Chicago Teachers Union: The Status of the Strike

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
2

Day 2 of CTU strike will bring educators, allies to City Hall at 1:30 pm

Some movement at bargaining table Thursday, but no agreement on special ed needs, classroom overcrowding, salary floor for low-wage teaching assistants, staffing shortages.

CHICAGO—Educators and frontline staff will hit the picket lines for a second day today, as rank and file union members attempt to bargain a fair contract for 25,000 CTU teachers, clinicians, teaching assistants and support staff. While some progress was made at the bargaining table Thursday, the union and CPS ramain far apart on efforts to reign in exploding class sizes and find a path to remedying dire shortages of school nurses, social workers, special education teachers and other critical staff.

Late this afternoon, CPS refused to discuss a proposal on special education needs with the expert special education teachers and clinicians at the table who had crafted the proposal, because not every CTU officer was present. The CTU’s 40+ member rank and file bargaining team must sign off on any tentative agreement to be sent to members for approval.

Today’s schedule: Thursday, Oct. 17

 

  • 1:30 p.m.: Mass rally and march, City Hall, 121 N. LaSalle St. with CTU rank and file, grassroots community groups, CTU officers, elected officials, allies.

Fast facts:

  • The State’s new equity-based school funding formula is sending a billion-plus additional dollars each year to CPS to reduce sizes of chronically overcrowded classes, support students in poverty and increase services to special education students and English language learners.
  • CPS passed the largest budget in its history this year: $7.7 billion. Yet CPS cut the amount of dollars it is spending in school communities this year.
  • Juarez High School in Pilsen, which enrolls over 1,300 overwhelmingly low-income Latinx students, saw its school budget cut this year by $840,000, costing the school nine teaching and staff positions.
  • CPS cut the budgets of more than 200 CPS schools by at least $100,000, and cut the budgets of more than 40 schools by more than half a million dollars for this school year.
  • CTU educators are fighting for better wages, smaller class sizes, adequate staffing, and educational justice for students and their families. They want the additional state revenue CPS receives to increase equity to go to school communities and student needs.
  • Almost half of CPS’ students are Latinx. Yet the district has acute shortages of ELL teachers—teachers for English language learners—and is severely short of bilingual social workers. Bilingual education services are chronically short of both educators and resources—a key issue at the bargaining table.
  • CPS is desperately short of school nurses, social workers, librarians, special education teachers, ELL teachers and more. CPS has staffing ratios three to five times higher than those recommended by national professional organizations and best practices. Fewer than 115 school nurses serve over 500 schools. Most schools have a nurse only one day a week.
  • One out of four schools has a librarian—and that number falls to barely one in ten for Black-majority schools. A decade ago, most schools had a librarian.
  • CPS is desperately short of social workers and special education teachers, even as CPS is under the oversight of a state monitor for shortchanging its diverse learners.
  • This year, more than 1,300 CPS classes are overcrowded under CPS’ own high class caps, up from more than a thousand overcrowded classrooms last year.
  • Almost 25% of elementary students attend overcrowded classes, with some kindergarten classes topping 40 students. Roughly 35% of high school students are enrolled in overcrowded classes; at schools like Simeon, virtually every core class is overcrowded, with math, social studies and world language classes topping 39 students.
  • The CTU’s school clerks and teaching assistants earn wages as low as $28,000/year—so low the children of two-thirds qualify for free and reduced lunch under federal poverty guidelines. Over 1,100 cannot afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment at prevailing rent rates in ANY zip code in the city. In year 5 of the mayor’s proposed contract, most of those workers would still be earning poverty wages. And in the last ten years, NO CTU member’s wages have kept pace with the inflation rate.
  • Candidate Lightfoot ran on a platform calling for equity and educational justice—including a nurse, a social worker and a librarian in every school—all proposals her negotiating team has rejected at the table. She also ran in support of an elected, representative school board—but moved to stall that legislation in the Illinois Senate after she was elected.
  • CPS has said it has budgeted to improve staffing shortages, but refuses to put those commitments in writing in an enforceable contract. The union wants those promises in writing, in an enforceable contract—the only way we have to hold CPS and the 5th floor to their promises.
Categories Accountability, Chicago, Class size, Education Reform, English Language Learners, Funding, Librarians, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Mike Klonsky: On the Chicago Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
3

 

Mike Klonsky just posted this as he was leaving to bring coffee and donuts to striking teachers, including his daughter.

