Timothy Snyder: Why Crimea Does Not Belong to Russia

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2022 //
41

Timothy Snyder, historian at Yale, explains in this post why Crimea does not belong to Russia, except in Putin’s delusional, self-aggrandizing mind. Crimea, he explains, existed long before there was a Russian state. It has gone through many transformations, the most appalling of which was when Stalin deported its entire population, claiming that they were Nazis (sound familiar?).

It is a long and fascinating essay.

In a small excerpt, he writes:

Crimea is a district of Ukraine, as recognized by international law, and by treaties between Ukraine and the Russian Federation. Putin, however, has taken the view, for more than a decade now, that international law must yield to what he calls “civilization,” meaning his eccentric understanding of the past. The annoying features of the world that do not fit his scheme of the past are classified as alien, and illegitimate, and subject to destruction (Ukraine, for example).

The example of Crimea lays bare a problem within Putin’s thinking. The idea that there is some sort of immutable “civilization,” outside of time and human agency, always turns out to be based upon nothing. In the case of Crimea, Putin’s notion that the peninsula was “always” Russia is absurd, in almost more ways than one can count.

The Crimean Peninsula has been around for quite a long time, and Russia is a recent creation. What Putin has in mind when he speaks of eternity and is the baptism of a ruler of Kyiv, Valdimar, in 988. From this moment of purity, we are to understand, arose a timeless reality of Russian Crimea (and a Russian Ukraine). which we all must accept or be subject to violence. Crimea becomes “holy.”

It takes time to recount even a small portion of the ways in which this is nonsensical. First of all, the historical event itself is not at all clear. One source says that Valdimar was baptized in Crimea, as Putin likes to say; others that he was baptized in Kyiv. None of the sources date from the period itself, and so we cannot be certain that it took place at all, let alone of the locale. (If Valdimar was indeed baptized in Crimea, Putin’s logic would seem to suggest that the peninsula belongs to modern Greece, since the presumed site was part of Byzantium at the time.)

Valdimar was, to put it gently, not a Russian. There were no Russians at the time. He was the leader of a clan of Scandinavian warlords who had established a state in Kyiv, having wrenched the city from the control of Khazars. His clan was settling down, and the conversion to Christianity was part of the effort to build a state. It was called “Rus,” apparently from a Finnish word for the slavetrading company that brought the Vikings to Kyiv in the first place. It was not called “Rus” because of anything to do with today’s Russia — nor could it have been, since there was no Russia then, and no state would bear that name for another seven hundred years. Moscow, the city, did not exist at the time.

Baptism, whatever its other merits, does not create some kind of timeless continuum of power over whatever range of territory some later figure chooses to designate. If it did, international relations would certainly look very different. When Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the Roman Empire controlled what is now Portugal, Spain, France, the Balkans, Israel, Turkey, North Africa… But we would be very surprised to hear an Italian leader (even now) cite Constantine’s baptism to claim all of these countries…

Categories History, International

A Beautiful Memory of Angela Lansbury

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2022 //
5

I have long been a fan of Angela Lansbury. I saw her in several Broadway plays and watched her for years on “Murder, She Wrote,” where she was a sleuth in a small town. in whatever genre she performed, she was an icon.

This is the best tribute that I have seen. Seth Rudetsky is the host of the Sirius Broadway channel. He tells the story of a strike that closed down Broadway for 19 days in 2007. That now seems paltry in the wake of COVID, which turned off the lights of Broadway for more than a year.

Please watch the video. It includes wonderful performances by Bernadette Peters and Angela Lansbury and the stars of every big production on Broadway at the time.

Categories Creativity, Joy, New York City

Steven Singer: Five GOP Lies About Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 20, 2022 //
15

Blogger-teacher Steven Singer lists five big lies about public schools that Republicans are pushing.

Be it noted that he leaves out a sixth big lie about public schools: some GOP nuts claim that public schools are putting litter boxes in classrooms for students who say they are cats. No one has identified a classroom where this has happened, but why should facts get in the way of propaganda?

Singer begins:

Critical race theory, pornographic school books, and other bogeymen haunt their platforms without any evidence that this stuff is a reality.

