The state Attorney General in Oklahoma just obliterated the distinction between charters and vouchers by ruling that the state law requiring charters to be non-sectarian was invalid. His decision won plaudits, not surprisingly, from far-right Governor Kevin Stitt, the state’s Catholic Conference, and the state’s American Federation for Children, which is part of Betsy DeVos’s voucher-advocating national group of the same name.
This is the breakthrough that Betsy DeVos has counted on for years: that charter schools would be the stepping stone to vouchers.
Think of all the “liberals” and “progressives” who have supported charters, abetting the eventual and inevitable public funding of religious schools: Senator Cory Booker, Senator Michael Bennett, Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Reed Hastings, former Governor Jerry Brown, the Center for American Policy (CAP), DFER, the Obama Education Department, and many more. CAP is supposedly the Democratic Party think tank, but it has resolutely supported charter schools. And now it’s on the same side as Betsy DeVos.
In a 15-page opinion released today, outgoing Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor advised charter school authorizers that the aspects of the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act requiring school operators to be non-religious and non-sectarian likely violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and should not be enforced.
Primarily citing three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings regarding religious liberties in public education — Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer (2017); Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020); and Carson v. Makin (2022) — O’Connor argued that religiously affiliated private organizations should be allowed to apply to operate charter schools.
“In sum, we do not believe the U.S. Supreme Court would accept the argument that, because charter schools are considered public for various purposes, that a state should be allowed to discriminate against religiously affiliated private participants who wish to establish and operate charter schools in accordance with their faith alongside other private participants,” O’Connor wrote in the opinion which is embedded below.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools that can be governed and operated outside of traditional school districts. The schools can run by private management companies. Currently, Oklahoma statute requires operators of the state’s approximately 30 charter schools to be “non-sectarian” and “non-religious.”
Among the entities allowed to authorizer a charter school in Oklahoma is the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board. Executive director Rebecca Wilkinson originally asked the formal question that resulted in O’Connor’s office issuing an opinion on whether the board may “continue to enforce the nonsectarian requirements set forth” in Oklahoma statute.
Reached for comment Thursday, Wilkinson said she didn’t know the opinion had been released.
“I have not seen it,” Wilkinson said. “I can’t comment on it today, but when we hang up I guarantee you I will be going out to search for it.”
‘Overjoyed with the attorney general’s opinion’
Gov. Kevin Stitt, the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma and the American Federation for Children-Oklahoma celebrated the opinion.
“Attorney General John O’Connor’s opinion rightfully defends parents, education freedom, and religious liberty in Oklahoma,” Stitt said in a statement. “Ultimately, government takes a backseat to parents who get to determine the best learning environment for their child.”
The Catholic Conference of Oklahoma also praised O’Connor’s opinion. In an interview. executive director Brett Farley said the Catholic Conference has an application ready to submit to the SVCSB to operate its own Catholic virtual charter school.
I started this blog in April 2012. At the time, I wanted to spread the word about the dangers that were looming via a coordinated, well-funded attack on public schools and the teaching profession. The blog was my medium for awakening the public and educators.
Each time, I reached one million page views, I would announce it. Page views are recorded each time someone opens the site. Some people log in more than once a day.
I just checked and discovered that the blog has been opened 40.1 million times.
Quite a lot of journalists read it regularly. I am guessing that most readers are educators.
I select articles that interest me and try to keep the site lively. On a few occasions, I have featured local stories shared by readers or by my daily reading of many newspapers and magazines, then discovered that those stories got national attention.
A note to readers: I read every comment.
Thank you for your attention, your time, and your participation.
One of the best programs created by the Biden administration was the Child Tax Credit. It cut child poverty in half. But Republicans, with the crucial vote of West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, killed the program at the first opportunity.
The New York Times reviews the effects of the program and predicts that Democrats will seek to revive it. It’s hard to imagine a future for the Child Tax Credit so long as Republicans control the House of Representatives. The House controls appropriations. I’m afraid I don’t understand a political party whose ideology is to oppose any program other than tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. Why fight a program that gives millions of children a better life? I don’t get it.