I hope this strike has a good outcome for both the teachers and the new mayor. She is not Rahm Emanuel. She inherited the debt for Rahm’s two terms of hostility to the city’s public schools and their teachers.

Mike included this quote:

Yesterday, the parent group, Raise Your Hand, issued a statement on the strike which made a lot of sense.

Please remember to be good to each other out there. At the end of this contract negotiation, we are all parts of school communities that are part of a larger community, the Chicago Public Schools. Our children need all of us working together.

 

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Teresa Hanafin: Why Gordon Sondland is a Person of Interest

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
23

In her Fast Forward news summary for the Boston Globe today, Teresa Hanafin writes:

Today’s witness in the hot seat on Capitol Hill is Gordon Sondland, the hotelier who donated a million bucks to Trump’s inauguration and in exchange, got to be the US ambassador to the European Union. He’s neck-deep in the Ukraine mess because Trump pushed aside the experienced diplomats and tapped the naif Sondland — and Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani — to lead the pressure campaign against Ukraine designed to dirty up Joe Biden.

Sondland is expected to tell lawmakers that he didn’t like Trump’s request that he coordinate all Ukraine contacts through Giuliani, and that by mid-summer, he realized that Trump had a preconditionbefore he would agree to meet with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office: an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden that would benefit Trump politically. He’ll also testify that the text message he sent to Bill Taylor, a top US diplomat for Ukraine, denying that there was a quid pro quo, was dictated by Trump.

Fiona Hill, one of Trump’s former top foreign policy advisers who testified earlier this week, told lawmakers that she considered Sondland to be a national security risk because of his inexperience, a naiveté that she thought foreign bad actors could easily exploit. Plus he used a personal cell phone for official business.

The back-slapping, glad-handing businessman also didn’t understand protocol: For example, he constantly invited foreign officials to visit the White House any time they wanted, but he never made any definite arrangements. Sure enough, a Romanian delegation showed up unannounced at the White House door one day, saying Sondland had invited them. I hope they at least got a meal and some MAGA hats for their trouble.

Sondland is undergoing scrutiny for another matter: He is spending close to $1 million in taxpayer money to jazz up the ambassador’s residence on the outskirts of Brussels. These are not simple renovations: He’s spending $400,000 to build a second kitchen and spruce up the main one, $33,000 for handmade furniture from Italy, nearly $30,000 for a new sound system, and $95,000 for an outdoor “living pod” with a pergola that has electric heating, LED lighting strips, and a remote-control system.

Jeez, if the Ukraine president can’t wrangle a White House invitation, maybe he can get a luxury hot tub session at Sondland’s fancy digs.

Categories Education Reform

Peter Greene: Beware, Kentucky! Here Come the Charter Hucksters!

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
11

Peter Greene notes that Kentucky passed a charter law but hashttp://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2019/10/ky-pushing-old-charter-myths-in-new.html so far wisely refused to fund them. Along comes a local marketing consultant to explain why charters are a great idea. Greene explains why charters are a very bad idea indeed.

The arguments for charters are bogus, he shows.

The marketing consultant says, why not give charters a chance. Greene responds that we have 30 years of experience with charters:

Finally: some public schools stink.

