Thom Hartmann provides a brief history of the power of the for-profit healthcare industry, which has successfully blocked a national Medicare-for-All system. Please open the link and read it all. The industry’s current push is to get people transferred from Medicare to for-profit Medicare Advantage plans. Under Medicare, seniors can choose their own doctors and do not have to seek permission for costly procedures. under Medicare Advantages, patients may see only in-network doctors and may be denied permission for treatment. That’s where the profit is: denying treatment. About half of all seniors are on a Medicare Advantage plan, because they were wooed by prescription drug coverage or a free gym membership.
Hartmann begins:
Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives, and already have their sights set on forcing major cuts to “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
One of the promises McCarthy made to become speaker was to force a vote on dialing back 2023/2024 spending back to 2021 levels — and there’s been a 7% inflation increase in costs/expenses since then. In other words, they want massive cuts.
His Republican colleagues have already outlined the starting point for their demands, as reportedby Yahoo News:
“The Republican Study Committee proposed a budget for fiscal 2023 that would gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare, and change the Social Security benefit formula for people 54 and younger…”
In that, they’re going to have a hell of a fight on their hands, as Senator Bernie Sanders is taking over leadership of the Senate Health Committee, which oversees Medicare and Medicaid. He’s already promising “a lot of subpoenas” will be arriving at the offices of healthcare and big pharma CEOs.
Most Americans have no idea that the United States is quite literally the only country in the developed world that doesn’t define healthcare as an absolute right for all of its citizens.
That’s it. We’re the only one left. Were the only country in the developed world where somebody getting sick can leave a family bankrupt, destitute, and homeless.
A half-million American families are wiped out every year so completely that they must lose everything and declare bankruptcy just because somebody got sick. The number of health-expense-related bankruptcies in all the other developed countries in the world combined is zero.
Yet the United States spends more on “healthcare” than any other country in the world: about 17% of GDP.
Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Japan all average around 11%, and Canada, Denmark, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia all come in between 9.3% and 10.5%.
Health insurance premiums right now make up about 22% of all taxable payroll (and don’t even cover all working people), whereas Medicare For All would run an estimated 10% and would cover every man, woman, and child in America.
How and why are Americans being played for such suckers?
We are literally the only developed country in the world with an entire multi-billion-dollar for-profit industry devoted to parasitically extracting money from us to then turn over to healthcare providers on our behalf. The for-profit health insurance industry has attached itself to us like a giant, bloodsucking tick.
And it’s not like we haven’t tried to remove that parasite.
Linda Lyon is a retired naval officer and past president of the Arizona School Boards Asociatuon, as well as her local school board. Her blog is called Restore Reason, and she writes here about the struggle to save public schools from antagonists who prefer to save money and who are antagonistic to anything that serves the public good.
Those of you’ve who’ve been around awhile will remember lobbyist Grover Norquist, who founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985. This was during the Reagan years, when government was seen as a drag on the free market. Norquist is probably best known for this quote in 2001: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub”
It has been obvious for many years that Arizona Republican lawmakers want to drown our district schools since the budget for K-12 education makes up almost 44% of the state budget. But then, the predominant responsibilities of the AZ state government are to provide for the public safety and public education, so…it stands to figure that education would comprise a large portion of the budget.
If you’ve listened to the AZ Republican lawmaker talking points over the last few years, you’d tend to believe that public education has been showered with funding. The truth however is quite another story. In fact, adjusting for inflation, K-12 funding per public school student hasn’t increased in 21 years and leaves us still 48th in the nation. In 2001, districts were provided $8,824 per student and now, only $8,770. The high-water mark in 2007 of $10,182 per student was under Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano. This was actually $1,412 more than in 2022.
You see, pretty much all the GOP has been doing over the last few years is to reinstate funding they took away to begin with. And to add insult to injury, they’ve been chipping away at the amount available to district schools by continuous expansion of privatization options.
Guess you’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the battle over vouchers (Empowerment Scholarship Accounts) during the past decade. ESAs were enacted in 2011 and GOP lawmakers have been steadily expanding these vouchers over the years. In 2022, (I’m really cutting to the chase here), they were finally successful in enacting a universal expansion. Not only are students no longer required to have previously attended a district school to qualify for a voucher, but there are no guardrails or cap and no transparency or accountability for private schools. And, only two months into the new law, AZ DOE had received nearly 30,000 filings for the vouchers, totaling an immediate hit to the state fund of $210M. The Joint Legislative Budget Committee only budgeted $33M for the program for the 2022-23 school year, but some now estimate the bill could approach as much as $500M.
