School Vouchers Will Indoctrinate a Generation in Alternative Truths

February 21, 2017 stevenmsinger Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Media, Obama, Politics, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers alternative facts, Betsy DeVos, Bowling Green Massacre, Donald Trump, epistemology, indoctrinantion, Kellyanne Conway, lies, partisan, Politics, School Choice, school vouchers

My middle school students are good at telling the difference between facts and opinions.

Facts, they’ll tell you, are things that can be proven.

They don’t even have to be true. They just have to be provable – one way or the other.

For instance: “I’m six feet tall.” It’s not true, but you could conceivably measure me and determine my height.

Opinions, on the other hand, are statements that have no way of being proven. They are value judgements: That is good. This is bad. Mr. Singer is short. Mr. Singer is tall.

It doesn’t make them less important – in fact, their relative importance to facts is, itself, an opinion.

But today the very ability to prove facts has been called into question.

Our government has put forward statements that are demonstrably false: The Bowling Green Massacre. Undocumented immigrants commit massive amounts of crime. Donald Trump had the largest electoral college victory of modern times.

All of these should objectively be viewed as facts. They’re false, but they are provable. Yet when we resort to the kinds of things that should count as proof, we refuse to agree, we come to a clash of epistemologies.

Today, your truth depends more on your political affiliation than your commitment to objective reality.

There was no Bowling Green Massacre. No one was killed in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Certainly there was no large scale mass death perpetrated by terrorists. There were two Iraqi nationals arrested who had been planning an attack outside of the U.S. They had been buying guns and materials here because they were easier to get.

However, many conservatives refuse to accept this. They believe there was a Bowling Green Massacre. And they believe that it justifies Trump’s immigration ban.

The same goes for undocumented immigrants committing crime. They do NOT actually commit more crime than U.S. citizens. In fact, they commit less. They don’t want to attract unnecessary attention and risk deportation.

But once again many conservatives refuse to believe it. With no hard evidence, maybe some anecdotal evidence blown way out of proportion, they simply accept what they’re told by their government and their chosen media.

And Trump’s electoral college victory? He won 306 of 538 electoral votes and lost the popular vote. Forty-five Presidents won by a greater margin. And only two Presidents had a lower popular vote tally.

These are just numbers. I don’t know how they’re controversial or how anyone can disagree, but many conservatives do.

Don’t get me wrong. Liberals do it, too, though to a lesser degree. Ask most liberals about President Barack Obama’s education policy and you’ll get a gooey story about support and progressivism. It isn’t true.

One popular meme shows Obama lecturing a tiny Trump about how he should invest in education and respect parents and teachers. Yet Obama never really did those things, himself. He held federal education funding hostage unless districts increased standardized testing, Common Core and charter schools. THAT’S not what parents and teachers wanted! It’s what huge corporations wanted so they could profit off our public schools!

But to many liberals Obama is some kind of saint, and any evidence to the contrary will be accepted only with great reluctance.

THIS is our modern world. A world of alternative facts and competing narratives.
Part of it is due to the Internet and the way knowledge has been democratized. Part of it is due to the media conglomerates where almost all traditional news is disseminated by a handful of biased corporations that slant the story to maximize their profits.

People end up picking the sources of information they think are trustworthy and shutting themselves off to other viewpoints. There is no more news. There is conservative news and liberal news. And the one you consume determines what you’ll accept as a fact.

As bad as that is, Trump’s education policy is poised to make it much worse.

He wants to radically increase the amount of school vouchers given to students. These allow federal dollars to be used to send children to private and parochial schools. As if the fly-by-night charter schools weren’t enough.

It’s a scam. A get rich quick scheme for corporations at the expense of students. But perhaps the worst part is how it exacerbates our world of alternative facts.

Students at private and parochial schools don’t learn the same things as public school students. At many religious schools they are indoctrinated in conservative market theory and a Biblical view of history and science.

You think we can’t agree on the truth or falsity of facts now? Just wait! What counts as a source will be radically different for the first generation of kids sent to such disparate schools.

This isn’t just about cashing in on education dollars today. It’s about creating a generation of adults educated with school vouchers who accept far right ideas about the world as bedrock truths. Climate change and evolution are hoaxes. Trickle down economics works. Slavery benefited slave and master alike.

These are the false truths the Trump administration hopes to seed into a larger portion of the next generation. And when you indoctrinate children so young, there is little hope they’ll ever be able to see beyond what they’ve been taught.

Conservatives counter that liberals are doing the same thing today in our public schools. That’s why they want to send their children to the private and parochial schools. They don’t want their kids taught about modern science without reference to God. They don’t want them to learn history that puts socialistic policies in a positive light. They don’t want them to learn that white people were ever inhuman to people of color.

And how do you argue with them? How do you have a productive conversation when you can’t agree on what proves a fact true or false?

This is the challenge of our generation.

I don’t know how to solve it, but I know that school vouchers will make it exponentially worse.

PA Legislature Plans Taking Away Teachers’ Sick Days

February 2, 2017February 12, 2017 stevenmsinger Budget, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Gerrymandering, Keystone Exams, Labor, PA Core, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers, union busting, Unions, Value Added Measures, VAM, Violence Against Children, voting, York Schools education, legislature, Pennsylvania, Politics, sick days, Students, teachers, war on teachers

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Dear Pennsylvania legislators:

So now you want to take away teachers’ sick days.

Sabbatical, sick days, bereavement leaves – the Senate Education Committee voted 7-5 to strip them from the law and make teachers bargain for them with their districts.

So the next time I get sick, you don’t want to guarantee I can take the day off. If my mother dies, you don’t want to protect my right to attend her funeral.

The full legislature still has to vote on it, but that’s pretty cold.

Which brings me to my first question: Why do you hate public school teachers so much?

Seriously. What did teachers ever do to you? Did we give you a bad grade when you were kids? Did we give you detention? What did we ever do to earn such animosity?

You obviously must have something personal against teachers.

It’s understandable. Even though the majority of Pennsylvanians voted for Democrats, most of you are Republicans. You have gerrymandered the state so that you artificially have the majority, and as such you must espouse the most radical positions possible. Otherwise, you’ll be primaried by someone even farther right – a Tea Partier, a plutocrat, an anarcho-capitalist, a fascist.

We see the same thing playing out nationally. Hello, Donald Trump!

So it’s no surprise that after stripping public schools of almost $1 billion every year for the past five years, after tens of thousands of teachers have been laid off, after you’ve given away millions of dollars to private corporations to run fly-by-night charter schools or through tax credits to religious schools – well, it’s no surprise that you feel the need to continue the war on teachers.

It’s paying off for you big time.

Not so much for our school children. They have had to deal with increases in class size, narrowing of the curriculum, reductions in extra-curriculars, cuts in tutoring – just about every deprivation imaginable.

I wonder – do you realize that every attack against teachers is also an attack against students? Making sick teachers come to school won’t improve kids’ educations. Forcing educators to choose between work or seeing their loved ones off to their final resting places won’t boost test scores. Do you understand that or do you just not care?

Follow-up, if I may: do you realize that most public school teachers are women? Does that factor in at all? Which do you hate more, the gender of most teachers or the fact that we are unionized?

Oh, and Pennsylvania School Boards Association, don’t think we’ve forgotten you. We know you requested this mess, Senate Bill 229. Instead of standing with your teachers to fight for fair, equitable, sustainable funding, you’ve decided to ask the legislature if you can stiff teachers to make ends meet. We’re there for your kids everyday, and this is how you thank us. That’s gratitude.

It’s what we get for being one of the last workforces to be unionized. We have the temerity to demand fair treatment. You can’t just do whatever you like with us, you have to actually sit down with us at the bargaining table and talk.

Legislators, we know it’s something that infuriates your base. No, I don’t mean the people who vote for you. I mean your real base – the corporations, millionaires and billionaires who pay your real salaries – the unlimited and shadowy campaign contributions that, let’s be honest, are really nothing less than legal bribes.

We shouldn’t be surprised that you have prioritized taking away legal protections for teachers’ sick days. It is quite in line with what you want to do to the profession. You no longer want highly qualified teachers making a middle class income who then can stay in our schools for their entire careers. You want lightly trained temps who use teaching as a stepping stone to a job that pays enough to live.

After all, if we afford teachers the status of professionals, they might actually be able to jump all the other hurdles we’ve put in front of them and educate the poor.

That would be terrible.

Despite all the standardized testing, Common Core, value-added measures, budget cuts, and constant propaganda about “failing schools,” they might actually teach these kids to think. That’s the last thing you want.

A thinking public might see how much you’re screwing them over. They might actually rise up and fight. They might refuse to accept the status quo that you are so desperately trying to protect.

That’s your real endgame. And though it makes me sick, I suppose I will no longer be able to take off.

I’ll just spend the day, coughing and wheezing with the children.

Yours,

Steven Singer

The Gadfly on the Wall

U.S. Public Schools Are NOT Failing. They’re Among the Best in the World

January 29, 2017February 13, 2017 stevenmsinger Betsy DeVos, Budget, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Donald Trump, Education, Journalism, Media, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, Teachers #StandUpForPublicSchools, education, International, PISA, Politics, public schools, Students

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Everyone knows U.S. public schools are failing.

Just like everyone knows you should never wake sleepwalkers, bulls hate red and Napoleon was short.

Wrong on all counts. Waking sleepwalkers will cause them no harm – in fact, they’re more likely to harm themselves while sleepwalking. Bulls are colorblind; they’re attracted to movement. And Napoleon was 5’7”, which was above average height for Frenchman during his lifetime.

So why do we believe that American public schools are doing such a terrible job?

Because far right policymakers have convinced us all that it’s true.

It’s not.

Let me repeat that in no uncertain terms – America’s public schools are NOT failing. They are among the best in the world. Really!