So why not give parents a choice. I would say because parents don’t want a choice as much as they want a non-stinky school. Vissing cites a local school that came up low on Kentucky’s ridiculous 5 star school rating program. Those parents would like to send children to a good school. Why, I wonder for the gazillionth time, wouldn’t we try to make the school not suck? The old argument is that students can’t wait, that it takes too long to change a school, yet somehow we’re proposing that a school can be go from nonexistent to awesome in the same short time.

Bonus round: charter schools are not public.

Kentucky charter advocates have gotten the memo to call charter schools “public charters schools.” They are not. Public schools are owned by the public, operated by elected representatives of the public, are completely transparent to the public, and serve all of the public.

Kentuckians, do not be snookered by these mythical myths and the charter advocates who push them. You’re a fresh market; at a minimum, you deserve a fresh sales pitch.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Hoax, Kentucky, Privatization

Cathy Frye: Inside the Shadowy World of the Arkansas School Choice “Movement,” Part 6

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
1

 

After a long career as a journalist, Cathy Frye worked for the Walton-funded “Arkansas Public School Resource Center,” an organization funded by the Waltons to hoax rural school districts and suck them into the Waltons’ plan to eliminate public education in the state. She has been posting about what she learned as communications director for the APSRC during her three years in the organization. This is her sixth post. Links to the first five are included in her post.

The thing to remember about the Waltons is that whatever they fund related to education is intended to advance their goals of eliminating public schools, destroying teachers’ unions, and undermining the teaching profession.

This, despite the fact that Sam Walton, his wife, and his children graduated from public schools.

Their defining features as a family are greed and a lack of gratitude for the schools that educated them.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Hoax, Privatization, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Randi Weingarten: How AFT Helped Teachers in Puerto Rico

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
11

Randi Weingarten, who is both president of the American Federation of Teachers and a veteran lawyer, describes the AFT’s efforts to save the pensions and benefits and dignity of teachers in Puerto Rico as the Island faced bankruptcy and predatory lenders.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Pensions, Puerto Rico, Unions

Rachel M. Cohen: When Bernie Sanders Stood Up to Teach for America

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
27

 

Rachel M. Cohen tells an important and powerful story of the time when Senator Bernie Sanders stood up to Teach for America.

His efforts were ultimately defeated by Arne Duncan, Senator Michael Bennett of Colorado, and Eli Broad.

In 2011, the Obama administration and TFA’s friends in Congress were eager to call the program’s inexperienced and ill-trained recruits “highly qualified,” to meet the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Law. At that time, Sanders was the only member of Congress to question how a recent college graduate who had never taught could be considered “highly qualified.”

TFA enjoyed the vigorous support of the Obama administration, which gave the wealthy organization $50 million in 2010 (as did the ultra conservative, anti-union Walton Family Foundation). In addition, TFA placed its alums on the staff of every member of the Senate and House education committees, thanks to the generosity of a California billionaire named Arthur Rock, who are then in a position to protect TFA’s interests as well as funding for charter schools. TFA recognized that few if any members of Congress pay close attention to education, since the federal role in education is small, especially compared to issues like healthcare, Social Security, and foreign policy. Thus, most rely on junior staff to inform them, which gives extraordinary power to the TFA plants.

Cohen tells the story of TFA’s battle to ensure that its uncertified recruits were considered “highly qualified” teachers, an oxymoron.

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the group was enmeshed in a dispute over teacher credentialing under the No Child Left Behind Act that demonstrated its ability to marshal influence in D.C. Under the law, a school district was permitted to hire educators who did not meet the “highly qualified” bar if there were teacher shortages. Schools that did so, however, had to then inform parents if their child was taught by such a teacher, publicly disclose how many teachers in the entire school were not highly qualified, and develop a plan to reach 100 percent highly qualified teachers. The law also barred schools from disproportionately concentrating inexperienced and uncertified teachers in classrooms with low-income students and students of color. In other words, if noncertified teachers had to be hired, they also had to be fairly distributed across schools.

