Jan Resseger explains how the Ohio legislature, which is devoted to charters and vouchers, managed to cheat districts like hers while boasting about “fair student funding.”
In the new state budget, the Ohio Legislature supposedly fixed an inequitable scheme for funding the state’s extensive private school vouchers. But it was a bait-and-switch. Public schools were losers, especially in poor districts.
Megan Schmidt wrote in Discover magazine about the value of reading fiction. Although written a year ago, this article is timely because it decisively refutes one of the central tenets of the Common Core, which encourages teachers to spend increasing amounts of time on “informational text” while decreasing time for literature.
She began:
Would the world be a better place if people read more books?
Of course, asserting that reading can fix the world’s problems would be naive at best. But it could help make it a more empathetic place. And a growing body of research has found that people who read fiction tend to better understand and share in the feelings of others — even those who are different from themselves.
That’s because literary fiction is essentially an exploration of the human experience, says Keith Oatley, a novelist and professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto.
“Reading novels enables us to become better at actually understanding other people and what they’re up to,” says Oatley. “[With] someone who you’re married to … or a close friend, you can actually get to know them. Reading fiction enables you to sample across a much wider range of possible people and come to understand something about the differences among them.”
Psychologists have found that empathy is innate, as even babies show it. And while some people are naturally more empathetic than others, most people become more-so with age. Beyond that, some research indicates that if you’re motivated to become more empathetic, you probably can. Although there are many ways to cultivate empathy, they largely involve practicing positive social behaviors, like getting to know others, putting yourself in their shoes and challenging one’s own biases. And stories — fictional ones in particular — offer another way to step outside of oneself.
Fiction has the capacity to transport you into another character’s mind, allowing you to see and feel what they do. This can expose us to life circumstances that are very different from our own. Through fiction, we can experience the world as another gender, ethnicity, culture, sexuality, profession or age. Words on a page can introduce us to what it’s like to lose a child, be swept up in a war, be born into poverty, or leave home and immigrate to a new country. And taken together, this can influence how we relate to others in the real world…
Sometimes, empathy is described as the glue that holds society together. Without it, humankind probably wouldn’t have gotten very far. Our ancestors depended on acts of caring for survival — such as sharing resources, help with healing the sick, and protection from predators. And we’ll probably continue needing empathy to move forward. Yet, at this particular moment in history,it can feel like empathy is on shaky ground.
From this perspective, it seems that our current test-driven regime and neglect of literature are promoting the wrong values. Selfishness, competitiveness, hyper-individualism, lack of empathy.”
The union movement built the middle class. For most of the past century, big business and plutocrats have waged war on unions and have largely succeeded. As the following analysis by the Economic Policy Institute shows, the high point of the labor movement was in the in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As the strength of unions waned, inequality grew.
The EPI study begins:
Unions improve wages and benefits for all workers, not just union members. They help reduce income inequality by making sure all Americans, and not just the wealthy elite, share in the benefits of their labor.
Unions also reduce racial disparities in wages and raise women’s wages, helping to counteract disparate labor market outcomes by race and gender that result from occupational segregation, discrimination, and other labor market inequities related to structural racism and sexism.
Finally, unions help win progressive policies at the federal, state, and local levels that benefit all workers. And conversely, where unions are weak, wealthy corporations and their allies are more successful at pushing through policies and legislation that hurt working people. A strong labor movement protects workers, reduces disparities, and strengthens our democracy.
A friend who works in a government health agency sent me the following thoughts about the Texas abortion ban. The bill does not permit abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, which amounts to a ban since very few women know they are pregnant at that time. Citizens are offered a bounty of $10,000 for identifying any woman who obtained an abortion or who helped her get an abortion. The author requested anonymity.
She writes:
You have probably already read a great deal about the SCOTUS decision upholding (for now) the Texas ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Below are a few notable excerpts (articles by Lithwick, Tribe, and some others are worth reading in their entirety) and, as usual, some comments.