Doug Mastriano, the GOP nominee for Governor of Pennsylvania, actually promises to ban pole dancing in public schools.

Pole dancing!

“On day one, the sexualization of our kids, pole dancing, and all this other crap that’s going on will be forbidden in our schools,” he says.

Mr. Mastriano, I hate to tell you this, but the only school in the commonwealth where there was anything like what you describe was one of those charter schools you love so much. The Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia used to run an illegal nightclub in the cafeteria after dark.

But at authentic public schools with things like regulations and school boards – no. That just doesn’t happen here.

Maybe if your plan to waste taxpayer dollars on universal school vouchers goes through you’ll get your wish.

Singer goes on to list the following five lies:

1. Teaching boys to hate themselves.

2. Teaching kids to be gay.

3. Teaching kids to be trans.

Open the link to read about the other two.

They are all smears, lies, and propaganda.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Elections, Extremism, Fake News, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Pennsylvania

Beware of “Medicare Advantage”—The “Cash Monsters”

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2022 //
83

In recent years, there has been a full-court press to persuade seniors to transfer from traditional Medicare to private, for-profit plans called “Medicare Advantage.” [MA]

MA plans include prescription coverage and lots of bells and whistles. But something is sacrificed to enable the plans to make a profit. What is sacrificed? Your preferred doctor may not be covered, and you may be denied coverage of some procedures.

Two progressive Congressmen—Ro Khanna and Mark Pocan—have introduced legislation to bar private for-profit plans from using the label “Medicare,” because it confuses seniors into thinking it’s a government plan, the one they paid into for many years. It’s not.

The New York Times wrote a scathing article about MA plans, calling them “cash monsters.”

By next year, half of Medicare beneficiaries will have a private Medicare Advantage plan. Most large insurers in the program have been accused in court of fraud.

The health system Kaiser Permanente called doctors in during lunch and after work and urged them to add additional illnesses to the medical records of patients they hadn’t seen in weeks. Doctors who found enough new diagnoses could earn bottles of Champagne, or a bonus in their paycheck.

Anthem, a large insurer now called Elevance Health, paid more to doctors who said their patients were sicker. And executives at UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest insurer, told their workers to mine old medical records for more illnesses — and when they couldn’t find enough, sent them back to try again.

Each of the strategies — which were described by the Justice Department in lawsuits against the companies — led to diagnoses of serious diseases that might have never existed. But the diagnoses had a lucrative side effect: They let the insurers collect more money from the federal government’s Medicare Advantage program.

Medicare Advantage, a private-sector alternative to traditional Medicare, was designed by Congress two decades ago to encourage health insurers to find innovative ways to provide better care at lower cost. If trends hold, by next year, more than half of Medicare recipients will be in a private plan.

Medicare Advantage is on track to enroll most Medicare beneficiaries by next year….

But a New York Times review of dozens of fraud lawsuits, inspector general audits and investigations by watchdogs shows how major health insurers exploited the program to inflate their profits by billions of dollars.

The government pays Medicare Advantage insurers a set amount for each person who enrolls, with higher rates for sicker patients. And the insurers, among the largest and most prosperous American companies, have developed elaborate systems to make their patients appear as sick as possible, often without providing additional treatment, according to the lawsuits.

As a result, a program devised to help lower health care spending has instead become substantially more costly than the traditional government program it was meant to improve.

Eight of the 10 biggest Medicare Advantage insurers — representing more than two-thirds of the market — have submitted inflated bills, according to the federal audits. And four of the five largest players — UnitedHealth, Humana, Elevance and Kaiser — have faced federal lawsuits alleging that efforts to overdiagnose their customers crossed the line into fraud.

The fifth company, CVS Health, which owns Aetna, told investors its practices were being investigated by the Department of Justice.

Many of the accusations reflect missing documentation rather than any willful attempt to inflate diagnoses, said Mark Hamelburg, an executive at AHIP, an industry trade group. “Professionals can look at the same medical record in different ways,” he said.

