rely only on one’s conscience is intuitively correct,” Mr. Navalny added. “But an abstract morality that does not take into account human nature and the real world will degenerate either into stupidity or atrocity, as it has happened more than once before. But the reliance on intellect without conscience is precisely what now lies at the core of the Russian state.”

Mr. Navalny recalled that Mr. Putin set out initially to use Russia’s energy and other resources to “build an unscrupulous but cunning, modern, rational, ruthless state.”

He summed up the rationale of those who rule Russia this way: “We will become richer than the czars of the past. We have so much oil that even the common folk will get something from it. By exploiting this world of contradictions and the vulnerability of democracy, we will become leaders, and everyone will respect us. And if not respect, then at least fear.

“And yet the same thing happens as everywhere else. The intellect, unconstrained by conscience, whispers: Snatch, steal. If you are stronger, your interests are always more important than the rights of others.”

Then came the invasion of Ukraine, in which Mr. Navalny said Russia under Mr. Putin had “slipped and collapsed with a crash, destroying everything around it. And now it is floundering in a pool of either mud or blood, with broken bones and the poor, robbed population, surrounded by the tens of thousands of victims of the most stupid and senseless war of the 21st century.

“Of course, sooner or later, it will rise again. And it is up to us to determine what it will rest on in the future.”

“It may seem to you now that I am crazy,” he told the court. “But in my opinion, it’s you who are crazy. You have one God-given life, and this is what you choose to spend it on? Putting robes on your shoulders and black masks on your heads to protect those who rob you? To help someone who already has 10 palaces to build an 11th?”

Mr. Navalny implored the court officials to join him in the fight for “a free and prosperous” Russia.
“When you’re tired of slipping under this regime, splitting your forehead and your future, when you finally realize that the rejection of conscience will eventually lead to the disappearance of intellect, then maybe you will stand on both of the legs on which every man should stand, and we will be able to bring the beautiful Russia of the future closer, together.”

These brave words, written from the cramped, miserable conditions of solitary confinement, are those of a man who possesses a vision for Russia and the high principles to lead it — unlike the brute who sits in the Kremlin.

Categories Courage, International

Peter Greene on the Flawed CREDO Charter Report

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
13

Peter Greene, retired teacher, contributes regularly to Forbes, where he reaches an audience of non-educators. In this post, he writes about the Network for Public Education’s new report on the fundamentally flawed CREDO report on charters, which claimed to show that charters outperform public schools.

He writes:

Over the past two months, headlines have declared that charter schools are outperforming traditional public schools, based on a new study from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), but a critique from the Network for Public Education suggests that the results are being overblown.

CREDO is housed at Stanford University but appears to be associated primarily with the conservative Hoover Institute (also housed at Stanford), with large chunks of funding coming from the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation and City Fund.

CREDO’s report highlights differences between charters and traditional public schools in days of learning. But “days of learning” doesn’t actually mean days of learning. Instead, it’s a metric that CREDO invented back in a 2012 paper as a way of rendering standard deviations of test scores more accessible to the average reader. By dividing one standard deviation in tests scores by the 720 days between 4th grade and 8th grade tests.

So 0.01 standard deviation translates to 5.78 days of learning.

CREDO finds charters come out ahead by 16 days of learning for reading, and 6 days of learning for math. That translates 0.011 and 0.028 standard deviations over traditional public schools.

But is that a remarkable difference?

To answer that question, NPE turned to another CREDO report.

In reading, charter students, on average, realize a growth in learning that is .01 standard deviations less than their TPS counterparts. This small difference — less than 1 percent of a standard deviation — is significant statistically but is meaningless from a practical standpoint. Differences of the magnitude described here could arise simply from the measurement error in the state achievement tests that make up the growth score, so considerable caution is needed in the use of these results.

In math, the analysis shows that students in charter schools gain significantly less than their virtual twin. Charter students on average have learning gains that are .03 standard deviations smaller than their TPS peers. Unlike reading, the observed difference in average math gains is both significant and large enough to be meaningful. In both cases, however, the absolute size of the effect is small.