Teach for America and its allies in the education reform community lobbied the government, and in 2002, the Department of Education issued a regulation that said “highly qualified” teachers could now also include unlicensed teachers for up to three years if they were making progress toward their certification. This effectively resolved the problem for Teach For America, as most program recruits planned to leave the classroom at the end of their assignment anyway.

In 2007, the civil rights law firm Public Advocates filed a suit against the Department of Education over this regulation. In effect, the lawyers argued, it created an exemption that condoned the assignment of novice, inexperienced teachers to students in high-poverty schools, which are disproportionately nonwhite and low-income.

“It seemed pretty simple to us all along that you can’t have a law that requires ‘full state certification’ for teachers to be highly qualified and also say that people who are in the process of getting their certification meet that designation,” said John Affeldt, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “Those are two different states of being.”

Affeldt said there was little question as to why the 2002 regulation came about. “Teach for America applied pressure because they saw the original statute as threatening to their model and to the growth of their organization,” he said. “At some point between its founding and the mid-2000s, Teach for America had changed its belief system from ‘Every student needs fully qualified, highly effective teachers’ to ‘Every student needs us.’ TFA’s model depends on being able to concentrate their people in low-income, high-minority schools, and they thought that was a good thing. And if the law incentivized districts to hire other types of teachers ahead of TFA, well, they didn’t want that. They wanted to be seen on the same level, and some in leadership truly believe that TFA’s teachers-in-training are as good or even better qualified than certified teachers who might apply.”

TFA fought the lawsuit in court and lost, then flexed its political muscles in Congress to protect its interests. The Democrat-controlled Congress overrode the court decision, which infuriated civil rights groups, which actually wanted highly qualified teachers in the classrooms of the neediest students.

The civil rights groups turned to Senator Sanders to fight their battle against TFA. He took up their banner, insisting that “highly qualified” should actually mean “highly qualified.”

In a Senate HELP committee hearing, Sanders emphasized that his amendments would not conflict with the goal of attracting new, bright teachers to the classroom, and said he is “a strong supporter of programs like Teach for America and other efforts to attract young people into education.” But, he stressed, it is wrong to characterize someone starting in the classroom two months after college graduation as already highly prepared.

“I think most of the people around this table would agree that doesn’t make any sense,” Sanders said. “That doesn’t make that person not a good teacher, not an inspired teacher; it simply does not make that teacher ‘highly qualified.’”

“If you had a heart condition, and you were going to go to a surgeon, you would go to a surgeon who has many surgeries successfully done,” he added. “And while another surgeon may be wonderful, a young surgeon who hasn’t yet performed his first surgery, you would probably go to the experienced [surgeon] who has already achieved a certain level of accomplishment.”

But Sanders’ efforts were countered and ultimately defeated by the persistent opposition of Senator Michael Bennett, recently appointed to the Senate after serving as superintendent of the Denver Public Schools. Bennett was and is a huge supporter of corporate reform. He is not an educator. Before his appointment to manage the Denver schools, he was a financier.

When the issue came up again a year later, members of Congress were lobbied by billionaire Eli Broad, who was then vice-president of the neoliberal Center for American Progress and an array of corporate charter chains, which needed TFA recruits. They falsely claimed that without the TFA loophole, “hundreds of thousands of tremendously gifted teachers who have a significant impact on students will not be able to continue to teach.”

Cohen points out that Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro conducted a study that determined that more than 800,000 of the nation’s neediest students had teachers who were still in training, not certified, certainly not “highly qualified.”

This is an excellent analysis of how TFA flexed its muscles and power to defend its self-interest, undermine the plain language of the law, and inflict unqualified teachers on children who actually needed—but didn’t get—highly qualified teachers.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Teach for America TFA

SCANDAL! Tennessee: Fake “Reform” Group Endorses Annual Testing

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
25

 

A Corporate Reform group in Tennessee released its own poll claiming that most voters in the state approve of annual testing.