The government now spends nearly as much on Medicare Advantage’s 29 million beneficiaries as on the Army and Navycombined. It’s enough money that even a small increase in the average patient’s bill adds up: The additional diagnoses led to $12 billion in overpayments in 2020, according to an estimate from the group that advises Medicare on payment policies — enough to cover hearing and vision care for every American over 65.

Another estimate, from a former top government health official, suggested the overpayments in 2020 were double that, more than $25 billion.

The increased privatization has come as Medicare’s finances have been strained by the aging of baby boomers. But for insurers that already dominate health care for workers, the program is strikingly lucrative: A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, a research group unaffiliated with the insurer Kaiser, found the companies typically earn twice as much gross profit from their Medicare Advantage plans as from other types of insurance.

For people choosing between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage, there are trade-offs. Medicare Advantage plans can limit patients’ choice of doctors, and sometimes require jumping through more hoops before getting certain types of expensive care.

But they often have lower premiums or perks like dental benefits — extras that draw beneficiaries to the programs. The more the plans are overpaid by Medicare, the more generous to customers they can afford to be.

“Medicare Advantage is an important option for America’s seniors, but as Medicare Advantage adds more patients and spends billions of dollars of taxpayer money, aggressive oversight is needed,” said Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, who has investigated the industry. The efforts to make patients look sicker and other abuses of the program have “resulted in billions of dollars in improper payments,” he said.

Many of the fraud lawsuits were initially brought by former employees under a federal whistle-blower law that allows them to get a percentage of any money repaid to the government if their suits prevail. But most have been joined by the Justice Department, a step the government takes only if it believes the fraud allegations have merit. Last year, the department’s civil division listed Medicare Advantage as one of its top areas of fraud recovery….

In contrast, regulators overseeing the plans at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., have been less aggressive, even as the overpayments have been described in inspector general investigations, academic research, Government Accountability Office studies, MedPAC reports and numerous newsarticles, over the course of four presidential administrations.

Congress gave the agency the power to reduce the insurers’ rates in response to evidence of systematic overbilling, but C.M.S. has never chosen to do so. A regulation proposed in the Trump administration to force the plans to refund the government for more of the incorrect payments has not been finalized four years later. Several top officials have swapped jobs between the industry and the agency….

The popularity of Medicare Advantage plans has helped them avoid legislative reforms. The plans have become popular in urban areas, and have been increasingly embraced by Democrats as well as Republicans. Nearly 80 percent of U.S. House members signed a letter this year saying they were “ready to protect the program from policies that would undermine” its stability.

“You have a powerful insurance lobby, and their lobbyists have built strong support for this in Congress,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Texas Democrat who chairs the House Ways and Means Health subcommittee.

Some critics say the lack of oversight has encouraged the industry to compete over who can most effectively game the system rather than who can provide the best care.

“Even when they’re playing the game legally, we are lining the pockets of very wealthy corporations that are not improving patient care,” said Dr. Donald Berwick, a C.M.S. administrator under the Obama administration, who recently published a series of blog posts on the industry. “When you skate to the edge of the ice, sometimes you’re going to fall in….”

Almost immediately, companies saw ways to exploit that system. The traditional Medicare program provided no financial incentive to doctors to document every diagnosis, so many records were incomplete. Under the new program, insurers began rigorously documenting all of a patient’s health conditions — say depression, or a long-ago stroke — even when they had nothing to do with the patient’s current medical care….

According to the lawsuit, some patients were diagnosed with cancer and heart disease. Nurses were told to especially look for patients with a history of diabetes because it was not “curable,” even if the patient now had normal lab findings or had undergone surgery to treat the condition.

The company declined to comment. “We will vigorously defend our Medicare Advantage business against these allegations,” Cigna said in an earlier statement regarding the lawsuit.

Adding the code for a single diagnosis could yield a substantial payoff. In a 2020 lawsuit, the government said Anthem instructed programmers to scour patient charts for “revenue-generating” codes. One patient was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, although no other doctor reported the condition, and Anthem received an additional $2,693.27, the lawsuit said. Another patient was said to have been coded for “active lung cancer,” despite no evidence of the disease in other records; Anthem was paid an additional $7,080.74. The case is continuing.