Student Tuition Organizations (STOs) are another vehicle to poke holes in the district funding life raft. They allow tax payers to take a dollar-for-dollar reduction in their state taxes when they give to an approved STO which provides scholarship funding to children attending grades K-12 at qualified private schools in Arizona. These STOs basically serve as a pass-through for tax credit donations to private schools while keeping 10 percent for themselves. STOs have also seen tremendous expansion over the years with the individual tax credit amount now at $1,306 which is over six times that which taxpayers can give to district schools. There are also two types of tax credits corporations can take and the combined cap for those is now up to $141M.
Just introduced last week by Representative Livingston, is HB 2014 which seeks to expand the aggregate dollar amount of STO tax credits from $6M in 2021-22 to $10M in 2022-23, to $15M in 2023-24, and to $20M in 2024-25. It also would eliminate the need for recipients of a corporate, low-income scholarship to have attended a district school prior to receiving the scholarship. Keep in mind that removing the requirement to have first attended a district school prior to receiving STO or ESA monies, accommodates students already in private school or being homeschooled, at their parent’s expense. In fact, that was the case for 80% of the filings for the universal expansion last year. And, when a student taking an ESA or STO scholarship was never in a district school, there is zero reduction in cost to that district school and ultimately, taxpayers.
These schemes are chipping away at the foundation of our district (community) schools so that eventually, they can be “drowned in the bathtub”. This is not by accident, but rather, by design. There are those in the Legislature, who do not believe in equal opportunity to learn and thrive, but rather, in survival of the fittest. And, they are hell-bent on deciding who the “fittest” are. Privatizing public education primarily serves those who “have” at the expense of those who “have not”. This continued war on public education will continue to weaken our communities and our democracy as it solidifies power and influence with those at the very top.
Just in case there was any doubt about what Governor DeSantis and Florida legislature banned when they outlawed any discussion of “critical race theory,” that doubt has been resolved. They do not want schools and teachers to acknowledge race, racism, or the very existence of people of color in the United States. Sight unseen, the DOE has banned an AP course on African American studies. The Department claimed that the content of the course is historically inaccurate and violates state law, even though the Department has never seen the course syllabus.
The Miami Herald reported today:
Without a detailed explanation, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration has rejected a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies for high school students, broadly claiming it violates state law and that it “lacks educational value.”
When asked for specifics on the content, the Florida Department of Education did not respond, making it unclear what items the state believes are unlawful or objectionable.
“In the future, should College Board be willing to come back to the table with lawful, historically accurate content, FDOE will always be willing to reopen the discussion,” the state wrote in a letter to the College Board, the company that administers the course as well as other interdisciplinary courses and the SAT exam.
The Advanced Placement program is the first course in African American studies to be offered by the College Board. It would allow high school students to earn credits and advanced placement at many colleges across the country.
The course has been in development for more than a decade, and it focuses not just in history, but explores the “vital contributions and experiences of African Americans” in literature, the arts, political science, geography and science, according to the College Board. A syllabus is not yet publicly available.
Writing in The Progressive, Carol Burris raised an important question: Where are the 1.3 million children who didn’t return to school after schools reopened? Burris is the executive director of the Network for Public Education.
As she points out, the lobbyists for the privatizers claim that they must be in charter schools or voucher schools, but Burris shows this is not accurate. Some may be homeschooled; but the data on the number of children being homeschooled is inadequate to know how many children are being tutored at home.
Burris writes:
Between the fall of 2019 and 2021, 1.3 million children left the American public school system, according toEducation Week. For those who care about the welfare of children, this sharp decline is worrisome. We know that enrollment declineswere the steepest in large cities, where our neediest students reside and where COVID-19 was more devastating.
How many have dropped out, working in the underground economy or languishing at home without schooling? The honest answer is that there is no comprehensive accounting of where (or if) all of those 1.3 million children are now being schooled.
However, what should be a national concern centered on the welfare of children has instead become promotional material for those who wish to eliminate public schools. The libertarian right and its allies, including the Center for Education Reform, have chalked up the decline to a story of unhappy public school parents exercising school choice. But is it?
According to a 2020 report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), “hundreds of thousands of families switched to charter schools during the first full school year of the pandemic.” On the surface, that is correct. But the report avoids the elephant in the room—the kinds of charter schools that gained enrollment during this period.