The group called SCORE was created in 2009 by former Republican Senator Bill Frist to promote the Common Core State Standards. Being fast to accept CCSS before they were finished or even released put Tennessee in an advantageous spot for Race to the Top funding. The state won $500 million from Arne Duncan’s competition. $100 Million was set aside for the Achievement School District, which gathered the state’s lowest performing schools, located mostly in Memphis and Nashville, and handed them over to charter operators. The ASD promised to raise the state’s lowest-performing schools into the top 20%. The ASD was a complete failure. It did not raise any low-performing schools into the top 20%. Most made no progress at all.

Tennesse’s SCORE is a member of the rightwing network called PIE (Policy Innovators in Education), created by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to connect groups that were disrupting and privatizing public education. Like other members of PIE, SCORE favors charter schools.

The board of SCORE is loaded with millionaires and billionaires who should be supporting the state’s public schools, which enroll nearly 90% of the state’s children, but prefer to disrupt and privatize them.

Five years ago, a public school parent blogger called out SCORE for making money off Common Core products. Open this link to see some eye-popping financial transactions, where RTTT money goes into the coffers of corporations owned by board members, who in turn make campaign contributions to Republican Governor BillHaslam. (Former Governor Haslam is now on the board of Teach for America.) The Gates Foundation helped to fund SCORE.

In addition to the oligarchs identified in the preceding post, the SCORE boards includes these super-wealthy Tennesseans:

Pitt Hyde of the Memphis Hyde Family Foundation. Owns AutoZone and the Memphis Grizzlies. The Hyde Family Foundation is the largest funder of the Tennessee Charter School Center.
 
Janet Ayers of the Ayers Foundation, also a funder of Common Core. 
 
Dee Haslam, married to the former governor’s brother. They own Pilot gas stations and the Cleveland Browns. Worth $1.8 billion, according to Wikipedia.
 
Orrin Ingram of the local billionaire family that has pushed charter schools.

Apparently the only plan that SCORE has for Tennessee’s public school students is to inflict Common Core and standardized testing.

SCORE has lots of money, but no imagination and no sense of the public good.

It is committed to charter schools, privatization, and accountability (but only for public schools).

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Hoax, Opinion Polling, Pearson, Privatization, Race to the Top, Scandals, Tennessee, Testing

If You Live Near Boston, Come Hear Eve Ewing Tonight!

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
0

If you live anywhere near Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, I hope you will join me to hear Eve Ewing speak tonight, October 17, at Jewett Arts Center at 7:30 pm.

Eve taught in the Chicago Public Schools, where teachers are going out on strike today.

She is speaking tonight at Wellesley in an annual lecture series that I established a few years ago to bring some of the most important voices in education today to the campus.

Eve Ewing is one of them.

Ewing is an amazing woman who wrote a fabulous book called Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.

I reviewed the book here.

She was teaching in one of the 49 schools that Rahm Emanuel closed on a single day, an incredibly cruel, arrogant, and heartless act.

She then went on to earn her doctorate and is now a college professor.

The media writes about “failing schools” in Chicago, but Ewing understands that schools are part of a community’s historic identity. Her writing captures the pain that people feel when their identity is torn away from them by  politicians and faceless bureaucrats.

If you can read The New York Times online, you will enjoy this article about Ewing. 

Some excerpts:

Dr. Ewing, 32, can be a hard woman to slow down, keep track of, or sum up. To keep it simple, you could just say she’s a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration…

But that would leave out the seemingly million other things she is doing.

In the past year, she has also published an acclaimed book of poetry; collaborated on a play about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and co-hosted the Chicago Poetry Block Party, a community festival she helped create. She also sold a middle-grade novel, coming in 2020; signed up as a consulting producer on W. Kamau Bell’s CNN series, “United Shades of America”; and began hosting a new podcast, “Bughouse Square,” inspired by the archives of another Chicago gadfly, Studs Terkel.