Note that “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the 1973 Roe v Wade SCOTUS decision, was a Texas resident who protested the unconstitutional abortion laws in her state.
Note also Michelle Goldberg’s useful framing of the crowdsourcing of anti-abortion enforcement as yet another illustration of the Republican embrace of vigilantism. (e.g.: Jan 6 insurrection, the call for military insubordination in defiance of civilian control, celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse in WI, praise for the Texas mob that attempted to force Biden’s campaign bus off the road, violence at anti-vaccine protests, Trump’s frequent promotion of assault.)
One of my questions today has still not been answered:
Are suits possible against individuals in other states who in any way help Texas women obtain an abortion out of state, i.e., if someone outside of Texas contributes money to an organization that helps Texas women leave the state to have an abortion, can the donor be sued? By anyone?
Dahlia LIthwick asserted on Rachel Maddow’s show tonight that the answer is not clear, and that that lack of clarity and the consequent chilling, self-censoring effect it has are deliberate. I’m sure clarity will be quickly forthcoming.
Another huge question is whether there will be sufficient political agitation (mostly among women) to make reproductive rights an issue with impact in the 2022 and 2024 elections. In theory, every legislator will now have to publicly take a position, and some are already lining up on either side. Dems see it as a winning issue – finally some serious motivation for our base and greater peril for Repubs.
A few points of clarification re misleading media reports:
– The Texas law is called a “heartbeat” bill. But there is no real “heartbeat” at 6 weeks because there is no real heart. At that point, the embryo is less than ½” long and has a slight pulse of electrical activity and a tiny tube that will eventually become a heart. After all, every living cell uses electric energy, including plants. So do cell phones. The term “heartbeat” bill is another form of emotionally manipulative, right wing branding which all journalists seem to be buying into.
– SCOTUS did not “give” women the right to abortion. The Roe v Wade decision agreed, as Jane Roe’s lawyers argued, that women have a Constitutional right to abortion based on the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides a “right to privacy.”
Here is what the Roe v Wade decision actually held. Note the differing terms and stipulations for each trimester:
State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life-saving procedure on the mother’s behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman’s qualified right to terminate her pregnancy. Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman’s health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a ‘compelling’ point at various stages of the woman’s approach to term. Pp. 147-164.
(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician. Pp. 163-164.
(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. Pp. 163-164.
(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164—165.
– An embryo is not an “unborn child.” An embryo is not even a fetus until week nine, and not viable outside the womb until 24-28 weeks. The Texas, Mississippi, and other laws outlawing abortion before “viability” are clearly unconstitutional.
Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” introduced in 2017, 2019, and again in Jan 2021 with the co-sponsorship of 42 Republican Senators, duplicitously claims viability (and capacity for pain) at 20 weeks, counting from the date of conception/fertilization, rather than the standard obstetric calculation, which is from the first day of the woman’s last period – that is, two weeks prior to conception and easier to determine. (Muddying the water about the time of “viability” is another deceitful tactic designed to push a ban back at least to 20 weeks.) In either case, according to the Executive VP of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
“…in no way, shape or form is a 20-week fetus viable. There is no evidence anywhere of a 20-week fetus surviving, even with intensive medical care.”
Further, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists:
“the neural circuitry necessary to distinguish touch from painful touch does not, in fact, develop until late in the third trimester.”
– Why are we only discussing the responsibility of women and penalizing those who help them? If a fetus is a child, isn’t the father a parent, guilty of child neglect if he walks away from a pregnant partner and guilty of aiding an abortion if he knows she will seek one? And why are women expected to fight for their human rights on their own? Where is the outrage of regular men, other than the liberal TV pundits and civil rights lawyers?
As Dahlia Lithwick, points out,
“…It’s almost impossible ..not (to)..declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women…..
…..a court that comes to you in the dark of night, without logic or reason, whispering soothing words about how “this order is not based on any conclusion about the constitutionality of Texas’s law” as it upends the constitutionality of Texas law? That is the stuff of ancient gaslighting, reserved for those moments in which Power is explaining to Women that they are just being hysterical, and to kindly lie back and enjoy it…..”