Jason DeParle wrote:
A pandemic-era program that sent monthly checks of up to $300 per child to most families drove down poverty rates. Amid new research about its merits, some Democrats are vowing to bring it back.
WASHINGTON — When the history of American hardship is written in some distant decade, two recent events may capture the whipsaw forces of the age.
Child poverty fell to a record low. And the program that did the most to reduce it vanished.
The story of that temporary program — technically, a tax-credit expansion but more plainly a series of monthly checks to most families with children — was extraordinary in every way. A guaranteed income in a country long resistant to one, the expanded child tax credit emerged from obscurity to win support from most of the Democratic Party, aided millions of low- and middle-income families during the pandemic and helped cut child poverty nearly in half.
Then it died, as President Biden’s efforts to preserve it drew unified Republican opposition and the defection of a crucial Senate Democrat. Critics called the monthly payments of up to $300 per child an expensive welfare scheme that would deter parents from working by providing cash aid regardless of whether they had jobs.
The checks have ended, but the battle has not. Supporters say new evidence shows the payments lowered hardship and nurtured children without reducing parental employment. Some Democrats hope to revive payments to small groups of parents as part of a year-end tax deal, and despite Republicans taking control of the House in January, restoring the full program remains a long-term Democratic goal.
“It was soul crushing not to get it, but the commitment to the tax credit remains — absolutely,” said Maria Cancian, a former Obama administration official who is dean of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. “We’ve shown that we can get money in the hands of parents and really make a difference.”
Skeptics argue the payments’ six-month run was too brief to test whether the guaranteed cash weakened incentives to work, and they find the short-term benefits less impressive than supporters say.
“There was a meaningful reduction in material hardship, but the reduction has been exaggerated,” said Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s much smaller than you would expect when hearing the phrase, ‘Cut child poverty in half.’”
Each side might find support in the experience of Thomas Horton and his wife, Pamela Mudge, who are raising three children in Pitcairn, Pa., outside Pittsburgh.
Mr. Horton, 38, and a teenage son receive disability benefits, which became the family’s main support after Ms. Mudge lost work at the start of the pandemic. Tax credit payments of $750 a month raised their cash income by nearly 50 percent and lifted them above the poverty line.
While most of the aid went to bills, Mr. Horton cited two breaks from frugal norms that lent the children a boost. One was a trip to Walmart, to quiet their classmates’ taunts over their thrift-shop clothes. Another was the family’s first vacation — a single night in a state park, where they pitched a borrowed tent and made s’mores. “I saw a happiness in my wife and kids I hadn’t seen in a long time,” he said. “I felt like father of the year.”
At the same time, Mr. Horton acknowledged the payments’ end hastened his wife’s return to work — a point the program’s detractors would emphasize — and that her earnings roughly replaced the lost aid. (She works part-time so she can assist with his care for a bone disease that has required several back operations.) Mr. Horton said she would have returned to work anyway and, had the payments continued as supporters hoped, the children would be better off.
“We’re back to the everyday struggle,” he said.
Many countries offer cash aid to subsidize child-rearing costs. But historically the idea gained little traction in the United States, where faith in upward mobility held greater sway and racial divisions slowed the growth of the welfare state. As recently as the 1990s, a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, eliminated guarantees of cash aid to poor families.
In part the growing interest in family aid is rooted in concerns about inequality. It also reflects science that showed the importance of the formative years and research (summarized in an influential 2019 report) that found government aid helps children advance.
An unlikely force accelerated the drive: a Republican tax cut. A 2017 law elevated the child tax credit by doubling its value and extending it to high-income families while keeping earnings requirements that denied the poorest third of children the full benefit.
Republicans argued that tax credits logically favor taxpayers, but Democrats saw inequity in a children’s policy that excluded children who most needed help. They sought to subsidize all poor and middle-class families, regardless of parental employment, and increase the benefit.
The pandemic offered the chance. The aid Mr. Biden won last year included six monthly payments (of $250 a child or $300 for those under 6) and a lump-sum payment for an additional six months that was paid this spring. Supporters had hoped that the program, kept temporary to limit costs, would prove too popular to lapse.