The 2020 charter enrollment spike that NAPCS reported was largely due to increased enrollment in low-quality online charter schools, as I detailed in an analysis for The Washington Post. Enrollment in these schools increased by 175,260 students during the 2020-2021 school year, representing more than 70 percent of the NAPCS’s reported enrollment growth.
The increase in enrollment in online charter schools that occurred during the early years of the pandemic is part of a long-term trend. In 2013, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) started tracking the online school sector. In the pre-pandemic years, between 2013 and 2020, online schools accounted for 25 percent of charter enrollment growth, according to the center’s data.
In 2022, NAPCS published another report that presented a dizzying array of data, some of which contradicted the previous year’s report, to make the case that charters had retained the students they gained in the pandemic shift.
According to that report, in fall 2021, there were only 1,436 fewer students in charters compared to 33,308 fewer students in public schools than there were in fall 2020. The most recent NCES numbers tell a different story: According to that data, charter school enrollment dropped by 5,323 students in 2021, while public school enrollment increased by 83,323 students—small shifts but nevertheless important to note.
So, did charter school enrollment go up during the pandemic? Yes. Was this a seismic shift? No….
Leaders of the anti-public school movement promote bootleg homeschools and “micro-schools” as innovative alternatives to public schools, using declines in test scores as the rationale for abandoning the public system. Ironically, however, homeschoolers are not required to provide any evidence of student learning in most states. This includes Arizona, whose ESA voucher program is taxpayer-funded with no standards. Parents can awarda high school diploma based on any criteria they want. According to Ed Choice, the average Arizona ESA account value on January 17, 2023 exceeded $15,500 per year per student. (On January 18, the site updated that figure to $11,332.)
This is akin to an insurance company giving the parent of an ill child a payout to spend on a cure—with no stipulation that the parent goes to a licensed physician or that anyone reports back on the child’s health.
Certainly, there are responsible homeschoolers who have developed sound programs to educate and socialize their child. But without requirements to provide sound evidence of learning, a sudden spike in homeschooling should be a cause for alarm, not celebration.
While libertarian advocacy groups call for a “de-centralized network of schools,” to resemble what existed for American schooling in the nineteenth century, before Horace Mann, the truth is that before it became a universal system of “government funded and operated schools,” schooling in America was an uncoordinated, free-for-all that left most children undereducated, which is exactly where the contemporary school choice movement is headed.
Instead, what we should be concentrating on is locating those 1.3 million children and ensuring they are both educated and safe.
Republican control of the state legislature has produced the customary demand to defund the state’s public schools by enacting vouchers to pay for private and religious schools from state funds. The initial proposals, as usual, are understated. Next steps will remove limits on income and eligibility and will increase the payments per students. The camel’s nose will soon be an entire camel inside the tent. Don’t believe the promises. The attack on public school funding is just the opening bid.
If state law permits it, the people of New Hampshire should demand a referendum and determine whether they want to defund their public schools for the benefit of those already in private and religious schools.
National School Choice Week is a week away and to celebrate, the House Education Committee has a number of hearings this week on the Education Freedom Account program.
Last fall, the program’s funding was challenged by the head of the American Federation of Teachers — NH claiming state law earmarks public education money for public education not private programs or schools and sought an injunction to block sending any more Education Trust Fund grants to parents.
“If the state desires to operate an Education Freedom Account or similar program, whereby it grants public money for parents to utilize for private use, it must separately fund it through additional taxation or another source of funds,” the suit claims, noting there currently is no mechanism for doing so. While program advocates downplayed the suit, at the time, a constitutional amendment and a bill were introduced to change the state constitution and state statutes to allow Education Trust Fund money to be spent on the program. That would appear to imply “we got a problem Houston,” as the astronauts said aboard Apollo 13 many years ago.
Constitutional Amendment Concurrent Resolution 7, with prime sponsor Rep. Glenn Cordelli, R-Tuftonboro, would remove a sentence from the state constitution that reads “Provided, nevertheless, that no money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools or institutions of any religious sect or denomination.”
To date about 75 percent of the state funds spent for the freedom account program has subsidized tuition for students who attended private and religious schools before the program was launched in 2021 and not students leaving public schools for private or religious schools as advocates had predicted.
To date the program has cost the state $24 million and the private organization that manages and administers the program, which the suit also says is not legal, the Children’s Scholarship Program, is holding a School Fair Jan. 21 in Manchester to recruit more students in “celebration of school choice week.”