In other words, when a study found charter schools behind traditional public schools by that amount, CREDO found the effects “meaningless” and “small.”

NPE also faults the study’s Volume II for being selective in its choice of charter management organizations to include in the study. In particular, NPE notes, CREDO did not include Charter Schools USA, which operates nearly 100 schools, the Michigan-based Leona Group, which operates 58 schools, and Pearson’s Connection Academy, the second-largest national chain of on-line charter schools. Just these three chains of the several left out of the study would potentially have large effects on the results.

The report points out that CREDO methodology has been criticized by scholars in the past, and that CREDO research is generally not peer-reviewed. “CREDO’s report engaged in misleading reporting of its own findings but continues to use a flawed methodology, as scholars have repeatedly shown when reviewing prior CREDO reports,” argues NPE.

I reached out to CREDO for their response to the NPE report. If they reply, that will be added to this post.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Deregulation, Education Industry, Ethics, Fake News

North Carolina: GOP Passes Bill to Increase Charter Funding and Enrollment

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
8

Republicans in North Carolina hold a supermajority in the state’s General Assembly after a renegade Democrat announced she was switching parties. That legislator, Tricia Cotham, betrayed the people who voted for her, thinking she supported abortion rights and opposed vouchers. After switching sides, she voted to ban abortion and to support vouchers. With a supermajority, Republicans can and do override Democratic Governor Roy Cooper’s vetoes.

In their hatred for everything public, the Republicans voted to fund capital expenses of charter schools (even though they also are passing legislation by declaring that charter schools are not public schools). Notably, they also voted to allow low-performing charters to expand! Nothing equals funding failure!! Republicans want more kids in failing charters!

Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper on Friday vetoed a Republican-backed bill that seeks to enable big changes to the state’s charter school system, likely setting up another override battle with the GOP-led General Assembly.

House Bill 219, the “Charter Schools Omnibus,” would remove a cap on enrollment growth at low-performing charter schools and allow charter schools to automatically add enrollment and grade levels over time without state approval.

It would also allow the schools to give preference to students in certain preschools. The law currently requires admissions to be done by lottery, not by preference. And it would allow charters to enroll and charge tuition for out-of-state and foreign exchange students.

The biggest change in the bill would allow charter schools to seek taxpayer money for capital expenses, such as construction, renovation or building purchases.

Currently, charter schools must secure and finance their own buildings. State and local taxes pay for the operating costs of charters, but not for their capital needs.

Counties would be authorized to raise taxes to generate the needed funds for charters but wouldn’t be required to do so.

Supporters of the bill say it would even the playing field between charters and traditional public schools, which are already fully funded by taxpayers.

But critics say there’s not enough funding available for traditional public school capital needs as it stands.

“This bill allowing more students to attend failing charter schools risks their education and their future,” Cooper said in a statement Friday.

He said the State Board of Education should maintain oversight of charter schools’ enrollment growth.

“Diverting local resources to build charter schools without clear authority on who owns them risks financial loss to county taxpayers who have no recourse,” Cooper said.

The measure passed both General Assembly chambers with full Republican support and at least one Democratic vote, so it’s a likely candidate for a veto override when lawmakers return to business in Raleigh on Aug. 7, along with five other veto overrides on their calendars.

It’s the 14th veto of the year for Cooper. Six are awaiting override votes. The previous eight have been overridden already.

Republican legislators don’t give a hoot about students or education. They keep their eyes on what matters: profit.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Deregulation, Education Industry, Extremism, Funding, North Carolina, Privatization

Texas A&M President Resigns After Failed Effort to Recruit an Esteemed Black Journalist

By dianeravitch
July 24, 2023 //
66

Kate McGee of The Texas Tribune reported on an academic mess in Texas that turned into a national scandal. Texas A&M, one of the state’s premier universities recruited veteran journalist Kathleen McElroy to serve as Dean of Journalism at A&M. Dr. McElroy was considered a prize catch after years of experience at the New York Times and her doctorate in journalism. In addition, she is a tenured professor at the University of Texas in Austin and a graduate of Texas A&M.