Here’s why: the United States educates everyone. Most other countries do not.

We have made a commitment to every single child regardless of what their parents can afford to pay, regardless of their access to transportation, regardless of whether they can afford uniforms, lunch or even if they have a home. Heck! We even provide education to children who are here illegally.

That can’t be said of many countries with which we’re often compared – especially countries comparable to the U.S. in size or diversity. So from the get-go, we have an advantage over most of the world.

We define education differently. Though our laws are woefully backward, in practice we look at it as a right, not a privilege. And for a full 13 years (counting kindergarten) it’s a right for every child, not just some.

But that’s not all! We also provide some of the highest quality education you can get in the world! We teach more, help more, achieve more and yet we are criticized more than any system in any country in the world.

TEST SCORES

Critics argue that our scores on international tests don’t justify such a claim. But they’re wrong before you even look at the numbers. They’re comparing apples to pears. You simply can’t compare the United States to countries that leave hundreds of thousands of rural and poor children without any education whatsoever. The Bates Motel may have the softest pillows in town, but it’s immediately disqualified because of the high chance of being murdered in the shower.

No school system of this size anywhere in the world exceeds the United States in providing free access to education for everyone. And that, alone, makes us one of the best.

It doesn’t mean our system is problem free. There are plenty of ways we could improve. We’re still incredibly segregated by race and class. Our funding formulas are often regressive and inadequate. Schools serving mostly poor students don’t have nearly the resources of those serving rich students. But at least at the very outset what we’re trying to do is better than what most of the world takes on. You can’t achieve equity if it isn’t even on the menu.

However, for some people, this will not be enough. They’ll say that despite our high ideals, the quality of what we actually provide our students is low. After all, those international test scores are so low.

First point: it depends on the scores you’re looking at. American elementary and middle school students have improved on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study every four years since the tests began in 1995. They are above the international average in all categories and within a few percentage points of the global leaders (something rarely mentioned on the nightly news).

Even on the PISA test administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 15-year-olds in about 60 countries, US children are far from the bottom of the scale. We’re somewhere in the middle. We’ve always been in the middle for all the decades since they’ve been making these comparisons. Our schools have not gotten worse. They have stayed the same.

IDEALS AND POVERTY

To some this just demonstrates that our schools have always been mediocre. But again you’re overlooking the consequences of our ideals.

The broader the spectrum of children who take a test, the lower the average score will be. In other words, if only your top students take the test, your average score will be very high. If only your top and middle students take the test, your average score will still be quite high. But if ALL of your students take the test, your average score will be lower.

Now add in poverty. Living in poverty reduces your access to health care, books, early childhood education and many other factors that increase learning throughout your life. Children from poor families are already more than a year behind those of rich parents on the first day of kindergarten. If you only test the wealthiest students, the average test score will probably be quite high. The average score will drop dramatically if you test all of your students.

That’s why many of these countries where the poorest children do not have access to education have higher test scores than the United States. You’re not comparing equals. The United States has the highest child poverty rate in the Western World. And we don’t hide them away. We include them on our tests. That has a major impact on our scores. But talking heads on TV almost always ignore it. They pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s the only way they can use these test scores to “prove” to a gullible audience that America’s schools are failing.

But if you fairly compare education systems and factor in the equal access we provide for all children to an education, our system comes out way on top. We have one of the best systems in the world.

But wait! There’s more!

SPECIAL EDUCATION

Not only does the United States serve all children regardless of academic achievement or poverty. We also serve far more students with disabilities.

Why are there so many special education children in the USA? Because we have a higher standard of living.

A standard pregnancy lasts about 280 days or 40 weeks. However, some mothers give birth to children after only 28 weeks. Two decades ago, these babies would not have survived. Today, they often do. Five years later that child will enter kindergarten and our school system will be responsible for teaching that student to read, write and learn math. In other countries, premature babies have a much lower chance of survival. They don’t survive to become the special education population. So things as diverse as the live-birth rate actually affect average test scores.

Another counterintuitive factor is the suicide rate. In many countries where pressure to perform at the highest levels on standardized tests is extreme, many children are actually driven to suicide. This is especially true in numerous Asian countries with a record of high scores on these international tests. So a higher suicide rate actually increases test scores.

Would you say this makes other countries superior to the United States? Heck no! In fact, just the opposite. I certainly wouldn’t wish more underperforming U.S. students were ending their lives so we could do better on international tests. Nor would I wish that more premature babies died to improve our international standing.

We have developed a special education system to help children at the edges that many other countries just can’t touch. In some countries these students are simply excluded. In others they are institutionalized. In some countries it’s up to parents to find ways to pay for special services. The United States is one of the only countries where these children are not only included and offered full and free access, but the schools go above and beyond to teach these children well beyond their 12th academic year.

In every public school in the United States these students are included. In math, reading, science and social studies, they are there benefiting from instruction with the rest of the class. And this, in turn, benefits even our non-special education students who gain lessons in empathy and experience the full range of human abilities.

Of course, most of our special education students are also included in our test scores. Yes, other countries that ignore these children and exclude them from testing get higher scores. But so what? Do you mean to tell me this makes them better? No, it makes them worse.

In many ways, we are the gold standard, not them. They should be emulating us, not the other way around. They should be jealous of the way we prize each other’s humanity. We shouldn’t be salivating at test scores achieved through shunning certain students in favor of others.

CURRICULUM AND STRATIFICATION

But it’s not just who we teach, it’s also what we teach.

Compared to many other countries, U.S. school curriculum is often much wider and varied. Countries that focus only on testing often leave out sciences, arts, literature and humanities.

Unfortunately, the push from policymakers even in the U.S. has been to narrow curriculum to imitate some of the worst practices of our competitors. But in many districts we still strive to create well-rounded graduates and not just good test-takers.

The bottom line: the curriculum at most American schools is more inclusive than that found internationally. We even include societal issues like alcohol and drug abuse prevention, stress reduction and relaxation, and physical fitness programs.

In addition we don’t stratify our children based on academic ability to nearly the same degree as many international schools. We don’t weed out our worst students through middle and high school until only our most capable are left in 12th grade. Nor is college only open to our best and brightest. We make a much greater effort than many other countries to keep this option open to as many students as possible regardless of whether they can afford it or not. The number of Americans with at least some college education has soared over the past 70 years, from 10 percent in 1940 to 56 percent today, even as the population has tripled and the nation has grown vastly more diverse. Meanwhile, Graduation rates are at an all-time high of 83.2 percent, and for the first time minority students are catching up with their white counterparts.

It’s not easy. But it’s something we’re committed to as a nation. And that’s not true around the world.

SIZE MATTERS

Finally, there’s the issue of size. The United States is a big country – the third most populous in the world. We have 324,450,000 people and growing. That’s about 50 million students in public schools.

It’s much easier to educate fewer children. Even excellent education systems would struggle with our sheer numbers. Small systems often outshine bigger ones. For instance, I might be able to make dinner for my immediate family, but I’d find it much more challenging to prepare a meal for a banquet hall of hundreds. Similarly, it remains to be seen whether smaller nations could handle educating a population as big and diverse as ours without collapsing.

By any fair measure, America’s public education system is simply stunning. But the media perpetuates the myth that we’re failing.

PUBLIC PERCEPTION AND THE MEDIA

After decades of hearing these falsehoods, the American public is strikingly divided. On a 2011 Gallup poll, parents were asked their opinion of their local school and the public was asked its opinion of schools in general. The results are enlightening. Parents who gave their local school an A grade were at the highest percentage ever (37%) whereas only 1% of respondents rated the nations schools that way. Why the difference? Respondents said it was mostly because people knew about their local schools through direct experience. They only learned about the state of education nationally through the news media.

Why is education reporting so biased? Part of it is monetary. Huge corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars off of the failing schools narrative. They sell new standardized tests, new test prep materials, new Common Core books, trainings for teachers, materials, etc. If they can’t demonstrate that our schools are failing, their market shrinks. And who do you think owns the shrinking media conglomerates? That’s right, many of these same corporations.

But even when journalists want to be fair, it’s difficult for them to get the inside story of how our public schools work. They are rarely permitted inside our schools to see the day-to-day classroom experience. Legal issues about which students may be photographed, filmed or interviewed, the difficulty of getting parental permissions and the possibility of embarrassment to principals and administrators often keeps the doors closed. In many districts, teachers aren’t even allowed to speak on the record to the media or doing so can make them a political target. So reporters are often in the position of being unable to directly experience the very thing they’re reporting on. Imagine if sportswriters never got to see athletes play or political reporters never attended a campaign rally. Of course there would be a disconnect!

So we’re left with a public education system that should be the envy of the world being portrayed as a loser.

THE BOTTOM LINE

As ever, far right politicians on both sides of the aisle, whether they be Democratic Neoliberals or Republican Tea Partiers, are using falsehoods about our public schools to sell an alternative. They say our public schools are beyond saving and that we need to privatize. They call it school choice but it’s really just an attempt to destroy the system that has so much going for it.

We should strengthen public education not undermine it. We should roll up our sleeves and fix the real problems we have, not invent fake ones.

People act as if “alternative facts” were invented by the Trump administration. Our policymakers have been using them for decades in a libelous and dishonest campaign against our public schools.

They are some of the best in the world – if only people knew it.

Trump says our schools are “Flush with Cash!?” They’re Falling Apart!

January 21, 2017 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Data, Donald Trump, Education, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teachers "Flush with cash", Budget, children, Detroit Schools, Donald Trump, education, failing schools, Falling Apart, Inauguration, LA Unified Schools, New York Schools, Politics, standardized testing, Students, teaching, transparency

Donald Trump lies.

If you haven’t learned that yet, America, you’ve got four more cringe-inducing years to do so.