The most common allegation against the companies was that they did not correct potentially invalid diagnoses after becoming aware of them. At Anthem, for example, the Justice Department said “thousands” of inaccurate diagnoses were not deleted. According to the lawsuit, a finance executive calculated that eliminating the inaccurate diagnoses would reduce the company’s 2017 earnings from reviewing medical charts by $86 million, or 72 percent….

Kaiser, which both runs a health plan and provides medical care, is often seen as a model system. But its control over providers gave it additional leverage to demand additional diagnoses from the doctors themselves, according to the lawsuit.

“The cash monster was insatiable,” said Dr. James Taylor, a former coding expert at Kaiser who is one of 10 whistle-blowers to accuse the organization of fraud.

Last year, the inspector general’s office noted that one company “stood out” for collecting 40 percent of all Medicare Advantage’s payments from chart reviews and home assessments despite serving only 22 percent of the program’s beneficiaries. It recommended Medicare pay extra attention to the company, which it did not name, but the enrollment figure matched UnitedHealth’s.

A civil trial accusing UnitedHealth of fraudulent overbilling is scheduled for next year. The company’s internal audits found numerous mistakes, according to the lawsuit, which was joined by the Justice Department. Some doctors diagnosed problems like drug and alcohol dependence or severe malnutrition at three times the national rate. But UnitedHealth declined to investigate those patterns, according to the suit…

“Medicare Advantage overpayments are a political third rail,” said Dr. Richard Gilfillan, a former hospital and insurance executive and a former top regulator at Medicare, in an email. “The big health care plans know it’s wrong, and they know how to fix it, but they’re making too much money to stop. Their C.E.O.s should come to the table with Medicare as they did for the Affordable Care Act, end the coding frenzy, and let providers focus on better care, not more dollars for plans.”

Categories Accountability, Health, Hoax, Privatization

Tennessee: State Charter Commission Rejects Two Charter Schools in Memphis

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2022 //
2

Undoubtedly, Governor Bill Lee must have been surprised when the charter school commission he created two new charter schools in Memphis.

The executive director of the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission has recommended against approving two proposed charter schools in Memphis, siding with a school board that found the charter applications failed to meet state standards.

Tess Stovall’s recommendations uphold the Memphis-Shelby County School board’s unanimous decision in April and again in July to reject the applications for the proposed Binghampton Community School and Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy. Leaders of both schools had appealed the decisions to the state.

The final decision on the applications will be up to a vote of the nine-member state commission. The commission’s members were all appointed by Gov. Bill Lee, who lobbied to create the panel in an effort to open more high-quality charter schools. The board will vote at its quarterly meeting on Tuesday.

Unless the commission members vote to reject Stovall’s recommendation, the two schools will not open in August 2023 as planned.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Tennessee

Jan Resseger: Why Ohio Must End the Failed Policy of 3rd Grade Retention

By dianeravitch
October 19, 2022 //
46

The ever wise Jan Resseger points out that the Ohio House overwhelmingly voted 82-10 to end the policy of holding back third graders who don’t score proficient on the state reading test. Now, she hopes that the State Senate will complete the elimination of this disastrous experiment. The idea that children will become better readers if they are failed is nonsense. Years of experience and research shows that failure leads to negative consequences, causing a loss of confidence, a sense of failure and higher dropout rates in later years.

She writes:

Ohio’s Third Grade Guarantee, enacted by the legislature in 2012 and implemented beginning in the 2013-2014 school year, requires that students who do not score “proficient” on the state’s third grade reading test must be retained for another year in third grade. Brown reports that,”Ohio has retained around 3,628 students per year.”

Jeb Bush and his ExcelInEd Foundation have been dogged promoters of the Third Grade Guarantee, but last May, the Columbus Dispatch’s Anna Staver traced Ohio’s enthusiasm for the Third Grade Guarantee to the Annie E. Casey Foundation: “In 2010, the Annie E. Casey Foundation released a bombshell special report called ‘Early Warning! Why Reading by the End of Third Grade Matters.’ Students, it said, who don’t catch up by fourth grade are significantly more likely to stay behind, drop out and find themselves tangled in the criminal justice system. ‘The bottom line is that if we don’t get dramatically more children on track as proficient readers, the United States will lose a growing and essential proportion of its human capital to poverty… And the price will be paid not only by the individual children and families but by the entire country.’”