“That’s a very big impact — very big,” said Elaine Waxman, a researcher at the Urban Institute. “People clearly used the money to buy food or we wouldn’t be seeing those kinds of numbers.”
“To put it bluntly. the child tax credit was a really good thing,” said Megan A. Curran, an analyst at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy who published a review of recent studies. “These are some of the most impressive results we’ve ever seen from a single policy.”
The payments’ effect on parents’ decisions to work has drawn extensive interest. One study found the aid coincided with an employment decline of two percentage points, though only among the least-educated parents. But at least sixstudies found no change in parental employment, though a decline would likely take longer than six months to fully appear…
Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute argues that last year’s program has little predictive value because the conditions were so unusual, with short-lived payments, other forms of temporary aid, and a job market skewed by the virus. “Studying a six-month program in the midst of a pandemic just doesn’t give you much information,” he said.
But others say a real-world test that involved more than 60 million children is more rigorous than the small experiments that often shape policies. “It’s worlds ahead of the kind of evidence we usually have,” said H. Luke Shaefer, a researcher at the University of Michigan who found that hardships fell as soon as the payments started and rose as soon as they stopped.
Last year, Mr. Biden’s lengthy attempt to continue the payments failed to persuade Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat who criticized the program’s costs and said aid should be limited to parents who work.
Despite bets on its popularity, the program expired with little political backlash, and Democrats, accused of inflationary spending, said little about it in congressional campaigns. The credit reverted to its previous state: a $2,000 annual benefit that includes high-income families but fails to fully reach those in the bottom third…
Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution, a longtime advocate for safety net programs, urged Congress to reinstate payments to some parents in exchange for preserving a corporate tax break that expires this year. “Its benefits are proven, while the idea that the there might be some small adverse effect down the road is merely speculation,” he said…
Supporters of the credit often lament that the United States has higher child poverty rates than many advanced countries (with poverty defined as half of each nation’s median income). Zachary Parolin, a researcher affiliated with Columbia University, found that the expanded credit raised the American rankto 21st of 53 nations, from 40th — to a place beside Germany, rather than Bulgaria.
He was stunned when the payments ceased. “I had this theory that once the policy is there there’s no way to get rid of it,” he said. “I was wrong — it’s gone.”
Jan Resseger and the Network for Public Education urge you to contact your Senators and members of the House to support reinstatement of the Child Tax Credit. It must happen before Republicans take control of the House. They inexplicably oppose reducing child poverty. Urge Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support the Child Tax Credit. Find one Republican Senator, perhaps one who is retiring, and urge him or her to support the legislation.
Jan writes:
In case you missed this opportunity: Earlier this week, the Network for Public Education sent out an action alert urging Congress, during this lame-duck session, to take one step that would reduce child poverty by roughly 10 percent and help 1.7 million children.
If you missed the earlier request, please take a moment now to send the Network for Public Education’s letter to your U.S. Senators and your Congressional Representative. Right now members of Congress are negotiating to take the one action researchers say would do the most to ameliorate child poverty in the United States: make the Child Tax Credit fully available to the poorest families with children.
You will remember that Congress significantly reduced child poverty temporarily in 2021 by expanding the Child Tax Credit as part of the American Rescue Plan. But the changes were terminated at the end of 2021.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains: “The current Child Tax Credit has a major design flaw: millions of children are prevented from receiving the full credit because their families’ incomes are too low.” The Child Tax Credit phases in with taxable income. A home health aide making $15,000 annually cannot collect the full $2,000 per child, while married families with children—families whose income is as high as $400,000 annually—can collect the full tax credit per child.
Decades of research show that child poverty is the primary driving force behind educational opportunity gaps. As educators, we know that public schools alone cannot close opportunity gaps.
Please do send the Network for Public Education’s action letter right now. Ask your U.S. Senator and your Congressional Representative to vote, as part of tax policy, to make the Child Tax Credit fully refundable to the poorest families with children. Then share this request with your friends and colleagues.