Even in his inaugural address, he couldn’t help but let loose a whooper about US public schools.

“Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families and good jobs for themselves,” he said. “But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. … An education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”

To which nearly every poor, nonwhite public school parent, student and teacher in the country replied, “What’s that heck did he just say now!?”

Los Angeles Unified School district routinely has broken desks and chairs, missing ceiling tiles, damaged flooring, broken sprinklers, damaged lunch tables and broken toilet paper dispensers.

They’re flush with cash!?

New York City public schools removed more than 160 toxic light fixtures containing polychlorinated biphenyls, a cancer causing agent that also hinders cognitive and neurological development. Yet many schools are still waiting on a fix, especially those serving minority students.

They’re flush with cash!?

At Charles L. Spain school in Detroit, the air vents are so warped and moldy, turning on the heat brings a rancid stench. Water drips from a leaky roof into the gym, warping the floor tiles. Cockroaches literally scurry around some children’s classrooms until they are squashed by student volunteers.

They’re flush with freakin cash!?

Are you serious, Donald Trump!?

And this same picture is repeated at thousands of public schools across the nation especially in impoverished neighborhoods. Especially in communities serving a disproportionate number of black, Latino or other minority students.

In predominantly white, upper class neighborhoods, the schools often ARE “flush with cash.” Olympic size swimming pools, pristine bathrooms – heck – air conditioning! But in another America across the tracks, schools are defunded, ignored and left to rot.

A full 35 states provide less overall state funding for education today than they did in 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which focuses on reducing poverty and inequality. Most states still haven’t recovered from George W. Bush’s Great Recession and the subsequent state and local budget cuts it caused. In fact, over the same period, per pupil funding fell in 27 states and still hasn’t recovered.

And the federal government has done little to help alleviate the situation. Since 2011, spending on major K-12 programs – including Title I grants for underprivileged students and special education – has been basically flat.

The problem is further exacerbated by the incredibly backward way we allocate funding at the local level which bears the majority of the cost of education.

While most advanced countries divide their school dollars evenly between students, the United States does not. Some students get more, some get less. It all depends on local wealth.

The average per pupil expenditure for U.S. secondary students is $12,731. But that figure is deceiving. It is an average. Some kids get much more. Many get much less. It all depends on where you live. If your home is in a rich neighborhood, more money is spent on your education than if you live in a poor neighborhood.

The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world – if not probably the ONLY country – that funds schools based largely on local taxes. Other developed nations either equalize funding or provide extra money for kids in need. In the Netherlands, for example, national funding is provided to all schools based on the number of pupils enrolled. But for every guilder allocated to a middle-class Dutch child, 1.25 guilders are allocated for a lower-class child and 1.9 guilders for a minority child – exactly the opposite of the situation in the U.S.

So, no. Our schools are not “flush with cash.” Just the opposite in many cases.
But what about Trump’s other claim – the much touted narrative of failing schools?

Trump says our schools “leave… our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge.”

Not true.

Graduation rates are at an all-time high of 83.2 percent. Moreover, for the first time minority students are catching up with their white counterparts.

It’s only international comparisons of standardized test scores that support this popular myth of academic failure. And, frankly, even that is based on a warped and unfair reading of those results.

It depends on how you interpret the data.

Raw data shows US children far from the top of the scale. It puts us somewhere in the middle – where we’ve always been for all the decades since they’ve been making these comparisons. Our schools have not gotten worse. They have stayed the same.

However, this ignores a critical factor – poverty. We’ve known for decades that standardized tests are poor measures of academic success. Bubble tests can assess simple things but nothing complex. After all, they’re scored based on answers to multiple choice questions. In fact, the only thing they seem to measure with any degree of accuracy is the parental income of the test-taker. Kids from rich families score well, and poor kids score badly.

Virtually all of the top scoring countries taking these exams have much less child poverty than the U.S. If they had the same percentage of poor students that we do, their scores would be lower than ours. Likewise, if we had the same percentage of poor students that they do, our scores would go through the roof! We would have the best scores in the world!

Moreover, the U.S. education system does something that many international systems do not. We educate everyone! Foreign systems often weed children out by high school. They don’t let every child get 13 years of grade school (counting kindergarten). They only school their highest achievers.

So when we compare ourselves to these countries, we’re comparing ALL of our students to only SOME of theirs – their best academic pupils, to be exact. Yet we still hold our own given these handicaps!

This suggests that the majority of problems with our public schools aren’t bad teachers, or a lack of charter schools and school choice. It’s money, pure and simple.

We invest the majority of our education funding in rich white kids. The poor and minorities are left to fend for themselves.

This won’t be solved by Trump’s pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos and her school choice schemes. In fact, that’s exactly what’s weakened public schools across the country by leaching away what meager funding these districts have left. Nor will it be solved by a demagogue telling fairy tales to Washington’s credulous and ignorant.

We need to make a real investment in our public schools. We need to make a commitment to funding poor black kids as fairly as we do rich white kids.

Otherwise, the only thing flushed will be children’s future.

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The Racists Roots and Racist Indoctrination of School Choice

January 15, 2017 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Obama, Politics, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Supreme Court, Teachers, White Privilege A Beka publishers, American Christian Education, Bob Jones University Press, charter schools, children, Donald Trump, Dr. Martin Luther King, education, Politics, president kennedy, racism, School Choice, school vouchers, Students, teaching, transparency, white flight

“Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, subsidizes, or results in racial discrimination.”
-President John F. Kennedy

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Billionaires and far right policymakers are pushing for school choice.

I say they’re pushing for it because voters always turn it down.

Every single referendum held on school choice in the United States has been defeated despite billions of dollars in spending to convince people to vote for it.

But advocates aren’t discouraged that the public isn’t on their side. They have money, and in America that translates to speech.

The Donald Trump administration is dedicated to making our public schools accept this policy whether people want it or not.

But don’t think that’s some huge change in policy. The previous administration championed a lighter version of these market-driven plans. The main difference goes like this: Democrats are for charter schools and tax credits for private and parochial schools. Republicans are for anything that calls itself a school getting your tax dollars – charter schools, private schools, religious schools – if some charlatan opens a stand on the side of the road with the word “school”in the title, they get tax dollars.

In all this rush to give away federal and state money, no political party really champions traditional public schools. Ninety percent of children attend them. In opinion polls, a majority of Americans like their local community schools. But like most things Americans want, politics goes the other way. Universal healthcare? Have Romneycare. Universal background checks on all gun sales? Nah. That sort of thing.

However, what often gets lost in the rush of politicians cashing in on this policy is its racist roots.

You read that right. School choice was invented as a mechanism of white flight. Before the federal government forced schools to desegregate, no one was all that interested in having an alternative to traditional public schools. But once whites got wind that the Supreme Court might make their kids go to school with black kids, lots of white parents started clamoring for “choice.”

It was intended as a way to get around Brown vs. Board. In 1953, a year before that landmark decision, many white southerners felt it was vitally important to continue a segregated education. They deeply desired to continue having “separate but equal” schools for the races, yet the US Supreme Court seemed ready to strike that down.

Enter Georgia’s Gov. Herman Talmadge who created what became known as the “private-school plan.” Talmadge proposed an amendment to the Georgia Constitution to empower the general assembly to privatize the state’s public education system. “We can maintain separate schools regardless of the US Supreme Court by reverting to a private system, subsidizing the child rather than the political subdivision,” Talmadge said.

The plan goes like this. If the Supreme Court mandates desegregation (as it did), the state would close the schools and issue vouchers allowing students to enroll in segregated private schools.

Fortunately, Talmadge’s plan was never implemented in Georgia. But it became the model for segregationists everywhere.

In Prince Edward County, Virginia, the plan actually came to fruition – sort of.

Two years before the 1959 federal desegregation deadline, local newspaper publisher J. Barrye Wall explained what county leaders were planning:

“We are working [on] a scheme in which we will abandon public schools, sell the buildings to our corporation, reopen as privately operated schools with tuition grants from [Virginia] and P.E. county as the basic financial program,” he wrote. “Those wishing to go to integrated schools can take their tuition grants and operate their own schools. To hell with ’em.”

Ultimately the county refused to sell the public school buildings. However, public education in Prince Edward County was nevertheless abandoned for five years, from 1959 to 1964. During that time, taxpayer dollars were funneled to the segregated white academies, which were housed in privately owned facilities such as churches and the local Moose Lodge.

The federal government struck down the program as a misuse of taxpayer funds after only a year, but even so whites benefited and blacks lost. Since there were no local taxes collected to operate public schools during those years, whites could invest in private schools for their children, while blacks in the county were left to fend for themselves. Since they were unable and unwilling to finance their own private, segregated schools, many black children were simply shut out of school for multiple years.

In other states, segregationists enacted “freedom of choice” plans that allowed white students to transfer out of desegregated schools. Any black students that tried to do the same had to clear numerous administrative hurdles. Moreover, entering formerly all-white schools would subject them to harassment from teachers and students. Anything to keep the races apart in the classroom – and usually the entire building.

Eventually, segregationists began to realize that separate black and white schools would no longer be tolerated by the courts, so they had to devise other means to eliminate these “undesirables.”

Attorney David Mays, who advised high-ranking Virginia politicians on school strategy, reasoned:

“Negroes could be let in [to white schools] and then chased out by setting high academic standards they could not maintain, by hazing if necessary, by economic pressures in some cases, etc. This should leave few Negroes in the white schools. The federal courts can easily force Negroes into our white schools, but they can’t possibly administer them and listen to the merits of thousands of bellyaches.”