But it turns out that promoters of the Third-Grade Guarantee ignored other research showing that when students are held back—in any grade—they are more likely later to drop out of school before they graduate from high school. In 2004, writing for the Civil Rights Project, Lisa Abrams and Walt Haney reported: “Half a decade of research indicates that retaining or holding back students in grade bears little to no academic benefit and contributes to future academic failure by significantly increasing the likelihood that retained students will drop out of high school.” (Gary Orfield, ed., Dropouts in America, pp. 181-182)

Why does holding children back make them more likely to drop out later? In their book, 50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, David Berliner and Gene Glass explain the research of Kaoru Yamamoto on the emotional impact on children of being held back: “Retention simply does not solve the quite real problems that have been identified by teachers looking for a solution to a child’s immaturity or learning problems…Only two events were more distressing to them: the death of a parent and going blind.” Berliner and Glass continue: “Researchers have estimated that students who have repeated a grade once are 20-30% more likely to drop out of school than students of equal ability who were promoted along with their age mates. There is almost a 100% chance that students retained twice will drop out before completing high school.” (50 Myths & Lies That Threaten America’s Public Schools, pp. 9-97)

In a recent report examining the impact of Third-Grade Guarantee legislation across the states, Furman University’s Paul Thomas explainsthat short term gains in reading scores after students are held back are likely to fade out in subsequent years as students move into the upper elementary and middle school years. But, Thomas quotes the National Council of Teachers of English on how the lingering emotional scars from “flunking a grade” linger: “Grade retention, the practice of holding students back to repeat a grade, does more harm than good:

  • “retaining students who have not met proficiency levels with the intent of repeating instruction is punitive, socially inappropriate, and educationally ineffective;
  • “basing retention on high-stakes tests will disproportionately and negatively impact children of color, impoverished children, English Language Learners, and special needs students; and
  • “retaining students is strongly correlated with behavior problems and increased drop-out rates.”

Here is what Thomas recommends instead: “States must absolutely respond to valid concerns about reading achievement by parents and other advocates; however, the historical and current policies and reforms have continued to fail students and not to achieve goals of higher and earlier reading proficiency by students, especially the most vulnerable students who struggle to read.” Specifically, Thomas urges policymakers to eliminate: “high-stakes policies (retention) around a single grade (3rd) and create a more nuanced monitoring process around a range of grades (3rd-5th) based on a diverse body of evidence (testing, teacher assessments, parental input)…. Remove punitive policies that label students and create policies that empower teachers and parents to provide instruction and support based on individual student needs.”

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, Failure, Literacy, Ohio

Fiona Hill: Putin Is Using Elon Musk to Send a Message

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2022 //
17

Fiona Hill is a former diplomat who specializes in the study of Russia and Ukraine. She was a star witness in the first impeachment trial of Trump (the Former Guy).

She was recently interviewed by Politico. This is a fascinating discussion with a deeply informed expert. Please open the link and read it all.

In the early days of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Hill warned in an interview with POLITICO that what Putin was trying to do was not only seize Ukraine but destroy the current world order. And she recognized from the start that Putin would use the threat of nuclear conflict to try to get his way.

Now, despite the setbacks Russia has suffered on the battlefield, Hill thinks Putin is undaunted. She sees him adapting to new conditions, not giving up. And she sees him trying to get the West to accede to his aims by using messengers like billionaire Elon Musk to propose arrangements that would end the conflict on his terms.

“Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin,” Hill says…

Whenever he has a setback, Putin figures he can get out of it, that he can turn things around. That’s partly because of his training as a KGB operative. In the past, when asked about the success of operations, he’s pooh-poohed the idea that operations always go as planned, that everything is always perfect. He says there are always problems in an operation, there are always setbacks. Sometimes they’re absolute disasters. The key is adaptation.