And then there’s her gig with Marvel Comics. In August, Dr. Ewing caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write “Ironheart,” the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, black girl genius from Chicago.

It’s tempting to see Dr. Ewing, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, as a real-life, grown-up version of Riri, a prodigy who builds her own Iron Man suit in her M.I.T. dorm room, without the benefit of Tony Stark’s millions….

Her poetry collection, “Electric Arches,” an Afro-futurist exploration of black girlhood, unfolds against the real and fantastical geography of Chicago, and includes plenty of homespun superpower technology. There are flying bikes, freedom-fighting space invaders, and,“The Device,” a machine created by “a hive mind of black nerds” that allows communication with the ancestors. (Publishers Weekly called it “a stunning debut.”)

In “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” published by the University of Chicago Press, Dr. Ewing uses the more staid tools of social science to dive deep into one of the most contentious episodes in the city’s recent history: the 2013 school closure plan that ultimately resulted in the shuttering of 49 public schools, most of them in African-American neighborhoods.

It’s a scholarly book, and also an unabashedly personal one. It focuses on Bronzeville, the storied African-American neighborhood on the South Side, where Dr. Ewing, as she notes in an impassioned introduction, taught middle school for three years after graduating from the University of Chicago.

She looks at the history of discriminatory housing and education policies that gave rise to intensely segregated, unequal, often overcrowded schools, which then suffered steeply declining enrollments after the public housing towers that once dominated the neighborhood were demolished.

I am excited to meet Eve Ewing. She is one of the heroes of the Resistance in my new book Slaying Goliath.  Because of her book, Rahm Emanuel will be remembered not as a “reformer” but as a disrupter who cruelly destroyed schools, communities, and the lives of children and families. Eve Ewing gets the last word.

Come to Wellesley tonight to hear her speak.

You will be glad you did.

 

Categories Education Reform

Elijah Cummings: This Is What Greatness Looks Like

By dianeravitch
October 17, 2019 //
27

The following story appeared in the Washington Post. Elijah Cummings was a man of conviction. We will miss him.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, Democratic leader and regular Trump target, dies at 68

His office cites ‘complications concerning longstanding health challenges’

Elijah E. Cummings, a Democratic congressman from Maryland who gained national attention for his principled stands on politically charged issues in the House, his calming effect on anti-police riots in Baltimore, and his forceful opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump, died early Thursday morning at Gilchrist Hospice Care, a Johns Hopkins affiliate in Baltimore. He was 68.

After undergoing an unspecified medical procedure, the Democratic leader did not return to his office this week, the Baltimore Sun reported. A statement from his office said that he had passed away due to “complications concerning longstanding health challenges.”

Born to a family of Southern sharecroppers and Baptist preachers, Mr. Cummings grew up in the racially fractured Baltimore of the 1950s and 1960s. At 11, he helped integrate a local swimming pool while being attacked with bottles and rocks. “Perry Mason,” the popular TV series about a fictional defense lawyer, inspired him to enter the legal profession.

“Many young men in my neighborhood were going to reform school,” he told the East Texas Review. “Though I didn’t completely know what reform school was, I knew that Perry Mason won a lot of cases. I also thought that these young men probably needed lawyers.”

In the Maryland House of Delegates, he became the youngest chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus and the first African American to serve as speaker pro tempore, the member who presides in the speaker’s absence.

In 1996, he won the seat in the U.S. House of Representatives that Kweisi Mfume (D) vacated to become NAACP president. Mr. Cummings eventually served as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus and as ranking Democrat and then chairman of what became the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

He drew national attention as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s chief defender during 2015 congressional hearings into her handling of the attack three years earlier on U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya. The attack killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

He was “the quintessential speaking-truth-to-power representative,” said Herbert C. Smith, a political science professor at McDaniel College in Westminster, Md. “Cummings has never shied from a very forceful give-and-take.”