Mays turned out to be somewhat prescient. Though desegregation efforts largely succeeded at first, in the last 20-30 years whites accomplished through housing and neighborhood segregation what they couldn’t legally enforce through outright school segregation. District lines were drawn to minimize the number of blacks at predominantly white schools and vice versa. Moreover, since funding was often tied to local property taxes, whites could legally ensure black schools got less resources than white schools. And with standardized tests constantly showing students at these schools as failing, policymakers could just blame the school instead of what they’d done to set the school up for failure.

Today racist policies undermine much of the structure of our public schools. We should acknowledge this and work to peel it back. We need to ensure all schools are equitably funded, that class sizes are under control, that all students get a broad curriculum and the services they need. But in the absence of a new, robust desegregation policy, our schools will always be in danger of racist programs that can easily select which students to benefit and which to ignore.

Instead of doing this hard work, we’re engaged in resurrecting the school choice policies of the deep South and universalizing them across the country. School vouchers are extremely similar to Talmadge’s private school plan. The main difference is that vouchers don’t close public schools outright, they simply allow them to be defunded and ignored. With universal school vouchers, public schools often become the de facto holding area for whichever group of children the private schools refuse to accept or who can’t afford private school tuition even with the vouchers.

Charter schools are built on the Prince Edward County model. They’re administered as private institutions yet claim to be somehow public. As a result, they’re allowed to bypass many of the rules that protect students at public schools from discrimination and fraud. In effect, they’re largely unregulated. In the modern age, that means they can be incredibly substandard for long periods of time and no one knows or intervenes. The kinds of scandals perpetrated at some charter schools are simply not possible at traditional public schools. Some charters close without notice, have facilities used as nightclubs, involve taxpayer funds used for non-school purposes such as apartments for mistresses, the purchase of yachts, etc.

In both cases, charters and voucher schools often cater to mostly one race rather than another. That increases segregation at both these facilities and traditional public schools. But voucher schools can go a step further. They can even put racism on the curriculum.

Supporting the racial order is often what’s actually being taught at private and religious schools. They are infamous for revisionist history and denying climate science. What’s less well-known is how they often try to normalize racist attitudes.

The American Christian Education (ACE) group provides fundamentalist school curriculum to thousands of religious schools throughout the country. Included in this curriculum is the A Beka Book and Bob Jones University Press textbooks. A Beka publishers, in particular, reported that about 9,000 schools nationwide purchase their textbooks.

These books include the following gobsmackers:

“[The Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross. Klan targets were bootleggers, wife-beaters, and immoral movies. In some communities it achieved a certain respectability as it worked with politicians.”
—United States History for Christian Schools, 3rd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 2001

“God used the Trail of Tears to bring many Indians to Christ.”
—America: Land That I Love, Teacher ed., A Beka Book, 1994

“A few slave holders were undeniably cruel. Examples of slaves beaten to death were not common, neither were they unknown. The majority of slave holders treated their slaves well.”
—United States History for Christian Schools, 2nd ed., Bob Jones University Press, 1991

“To help them endure the difficulties of slavery, God gave Christian slaves the ability to combine the African heritage of song with the dignity of Christian praise. Through the Negro spiritual, the slaves developed the patience to wait on the Lord and discovered that the truest freedom is from the bondage of sin. By first giving them their spiritual freedom, God prepared the slaves for their coming physical freedom. ”
-Michael R. Lowman, George Thompson, and Kurt Grussendorf, United States History: Heritage of Freedom, 2nd ed. (Pensacola, FL: A Beka Book, 1996), p. 219.

“Africa is a continent with many needs. It is still in need of the gospel…Only about ten percent of Africans can read and write. In some areas the mission schools have been shut down by Communists who have taken over the government.”
—Old World History and Geography in Christian Perspective, 3rd ed., A Beka Book, 2004

Gay people “have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”
—Teacher’s Resource Guide to Current Events for Christian Schools, 1998-1999, Bob Jones University Press, 1998

Brown v. Board of Education is described as social activism by the Supreme Court: “While the end was a noble one – ending discrimination in schools – the means were troublesome… liberals were not willing to wait for a political solution.”
-Teacher’s Resource Guide to Current Events for Christian Schools, 1998 – 1999 (Greenville, SC: Bob Jones University Press, 1998), p. 34

These are claims that are uncritically being taught to children at many voucher schools. If this were happening only at private schools, it would be troubling that racists were indoctrinating their children in the same hatred and bigotry of their parents. However, that we’re actually using public money – and planning to expand the amount of public money – to increase the racism and prejudice of the next generation is beyond troubling! It’s infuriating!

School choice does not enhance civil rights. It is inimical to them. It is part of a blatant policy to make America racist again. We cannot allow the Trump administration and any neoliberal Democrats who quietly support his ends to undo all the progress we’ve made in the last 60 years.

The bottom line is this – voters don’t want school choice. It does nothing to better childrens’ educations. It is a product of segregation and racism and even in its modern guise it continues to foster segregation and racism.

If we care about civil rights, social equality and democratic rule, school choice is something that should be relegated to the dust heap of history. It’s time to move forward, not look back fondly on the Confederacy, Jim Crow and segregationism.

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

December 27, 2016December 28, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Antonin Scalia, Arne Duncan, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Hillary Clinton, John King, John Podesta, Journalism, Labor, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Teachers, union busting, Unions, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege 2016, 2017, blogs, children, culture, education, end of the year, Politics, Students, teaching, year in review

Is it just me or did 2016 really stink?

Both personally and publicly, it was a year I’d rather not revisit. I lost family. I lost idols (RIP, David Bowie and Prince). And we lost a horrible, protracted Presidential election.

But as has become a tradition, I find myself in front of the computer compelled to compile this list of the best of my own writings.

It would be easy to just say nothing much of value happened in 2016 so let’s just move on. But that wouldn’t be true.

There were good things. I’m just stumped to remember many of them right now. Perhaps as time goes on we’ll look back fondly on a smattering of events from this year that was. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. That was kinda cool. There were some decent movies and a heck of a lot of good TV shows. The Arrival, Star Trek Beyond, Deadpool… Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, two excellent series about O. J. Simpson. We got a Harry Potter sequel of sorts – and another movie! I thought “Underground Airlines” by Ben H. Winters was quite good. We got an amazing musical in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton.” Technically it opened in 2015, but it swept the Tonys this year. And hey! We stopped the Dakota Access Pipeline – for now.

It was certainly a productive year for blogging.

There was so much to write about.

This little education and civil rights blog went into overtime. I almost doubled traffic to the Website and got 2,145 more followers for a total of 11,335.

Gadflyonthewallblog, or if you prefer Gadfly on the Wall Blog, has been going strong since July 2014. In those two and a half years, I’ve gotten 849,000 hits – 363,000 just this year, alone. I also increased the number of posts I write a year. Last year, I only managed about 90 posts. This year it was 120 posts – a full 30 additional articles.

I hope you’ve enjoyed them. I hope you’ve found them valuable.

Sometimes readers send me a note saying that they’re going to share this post or that post with their school board or their representative in the House or Senate. I’m always very flattered to hear that something I wrote is helping someone else fight for what’s right. Of course, I do get a lot of hate mail, too. No death threats yet, but it’s getting awfully close. Readers have wished I was dead, but no one has offered to give me that little push to the other side.

I hope that no matter what your reaction, you’ll remember these are just the writings of a humble public school teacher and father. No one pays me, though sometimes I do get donations for the right to reprint something elsewhere. I write all this stuff because I have to. So few people seem to care what people like me have to say – even in my own profession. Like many others, I’ve stopped waiting to be asked.

So for your end of the year amusement, I offer this top ten list of my most popular writing from 2016. And here’s to a better 2017.

10) F is for Friedrichs… and Freeloader: A Supreme Court Nightmare

Published: January

Views: 5,550

Description: Some crazy lady didn’t want to pay the union for benefits that she got as a member and didn’t want to give them up. And rich folks everywhere had her back. They slobbered all over and pushed forward a bull crap case through the Supreme Court that probably would have made it much more difficult for labor unions everywhere had not Justice Antonin Scalia died deadlocking the vote. This article was my attempt to show how absolutely absurd the argument was against being forced to pay for something that benefits you.

Fun Fact: Now that Congress blocked President Obama’s Constitutional right to appoint a replacement for Scalia, and Donald Trump will probably get to pick a replacement, look for a similar case to come down the pike and win! Oh, 2016, will you ever truly leave?

9) The Charter School Swindle – Selling Segregation to Blacks and Latinos

Published: June

Views: 6,489

Description: Charter school promoters often sell these institutions to minorities as being “Separate but Equal.” Hm. Didn’t Brown v. Board outlaw that kind of practice because if schools were separate, they usually were anything but equal? This article is my attempt to explain how charter marketers are really selling minorities on segregation and trying to talk them out of their own civil rights.

Fun Fact: During the Obama years, it was common practice to sell corporate education reform as a way of increasing civil rights while it actually violated them. It will be interesting to see if that rhetoric gets left behind in the Trump years when lawmakers already seem to have little interest in them at all.

8) ‘We’re Sorry Teachers are Unfairly Blamed’ says John King – Man Responsible for Unfairly Blaming Teachers

Published: February

Views: 6,832

Description: When John King became temporary Secretary of Education, he went on an apology tour telling educators that the federal government was sorry for how terribly it had treated teachers. In particular, he was sorry the department had blamed educators for societal problems that our schools need to fix without giving them the resources necessary to actually correct them. However, King was personally guilty of many of these same practices in his old job in New York. It was typical disingenuousness from the Obama administration and the Democrats – ignore and abuse their key constituents until election time and then make positive noises in their general direction hoping we’d support them at the polls.

Fun Fact: It didn’t work.