Blogger Robert Hubbell analyzes the choices that President Biden had to make to avoid a shutdown of the nation’s rail system and concludes that he made the best decision. Some support—any support—from Republicans would have made it possible to include paid sick days, but Republicans adamantly oppose a perk that they themselves enjoy.
The Republicans know what they are against: anything that helps middle-income people, low-income people. They don’t know what they are FOR. Do you know? Well, tax breaks for the rich and corporations.
Democrats lead the way in the effort to avert a rail strike.
The House passed a bill to avert a rail strike, which passed with broad bipartisan support. The House also passed a separate bill authorizing seven days of paid sick leave for rail workers; Republicans voted in near lockstep against the bill providing for sick leave—221 to 207. Of course, the Republicans who voted to deny sick leave to rail workers have unlimited sick days themselves. See Newsweek, Republicans With Unlimited Sick Days Vote Against Time Off for Rail Workers.
Senate Republicans will vote against the paid sick leave bill but support the bill to end the strike, thereby forcing a contract on rail workers they rejected over the absence of sick leave. In a truly perverse display of GOP deceit, Senator Rubio tweeted that he would “not support a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.” Of course, if Rubio voted to support the sick leave bill, that would be the “deal” that rail workers want. Rubio gives politicians a bad name—and that is saying a lot!
Many readers sent emails and made comments in support of the rail workers’ demand for paid sick leave. For an explanation of the arguments in favor of allowing a strike over paid sick leave, see Ryan Cooper’s op-ed on MSNBC, Biden picked the wrong side in the rail union strike. As Cooper explains, the refusal to grant sick days will harm the operations of rail carriers and eventually lead to many of the supply chain issues that Biden is seeking to avoid.
Mr. Cooper’s arguments are unassailable, but he describes only one side of the argument. He does not address whether a strike now that would impose $2 billion in daily losses to the economy and cause the loss of 700,000 jobs is an appropriate way to secure a benefit for 115,000 rail workers.
Mr. Cooper could reasonably say, “Yes, the loss of jobs and harm to the economy is worth it because we must draw a line in the sand somewhere” (as one reader said in an email). But simply ignoring the harm to the economy and job losses is hardly fair to President Biden if your thesis is that Biden picked the “wrong” side in the dispute. It was a difficult choice and Biden made a tough call. As with almost every issue, Biden will be blamed for seeking to protect the interests of tens of millions of Americans. It comes with the territory!
Having gone to college many years ago in Massachusetts, I have an idyllic view of small-towns in New England. Thus, I was shocked to read this article from InDepth New Hampshire about hate groups that are active in Franklin, New Hampshire. True, NH has its Free Staters, rabid libertarians who want no government at all, but you will read here about a different type of extremism, based on hate.
What’s happening to our country? when I read articles celebrating the last election as a rebuke to Trumpism, I remind myself that many important votes were very close. In many states, reason won by 50.4%. Or 51%.
A new hate incident in Franklin, this time white supremacist graffiti painted on a downtown building, has city leaders looking for answers.
Mayor Jo Brown said the city’s task force to combat hate, formed after a Jewish business owner was targeted by a hate group this summer, is working on stifling hate with education and positivity…
It is not clear who is behind this week’s graffiti, Brown said. This is the second time this year Franklin leaders have dealt with hate-influenced issues. Over the summer, members of the notorious hate group, NSC 131, targeted Miriam Kovacs, owner of the Broken Spoon, which is a Jewish-Asian fusion takeout restaurant.
NSC 131, also known as the Nationalist Social Club, is a neo-Nazi hate group active in New England. The group has a chapter active in New Hampshire. In the past year, the group has targeted businesses on the Seacoast for harassment, and even threatened former Nashua Democratic state Rep. Manny Espitia.
State Rep. Charlotte DiLorenzo, D-Newmarket, recently spoke about receiving a racist email from a different group. Attorney General John Formella is investigating the email from a man who identified himself as the founder and president of a group called the New England White Network.