The death of Freddie Gray

Baltimore’s plight informed Mr. Cummings’s life and work on Capitol Hill, a connection exemplified by his response to the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in April 2015 and the explosion of outrage that came after it.

Gray died of injuries suffered while riding, improperly secured, in a police van after he was arrested for carrying a knife, in his pocket, that police said was illegal. His death ignited rioting in Baltimore and elevated tensions nationally over perceived racism and excessive violence in law enforcement.

Speaking at the funeral, Mr. Cummings, who lived near where Gray was arrested, bemoaned the presence of media to chronicle Gray’s death without celebrating his life.

“Did you see him? Did you see him?” Mr. Cummings asked in his booming baritone. The church exploded with applause, and civil rights activist Jesse L. Jackson sat, rapt, behind him. “Did you see him?”

“I’ve often said, our children are the living messages we send to a future we will never see,” he said, his voice rising. “But now our children are sending us to a future they will never see! There’s something wrong with that picture!”

When looting began, hours after the funeral, Mr. Cummings rushed, bullhorn in hand, to a troubled West Baltimore neighborhood, where he worked to restore order and to assure residents that authorities were taking the case seriously. (Six officers would be charged in Gray’s death, although prosecutors failed to secure a conviction against any of them.)

Amid the unrest, he and a dozen other residents marched, arm in arm, through the streets, singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

Mr. Cummings was known for showing the same kind of commitment in the House. The bullhorn he wielded in West Baltimore was emblazoned with a gold label that read, “The gentleman will not yield.” It was a gift from his Democratic colleagues, bestowed after Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) silenced Mr. Cummings’s microphone at a 2014 hearing into complaints that the Internal Revenue Service had unfairly targeted conservative nonprofit groups.

The next year, while serving on the House Select Committee on Benghazi, he sparred with Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) during hearings Republicans convened to examine Clinton’s role in the Benghazi debacle.

When Gowdy interrogated Clinton about Libya-related emails sent from a longtime confidant of hers, Sidney Blumenthal, Mr. Cummings interjected: “Gentleman, yield! Gentleman, yield! You have made several inaccurate statements.”

Talking to reporters in the hallway later, Mr. Cummings said his primary purpose was not to defend Clinton but to seek “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

“Let the world see it,” he said.

The experience didn’t appear to sour Gowdy on Mr. Cummings.

“It’s not about politics to him; he says what he believes,” Gowdy told the Hill newspaper. “And you can tell the ones who are saying it because it was in a memo they got that morning, and you can tell the ones who it’s coming from their soul. And with Mr. Cummings, it’s coming from his soul.”

Dealing With Trump

The first two years of the Trump administration were agonizing for Mr. Cummings. While battling ill health, including heart surgery, and as many other democrats advocated a strategy of resistance to the divisive president, he made fruitless efforts to work with the newly elected Republican in the White House and found himself sidelined by his House colleagues in the GOP majority.

In a bipartisan gesture, he attended Trump’s inauguration and, at the luncheon afterward, raised an issue on which he felt they could find common ground, lowering prescription drug prices. In that and in future encounters, he urged the president to pursue policies that could unite the country and burnish his legacy. The congressman said that after a few promising meetings, he never heard from Trump again.

“Perhaps if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had a lot of hope,” Mr. Cummings later remarked. “He is a man who quite often calls the truth a lie and calls a lie the truth.”

As ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Mr. Cummings became a leading voice against the Trump administration’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, a change that critics contended would discourage participation by documented and undocumented immigrants alike.

He was also a forceful opponent of an immigration policy that separated thousands of children from their parents after they illegally crossed the southern U.S. border. He described the Trump White House as inhumane in its use of “child internment camps.”

After Democrats won control of the House in the November 2018 midterm elections, Mr. Cummings was elevated to chairman of the Oversight Committee, a position that he used to sound further alarms. He spearheaded probes into security clearances issued by the White House over the objections of career officials and payments made during the 2016 campaign to silence women who claimed to have had affairs with Trump.