7) Bernie Sanders is Right: We Should Federalize Public School Funding

Published: January

Views: 6,947

Description: The way we fund public schools in this country is messed up. In many states, we rely heavily on local property taxes which result in poor communities being substantially underfunded and rich ones having more than enough of everything. In most of the world, funding is done much differently – the burden is handled mostly by the federal government who then distributes it equitably from place-to-place. Bernie Sanders proved he was the real deal by suggesting we do the same thing here in the US, a suggestion that no one in either party was ready for.

Fun Fact: Even some of my readers were uncomfortable with this one. They feared that if the federal government took responsibility for funding, it would increase their ability to micromanage local school districts. This is a fair concern, but there is a way to do this without increasing federal control of education policy, just funding. In any case, funding disparity is an issue that hardly ever even gets acknowledged less than discussed. Thank you, Bernie!

6) Summer Break – the Least Understood and Most Maligned Aspect of a Teacher’s Life

Published: June

Views: 7,429

Description: Just about every teacher gets crap from non-educators about summer break. Everyone thinks they know what it’s like to be a teacher and how easy we’ve got it. This post was my way of shutting up the ignorant. It explains why educators aren’t teaching in summer, what they’re actually doing and how the public benefits from giving teachers this time. Share it with someone you love.

Fun Fact: Or just shut someone up with it.

5) Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager is a Longtime Corporate Education Reformer

Published: March

Views: 9,268

Description: Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is not a nice man. I unearthed a speech he gave to corporate school reformers including Jeb Bush in 2012 where he pledges his allegiance to conservative, market-driven school policies. And THIS is the guy who was influencing Hillary’s approach just like he influenced Obama’s when he worked on that campaign. Legend has it, Podesta is responsible for giving us Arne Duncan. He suggested Duncan over Obama’s campaign education advisor Linda Darling Hammond, a critic of high stakes testing. These were truths that needed to be told and tell them I did.

Fun Fact: That this came out was a huge embarrassment to the Clinton campaign. All they could do was suppress it. Even dedicated supporters who read the article had to admit that she would probably not be very good for education – but she’d be better than Trump. It’s these kinds of Faustian bargains that derailed her campaign. How much better off we would have been had we had a real progressive to vote for than just another Democrat in Name Only!

4) What Antonin Scalia’s Death Means to the People I Love

Published: February

Views: 14,001

Description: Scalia was a terrible Supreme Court judge who used his position to justify hurting a lot of people. While others tried to hide their excitement at his passing, I let mine show. It might not be nice to say, but the world is a better place without him in it. I had hoped my honesty would make it harder for anyone like him to ever reach that office again. Unfortunately, weak Democrats and an incoming Republican President mean his replacement will probably be just as bad as he was.

Fun Fact: Originally my title was much more provocative – something like “Antonin Scalia was a Terrible Person and I’m Glad He is Dead.” It got over 10,000 hits in a few hours, but then I reconsidered and changed the title. People almost immediately stopped reading it.

3) Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture

Published: June

Views: 15,519

Description: We often talk about black people as victims. Police brutality, civil rights violations, economic disparities – but this is only half of the story. There is a buried history of success that rarely gets mentioned. Think of what American culture would look like without black people. It would be something completely different. This was my attempt to tip my hat at the incredible ways black Americans have made their mark on our society especially in the field of music.

Fun Fact: Black Twitter really liked this article. It was especially gratifying to see how appreciative people were. Of course, at the same time, some folks’ white fragility couldn’t handle it, either. Some readers tried to bully me into making changes here or there for no reason other than that it made black people look too good. Sorry, folks, no one determines what I put on this blog but me.

2) The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

Published: November

Views: 40,268

Description: School choice is less an education policy than a propaganda effort. Most people don’t understand what it really is. They don’t understand how essentially selfish it is like cutting a piece of pie from the middle of the dish so no one else can get a whole slice. I tried here in the most simple, direct language I could to explain why.

Fun Fact: With the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary and Trumps’ promise to spread school choice across the land like a Trump University franchise, the article remains popular. A lot of readers told me that it helped make sense of the issue for them for the first time. No doubt it’s been sent to policymakers across the nation. And it all started when I saw that picture of a ruined pumpkin pie on Reddit. I started to think – isn’t that a lot like school choice?

1) Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice

Published: January

Views: 77,139

Description: Both Democrats and Republicans love school choice. So I thought that real education advocates needed a quick list of the main reasons why it is bad policy. There’s nothing really new or amazing here. We’ve known this for decades, but this keeps getting brought up again and again like zombie legislation. The wealthy will push this forward whether we want it or not. There’s just too much money they can make if it passes. That’s why it’s good to know why what they’re peddling is so harmful to students, parents and communities. Consider it ammunition for quick come backs.

Fun Fact: I wrote this long before the Trump administration was a prospect to be taken seriously. This was long before DeVos or the Donald pledged to bring this to the national stage. It has continuously gotten a steady flow of hits since it was published. If my goal as a blogger is to be useful, I think this post more than any other written this year fits the bill. You can quibble with one or two points here, but all ten are enough to show any rational person why school choice is no choice.

The Ongoing Resistance to Trump, Neoliberals & Anyone Else Trying to Destroy Our Schools

December 21, 2016December 22, 2016 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, John King, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Republican, School Choice, school closings, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Teachers, White Privilege Barack Obama, Betsy DeVos, children, Corporate Education Reform, Donald Trump, education, neoliberal, plutocracy, Politics, Rex Tillerson, Steve Bannon, Students, teaching, Trump

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no help at all.” —Dale Carnegie

“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

-Nelson Mandela

Buck up, Education Activists.

I see that hopeless look on your faces. I see it because it’s the same look reflected back at me in the mirror every morning.

Donald Trump will be our next President, and he’s filling his cabinet with people who are determined to destroy the very offices where he’s putting them in charge.

His Education Secretary doesn’t believe in public schools. His Labor Secretary doesn’t believe in worker’s rights. His Housing chief doesn’t believe in public housing. His head of Environmental Protection doesn’t believe in protecting the environment. Heck! You pick a department and he’s found someone to lead it who doesn’t believe in doing that job!

And to top it all off, he’s got a literal white supremacist as his chief strategist.

But you know what? I’m not scared.

You know why? Because I’m still here.

Seriously.

The forces of greed and ignorance have been salivating all over the prospect of destroying public education for decades, and they haven’t been able to do it.

We’re still here. In almost every municipality, district or borough, our public schools remain open.

Sure, they’re a bit worse for wear in some neighborhoods. But despite billions of dollars being spent to crush them under foot, we survive to fight another day.

And that day is today.

Why should we despair when we behold the glass menagerie of fools Trump has assembled to populate his administration? Glass breaks.

Why despair when hearing the tired rhetoric of Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South coming out of his mouth? We defeated both! We can do so again.

Take Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary. She’s a religious fanatic who’s dedicated her life to destroying public schools.

I’m not scared of her. We just fought off Arne Duncan and John King – two of the Democrats Ivy League privateers who actually knew what they were doing! If we can stop those jackholes from giving away community schools to rich corporations, we can take this rich Republican lady who never held down a real job and only knows how to get her way by bribing people to do her bidding.

Sorry, Miss Betsy, but your school vouchers aren’t driving my family out of our neighborhood school so my kid can be taken advantage of by multinational corporations and Christian Cult madrasas. We’re wise to your B.S. “School Choice” fantasies.

Then there’s Rex Tillerson, another corporate vampire who’d like to suck our classrooms dry. The Exxon CEO and Trump’s pick for Secretary of State is a climate denying gasoline peddler who’s dimwitted enough to think he knows everything. Drawing on his zero years of experience with children, he actually said aloud that struggling students were “defective products” as if they were irregular widgets being pressed out on the assembly line and unfit for service at his service stations.

I’m not worried about that gashole. He’ll be too busy enriching himself in backroom deals with foreign leaders to pay much attention to our schools. He’s no threat.

Okay. I’ll admit Steve Bannon makes my skin crawl. Trump’s picked a literal neo-Nazi propagandist as chief strategist, an alleged wife beater who apparently thinks black people don’t necessarily deserve the right to vote. Well, my grandfathers taught me how to deal with jackbooted Eurocentric thugs. Bannon can goosestep his way back to Brietbart and take his orange-faced Reality TV star Commander in Chief with him.

Look, Trump is a monster and he’s assembling a cabinet of monstrosities to back him up. But that doesn’t make him scary. The best way to fight monsters is to turn on the light. And we have the brightest light of all – the light of knowledge, experience, and wisdom.

We’ve been doing it for the past 8 years with the Democrats, people who were supposed to be our friends and allies. You think it’ll be harder with GOP nitwits declaring themselves our enemies!?

For all the cosmetic ways the Obama Administration was better, they were almost as enthusiastic about boosting privatization and making sure every child had a standardized test that was written above their level and biased towards rich white kids. All their talk about championing civil rights didn’t stop them from closing poor black kids schools and forcing them into unaccountable charter operations that often provided fewer services, achieved dismal academic results and boosted racial segregation. All their talk about equity didn’t result in any more funding for minority children – only more Common Core, unqualified Teach for America temps and testing, testing, testing. Yet their donors in the standardized testing, publishing and privatization industry raked in obscene profits.

I’m sorry if this hurts some people’s rosy-eyed view of politics, but Obama was no friend to education. Plutocracy isn’t just a practice on the other side of the aisle. The Democrats are almost as beholden to their corporate masters, and like good servants, they do what their rich donors tell them to do.

This isn’t news to us. We’ve been on the outs before. In fact, we’ve never been on the ins.

Donald Trump? Shit! We lived through an administration that wanted to destroy us and actually knew how to do it! We can take Tiny Hands, the Bankruptcy King any day! This is a guy who couldn’t make a profit running casinos – you know, a business where the house always wins! You expect us to cower in fear that he’s going to take away our schools. Son, we’ve fought better than you!