Another hallmark of Putin is that he doubles down. He always takes the more extreme step in his range of options, the one that actually cuts off other alternatives. Putin has often related an experience he had as a kid, when he trapped a rat in a corner in the apartment building he lived in, in Leningrad, and the rat shocked him by jumping out and fighting back. He tells this story as if it’s a story about himself, that if he’s ever cornered, he will always fight back.

But he’s also the person who puts himself in the corner. We know that the Russians have had very high casualties and that they’ve been running out of manpower and equipment in Ukraine. The casualty rate on the Russian side keeps mounting. A few months ago, estimates were 50,000. Now the suggestions are 90,000 killed or severely injured. This is a real blow given the 170,000 Russia troops deployed to the Ukrainian border when the invasion began.

So, what does Putin do? He sends even more troops in by launching a full-on mobilization. He still hasn’t said this is a war. It remains a “special military operation,” but he calls up 300,000 people. Then, he goes several steps further and announces the annexation of the territories that Russia has been fighting over for the last several months, not just Donetsk and Luhansk, but also the territories of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

Putin gives himself no way out except to pursue the original goals he had when he went in, which is the dismemberment of Ukraine and Russia annexing its territory. And he’s still trying to adapt his responses to setbacks on the battlefield….

Reynolds: If Putin wants Ukrainian territory so badly, why is he raining down such destruction on civilian areas and committing so many human rights abuses in occupied areas?

Hill: This is punishment, but also perverse redevelopment. You cow people into submission, destroy what they had and all their links to their past and their old lives, and then make them into something new and, thus, yours. Destroy Ukraine and Ukrainians. Build New Russia and create Russians. Its brutal but also a hallmark of imperial conquest….

Reynolds: We’ve recently had Elon Musk step into this conflict trying to promote discussion of peace settlements. What do you make of the role that he’s playing?

Hill: It’s very clear that Elon Musk is transmitting a message for Putin. There was a conference in Aspen in late September when Musk offered a version of what was in his tweet — including the recognition of Crimea as Russian because it’s been mostly Russian since the 1780s — and the suggestion that the Ukrainian regions of Kherson and Zaporizhzhia should be up for negotiation, because there should be guaranteed water supplies to Crimea. He made this suggestion before Putin’s annexation of those two territories on September 30. It was a very specific reference. Kherson and Zaporizhzhia essentially control all the water supplies to Crimea. Crimea is a dry peninsula. It has aquifers, but it doesn’t have rivers. It’s dependent on water from the Dnipro River that flows through a canal from Kherson. It’s unlikely Elon Musk knows about this himself. The reference to water is so specific that this clearly is a message from Putin.

Now, there are several reasons why Musk’s intervention is interesting and significant. First of all, Putin does this frequently. He uses prominent people as intermediaries to feel out the general political environment, to basically test how people are going to react to ideas. Henry Kissinger, for example, has had interactions with Putin directly and relayed messages. Putin often uses various trusted intermediaries including all kinds of businesspeople. I had intermediaries sent to discuss things with me while I was in government….

Putin plays the egos of big men, gives them a sense that they can play a role. But in reality, they’re just direct transmitters of messages from Vladimir Putin.

Reynolds: Putin is very comfortable dealing with billionaires and oligarchs. That’s a world that he knows well. But by using Musk this way, he goes right over the heads of [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian government.

Hill: He is basically short-circuiting the diplomatic process. He wants to lay out his terms and see how many people are going to pick them up. All of this is an effort to get Americans to take themselves out of the war and hand over Ukraine and Ukrainian territory to Russia….

Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, exactly 100 years after Germany invaded Belgium and France — and just in the same way that Hitler seized the Sudetenland, annexed Austria and invaded Poland. We’re having a hard time coming to terms with what we’re dealing with here. This is a great power conflict, the third great power conflict in the European space in a little over a century. It’s the end of the existing world order. Our world is not going to be the same as it was before.

Categories Cruelty, Fascism, International

Stephen Dyer: Fordham Institute Turns Cherry Picking Data into an Art Form

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2022 //
12

Stephen Dyer is a former legislator in Ohio who keeps close watch on charters and vouchers in Ohio. He writes here about an article by Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute claiming that charter schools in Ohio are better than public schools.