NSC 131 was founded in eastern Massachusetts and its members are tied to violent Neo Nazi groups like The Base, Aryan Strike and Patriot Front. The group has off-shoot chapters in Europe and some southern states. NSC 131 graffiti has been spotted all throughout southern New Hampshire, and the group has made appearances at Nashua City Hall and Nashua School Board meetings, among other incidents.
This summer, the group hung two banners over a highway in Dover that read: “Keep New England white” and “Defend New England.”
The group is virulently anti-Semitic and calls for expelling Jewish people from the United States. The group also calls for violence against Jews and minorities.
“110 and never again. Jews have been expelled from 109 countries make America 110. Any nationalist of action will agree, 110 and never again,” on NSC 131 poster wrote on Telegram.
How do we make sense of the last six years, and how do we figure out what we do next?
I’m wrestling with the dilemmas intertwined with the wisdom of Michelle Obama: When they go low, We go high.
To go high, we must wrestle with the irrational and anti-Semitic statements of Kanye West. We must confront the MAGA right wing propaganda while also responding to his words, “Hurt people hurt people – and I was hurt.”
I was born in the middle of the luckiest generation in history. My first memory is a metaphor for the opportunities that were bestowed on Baby Boomers, that have been in decline. I was “twaddling” across the living room to the “win-dome” when adults were watching television, and they exploded with joy. The news, I was told later, was that the polio vaccine had been released!
Our parents’ generation survived the Great Depression and World War II, they were committed to our generation having far greater opportunities. Time after time, when I walked somewhere, worked with neighbors, and played with their children, I found one mentor after another. I was repeatedly told, “Pay close attention, I’ll only show you once;” reminded that my job at school wasn’t high grades but “Learning how to learn;” and “Your job is to be ‘inner-directed’ not ‘outer-directed’” like those who were “like the Red River, ‘a mile wide and a foot deep.’”
Of course, we felt the uneasiness of neighbors watching the Sputnik satellite cross the night sky, of “duck and cover” drills at school, and the Cuban Missile crisis (which only affected me by the news alerts interrupting the World Series.)
And I was clueless about Jim Crow until we went to a restaurant during the Sit-In movement. The owner directed us to the fancy room where, that evening, prices were not higher than the big serving area, because we shouldn’t have to eat with N—–rs. We shouted to our parents, “You’re not supposed to say that word! Why did he say that word?” My dad tried to remain calm but he exploded, “there’s not a god-damned reason” and tore into the racist owner. It took the full police line to pull my dad off him.
Of course, Oklahoma was incredibly corrupt and my dad would jokingly point out concrete examples such as “the road to Nowhere” (which led to our top oligarch’s property,) the Turner Turnpike, and the photo at church of a Supreme Court Justice who was convicted of bribery in conjunction to with the turnpike and other cases. But, as I began to lobby and/or interview members of the “Greatest Generation,” I realized that that criminal behavior was far more common back then, but their handshakes had to be good. In the last few decades, I asked powerful people if corruption had declined significantly, and whether norms have also dropped. They agreed but, a decade ago, a State Auditor added a disclaimer; so many behaviors by elites that used to be felonies were now legal.
And that gets us to the intertwined forces of the last fifty years that laid the foundation for Trumpism. In the 1970s, rightwing think tanks sold the theory that corporations were only beholden to the share owners, not the stakeholders, the community, and the United States of America. Then, the Reagan administration’s Supply Side Economics quickly wiped out good-paying industrial jobs, which undermined communities, especially in places like rural Oklahoma which became Trumpland.
As the economic pie became more unequal, more hurt people hurt people. The willingness to share declined. And, eventually, hope declined, and life expectancy dropped for whites who hadn’t attended college, especially in places like eastern Oklahoma.
Rightwing spin masters convinced rural Oklahomans that Reagan “brought America back,” and immigrants and people of color “cut in line” in front of whites. I plead guilty to being slow to admit the importance of racism in fueling Trumpism. My wife and I have had an Obama bumper sticker on our car since 2008. I don’t recall any rudeness by Oklahomans in response to it. As soon as we crossed into Texas, and many other states, we’d be shouted at and given the finger.