Re suggested next steps and remedies:
– Presidential “whole government” study commissions are clearly not going to meet the urgent, desperate need for action.
– Likewise, voting rights reinstatement (in order to elect new judges and leaders who will appoint different judges) and court reform (expanding the Supreme Court and other changes) are supremely (pun intended) worthy goals, but will take years or decades to achieve. Further, Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court is not chargedwith actually making recommendations, and Biden has not expressed support for court expansion.
– Codifying national abortion rights through Congresswoman Judy Chu’s “Women’s Health Protection Act” would face highly likely defeat in the Senate (Dem Senators Manchin and Casey are anti-choice) and, if it survived that, a challenge and likely defeat by SCOTUS, which, after all, couldn’t even wait to hear normal public arguments in the Mississippi anti-abortion case (Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization), which comes before the court this fall and specifically requests the overturn of Roe.
I know there are many pro choice orgs desperate for funds at this moment, but the Center for Reproductive Rights (4-star rating) will argue the Dobbs case at SCOTUS and is a very focused and potentially impactful place to put some money:
https://reproductiverights.org/
https://reproductiverights.org/texas-abortion-ban-supreme-court-ruling-sb8/ (background and highlights from dissents.)
– 19 states have already banned abortion via telehealth using pills (despite Covid), and many are rushing to ban sending abortion pills by mail. Keep in mind that anti-abortion people, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, consider some types of birth control to be “abortion-inducing.” As Laurence Tribe, discussing this “grotesque” Texas law, statedtoday in The Guardian, there will be many other downstream consequences:
“The prospect of hefty bounties will breed a system of profit-seeking, Soviet-style informing on friends and neighbors. These vigilantes will sue medical distributors of IUDs and morning-after pills, as well as insurance companies. These companies, in turn, will stop offering reproductive healthcare in Texas…….. if a young woman asks for money for a bus ticket, or a ride to the airport, friends and parents fearful of liability might vigorously interrogate her about her intentions. This nightmarish state of affairs burdens yet another fundamental constitutional privilege: the right to interstate travel….”
– Neighboring states are not going to offer safe haven. As of June 2021, 12 states already have anti-abortion bans ready to be “triggered” with the fall of Roe, and 15 have early gestational age abortion bans ready to go. Per the Guttmacher Institute, abortion would almost immediately be illegal or severely restricted in 22 states. At least half a dozen states (e.g., FL, AR, MS) are now considering draconian laws modeled on that of Texas. (The idea is not new: In 2014, a Pennsylvania woman was imprisoned for buying her daughter abortion drugs.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/01/texas-abortion-law-faq/ (Note the few purple states.)
In any case, as Michelle Goldberg and others have pointed out, the goal was never just overturning Roe. Despite the professed commitment to state determination of abortion laws, the right will never be satisfied with a patchwork of state laws. Their goal has always been a total, national abortion ban.
“Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Stephen Breyer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Justice Elena Kagan. Each wrote their own dissents calling for the law to be blocked.”
Four Justices dissented from the SCOTUS ruling re the Texas law:
In case you missed the strong dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the SCOTUS ruling:
“The Court’s order is stunning. Presented with an application to enjoin a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny, a majority of Justices have opted to bury their heads in the sand.”
More from Sotomayor:
Governor Ron DeSantis has decided to drop standardized testing and replace it with “progress monitoring.”
The devil is in the details. How will the state monitor “progress” without standardized testing? Is he trying to hide the poor performance of charter schools?
Florida blogger Billy Townsend explains what’s happening here. He says Ron is ditching Jeb.
The Washington Post editorial board published a statement condemning Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ fierce opposition to mandates for masks and vaccinations. He wants to run for President as the candidate most like Trump.