Dyer disagreed with Petrilli. He has the facts. He wrote this post in response.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ohio

Mississippi: Judge Rules that Public Funds Can’t Use Public Funds for Private Schools

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2022 //
9

Here is good news. The politicians in Mississippi tried to divert public funds to benefit private schools. This is taking from the poor and middle-class to benefit the children of the affluent. The judge said no. in most red states, state judges have repeatedly ruled that state constitutions are invalid when it comes to funding private and religious schools. All state constitutions require that public funds are for public schools. Mississippi is lucky to have a judge who ruled that the state constitution means what it says.

(JACKSON, MS October 13, 2022) On Thursday, Hinds County Chancery Court Judge Crystal Wise Martin ruled that a recent law which would allocate $10 million of federal pandemic relief money to infrastructure grants for private schools is unconstitutional. This ruling by Judge Martin is a major victory for Parents for Public Schools, a national organization based in Mississippi with chapters in several states.

Parents for Public Schools (PPS), represented by The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)-Mississippi, Democracy Forward, and the Mississippi Center for Justice, filed a complaint in June petitioning the court to prevent the State from implementing this grant program. The attorneys representing PPS argued that Section 208 of the Mississippi Constitution prohibits the use of any public funds in support of private schools, and thus, the money allocated through this law is indeed unconstitutional.

The grant program, created as the result of one law and funded by an additional law, would allow only private/independent schools in Mississippi which are members of the Midsouth Association of Independent Schools to receive up to $100,000 each for infrastructure improvements, yet public schools are not eligible to apply for these grants. By contrast, the Mississippi Legislature created a loan program for public schools to improve infrastructure; however, those loans, although interest free, must be repaid to the State within 10 years. The grants to private schools do not have to be paid back.

PPS Executive Director, Joann Mickens, testified during the hearing in August that any public funding spent on private schools has a detrimental impact on public school students due to the Mississippi Legislature’s historic underfunding of public schools. “For 23 of the past 25 years, the Legislature has chosen to underfund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), which is the State portion and main source of funding for Mississippi’s public schools. One of the results of this is that we now have schools all over the state that are struggling in multiple ways, including – and especially in – infrastructure needs. For over 30 years, PPS has worked with parents, public schools, and other organizations to improve equity and student outcomes in public schools,” said Mickens.

“Parents for Public Schools advocates on behalf of public schools because each child, each family, each community, and our collective democracy depend on education. We chose to enter this arena in Mississippi knowing that victory would not mean monetary gain for us or even for Mississippi’s public schools. We entered this argument because one of our core values is to educate all children well and equitably. In this case, we’re standing up for almost half a million children, their families, and their communities. In doing that, we stand up for a stronger, better Mississippi and against perpetuating inequity. We’re grateful to PPS parents and families who spoke up, for our legal representatives, and for the Court’s wise decision to honor the plain and clear language of our constitution,” said Becky Glover, Policy Analyst at Parents for Public Schools, Inc.

Vangela M. Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice: “Today’s ruling is a resounding victory for the hundreds of thousands of public school students in Mississippi. At a time when public schools are already strapped for resources, the legislature’s attempt to funnel $10 million to private schools was egregious. We thank the court for its ruling but also recognize that much more must be done to foster high-quality public education for all Mississippi school children.”

“We are elated with the Court’s ruling, which affirms our argument that the Mississippi Constitution explicitly forbids appropriating public funds to private schools. Public funds must have a system of accountability. Senate Bill 2780 and Senate Bill 3064 funneled taxpayer dollars to private schools, which have no responsibility to taxpayers. This outcome returns $10 million to Mississippi taxpayers,” Joshua Tom, legal director at ACLU of Mississippi.

“Today’s ruling is a victory for the Mississippi Constitution and every person who cares about public education in the state,” said Will Bardwell, Senior Counsel at Democracy Forward. “When the state legislature violated the Constitution by directing public money to private schools, it did more than merely continue Mississippi’s shameful history of undermining its children’s public schools. It broke the law, period. Today’s ruling makes clear: no one, not even the Mississippi legislature is above the law.”