Since my family came from “Little Dixie,” I was embarrassingly slow in admitting why counties in Southeast Oklahoma instantly turned Republican between 2006 and the 2008 presidential race. Similarly, Oklahoma passed one of the nation’s most punitive immigration laws, and I’d seen large numbers of attacks on Hispanics in our high school. But in my experience, Oklahomans also respected the work ethic and family values of immigrants. I saw our welcoming side until, surprise!, the nonstop anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, and anti-Muslim propaganda sunk in.
While acknowledging my excessive optimism, I believe we can build on our strengths – the values that gave so much hope to this young Baby Boomer. Given my experience as an inner-city teacher, I will draw on my students’ moral cores. But I see those experiences as metaphors for how we can “go high” when reversing a full range of interconnected economic, social, political, and civility challenges.
Starting with economics, the worship of Free Markets began with Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” Corporate school reformers (like other true believers in the Market) adopted the same mindset, which they called “creative disruption” as the lever for transforming schools and rebuilding them through “venture philanthropy.” They became very skilled at “kicking down the barn,” and attacking teachers, hoping to quickly fire enough teachers (especially Baby Boomers) while training young teachers to obey top-down, teach-to-the-test mandates.
But, both sides of the “Teacher Wars” were bipartisan. Up until three or four years ago, I was very successful working with conservative Republicans who also didn’t trust the “Billionaires Boys Club” which dominated the Bush and Obama education policies. And many or most were angry at other big corporations.
If we could admit that neither Democrats or Republicans stood up to our neoliberal and their conservative funders, we could restart conversations about schools as a public good, not just a Free Market experiment. Then, maybe we could discuss the privatization of health care, the social safety net, and the other institutions on Gov. Stitt’s and other MAGA’s hit list.
Hopefully, Democrats and Republicans could join together in community building; the first step could be full-service community schools, which could also serve as community hubs. We could admit that both sides bought into the simplistic, false meme that teachers, alone, could drive transformative change of our highest-challenge schools.
Of course, teachers deserve more respect. But so do cafeteria ladies, bus drivers, counselors, tutors, parent liaisons, mentors, apprentices, and volunteers. And, sharing the respect and the credit with education teams will also create good will that would assist the dialogue we need.
As the MAGA Republicans ramp up the campaigns for vouchers, we will have new opportunities for bridging differences with rural areas. And, students can lead the way in explaining that accusations of spreading Critical Race Theory and Socialist propaganda are false.
In the late 1990s, during a community discussion about public health, my students asked white participants about the more humane way that Meth, as opposed to crack, was being handled. Perhaps because the students were so polite, the adults didn’t understand that the teenagers were contrasting the cruelty of the War on Drugs during the crack epidemic with the more empathetic public health response to the new, predominantly white epidemic. Afterwards, they told me that the white participants didn’t understand what they were saying, but they had hope for future conversations and, at least, the more humane response to Meth was a first step.
A decade later, Big Pharma profited by promoting Opioid addiction in the MAGA areas, significantly lowering life expectancy for under-educated whites. Rather than condemning “deplorables,” we should have recognized that “Hurt people hurt People.” Now, it won’t be easy, but perhaps we could unite, regulate, and control the corporate dominance that is spreading destruction across the world.
Finally, we must move on from the failed experiment of Creative Disruption. We should build on both, social and cognitive science, as well as what has worked for centuries. After all, teaching is an act of love. Neighborliness can be the driving force for community schools. Defending our children’s schools, as well as privatization battles ranging from public health to global warming, will require cross-generational, cross-cultural discussions. When they go low, we should go high by bringing the full diversity of our communities into schools, and bringing students out into the full diversity of our community.
Ohio is a state dominated by Republicans. When progressive candidates won seats on the state board in the recent election, Republicans moved swiftly to strip the state board of its powers and transfer them to a new state agency.
The state board has 19 seats. Eleven are elected. Eight are appointed by the Governor, Republican Mike DeWine.