It wrote:
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, has descended to a jaw-dropping level of cynicism. At a news conference on Monday, he announced that if local governments in Florida impose vaccine mandates on their employees, he would fine them $5,000 for every worker. Then he stood silently by as Gainesville city employees made false claims about the mRNA vaccines that have saved countless lives during the pandemic.
Although the wave of illness from the delta variant appears to be receding in Florida, the state has suffered a terrible summer toll of hospitalizations and deaths. A governor facing such a cataclysm might naturally be expected to use all methods to keep people safe. Instead, Mr. DeSantis, an ally of former president Donald Trump, has for months been campaigning against mask and vaccine mandates and actively sought to prevent business, government and schools from imposing them. These are vital tools to save lives in the face of a highly transmissible disease, but the governor insists that everyone should have the right to make their own decision. He casts himself as a defender of personal freedom.
This is a favorite argument of Republican governors and others, including Mr. Trump, who last year amid lockdowns was tweeting “LIBERATE MICHIGAN” and other states. But personal freedom does not give an individual the right to hurt others. Those not wearing masks and refusing to get vaccinated are spreading the virus and overcrowding the nation’s hospitals. They are the majority of those who are dying. This is not freedom; it is recklessness.
In 2005, Ohio launched a new voucher program to “save poor kids from failing schools.” The voucher program served 3,000 students and cost $5 million.
Now the state’s voucher program serves 69,000 students and costs Ohio taxpayers $628 million annually. Voucher advocates want more.
The legislature continually rewrote the rules for eligibility to expand the number of students who can get a voucher.
At first, only students assigned to schools in “academic emergency” – the state’s lowest rating – for three consecutive years could apply for a voucher.
A year later it became schools in either academic emergency or academic watch for three years. Six months after that, the requirement dropped to two of the last three years.
In 2013, lawmakers created an income-based scholarship for all kids regardless of their home district. Then, they removed the requirement that kindergartners be enrolled in their local public school first and later expanded it all the way up to high school students.
Today, roughly half of Ohio’s families are eligible for an income-based voucher because the limit for a family of four $65,500 of annual household income.
Not many children are being “saved.” Most voucher schools perform worse than the public schools that the students left.
Most kids who use EdChoice scholarships perform worse on state standardized tests than their public school peers, a 2020 investigation by the Cincinnati Enquirer found. null
In 88% of Ohio cities where vouchers are used, the data showed better test results for the public schools. And when it came to Ohio’s eight largest cities, five of the districts (Akron, Canton, Cleveland, Toledo and Cincinnati) reported higher proficiency levels.
Akron City Schools had the biggest difference, scoring nearly 8 percentage points higher than the private schools in its area.
Public school advocates say that’s because many of the schools on the voucher list aren’t failing. The criteria for getting on the list is wrong, not the schools.
The goal of voucher advocates is not to “save poor children from failing schools,” but to transfer public funds for parents to use at private and religious schools, even though their public schools are better.
The talented investigative journalist Jennifer Berkshire reports on the changing politics behind charter schools. Democratic support for charters, once led by the Obama administration, is waning. Betsy DeVos made clear that school choice is a Republican goal.
She writes:
In 2019, when West Virginia passed legislation that allowed for the creation of charter schools, it represented yet another feather in the cap of the school-choice movement. Nearly three decades after the creation of the very first publicly funded, privately managed school, in Minnesota, charters now educate more than 3.3 million K-12 students in 7,500 schools across the country, and West Virginia—where lawmakers ignored the fierce opposition of the state’s teachers’ union—became the forty-fifth state to allow them.
Yet today the charter school movement itself is perhaps more vulnerable than it has ever been. Unlikely allies in the best of times, its coalition of supporters—which has included progressives, free-market Republicans, and civil rights advocates, and which has been handsomely funded by deep-pocketed donors and Silicon Valley moguls—is unraveling.
Much of the blame rests on the hyperpolarized politics of the Trump era. Under Betsy DeVos, the lightning-rod secretary of education, Republicans rediscovered their love for private school vouchers and religious education. And with the taste for all things neoliberal on the wane within today’s Democratic Party, charter schools, long the favored policy plaything of the liberal donor class, are simply a harder sell….