Parents for Public Schools, Inc. is a nonpartisan nonprofit that began in Mississippi more than 30 years ago by parents who organized to support their public schools while educating and mobilizing themselves and others to demand higher standards and better resources for each student. Following interest from other cities around the nation, the National Office for Parents for Public Schools, Inc. (PPS) was founded in 1991. Since then, PPS has become a diverse, national organization of community-based chapters whose mission is to advance the role of parents and communities in securing a high-quality public education for every child by providing professional leadership training that prepares parents and others to become equal partners with and responsible stewards of their public schools.

Democracy Forward Foundation(“Democracy Forward”) is a nonprofit legal organization founded in 2017 that litigates cases involving government action on behalf of organizations, individuals, and municipalities. The organization has taken 650 legal actions and achieved victories supporting democracy and improving the lives and well-being of people and communities. Democracy Forward Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

ACLU of Mississippi is a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that defends and expands the constitutional rights and civil liberties of all Mississippians guaranteed under the United States and Mississippi Constitutions, through its litigation, legislative and public education programs. It is an affiliate of the national ACLU.

The Mississippi Center for Justice is a nonprofit, public interest law firm dedicated to dismantling the state’s culture of inequity and injustice. Supported and staffed by attorneys and other professionals, the Center pursues strategies to combat discrimination and poverty statewide.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Funding, Justice, Mississippi

Paul Bowers: “We Are Not a Threat; We’re Just People”

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2022 //
14

Paul Bowers is a journalist in South Carolina who blogs at “Brutal South.” This post is a story of a young person who realized he was transgender. He wrote an essay about his discovery that was published in Scholastic magazine. Two years later, a substitute gym teacher in South Carolina handed out the essay for his class to read. This act created a major scandal, and before long, the governor of the state got involved and demanded censorship of the essay. Bowers interviewed the author of the essay for this post.

Politicians have tried to whip up the issue of transgender youth as a menace to society. The most current survey suggests that about 1.4% of youth 13-17 identify as transgender. About 0.05% (half of one percent) of adults identify as transgender. These numbers have remained stable over time.

Bowers writes:

At the start of 7th grade, Leo Lipson emailed his teachers letting them know about a change in his pronouns.

Writing about his experience growing up transgender in New York, Leo had this to say:

When I asked my teachers for help, they told me I needed to teach my classmates about gender. I thought, “Aren’t you supposed to be the teacher?” I guess they saw gender as my thing, something they couldn’t explain.

Leo’s essay, “I Am Leo,” ran in the December 2019 / January 2020 issue of Scholastic’s Choices magazine, a classroom publication for grades 7-12. It was a fine personal essay that broke down a complicated subject in simple terms.

As far as I can tell, Leo’s article didn’t make many waves until Sept. 9, 2022, when a substitute physical education teacher at a public middle school on James Island, South Carolina, handed out copies of the article to a class (it might have been the entire magazine issue; I’m not certain based on local news reports). The teacher also handed out a worksheet of questions testing students’ basic comprehension. It was an ungraded assignment.

Eleven days later, the assignment earned an official rebuke and press release from the Republican governor of South Carolina.

“I call on [Charleston County School District]’s Board of Trustees to take action immediately to prohibit these types of instructional materials from being distributed or utilized in the classroom without parents’ knowledge and consent,” Gov. Henry McMaster wrote in an open letter to the school board chair on Sept. 20.

Here we had the highest elected official in South Carolina nitpicking a single assignment handed out by a substitute gym teacher. The governor demanded censorship, and he got it: Leaning on South Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ+ sex education policies, a school district spokesperson said in a prepared statement, “District staff regrets that this matter occurred, and leaders are working to ensure all staff is reminded of parents’ opportunity to opt their children out prior to sensitive materials being shared with students.”

Now the issue is a big deal in the state. Parents are being frightened into thinking that the schools are trying to turn their children transgender. Republicans are busy scaring parents and passing laws to make sure that students never learn that transgender people exist.

To be effective, they will have to monitor their television watching and take away their cell phones. If knowing about the existence of transgender people turned people transgender, there would be many more than half a percent to 1.4%.

Open Blowers’ post to read his interview with Leo, who is now 19.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Cruelty, South Carolina
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