For the first time in years, progressive candidates will control the elected seats on the executive agency, regulating if a resolution is able to pass or not. Candidates are voted on as nonpartisan candidates, however, each leans conservative or progressive and will be endorsed by a party. School board candidates tend to share their beliefs publically.
Three of the five seats up for grabs were taken by liberal candidates. Tom Jackson, of Solon, beat out incumbent Tim Miller by about 50,000 votes. Teresa Fedor, a now-former state senator from Toledo, beat opponent Sarah McGervey by more than 30,000 votes. Katie Hofmann, of Cincinnati, beat out incumbent Jenny Kilgore by around 30,000 votes.
“We’re just looking forward to getting back to Columbus and doing the people’s work,” Jackson told News 5.
Now, seven of the 11 elected seats are held by Democrats. The elected seats ensure that the total board can’t pass all resolutions it wants, since it needs a 2/3 majority. Of the 19 total seats, eight were appointed by Gov. DeWine. Now, with 12 GOP seats, a Democrat would need to switch over for policy to pass. This could change depending on attendance.
Even though Republicans hold a majority, they don’t have a 2/3 majority, and they won’t be able to pass resolutions without at least one Democrat.
Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday he supports an Ohio Senate bill that would overhaul the Ohio Department of Education, gut powers from the Ohio State Board of Education and give his office more oversight of education.
“I think virtually every governor for 40 or 50 years has wanted to have more control in regard to the Department of Education,” DeWine, a Republican, told reporters. “So this governor is not going to be different. You know, I support the bill.”
Senate Bill 178 would put the Ohio Department of Education under a cabinet-level official in the governor’s office and rename the agency the Department of Education and Workforce, which would be called by the acronym DEW. The cabinet official would oversee the department, a task currently held by the state school board. The department would have two divisions: one for primary and secondary education and one for workforce training.
The 19-member state school board, made up of 11 elected members and eight members appointed by the governor, would continue to exist, but it would be stripped of most of its duties. It would oversee educator licensing and select the superintendent of public instruction, who would be a secretary to the board and an advisor to the DEW leader in the governor’s office.
“Candidly, the bill was not our idea, but I support the bill,” DeWine said. “I think what the public expects is accountability. And it’s hard to have accountability under our current system. You know, having the Department of Education with kind of a joint control between the governor’s office and the governor on certain areas, and other areas be the state elected Board of Education, I think is a very significant improvement.”
We have seen the same anti-democratic move in other states, like Indiana and North Carolina, where the legislature removed powers from the Governor or state superintendent so as to keep control of education in Republican hands, disregarding the voters’ wishes.
This is the same president that Trumpers call a “radical,” a “socialist,” and a”communist.”
The agreement Mr. Biden asked Congress to impose would raise pay nearly 25 percent between 2020, when the last contract expired, and 2024, and allow employees to miss work for routine medical appointments three times per year without risking disciplinary action. It would also grant them one additional day of paid personal leave.
It would not provide paid sick leave, however, a provision that many workers argue is the bare minimum they can accept given their grueling work schedules, which often leave them on the road or on call for long stretches of time. Rail carriers say workers can attend to illnesses or medical appointments using paid vacation.
Four of the 12 unions that would be covered by the agreement voted it down, and several others approved it only narrowly.
Tony Cardwell, the president of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division — International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which voted down the agreement Mr. Biden has asked Congress to impose, said that simply asking Congress to include paid sick days in the agreement would have gone a long way toward satisfying his members.
“If he would have said, ‘I want this one thing,’ it would have changed the whole narrative,” Mr. Cardwell said in an interview on Wednesday.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told members on Tuesday night that she would hold a vote on a separate bill that included seven paid sick days, but it was unclear whether it could pass both houses of Congress.
Our reader, who signs in as Joel, has frequently noted the bias in the media towards negativity and “worst case scenario.” How many stories were published predicting a Red Wave, lamenting the dozens of seats that Democrats would lose, predicting doom and gloom. There is also its problem of “both-sides-ism,” as though the scientist who says the sun rises in the west is as equal in credibility as the one who says it rises in the East. I leave his own sentence structure unchanged.