We just need to stop, take a deep breath and re-energize ourselves.

We need a moment of rededication, time to size up our newest antagonists, and prepare for the battles ahead.

Yes, we’re surrounded on all sides. But it’s never been any different.

Yes, we don’t have any political party that supports us. So we’ll either take over the Democrats or build our own legislative network.

I don’t mean to minimize the threat. Trump represents a clear and present danger to our nation, our people and our schools. But we represent a clear and present danger to him. He hasn’t even been sworn in yet and the clock is already ticking. He’ll be lucky to last four years in the ring with us.

So in that spirit, I offer the following advice. And not just to you, my brothers and sisters at arms. I’m speaking to that broken down father, teacher and activist in myself, too.

Chin up, Bucko. We aren’t done yet. Not even close.

Together we can win this fight. We’ve been doing just that for years.

We have nothing to fear from Trump. He and the neoliberals have much to fear from us.

“Fate whispers to the warrior ‘You cannot withstand the storm.’ The warrior whispers back ‘I am the storm.’ ”

– unknown

“If you want to make a permanent change, stop focusing on the size of your problems and start focusing on the size of you!”

–T. Harv Eker

Four Practical and Four Moral Reasons to Make Your City a Sanctuary City

December 18, 2016 stevenmsinger Budget, California, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Donald Trump, immigration, Local Control, Mexico, Philadelphia, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Refugees, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Whiteness deportation, federal, homeland security, immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, moral, Politics, practical, racist dog whistle, Sanctuary Cities

There’s an entire underclass of people living among us.

These are people like you or me who have no choice but to do the most menial jobs for meager pay under the table. And when reality-TV-stars-turned-politicians like Donald Trump come around offering to solve all our problems with magic, you know who they blame for everything? THEM!

They’re illegal immigrants. They had the gumption to flee countries with worse economies than ours for the privilege of being our construction workers, housekeepers, gardeners and janitors. They are the fruit and vegetable pickers and the restaurant workers putting food on our tables.

They don’t collect social security, they don’t have health benefits or retirement plans and employers can pay them less than minimum wage. Heck! We can do almost whatever we want to them because who are they going to complain to – the police? If they do anything to get noticed by the law, they could be deported. So they keep a low profile doing the work no one else wants while the rest of us allow ourselves to be fooled into accepting them as easy scapegoats for all our ills.

What we need are sensible immigration laws that offer these people a path to citizenship, a way for them to climb out of perpetual servitude and fear. But that would cost us too much money, so it will never happen.

The least we can do – literally the least – is allow them some moderate amount of safety. We can let them partake in the minimum advantages of our society – protection from crime, a safe place to live, schools for their children, and an end to the fear that at any moment they could be kidnapped and taken away.

It’s called being a sanctuary city and more than 300 urban centers across the country have officially or unofficially adopted it as their local policy.

Though there’s no clear legal definition of sanctuary cities, in places like New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Houston, it goes something like this – if someone questions a person’s immigration status, local police don’t investigate it. You arrest someone for a non-violent crime, he does his time, then you let him free. If he has a long rap sheet, all bets are off, but in general you don’t hold him past his sentence for the feds to come and drag him away unless he’s got a substantial criminal record.

These sanctuary policies came under fire after the July 2015 death of Kate Steinle, a woman who was shot and killed in San Francisco, allegedly by an undocumented immigrant and repeat felon who had been deported five times to Mexico. He was being held by police but was released when drug charges were dropped. Police clearly made a mistake. Most law enforcement – even in sanctuary cities – would have contacted Homeland Security about someone like Lopez Sanchez. Moreover, deportation isn’t an answer either because Sanchez had already been given the boot multiple times. Unfortunately, the case has become the poster child for everything that’s supposedly wrong with these policies.

Trump became President on the backs of a promise to deport up to 3 million illegal immigrants because he said they are more violent and sanctuary cities result in increased crime. However, as are most things that come out of his mouth, it’s simply not true. These people are less likely to commit serious crimes than those born in the U.S. They can’t attract attention to themselves. Even in sanctuary cities, going on a crime spree is a sure way to get yourself deported.

On average, between 2011 and 2013 immigration courts ordered about 414,650 people removed from the country. Adding to those numbers won’t solve the problem, but there is something we can do.

If you live in a sanctuary city, protect that status. If you don’t, lobby to make your city a place of sanctuary. There are plenty of good reasons to do this – some practical, some moral. Here are four examples of each:

Practical

1) Holding Suspected Illegal Immigrants Drains Resources

Local and state police departments are not made of money. Like most public services these days, law enforcement agencies are cash-strapped. They only have so much funding to spend protecting and serving communities. Holding people in jail who are suspected of being in the country illegally costs money -money we don’t have to waste.

Moreover, the Department of Homeland Security has refused to even prioritize deporting convicted illegal immigrants. Suspects can spend days, weeks or longer in lock up waiting for the feds to get in gear.

It has become increasingly common for law enforcement to let these people go instead of taking responsibility for what is, after all, a federal job. Between January 2014 and September 2015, local and state law enforcement agencies declined 18,646 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers, the Texas Tribune found. The majority were from California, where the notion of sanctuary cities first took root.

2) Holding Suspects Without a Warrant Can Get Your City Sued

Not all sanctuary cities lean left like Los Angeles. Many are deep in the red states and deeply conservative. In 2014, sheriff’s departments across the country announced that they would no longer honor detainer requests from the federal government. Instead, they would require ICE to get a formal warrant or court order before they would jail someone longer than they would otherwise.

The reason explicitly laid out in policy memos and press releases in places like rural Oregon, eastern Washington, and Kansas was to avoid expensive lawsuits. Federal courts in Pennsylvania and Oregon ruled in 2014 that detainer requests are not legally binding. In other words, counties jailing people based solely on those detainers could be violating individuals’ rights.

So these cities are trying to shield taxpayers from potential lawsuits. Residents may not consider themselves to be in sanctuary cities. Officials and sheriffs in these areas may even object to the label, but they are effectively doing the same thing.

3) Complying with the Feds Infringes on Local Autonomy

No one likes to be told how to do their job – especially police. Some law enforcement experts claim that the federal government is overstepping its authority by demanding state and local police to comply with requests for detention.

When Louisiana was considering a state law banning sanctuary cities, Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand, a Republican, gave legislators an earful at a senate hearing on the matter: “Don’t come down here with some overarching bullshit Republican philosophy from Washington, DC…. and tell me how to do my business!” he said. “This bill goes down to discretion of a frontline officer and usurps my authority as a manager in how I’m going to deal with my officers… Give me a break!”

4) Holding Detainees Makes Law Enforcement’s Job Harder

Being a police officer is hard enough. If the people in the community you’re trying to protect and serve are afraid you’ll detain them for suspicion about their immigration status, they’ll be less likely to co-operate in the everyday business of policing.

People will flee from police on sight because they’re afraid some minor incident is going to get them deported. This is exactly what happened in North Carolina after the state passed a law requiring officers to fully comply with ICE, according to Jose Lopez, the Durham police chief.

Some agencies say it leads to mistrust between the community and the police, because victims and potential witnesses don’t come forward to report crimes. The fear of being deported is too strong. That is a real threat to public safety.

Moral

1) Violations of Human Rights/Unconstitutional

Detaining a person in jail for unspecified periods of time simply on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant is certainly of dubious legality, but it may also be immoral.

It certainly creates a situation ripe for corruption and graft. From 2004 – 2012, it was common for law enforcement agencies to enter into agreements to help federal authorities with immigration enforcement. These agreements allowed local jails to house undocumented immigrants after they had served time on state charges and then bill the federal government for this service.

Unfortunately, this turned detainees from suspects into sources of revenue and profit. The program was widely criticized because it incentivized detentions in the same way that for-profit prisons incentivize convictions. Local jails made money from detaining suspected illegal immigrants, so detentions skyrocketed. Suddenly every brown skinned person walking the streets was a potential payday.

People disappeared without warning, explanation or recourse. Inmates sometimes were passed along to jails in other municipalities without any formal notice to family members, then into the immigration court system for an expedited removal hearing. In some cases, people were returned to their home countries in weeks. Detainees were unable to communicate with embassy officials from their countries of origin or notify family members of their arrests. They were simply gone.

At very least, it was a potential violation of international human rights accords. Civil liberties groups called it a vehicle for racial and ethnic profiling. One Tennessee sheriff said it allowed him to “stack these violators like cordwood.” The system was out of control. More than one analysis of who was deported and what happened during that process showed that most were people initially arrested for minor traffic violations and who had no criminal record.

This is not how you should treat people no matter how they may or may not have entered the country. Disappearing people is the mark of a fascist state, not the land of the free, home of the brave.

2) Historical/ Biblical Precedent

Offering sanctuary has a long and respected history.

The concept derives from the ancient imperative to provide hospitality to strangers. In Greek cities, slaves and thieves took sanctuary at the shrines of the gods. In Biblical times, people who committed accidental murder could escape to sanctuary cities where they could remain in safety. These cities of refuge were places for wrongdoers who did not merit the fullest sanction of the law but were instead supposed to be kept separate from the community for a certain period.

In the Middle Ages, accused felons were allowed to seek sanctuary in any church. They could stay there, fed by neighbors for up to 40 days. When they emerged, they could confess, give up all their belongings and go into exile. This delayed prosecution so the community could cool off and not make judgements in haste. It gave the community time to determine the facts and come to a fair sentence.

Even in America, sanctuary is not a new concept. Though we have been criticized for not doing more, we have continually offered safe harbor to thousands of refugees fleeing violence in other parts of the world from Central America to Africa to central Europe. This is why some municipalities use the term “sanctuary city,” – to connect with this long history. Their morality demands they protect immigrants.