Cordelli is also the prime sponsor of House Bill 440, which would change the statute for the Education Trust Fund allowing the distribution of funds “to scholarship organizations approved under RSA 77:G that administers and implements the education freedom accounts program pursuant to RSA 194-F.”
The change would also allow the transfer of general fund money into the Education Trust Fund if it runs out of money and cannot pay its obligations.
Public hearings have not been set for either the proposed constitutional amendment or the bill changing the use of Education Trust Fund money.
However, there will be public hearings this week on two bills that would expand who would qualify for the freedom account program.
Currently program participants are limited to 300 percent of the federal poverty level or about $80,000 for a family of four and $52,000 in a two-person household.
The guideline is just for income and does not include a person’s assets.
Parents could own a lakefront home, but do not earn $80,000 the first year of eligibility, and their child or children may participate in the program for as long as they are school age.
House Bill 357 would increase the income threshold to 500 percent of poverty level which would be about $140,000 for a family of four and $68,000 for a two-person family.
The prime sponsor of the bill is Rep. Alicia Lekas, R-Hudson, and the public hearing will be held before the House Education Committee at 11 a.m. Thursday in Rooms 205-207 of the Legislative Office Building.
The same day at 9:30 a.m., the committee is scheduled to hear House Bill 464, which would also expand who is eligible for the scholarship program.
The bill would retain the 300 percent of poverty level threshold, but would add a child in foster care, or homeless or disabled, or has an educational hardship; or his or her parents travel for work like farm workers, are in the armed services or National Guard; or in a school in need of improvement under the No Child Left Behind Act or is designated as persistently dangerous; or if a child qualifies for the free or reduced lunch program.
The additional children added under this bill would bring it more in line with how it was sold as an opportunity for lower-income families to find the best educational opportunity for their child instead of subsidizing the tuition payments of children already attending private and religious schools.
However, the bill, with prime sponsor Rep. Erica Layon, R-Derry, could add a substantial number of children to the program.
The program’s average grant this school year is about $5,000 per student, so the state’s obligation could increase substantially. It would take 200 new students to add $1 million in annual costs.
The original estimate for program costs was $300,000 the first year and $3.3 million the second. Instead it was more than $8 million the first year with 1,500 students, and as of November, $15.2 million this school year with 3,110 students.
Another bill sponsored by Lekas would eliminate an income limit on the program, which could cost the state as much as $70 million if all eligible students participated under the current guidelines.
A public hearing on House Bill 331, which would eliminate the income threshold, has not yet been scheduled.
And the bills do not stop there.
Please open the link and read on. New Hampshire’s public schools are at risk.
Mercedes Schneider takes issue with the new authoritarians who are imposing book bans in the name of “freedom” and limiting free expressions of views they disagree with in the name of of “choice.”
She writes:
We are certainly in an age in which the term, “free speech,” is indeed not free because of increasing conservative pressure to shape speech into that which a minority of extreme, right-wing conservatives would agree with.
Of course, that is not “free speech” at all.
In my school district, the St. Tammany Library Alliance is combating the right-wing conservative push to ban library books not to its liking. In its campaign declaring “Libraries Are for Everyone,” the Alliance is circulating a petition that states the following:
St Tammany Parish is a welcoming community to all and we stand firmly against banning books. As such we endorse the following statements:
We believe that all young people in our Parish deserve to see themselves reflected in our library’s collection.
We know a large majority of Americans (75%) across the political spectrum oppose book bans.We stand in opposition to the St Tammany Parish Accountability Project’s proposed “Library Accountability Board” ordinance because we believe parents should not be making decisions for other parents’ children about what they read or what is available in our public libraries.
Banning books from public libraries is a slippery slope to government censorship and a violation of our first amendment rights.
We hold our library Director, board and library staff in high regard and trust them to do their jobs.
We are united against book bans and we ask that our Parish President and Council pledge to act to protect the rights of members of our community to access a variety of books, magazines and other media through our public libraries.
Those truly adhering to and protecting free speech are at risk of losing their jobs– and under increasing pressure to modify their speech in order to please the extreme, disgruntled few.
I gladly signed the petition. Even though it is not likely that I might choose to read certain books harbored in my local public library, there is something much greater at risk if I try to impose a self-tailored book purge, and that something is freedom itself.
Freedom is not freedom if I tailor the freedom of others to suit my own preferences.
A great irony is that some of the same folks who would shape education and curriculum into their preferred image also promote themselves as great advocates of “school choice.”