A&M wooed Dr. McElroy, offered her a position with tenure, and held a celebration when she accepted.

When Texas A&M University announced last month that it had hired a director to revive its journalism school, it included the kind of fanfare usually reserved for college coaches and athletes.

The university set up maroon, silver and white balloons around a table outside its Academic Building for an official signing ceremony. It was there that Kathleen O. McElroy, a respected journalist with a long career, officially accepted the position to run the new program and teach as a tenured professor, pending approval from the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

McElroy, a 1981 Texas A&M graduate, was the director of the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism between 2016 and 2022, where she is a tenured professor. Earlier, she spent 20 years in various editing roles at The New York Times until heading to UT-Austin to pursue her doctorate.

But apparently some conservative members of the A&M board objected to Dr. McElroy’s concern for diversity and inclusion, as well as her career at the New York Times, and the offer was whittled down to a position without tenure. Dr. McElroy withdrew her acceptance, and in the ensuing publicity, the president of the multi-campus university resigned.

McGee wrote:

After a week of turmoil over the botched hiring of a Black journalist to revive the Texas A&M University journalism department, M. Katherine Banks has resigned as the university’s president.

Mark A. Welsh III, dean of the Bush School of Government and Public Service, will serve as acting president until the Board of Regents can meet to name an interim president. Texas A&M System Chancellor John Sharp has recommended they appoint Welsh as an interim until the board can do a national search for a new president. Banks’ resignation is effective immediately.

In a letter sent to A&M System Chancellor John Sharp Thursday evening, Banks wrote, “The recent challenges regarding Dr. [Kathleen] McElroy have made it clear to me that I must retire immediately. The negative press is a distraction from the wonderful work being done here.”

The fallout over McElroy’s hiring, which has garnered national media attention, marks the culmination of Banks’ two-year tenure, which was often met with pushback from faculty and students who consistently raised concerns with the direction she was taking the university and the way in which her administration was communicating its vision.

During that time, faculty leaders have passed resolutions calling for more involvement in university decisions, and research leaders on campus raised concerns with her administration’s decision-making. She was forced to walk back the decision to abruptly end the print publication of the university’s student newspaper, The Battalion, after students and alumni protested. Her administration also faced pushback from students after the school decided to cut funding and sponsorship of an annual campus drag show, known as Draggieland. Throughout all of that, Sharp has remained supportive of Banks’ leadership.

In response to the news, McElroy told the Tribune in a text message Friday evening: “I’m deeply grateful for the groundswell of support I’ve received, especially from Aggies of all majors, and my former and current students. There’s much more I could say and will say about what has unfolded. But for now, I’ll reserve those statements for a future date.”

The latest fracas on campus that led to Banks’ resignation comes after the university’s faculty senate passed a resolution Wednesday to create a fact-finding committee into the mishandling of the hiring of McElroy. During that meeting, Banks took responsibility for the flawed hiring process but told faculty members that she did not approve changes to an offer letter that led a prospective journalism professor to walk away from negotiations amid conservative backlash to her hiring.

However, Hart Blanton, the head of the university’s department of communications and journalism who was closely involved in McElroy’s recruiting, said in a statement Friday that Banks interfered with the hiring process early on and that race was a factor in university officials’ decision to water down the job offer…

McElroy, an experienced journalism professor currently working at the University of Texas at Austin who previously worked as an editor at The New York Times, turned down an offer to reboot A&M’s journalism program after a fraught negotiation process first reported by The Texas Tribune. What originally was a tenure-track offer was reduced to a five-year position, then to a one-year position from which she could be fired at any time.

“This offer letter … really makes it clear that they don’t want me there,” McElroy said last week about the one-year contract. “But in no shape, form or fashion would I give up a tenured position at UT for a one-year contract that emphasizes that you can be let go at any point.”