3) Immigration Law is Broken, Unfair and Unjust

Sanctuary cities aren’t the problem. Our immigration laws are. Allowing rampant deportation does nothing to solve the very real issues we have with citizenship. We are, after all, a country of immigrants. It makes little sense to kick out people many of whom have longer ancestral ties to these shores than the white majority. This is our land? Actually, many illegal immigrants could make a stronger case for ownership.

In addition, illegal immigration is a breach of civil law, not criminal. Therefore, violators don’t deserve to be deported. They deserve a chance to make things right, to become full citizens. Our laws don’t adequately protect the needs of the strangers who, for the most part, have crossed the border to take work that is eagerly offered them. Deportation is purely a bureaucratic enforcement system, which can include long detainment and judgment without judge or jury. It’s an arbitrary prejudicial policy, not just law.

4) Deportation can be a Death Sentence

Some asylum seekers don’t come to this country just to find work. They’re fleeing incredible violence in their home countries. If we simply deport them, we may be sending them to their deaths.

Officially, asylum is limited to individuals who can provide evidence that they have faced persecution or might be killed if they return to their home country. And U.S. law says that most people caught inside the United States should be given a chance to prove those claims in an immigration court. However, there are more than 445,000 people awaiting immigration hearings. Most of these people cannot make a successful asylum claim but might have some other legal defense such as proof of a U.S. citizen parent or grandparent.

Even so, mistakes have been made. Expediting deportation, holding hearings in secret, etc. increase the potential that we’ll have blood on our hands. Many would rather err on the side of caution especially when the stakes are this high.

As we see, there are many reasons to make your city a sanctuary city. It’s a bipartisan decision that’s being politicized. The Trump administration is using the worst kind of racist dog whistles and proto-facist propaganda to convince the public that deportations must increase and sanctuary cities must be abolished.

However, there are plenty of practical and moral reasons to think otherwise.

The best argument against sanctuary cities is Trump’s threats to use the federal government against states and local municipalities.

Losing Federal Funding?

Trump has threatened to take away federal tax dollars from sanctuary cities. Last year, a proposal to defund sanctuary cities, introduced by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), was blocked by Senate Democrats. Yet at least 18 states, including Iowa, Kansas, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, have considered comparable bills.

If these measures pass, they could cost municipalities billions of dollars.

But doing so would have drastic consequences for the federal government as well. It would be tantamount to declaring war on states and local governments. These monies that they’re threatening to withhold come from taxes. It’s our money!

The political fallout of such a decision would be disastrous for any administration foolhardy enough to go through with it. At very least it would destroy the Republican brand as being against federal intrusion and for states rights. Libertarians, alone, could flee the party in droves. And when the next election cycle came, the administration would find itself quickly out of office.

Becoming a sanctuary city is not without risk. However, it is the right thing to do. It protects your community financially, legally and morally. And it forces us to confront the real issue that no one wants to face – we need rational immigration policy. We can’t continue to live as a society with an underclass.

If we really want to make America great, that may be the first thing to do.

Don’t Be Fooled: Betsy DeVos Still Loves Common Core

December 14, 2016 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Campaign Donations, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Donald Trump, Education, National Academic Standards, Obama, Politics, President, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Teachers children, common core, education, Great Lakes Education Project, Michigan, Politics, Students, teaching

Poor Betsy DeVos.

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Education Secretary has spent her entire adult life advocating for Common Core, but now she has to pretend like she doesn’t like it.

In fact, if you point out any of the multiple projects that she supports boosting Common Core, the multi-billionaire Republican mega-donor will probably say you’re promoting “fake news.”

But facts are facts.

She’s a board member of Jeb Bush’s pro-Common Core think tank, Foundation for Excellence in Education, where she hangs out with prominent Democratic education reformers like Bill Gates and Eli Broad. But she says that somehow doesn’t mean she likes it.

She founded, funds and serves on the board of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP), an organization dedicated to the implementation and maintenance of Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s for the standards.

She’s even spent millions lobbying politicians in her home state of Michigan asking them NOT to repeal Common Core. But somehow that doesn’t mean she’s in favor of it.

It must be a hard position to be in.

Her entire nomination for Trump’s cabinet is contingent on convincing the public that she hates this thing that he explicitly campaigned against but she favored.

Rarely has an education policy been such a political hot potato as Common Core. Typically Republicans hate it and Democrats love it. However, little of this has to with its actual merits – or lack thereof.

Common Core is a set of academic standards saying what students should know in each grade. Nonetheless, these standards are deeply unpopular with teachers, students, parents and the general public. Part of this stems from the undemocratic way state legislatures were bribed to enact them by the Obama administration in many cases before they were even done being written and often circumventing the voting process altogether. Other criticisms come from the way the standards were devised almost entirely by standardized test corporations without input from experts in the field like child psychologists and classroom teachers. Finally, the standards get condemnation for what they do to actual classrooms – narrowing the curriculum, promoting excessive test prep, increased paperwork, the purchase of new text and work books and requiring new and more unfair standardized assessments.

As a Republican, DeVos must do everything she can to distance herself from this policy.

It’s just that her history of advocating for it gets in the way.

She even acknowledges it.

When she was nominated by Trump, one of the first things she did was publish a statement on her Website explaining how very much she hates Common Core – despite appearances to the contrary.
“Have organizations that I have been a part of supported Common Core? Of course. But that’s not my position,” she says on her Website.

And it makes perfect sense. How many times have you, yourself, given millions of dollars to a cause that you don’t support? Who hasn’t founded an organization called “I Love Apples” because of your deep hatred for the fruits?

It’s kind of like Colonel Sanders admitting that he doesn’t actually approve of people eating fried chicken. Or maybe Milton Hershey supporting a ban on chocolate.

Yeah… That’s not going to convince anybody.

What DeVos needs is a new narrative, a new story to tell people to convince them that she’s really and truly against Common Core. And at Trump’s victory rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Dec. 9, she tried it out on the crowd.

“It’s time to make education great again in this country…” she told the crowd. “This means letting states set their own high standards and finally putting an end to the federalized Common Core.”

Ah! So it’s not Common Core, per se, that she’s against. She’s against FEDERALIZED Common Core.

Shoddy academic standards designed by non-educators are just fine so long as they don’t come from the federal government? Academic standards that are developmentally inappropriate are okay if Big Brother didn’t force you to adopt them?

Well, apparently.

DeVos doesn’t want a world without Common Core. She wants one where the Core isn’t tainted with federalism. If the states somehow magically decided all by themselves that these exact standards were just peachy, that would be fine with her. It’s just that we can’t let the Feds tell us what to do.

In my book, that’s still being in favor of Common Core.

Moreover, it’s terribly disingenuous because not so long ago, DeVos’ organization, GLEP, was trying to convince people that Common Core actually wasn’t federal at all. In fact, that’s why the organization favors it.

According to GLEP’s Mission statement, one of its priorities is:

“Implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
This is a state-driven effort to create a strong and consistent framework which will make our students internationally competitive. 45 states (including Michigan) have adopted the CCSS.”

Which begs the question – if Common Core isn’t federal, what does DeVos think is wrong with it?

Answer: Nothing!

This is the kind of wordplay you expect from Democratic apologists. You hear the similar things from Gates, David Coleman or even Hillary Clinton. It’s political rebranding: We don’t support Common Core so much. We support “high academic standards” that will ensure kids are “college and career ready.”

It’s all just double speak and spin.

In reality, establishment Democrats AND Republicans support Common Core. It’s just regular folks like you and me who hate it.

You don’t believe me? Then ask yourself this: in the more than 30 state legislatures controlled by Republicans, why haven’t they repealed Common Core already?

Seriously. They could legally get rid of Common Core in more than half of the country tomorrow, but they don’t. Why? Answer: People like DeVos.

In Michigan, Republicans control the legislature. When lawmakers were debating if they should implement Common Core in the first place, DeVos and GLEP lobbied to move forward and won. Then in Spring of 2015, lawmakers considered two bills to repeal and replace Common Core. DeVos partnered with Governor Rick Snyder (a Republican) and the Michigan Coalition for Higher Standards to oppose both bills.

If that’s not being in favor of Common Core, I don’t know what is.

From my point of view, the rest of her educational ideas are little better. She supports school vouchers and increasing charter schools.

These are terrible ideas for reasons I have enumerated here and here. But even if you’re in favor of them, imagine what a pro-Common Core Education Secretary could do with a national school choice program.

If federal tax dollars are going to follow students to parochial and private schools, DeVos could make adopting Common Core a prerequisite to getting those monies.

Certainly she’ll call it something else, but it will be almost the same academic standards, freely chosen, because if you don’t, you won’t get any of this delicious tax money. Don’t forget, this is similar to why we have Common Core in the public schools – we were bribed.

That’s what the Department of Education has done for the last few decades. It tries to encourage education policy at the state level by offering tax money if you do its bidding.

If the federal government was offering money to do things everyone supports like expanding pre-K programs or after school tutoring, that would be fine. But the federal government has been pushing an agenda on our schools – I think that’s bad no matter which political party does it.

Common Core is big business. It has generated obscene profits for the testing and publishing industry. Likewise, school privatization is a great way to get rich – reducing regulations and offering free tax money to any private or charter school operator! It’s manna from heaven for every flim-flam man and con artist from here to Syria.

Trump knows something about defrauding students. He ran his own fake business school, Trump University. Just imagine how much money he and DeVos can make for themselves and their billionaire buddies with the education reforms being proposed!

And worst of all, at the end of the day we still won’t be rid of Common Core. It will just expand into new markets – I mean, schools.

So if you support DeVos, fine. But don’t delude yourself into thinking she’s against Common Core. She still loves it just as much as she ever did.