Mercedes goes on to describe examples of “choice” that is no choice at all.” Freedom is curtailed when one group of people can curtail the rights of others to disagree.
Please open the link and read her warning about the threat to democracy posed by today’s narrow-minded ideologues.
Think of the most extreme, most vitriolic, least responsible members of the GOP caucus in the House of Representatives. Think of the ones who defended the insurrection. Think of those who encouraged the effort to overturn our government. Speaker Kevin McCarthy just put them on the most important committee in the House, the one that will conduct investigations for the next two years.
Hunter Biden’s laptop! Hunter Biden’s Laptop! Jewish space lasers! QAnon! Pedophiles! The entire Biden family (unlike the Trump family) enriching themselves on your dime (please don’t bring up the $2 billion that the Saudis gave Jared Kushner after Biden took office!) Hunter Biden’s laptop! The hundreds of classified documents that Trump fought to hold onto for over a year, first claiming they were planted by the FBI, then claiming they were his personal property, and the small number of documents that Biden immediately turned over! Trump good, Biden bad! Laptop!
WASHINGTON — They were deeply involved in President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. They have come to the defense of people being prosecuted for participating in the deadly storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Some have called for violence against their political enemies online, embraced conspiracy theories or associated with white supremacists.
Several of the most extreme Republicans in Congress and those most closely allied with Mr. Trump have landed seats on the Oversight and Accountability Committee, the main investigative organ in the House. From that perch, they are poised to shape inquiries into the Biden administration and to serve as agents of Mr. Trump in litigating his grievances as he plots his re-election campaign.
Their appointments are the latest evidence that the new Republican majority is driven by a hard-right faction that has modeled itself in Mr. Trump’s image, shares his penchant for dealing in incendiary statements and misinformation, and is bent on using its newfound power to exact revenge on Democrats and President Biden.
Many of the panel’s new Republican members — including Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Paul Gosar of Arizona, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania — are among Mr. Trump’s most devoted allies in Congress. Their appointments underscore that, while the former president may be a shrunken presence in the current political landscape, he still exerts much control over the base of his party.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wants to stake his claim to be the leader of the libertarian anti-vaxxers. He has banned any mandates by schools or businesses to require masking or getting vaccinated. The legislature went along with him, on a temporary basis, but now he wants the legislators to mandate non-compliance with CDC public health protocols. (Because he opposes mandates!). In short, he is mandating that no one can require a mandate to wear a mask or get vaccinated.
Is he stupid, clever, craven, cunning or what? If nothing else, he’s getting attention.
The Miami Herald reports:
Despite facing pushback from medical professionals and businesses, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced legislation Tuesday that would make permanent a law to penalize companies that require employees to wear masks or be vaccinated for COVID-19 and added a new ban on medical boards reprimanding doctors for spreading COVID misinformation.
“This is just nuts that we’re still doing this,’’ DeSantis said to cheering supporters in Panama City Beach. “We need to be leading on this by making all of these protections permanent in Florida statute as we need to do in the upcoming legislative session.”
The proposal will attempt to make permanent a series of laws passed by legislators in November 2021 after DeSantis called a special session aimed at restricting Florida businesses that were following a federal law requiring mask mandates or requiring employees to be vaccinated. If approved by Florida legislators, the measure would continue to prohibit COVID-19 vaccine and mask requirements in schools and government, and prohibit COVID-19 vaccine requirements for employment or travel.
Those laws are set to expire in June. DeSantis wants them re-enacted and made tougher to be sure that no one feels compelled to wear a mask or get vaccinated.
This year, DeSantis wants to expand the sanctions on businesses by prohibiting employers from hiring or firing based on vaccine status or wearing a mask, and he wants to revive a failed proposal from last year’s legislative session that would make it more difficult for a medical licensing board to reprimand or sanction a doctor for views expressed by the medical professional — including on social media.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo also spoke at the news conference Tuesday and repeated his claim that masks are not effective in preventing the spread of the virus and dismissed the effectiveness of vaccines. “This is the first time in history where we are using this technology widely in human beings,’’ he said, referring to the mRNA vaccines.
“You’re telling people to put it in children, and you’ve never even shown the children to gain from it in terms of an actual help. That’s the land of crazy. Florida is the land of sanity.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website lists several studies that have shown masking to be helpful in curbing the spread of the virus. In January 2022, a CDC report found vaccinated Americans were far less likely both to contract the virus and die from it.