I asked Joel to describe himself. He wrote:
I am a retired Trade Union activist who sees the attacks on America’s teachers as an attack on the most visible and the largest of Americas unions. It is no accident that whether the Billionaire oligarchs / plutocrats / politicians who attack public schools and their teachers consider themselves socially progressive or are religio fascist , they abhor Unions.
He writes:
So for two years now I have been pointing out crime statistics on Diane’s blog and on Union Facebook page’s. Knowing that the American Public is always a sucker for the big bad Black man coming to get you; or simply the Willie Horton story . Which actually predates Willie Horton going back to Goldwater and his Nation of Moral decay and Nixon’s war on drugs. Which targeted minorities disproportionately.
Both on crime and inflation the supposed “Liberal Media” did its best to prove Trump correct in his charges against them. Whether it was intentional or not, the hype was far greater than the reality. For a group of people who profess to despise Trump and his merry band of seditious Neo Nazi White Christian Nationalists, they did their best to bring them back to power. Crime sells advertising .
They say, Inflation is the worst it has ever been— except at its peak, it was half the rate of the 1980s and accompanied by 3.5% unemployment now, not 8%. Endless stories of the terrible economy.
Last Fall when they started blasting away, it was under 5% . With gas lower than it had been from 2011-14 . Wage inflation was already moderating. Tough to have a wage price spiral without the wage component. The media frenzy did allow Corporations with virtual monopoly power to take the Public’s expectation of inflation and deliver it to them, tacking on record profits far above increased costs.
But Crime is the issue that may have cost Democrats 4-5 seats in NY and with it the House. All in Down State districts formally represented by Democrats . Far more harm done to Democrats on MSNBC , CNN, WaPo and the NY Times than on Fox News, the NY Post and the Wall Street Journal”’…. No one who follows the Murdoch rags is voting Democratic to begin with.
On top of a redistricting enabled by Cuomo appointed Judges as part of bone thrown to Republicans when they controlled the State Senate with the help of Cuomo’s turncoat IDC caucus. On top of Adams and Suozzi running around like they were Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels, there were 800 stories a month in 2022 about crime in the NYC Media Market vs 130 a month in deBlasio’s last term ending in 2021. Talk about manufactured consent.
What was the reality. Last year there were fewer murders than 2011 a year Bloomberg was running around calling NYC the safest big City in the Nation . This year with a 13% reduction there will be fewer murders than 2012 the next to last year he was in office when he was taking bows for how safe the City was .
But not only lower than 2012; significantly lower than every year between 2012 all the way till when America was GREAT in 1960.
Your odds of being injured on a 2 mile ride in your car are greater than being injured in a violent crime in the NYC Subway. The murder rate in NYC truly does make it one of the safest cities in America with bail reform having little or no impact on recidivism.
Of course that is not the narrative from CNN, MSNBC, nor the local mass media. The Press made it sound that murders were like the terrible 60s when there were 1000 murders a year by mid decade . The 70s when there 1500 , the 80s when there were 1800 to 2000 and the early 90s when there were 2400 murders . There were 468 in 2021 and 379 as of last week in 2022 with only 6 weeks to go.
So here is the thing . Excluding the Garbage dump in the Harbor (Staten Island) that should be turned over to NJ. 82 % of Manhattan residents voted for Democrats. Ah but they are just woke liberals . 79% of Bronx Residents voted for Democrats not so woke , 73% of Brooklyn and 67% of Queens residents. So where all this supposed crime was happening it was not a concern enough to sway voters .
Yet in the NYC suburbs (all six counties) where all the seats were lost. Crime was lower in almost every major category recorded. 2021 Lower than not just 2020 but most years back to 2017 the last year listed in the state crime registry. The 100 million dollar Republican Willie Horton Campaign supplement by the ” Liberal Media ” and their 800 stories a month.
Heck of a Job Joe Scarborough, mission accomplished. And I know he is a Conservative Republican but he also claims to be a never Trump-er. Perhaps they will give him an extra hour to cover Hunter Biden’s Laptop.
Diane Ravitch's blog 