Truth Bomb: Democrats Need to Embrace Progressivism or Else Move Out of the Way

December 3, 2016December 4, 2016 stevenmsinger Bernie Sanders, Chuy Garcia, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, Dr. Jill Stein, Education, Election, Election Reform, Feminism, Gerrymandering, Green Party, Hate Crimes, Hillary Clinton, LGBT, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Teach for America, Unions, voter suppression, voting, White Allies education, Healthcare, history, Politics

“Democrats: Are we the party of the donor class or the working class? This is value clarification time. It’s now or never!”

–Nina Turner, former OH State Senator

Democrats, liberals and progressives of every stripe – you’re not going to want to hear this, but hear it you must.

We’ve gone around for too long thinking we’ve got all the answers, but obviously we don’t.

Hillary Clinton lost. Donald Trump won. There’s something seriously wrong with what we’ve been doing to get that kind of result.

There are some hard truths we’ve got to understand, that we’ve got to learn from. Hearing them may be painful. Many of us will fight against it. But we can’t keep fooling ourselves anymore. All that “hope” and “change” we’ve been waiting for – it has to start with us, first.
We’re stuck in a loop and we’ve got to break ourselves out of it. And the only way to get there is to break the track wide open.

It’s time to stop mourning.

Trump is President-elect.

Yeah, that sucks. Hard.

He’s going to protect us by enacting policies to hurt brown people. He’s going to make it harder to get healthcare. He’s going to trample the Constitution. He’s going to offer up our schools to private companies to do with as they please in secret using our tax dollars. He’s going to legitimize white nationalism and embolden racists, bigots, sexist, xenophobes, homophobes and every kind of hate group imaginable. He’s going to hand out tax cuts to his megarich campaign contributors and tax us with the loss of government services. He’s going to use the office as an opportunity to enrich himself and his billionaire buddies and then go on social media and tweet about how he’s fighting for working people.

I don’t like it any better than you. But it’s time to face it.

Sure, Clinton won the popular vote. Sure, there’s a recount going on in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. I’d love for it to overturn Trump’s victory. But I have zero confidence that it will. And I refuse to let it blind me to the urgent need for change.

The first thing we have to do is own up to one essential thing: Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate.

The people were crying out for a populist champion. We had one in Bernie Sanders. He would have destroyed Trump, but we blew it.

I’m not going to rehash it all again, but there’s no way you can honestly say the Democratic primary process was fair. Party leaders were clearly in the bag for Clinton. They ignored her negatives and what their constituency were trying to tell them.

This loss belongs squarely on the shoulders of establishment Democrats. It’s not the fault of the electorate. It was the party’s job to convince people to vote for their candidate. They didn’t do that. Instead they told people who to vote for – or more accurately who NOT to vote for. It was clearly a losing strategy. It lost us the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court. Own it.

Next we have to acknowledge that this problem is not new. The Democrats haven’t been what they were or what they could be for a long time.

Since at least President Bill Clinton, many Democrats have traded in their progressive principles for neoliberal ones. They have sold out their concern for social justice, labor and equity in favor of slavish devotion to the same market-driven principles that used to characterize the other side.

Bill Clinton approved NAFTA. He deregulated Wall Street paving the way for the economic implosion. He expanded the failing war on drugs, increased the use of the death penalty, used the Lincoln bedroom as a fundraising condo, ignored the genocide in Rwanda while escalating conflicts abroad in Russia and the middle east. He dramatically and unfairly increased the prison population. He pushed poor families off welfare and into permanent minimum wage jobs. And when people had clearly had enough of it and wanted a change, we gave them Al Gore a.k.a. Bill Clinton part 2.

THAT’S why an idiot like George W. Bush won in 2000. It wasn’t because of Green Party challenger Ralph Nader. It was because people were sick of the Democrats not being real progressives.

But we clearly didn’t learn that lesson, because we did the same damn thing in 2016.

President Barack Obama is just as neoliberal as Bill. He gets credit for bringing back 16 million jobs lost under Bush. But we haven’t forgotten that they’re mostly minimum wage jobs. He gets credit for reducing unemployment to only 4.7%. But we haven’t forgotten that nearly 50 million Americans aren’t included in those statistics because they haven’t been able to find a job in two years and have given up even looking for one.

Obama rolled back legal protections that used to stop the government from spying on civilians, that used to stop the military from being used as a police force against civilians, that used to stop the military from assassinating U.S. citizens, that used to protect whisteblowers, that guaranteed free speech everywhere in the country not just in designated “free speech zones.” Not only did he fail to close Guantanamo Bay, his administration opened new black sites inside the U.S. to torture citizens.

Obama continued the endless wars in the middle east. Sure, he had fewer boots on the ground, but infinite drone strikes are still a continuation of Bush’s counterproductive and unethical War on Terror.

And when it comes to our schools, Obama continued the same corporate education reform policies of Bush – even increasing them. He pushed for more standardized testing, more Common Core, more privatization, more attacks on unions, more hiring unqualified Teach for America temps instead of authentic educators.

Voters clearly wanted a change. We wanted a real progressive champion who would roll back these neoliberal policies. Instead we got Hillary Clinton a.k.a. Obama part 2.

The Democrats didn’t learn a thing from 2000. We just repeated the same damn mistake. And some of us still want to blame third party candidates like Jill Stein.

It wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t voters faults. It was the Democratic establishment that refused to listen to their constituency.

So here’s the question: will we do it again? Will we let party insiders continue in the same neoliberal direction or will we change course?

Re-electing Nancy Pelosi to House Democratic leadership isn’t a good sign. She represents the same failed administration. But we’ve kept her in place for another term, repeating our mistakes.

Maybe we’ll make a change with U.S. Rep Keith Ellison as DNC chair. It would certainly be a good start to put a real progressive in charge of the party. What better way to challenge Trump’s anti-Muslim propaganda than by promoting the only Muslim representative in the House to the head of our movement! That’s a sure way of showing that Democrats include all peoples, creeds and religions in contrast to the Republicans insularity. But there’s no guarantee we’re going to do it, and even if we did, it would only be a start.

It’s time to clean house.

We need to take back what it means to be a Democrat. We can’t have organizations funded by hedge fund managers and the wealthy elite pretending to be in our camp while espousing all the beliefs of Republicans. We can’t have Democrats for Education Reform, a group promoting the policies of George W. Bush, the economics of Milton Friedman and prescribing laws crafted by the American Legislative Exchange council. We don’t need Cory Booker going on Meet the Press to defend Mitt Romney against income inequality and then pretending to champion working people while taking in contributions from the financial sector. The brand needs to mean something again.

The party needs to move in an authentic progressive direction. So we need to get rid of all the neoliberals. They can go become Republicans. All it would take is exchanging in their blue ties for red ones. They’re functional Republicans already.

We’ve got leaders who can take their place. We’ve got longtime progressives like Bernie and sometime progressives like Elizabeth Warren. We’ve got younger statesmen like Nina Turner, Tulsi Gabbard, Jeff Merkley, John Fetterman, and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, to name a few. But we need new blood.

Of course none of this matters if we don’t take steps to secure the validity of our elections in the first place.

We need to reform our entire electoral process. Ancient and hackable voting machines, voter suppression laws and efforts, rampant gerrymandering and, yes, that stupid relic of the slave states, the Electoral College – all of it must go. We’ve got to ensure that people can vote, people do vote and it actually counts. And if something goes wrong, we need a way to double check. Recounts in close races should be standard and automatic.

We’ve got to fight Citizens United and other Supreme Court rulings equating money with speech. We’ve got to run people-powered campaigns like Sanders did so our politicians aren’t so beholden to corporate and wealthy interests. We’ve got to make it easier for third parties to be part of the process, to include their candidates in debates, etc.

These are some of the many challenges ahead.

Sure, we have to fight Trump. But the best way to do that is to reinvent ourselves.

If the Democrats aren’t willing to do that, many of us will go elsewhere. The party cannot continue to exists if it continually ignores its base. It’s not enough to give us a charismatic leader to latch onto – we need real progressive policies.

The next four years are going to be hard. Trump is going to make things very difficult for the people we love. But in a way that’s a blessing.

We have a real opportunity to create an authentic resistance. People will be untied in their dissatisfaction and anger at what Trump is doing to the country. They’ll be looking for somewhere to turn, for a revolutionary movement to lead them through it.

We can give them another fake insurgency as we did against Bush. Or we can learn the lessons of history.

We can move forward. We can change. We can become a party of real progressives.

Or if we need – we can start a new one from the ground up.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

Propaganda

School Vouchers Will Indoctrinate a Generation in Alternative Truths

PA Legislature Plans Taking Away Teachers’ Sick Days

U.S. Public Schools Are NOT Failing. They’re Among the Best in the World

TEST SCORES

IDEALS AND POVERTY

SPECIAL EDUCATION

CURRICULUM AND STRATIFICATION

SIZE MATTERS

PUBLIC PERCEPTION AND THE MEDIA

THE BOTTOM LINE

Trump says our schools are “Flush with Cash!?” They’re Falling Apart!

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

10) F is for Friedrichs… and Freeloader: A Supreme Court Nightmare

9) The Charter School Swindle – Selling Segregation to Blacks and Latinos

8) ‘We’re Sorry Teachers are Unfairly Blamed’ says John King – Man Responsible for Unfairly Blaming Teachers

7) Bernie Sanders is Right: We Should Federalize Public School Funding

6) Summer Break – the Least Understood and Most Maligned Aspect of a Teacher’s Life

5) Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Manager is a Longtime Corporate Education Reformer

4) What Antonin Scalia’s Death Means to the People I Love

3) Without Black Culture There Would Be No American Culture

2) The Essential Selfishness of School Choice

1) Top 10 Reasons School Choice is No Choice

Don’t Be Fooled: Betsy DeVos Still Loves Common Core