LEADING HOUSE DEMOCRAT RESPONDS
House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell of Tampa called the governor and his administration “the No. 1 peddler of misinformation from the anti-vax establishment.”
“It is a fake ideology with real consequences,’’ she said, noting that less than one-third of Florida’s nursing home residents, the most vulnerable age group, are up to date on their vaccines, even though the state Department of Health recommends it.
Driskell emphasized that “no one ever promised total immunity, but those vaccines do lessen the chance of infection and they increase the likelihood of a milder case if you do get sick.” She accused the governor of “rewriting history” after promoting the vaccines when they were first available.
Since former President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid, DeSantis sought to become the face of the opposition to the Biden administration’s COVID policies which the governor said were overreaching. He called lawmakers into special session in November 2021 to punish companies that followed the federal law.
DeSantis wanted the legislature to punish businesses that required their employees to get vaccinated, but more than 100 corporations objected to the state’s interference in their operations, and the legislature did not adopt DeSantis’ most punitive measures. However, after his sweeping re-election, the legislature is likely to give him what he wants…
“The Free State of Florida did not happen by accident,” DeSantis said at the news conference Tuesday in which he took no questions. “It required us over these last few years to stand against major institutions in our society — the bureaucracy, the medical establishment, legacy media and even the President of the United States — who together were working to impose a bio medical security state on society.”
Long before the Presidential election of 2020, Trump predicted that it would be rigged. On Election Day, he claimed that he had won. When the results were in, he insisted the election was stolen. His attack on the security of our elections was an attack on democracy itself. Despite the fact that his legal team lost 60 court cases and never produced any evidence of fraud, millions of Trump’s fervent believers continue to think the election was stolen.
Demands for a recount continue, even though hand recounts in Georgia and Arizona produced no evidence of fraud.
Even in counties that Trump won, his supporters demand a recount.
Election deniers in a small rural county in Pennsylvania, where Trump won 70% of the vote, insisted on a hand recount. County officials conceded.
WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — On the 797th day after the defeat of former President Donald J. Trump, a rural Pennsylvania county on Monday began a recount of ballots from Election Day 2020.
Under pressure from conspiracy theorists and election deniers, 28 employees of Lycoming County counted — by hand — nearly 60,000 ballots. It took three days and an estimated 560 work hours, as the vote-counters ticked through paper ballots at long rows of tables in the county elections department in Williamsport, a place used to a different sort of nail-biter as the home of the Little League World Series.
The results of Lycoming County’s hand recount — like earlier recounts of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona — revealed no evidence of fraud. The numbers reported more than two years ago were nearly identical to the numbers reported on Thursday.
Mr. Trump ended up with seven fewer votes than were recorded on voting machines in 2020. Joseph R. Biden Jr. had 15 fewer votes. Overall, Mr. Trump gained eight votes against his rival. The former president, who easily carried deep-red Lycoming County in 2020, carried it once again with 69.98 percent of the vote — gaining one one-hundredth of a point in the recount.
Did that quell the doubts of election deniers, who had circulated a petition claiming there was a likelihood of “rampant fraud” in Lycoming in 2020?
It did not.
“This is just one piece of the puzzle,” said Karen DiSalvo, a lawyer who helped lead the recount push and who is a local volunteer for the far-right group Audit the Vote PA. “We’re not done.”
Forrest Lehman, the county director of elections, oversaw the recount but opposed it as a needless bonfire of time, money and common sense. He sighed in his office on Friday….
“It’s surreal to be talking about 2020 in the present tense, over two years down the road,” he said. He attributed the slight discrepancies between the hand recount and voting machine results to human error in reading ambiguous marks on the paper ballots.
Lycoming County’s recount was part of the disturbing trend of mistrust in elections that has become mainstream in American politics, spurred by the lies of Mr. Trump and his supporters. Amid the Appalachian ridges in north-central Pennsylvania, such conspiracy theories have firmly taken hold.
This is Donald Trump’s most important legacy: the deep erosion of trust in democracy. If people no longer trust the validity of elections, they can no longer trust the foundational principles of a democratic society.
For this legacy of mistrust in free and fair elections, Trump must be counted as the worst president in American history. Bar none.
Billy Townsend writes in the Tampa Bay Times about how Florida politicians game the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores to boast about unearned “success.” The gaming consists of bragging about fourth grade scores (which are high) while ignoring eighth grade scores (which are unimpressive).