Initially, Texas A&M celebrated hiring McElroy with a public signing ceremony to announce her hiring. But in the weeks following, vocal groups from outside the university system expressed issues with her previous employment at The New York Times and her support for diversity in newsrooms. McElroy has said she was told that not everyone was pleased by her joining the faculty. Critics of her hiring focused on her prior work on diversity and inclusion.

McElroy said she was further told by José Luis Bermúdez, then interim dean of Texas A&M’s College of Arts and Sciences, that there was “noise in the [university] system” about her, though he did not give specifics. When she pressed him, she said he told her, “you’re a Black woman who worked at The New York Times.” He told her that in some conservative circles, The New York Times is akin to Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party in Russia that began in the early 1900s.

McElroy said that Bermúdez ultimately told her he could not protect her from university leaders facing pressure to fire her over “DEI hysteria” surrounding her appointment and advised McElroy to stay in her tenured role at UT-Austin.

Earlier this week, Bermúdez announced he would step down from his role as interim dean at the end of the month.

Categories Ethics, Failure, Higher Education, Race, Racism

Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner: Teach the Truth

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2023 //
18

Dan Rather and his associate Elliot Kirschner explain here why it is important to teach the truth, no matter how unpleasant it is.

They write:

I was born 66 years after slavery was legally abolished by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution. Not exactly ancient history. Today, that’s how long ago the Eisenhower administration was, or Elvis Presley’s first number one hit.

And the legacies of slavery — lynchings, Jim Crow, disenfranchisement — were woven tightly into the American tapestry of my youth. They still echo with us. Loudly and persistently. No matter how much some would want us to ignore the clamor of justice.

As much as we wish American history were different, tragedy is part of our reality. We do a grave disservice to future generations if we sanitize the truth. People can behave horribly. Societies that profess noble values can countenance violent bigotry. We can either look back from whence we have come with clarity, or we can try to muddy the roots of the present and weaken ourselves in the process.

This week, the Florida State Board of Education reworked its standards for teaching Black history. The changes come in response to the state’s so-called “Stop W.O.K.E. Act.” Passed last year, it limits training and education around issues of race, sex, and other criteria for systemic injustice. At its heart is a core belief that has animated right-wing culture warriors: that people alive today should not be made to feel bad or even uncomfortable by the sins of the past. The thinking goes, that was a long time ago.

But of course it really wasn’t. And the legacies of the past live on. And if we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.

Proponents of these new standards, especially their biggest cheerleader, Governor Ron DeSantis, say they promote teaching positive achievements of Black Americans in history. No problem there. It’s when it comes to the other side of the coin that we have a big issue — the new lessons seem intent on downplaying the horrors of the Black experience. In other words, once again, the truth. The truth revealed by hard facts.

One passage that has gotten a lot of attention is for middle schoolers. It states they should learn that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” The danger of this narrative is striking. A system that brutalized, raped, and killed human beings while stealing their freedom and denying their humanity is rotten to its core. That enslaved people were able to find resilience and build lives in some form is a testament to their courage and spirit. There is no “other side” to the story of slavery.

It is true that these new standards, as horrific as they are, would have been a great improvement over what I learned in my segregated middle school. We have come a long way. But that was because of the bravery of civil rights leaders and activists who fought, sometimes with their lives, for a full realization of American values. Any receding from progress — as this surely is — represents a threat to our democracy. We have been strengthened as a nation, all of us, by a national movement to right the wrongs of our past.

It is tempting to try to ignore DeSantis. He is a bully. He wants a reaction. He uses cruelty and disingenuity to garner headlines. He feeds off the anger of his adversaries.

But he also has power. And the lessons of history tell us that we should not ignore would-be autocrats.

The generation that lived through the fights over civil rights in the 1950s and ‘60s is passing away, much as the generation that remembered the Civil War did during my own youth. The loss of the earned knowledge of living through and fighting for change is profound.

This makes it all the more important that when we teach history, we teach the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Or as close to it as is humanly possible.

Categories DeSantis, Education Industry, Extremism, Fake News, Florida, Fraud, Freedom to Read, History
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