Mr. Cummings had a combative streak, but he was adept at calming volatile situations, such as the sharp exchange between Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) during a hearing in February 2019.

The Oversight Committee was taking testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, and Tlaib accused Meadows of pulling a “racist” stunt by having a black woman, an administration employee, stand behind him. Meadows demanded that her words be stricken from the record.

Mr. Cummings called Meadows “one of my best friends” and prompted Tlaib to say that she was not calling Meadows a racist. By the next day, the conservative Meadows and liberal freshman Tlaib were hugging in public.

“Interaction, man,” Mr. Cummings said by way of explanation. “Human interaction, that’s all.”

Lawyer and lawmaker

Elijah Eugene Cummings was born in Baltimore on Jan. 18, 1951. His father worked at a chemical factory, his mother at a pickle factory and later as a maid while raising seven children. Both parents came from sharecropping families in South Carolina. Although they struggled to feed their family, his parents would can apples and peaches and give half the preserves to people in need.

The proprietor of a Baltimore drugstore where Mr. Cummings worked paid his application fee to Howard University and, during Mr. Cummings’s time as a Howard student, regularly sent him $10 with a note that read, “Hang in there.”

At Howard, he served as student government president, and he received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1973. He received a law degree from the University of Maryland three years later and practiced law, mostly in private practice, for nearly two decades.

He also helped law students develop their oral and writing skills as chief judge on the Maryland Moot Court, a competition in which students submit briefs and present oral arguments in a hypothetical appellate case.

In the Maryland House of Delegates, where Mr. Cummings served from 1983 to 1996, he championed a ban on alcohol and tobacco ads on inner-city billboards in Baltimore — the first prohibition of its kind in a major U.S. city.

On Capitol Hill, Mr. Cummings was among the minority of House members and senators who voted in 2002 against authorizing a military invasion of Iraq. President George W. Bush’s administration, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was alleging that Iraq continued to possess and develop weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Cummings said there was not sufficient evidence of such weapons to “send our young people off to war and thereby place their lives in harm’s way,” an opinion supported by subsequent investigations.

Also in 2002, Mr. Cummings was elected chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, a position he used to push for increased funding for public education and the Head Start program.

He was the only member of the House delegation from Maryland to oppose the release of the Starr Report, which contained salacious details of President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

His first marriage, to Joyce Matthews, ended in divorce after a long separation. In 2008, he married Maya Rockeymoore, a policy consultant. Besides his wife, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage; and two children from other relationships.

In the mid-1990s, he had financial difficulties. He was sued by creditors and owed $30,000 in federal taxes, which he eventually paid. He told the Baltimore Sun that during his time as a congressman, he endured two winters without heat because he could not afford to fix his furnace.

He has said the money problems stemmed from his struggles to keep his law practice afloat while running for Congress and also from helping to support his three children. “I have a moral conscience that is real central,” he told the newspaper. “I didn’t ask the federal government or anyone else to do me any favors.”

Mr. Cummings said he considered running to succeed Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.), who did not seek reelection in 2016, but decided that he was needed in Baltimore to help the riot-torn city.

A member of New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, Mr. Cummings said he was driven by his faith and secure in his conviction that history would recognize his resolve to stand up for what he believed was right.

“In the city of Baltimore, there are over a thousand monuments, and not one monument is erected to memorialize a critic,” he once said in a speech. “Every one of the monuments is erected to memorialize one who was severely criticized.

Jenna Portnoy covers Virginia, Maryland and D.C. politics for The Washington Post. She previously worked for the Newark Star-Ledger and the Allentown Morning Call, and has been a newspaper reporter since 2001.

Antonia Noori Farzan is a reporter on The Washington Post’s Morning Mix team. She previously worked at the Phoenix New Times.

Democracy Dies in Darkness

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Categories Character, Courage
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