The big Florida trick is third grade retention—holding back the children in third grade who have low reading scores. This artificially boosts fourth grade scores. But then comes the eighth grade scores, and Florida falls behind. They can’t hide the low-scoring students forever.
He writes:
A close look at ‘the Nation’s Report Card’ shows how Florida fails its students as they move up through the grades.
A few years ago, just before COVID hit, a Stanford University study of state-level standardized tests showed that Florida’s “learning rate” was the worst in the country — by a wide margin.
Florida has the worst learning rate, according to a Stanford study. [ Provided ]
Florida students learned 12 percent less each year from third to eighth grade than the national average from 2009 to 2018. The next worst state was Alabama, according to The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University. Florida’s political and education leaders completely ignored that finding.
Contrast that deafening silence with the hype and misinterpretation that comes with the release of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), “the Nation’s Report Card.” When those results came out last fall, Gov. Ron DeSantis crowed on Twitter that, “We kept schools open in 2020, and today’s NAEP results once again prove that we made the right decision. In Florida, adjusted for demographics, fourth grade students are #1 in both reading and math.”
Tellingly, DeSantis ignored the eighth grade results, which came out far worse than fourth grade — just as they have in every NAEP cycle since 2003.
The “Nation’s Report Card” is a snapshot of group proficiency taken by different cohorts of kids every two years in reading and math in fourth grade and eighth grade. It produces state-by-state results and proficiency rankings. It does not track individual kids year over year. But it does tell you how Florida’s fourth and eighth graders compare with students in other states. I crunched the data, and here’s the bottom line: Florida’s students perform worse as they move up through the grades. There is consistent, massive systemic regression with age. And the gap is widening.
This is a state failure, not a local one attributable to individual districts. Yet, in every NAEP cycle, Florida politicians and education leaders brag about fourth-grade NAEP results in press releases.
But ignoring the eighth grade results or the “learning rate” study does not change these facts:
· Florida kids regress dramatically as they age in the system. Since 2003, Florida’s eighth grade rank as a state has never come close to its fourth grade rank on any NAEP test in any subject.
· The size of Florida’s regression is dramatic and growing, especially in math.Florida’s overall average NAEP state rank regression between fourth and eighth grade since 2003 is 17 spots (math) and 18 spots (reading). But since 2015, the averages are 27 spots (math) and 19 spots (reading).
· No other state comes close to Florida’s level of consistent fourth to eighth grade performance collapse. In the last three NAEP cycles — 2017, 2019 and COVID-delayed 2022 — Florida ranked sixth, fourth and third among states in fourth grade math. In those same years, Florida ranked 33th, 34th and tied for 31st in eighth grade.
· For comparison, Massachusetts typically ranks at or near #1 among states on both the fourth grade and eighth grade NAEP for math and reading. Its eighth grade rank has never been more than one spot lower than fourth.
· Florida has never matched the U.S. average scaled score on eighth grade math NAEP.
· In COVID-marred 2022, Florida’s eighth grade scale scores in reading and math both lost 8 points relative to the national average, compared to fourth grade. That’s larger or equal to the overall collapse of NAEP scores nationwide attributed to COVID.
To restate, what happens every NAEP cycle between fourth and eighth grade in Florida matches and mostly exceeds the negative impact of COVID. Overall, recent NAEP cycles show Florida collapsing from elite test scores in fourth grade reading and math to abysmal in eighth grade math and average in eighth grade reading, even after its much-hyped approach to COVID in 2022.
And, worse, there is no reason at all to believe Florida’s test performance regression with age stops at eighth grade. The only two years the NAEP tested 12th graders — 2009 and 2013 — the Florida collapse worsened significantly with further age, but against a smaller pool of states.
Willful ignorance, useless testing
So what to make of this?
You can rest assured that your top education officials know all about Florida’s eighth grade NAEP and learning rate failures, which is why they never discuss them. I suspect these test data realities helped drive Florida to drop its big state growth test — the Florida Standards Assessment — and move toward a “progress monitoring” regime this year that may or may not create functionally different data reporting models.
The discourse around Florida’s NAEP performance — and the catastrophic learning rate that we ignore on our state tests — makes me deeply skeptical of standardized tests and their use in our education systems and society. I see them as punitive political and social sorting tools, rather than “assessments” designed to help individual children reach their potential.
Forget whether test results are valid or biased. We can’t even accurately describe what the test results say — on their face — about the success of our state school system. So what use are they?