The GOP’s most stunning move was to enact, without a single Democratic vote, the Hope Scholarship Program, a sweeping voucher program aimed at moving students out of what the right refers to derisively as “government schools.” Starting in 2022, West Virginia parents who withdraw their children from public schools will receive their child’s state share of public education funding—approximately $4,600 in 2021—to spend on virtually any educational cost: private school tuition, online education programs, homeschooling, tutors, even out-of-state boarding schools. Newly school-age students whose parents never intended to go the public route are also eligible for the funds, which can be banked and spent on future expenses, similar to a health savings account.
While West Virginia’s moves were the most dramatic, legislators in 18 states, including Florida, Indiana, Arizona, and New Hampshire, were close behind, creating private school–choice initiatives or expanding existing ones. Although lawmakers pointed to the pandemic’s shuttering of public schools as part of the justification, schools—both public and private—in most of these states remained open. For all of the bluster from Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and others about the importance of in-person schooling, the GOP’s favored school-choice programs increasingly bypass traditional classroom learning altogether. Instead, parents are encouraged to use publicly funded “education freedom accounts” to purchase an array of education “options,” much like television viewers who eschew cable packages for à la carte channels.
Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the pro-privatization Goldwater Institute in Arizona, says that the GOP’s increasing hostility to public schools could ultimately harm charters as well. “The real target here is taxpayer-funded public education, and that’s a category that includes charters,” said Siler.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, wrote the following:
As you know, the House is trying to block federal funding to charters controlled by for-profits. But it will be an uphill battle. I recently did an investigation into the private sale of 69 charters by for-profit NHA. It is jaw-dropping. Please read about it and share. This is a critical time to get the word out. Thanks, Carol
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/09/14/charter-school-scams/
It’s true that there are occasional stories of embezzlement or fraud in public schools, but none compares to the sheer audacity of California’A3 online charter chain. Its two cofounders—Jason Schrock and Sean McManus—concocted elaborate schemes and pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars of state funds. They both pleaded guilty and repaid hundreds of millions.
Schrock, however, will not spend a day in prison.
SAN DIEGO —
One of the two masterminds behind a massive charter school scheme that defrauded the state of California out of tens of millions of dollars was sentenced to four years in prison and ordered to pay $18.75 million in fines in San Diego Superior Court on Friday.
Jason Schrock, a co-creator of the now-defunct A3 charter school network, pleaded guilty in February to one count of conspiracy to misappropriate public funds and one count of conflict of interest. He has been on house arrest in Orange County since he was arraigned in May 2019.
Because the law requires that Schrock receive credit for the more than 750 days he has spent on house arrest, he will not spend a single day in prison.
At Schrock’s sentencing hearing, defense attorney Knut Johnson emphasized that Schrock had been wholly cooperative during the investigation, turning over hundreds of millions of dollars in assets and thousands of pages of documents to further the investigation.
It was that cooperation that kept San Diego Superior Court Judge Frederick Link from handing down a stiffer sentence, the judge said. The case centered on what has been labeled as one of the nation’s largest fraud schemes after taxpayers were fleeced out of $400 million meant for K-12 education. Due in part to the cooperation of Schrock and his co-conspirator, Sean McManus, investigators have recovered $220 million…
A yearlong investigation by the San Diego County district attorney’s office determined that Schrock and McManus and their codefendants fraudulently obtained hundreds of millions in state school dollars from 2016 to 2019 after opening a network of 19 online charter schools. Three of those schools were in San Diego County.
Prosecutors accused A3 leaders of buying children’s personal information to falsely enroll them in the schools and of providing incomplete education services while taking tens of millions of dollars for personal use. A3 leaders also manipulated enrollment figures across their schools to receive more state funding per student and manipulated school attendance reporting to get more money for time that children were not spending in A3 schools.
So far, nine defendants in the case have pleaded guilty.
Diane Ravitch's blog 