Florida’s politicians, education leaders, policy community and journalists should look at these results and ask this basic question: The data tells us your child will regress dramatically every year he or she stays in the Florida system. What’s going on?
If we can’t do that, then why do we force standardized tests on kids at all?
What we should be studying
I’ve been attempting to draw attention to this dramatic Florida regression dynamic for years. So I was pleased to the see the Tampa Bay Times Editorial Board and Hillsborough County Schools Superintendent Addison Davis notice and publicly address the massive drop in test performance between fourth and eighth grade in Florida on the 2022 NAEP. But I was puzzled by suggestions that it was something new, caused by COVID. It isn’t; and it wasn’t.
Indeed, if we took standardized tests seriously as diagnostic and development tools, we would have long ago started asking: What causes this? What changes need to be made beyond rebuilding and supporting a developmentally focused teacher corps? What are the system quirks of Florida that cause this dynamic?
Here are some good questions to ask and study:
· Why doesn’t “learn to read, read to learn” work in Florida?
One of our treasured education cliches is “learn to read” so you can “read to learn.” It’s essentially the policy justification for imposing mass retention on third graders, as Florida does. And yet, although Florida routinely ranks high fourth grade NAEP reading, our readers immediately lose massive ground relative to other states. The data shows that Florida’s often punitive emphasis on “learn to read” by third or fourth grade creates no benefit in “reading to learn” in later grades — in math or reading. Why not?
· What is the role of mass third grade retention in Florida’s fourth grade peak and subsequent collapse?
Florida pioneered mass third grade retention based on reading standardized test scores in 2003. This prevents the lowest scoring third grade readers from taking the NAEP with their age cohort in fourth grade. And when that low scoring third grader finally takes the fourth grade NAEP, retention has made it as if he or she is a fifth grader taking the fourth grade NAEP.
Florida law theoretically subjects more than 40 percent of Florida’s roughly 200,000 public school third graders to retention because of low scores. A smaller — but still significant — number is actually retained. Florida does not appear to publish that actual total number of third graders retained.
· What is the cost to the individual children and overall system performance?
Is that affecting Florida’s learning rate for older kids and the eighth grade NAEP collapse? A 2017 study of a cohort of southwest Florida students showed that seven years after retention, 94% of the retained group remained below reading proficiency. It also showed that third and sixth graders find retention as stressful as losing a parent.
· How many voucher third grade testing refugees are there? What effect do they have on the fourth grade NAEP?
Third grade retention is not Florida’s only way to get low scoring fourth graders off the books for the NAEP. It’s been well-established that Florida over-testing and third grade retention is a primary sales tool for vouchers.TheOrlando Sentinel’sPulitzer-worthy “Schools without Rules”report in 2017 about voucher schools reported: “Escaping high-stakes testing is such a scholarship selling point that one private school administrator refers to students as ‘testing refugees’.”
How many testing refugees are there? And how does Florida’s massive voucher program — America’s largest and least studied — affect performance on the NAEP by allowing low scoring kids to duck it?
· What effect do voucher school dropouts have on scoring when they return in massive numbers to public schools?
Enormous numbers of “low-scoring” kids duck third and fourth grade tests and then come back into the public system to be counted in the eighth grade NAEP and other yearly tests. That’s likely a recipe for score collapse. But there is no hard data to analyze. Florida is long overdue for such a study, and voucher advocates know it will be a data bloodbath.
· Does chasing test scores kill test scores over time?
Test-driven instruction isn’t engaging. Kids come to understand how useless these tests are to their lives; and they behave accordingly. Teachers come to hate the test-obsessed model and leave the profession. How has that affected test scores?
A longstanding waste of human potential
For me, the eighth grade NAEP and “learning rate” failures are evidence that we’ve wasted a generation of human potential and severely damaged Florida’s teaching profession. Will anyone “follow the data” where it leads? Will anyone ask: Should our kids peak at age 9 and decline inexorably from there?
I believe Florida has long had one of America’s worst test-performing state school systems because of its governance model and intellectual corruption and pursuit of useless measures and fake accountability.
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Billy Townsend was an award-winning investigative reporter for The Lakeland Ledger and Tampa Tribune. He oversaw education reporting as an editor for The Ledger. He has been an independent writer and journalist since 2008, focused on Florida history, education and civic systems. He was an elected Polk County School Board member from 2016-2020. Today he writes the Florida-focused email newsletter “Public Enemy Number 1.” He can be reached at townsendsubstackpe1@gmail.com.
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