Every Charter School Must Be Closed Down – Every. Single. One.

September 8, 2019September 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, private schools, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Special Education, Students, Taxation, Teachers, Tom Wolf, Unions Austin Davis, charter schools, Democrats, for-profit, James Brewster, Pennsylvania, policy, Politics, public schools, Republicans, school closings, school privatization, Tom Wolf

The problem with charter schools isn’t that they have been implemented badly.

Nor is it that some are for-profit and others are not.

The problem is the concept, itself.

Put simply: charter schools are a bad idea. They always were a bad idea. And it is high time we put an end to them.

I am overjoyed that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are starting to hear the criticisms leveled against the charter school industry in the face of the naked greed and bias of the Trump administration and its high priestess of privatization, Betsy DeVos. However, I am also disappointed in the lack of courage displayed by many of these same lawmakers when proposing solutions.

Charter schools enroll only 6 percent of students nationwide yet they gobble up billions of dollars in funding. In my home state of Pennsylvania, they cost Commonwealth taxpayers more than $1.8 billion a year and take more than 25 percent of the state’s basic education funding. That’s for merely 180 schools with 135,000 students!

Charter schools are privately run but publicly financed. They are what happens when the public abrogates its responsibility to run a school and signs that right away (in a charter agreement) with another entity, usually a business or corporation.
As such, these schools are not held to the same standards as authentic public schools. Unlike your neighborhood school, charters are not required to be run by elected boards, to have public meetings, to have open records, or to spend all their money in the service of their students. Nor do they have to provide the same standard of services for students – even children with special needs. Nor do they have to accept all students within their coverage area who enroll. And that’s to say nothing of how they increase racial segregation, are susceptible to fraud and malfeasance, often produce much worse academic results, close without notice, hire many uncertified teachers, trample workers rights and destabilize the authentic neighborhood public schools.

These are not problems that can be solved by fiddling around the edges.

We cannot simply constrain them from stealing AS MUCH from authentic public schools and consider it a victory.

We need to address the issue head on – and that issue is the very concept of charter schools.

Why would the public give up its schools to a private entity? Why allow someone else to take our money and do whatever they want with it behind closed doors? Why allow anyone to give our children less of an education than we’re already providing at our own schools?

We must end this failed experiment. Nothing less will do. It will only provide more breathing room so that this unjust situation can drag on for another generation.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf has proposed sweeping reforms via executive order that would make real progress toward holding charter schools accountable. He has asked that the state senate and house take the next step with legislation to finish the job.

Just this past week, Wolf visited Twin Rivers Elementary School in McKeesport along with state Senator Jim Brewster and state Reps Austin Davis and Jake Wheatley to listen to resident and teachers’ concerns and propose solutions.

Such a move is unprecedented and represents a seismic shift in the political landscape. However, I am concerned that lawmakers are too timid to fix the real problem here.

No one has the bravery to come out and say what I’ve said here.

Consider this statement from Brewster, my state Senator:

“I have legislation to address some of these issues, but it’s not an indictment on charter school teachers. It’s not an indictment on the charter school concept. It’s an indictment on the process that was put in place 20 some years ago that has put in a playing field that’s not level. Together I believe if we get the charter school folks to the table we can iron this out, we can fix several things that need to be fixed – the funding formula, the capacity, the cap and those sort of things – and when we do that, then the mission statements of the charter schools and the public schools are the same – educate our children, bring their skill sets out, help them achieve their dreams.”

I am deeply grateful for Brewster’s support and willingness to take on the charter industry. And he is right about many things. But not all of them.

He is right, for example, about the financial impact of charter schools on authentic neighborhood public schools.

At the same meeting, McKeesport superintendent Mark Holtzman said, “Charter schools are depleting our resources with no accountability or without being financially responsible. Taxpayer money is being used to flood the media with commercials and billboards right before the start of school so that they can take our students.”

There are roughly 500 students living in the McKeesport district enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools and 100 students enrolled in cyber charters. The district spends about $7 million — or 10% of its budget — on charter school payments, according to Holtzman.

It’s roughly the same at other districts in the Mon-Valley. Steel Valley Schools, where I work as a middle school teacher, has budgeted a $6 million payment to charter schools this year – 16% of our spending plan.

Again, I am extremely grateful that Wolf and other state Democrats recognize this fact and are willing to take measures to make matters more fair. I hope many Republicans will join them in this.

However, fixing the way charters are funded alone will not correct the problem.

Charter schools are a parallel service to authentic public schools. If you’re suggesting we fund them both, you’re asking taxpayers to pay for two complete and separate school systems.

Why should we do that? Why should we waste our money on it? I don’t think the people of Pennsylvania – or any state of the union – have money to spare on a pointless duplication of services.

It is a politically impossible position that has zero justification – especially when you consider all the inequitable practices charter schools are allowed to get away with.

In his executive orders, Wolf proposes putting a stop to some of this.

For example, he wants to require charter schools to stop turning away students based on race, ethnicity, gender, disability, intellectual deficits, or other factors. He wants to make charter schools as transparent as authentic public schools. He wants to stop conflicts of interests for charter school board members and operating companies so that they can’t make decisions on behalf of the school that would enrich themselves, their families and/or friends.

These are excellent suggestions and I hope he is able to make them a reality.

However, these “fixes” are all things that authentic public schools already do. They don’t discriminate in enrollment. They are financially accountable and transparent. They aren’t allowed to engage in conflicts of interest.

Why bother making charter schools act like authentic public schools when we already have authentic public schools? That’s like genetically engineering your cat to have a longer snout and say “woof.” Why bother when you already have a dog?

The same could be said about for-profit and non-profit charter schools.

Apologists want to pretend that the former is the “bad” type of charter and the latter is the “good” type.

Wrong.

As Jeff Bryant, an editor at Education Opportunity Network, puts it, this is a “Distinction without a difference.”

These terms only define an organization’s tax status – not whether it is engaged in gathering large sums of money for investors.

With a knowledgeable accountant or hedge fund manager, almost anyone can claim nonprofit status while still enriching yourself. It happens all the time.

For instance, take the use of management companies.

A for-profit charter school can simply cut services to students and pocket the savings as profit.

A nonprofit charter school can do the same thing after engaging in one additional step.

All they have to do is start a “nonprofit” charter school and then hire a for-profit management company to run it. Then the management company can cut services and pocket the profits!

Yet we call such a school “nonprofit.” It’s meaningless.

It doesn’t even matter who owns the for-profit management company. It could even be the same people who own the nonprofit charter school.

The law actually allows you to wear one hat saying you’re nonprofit and then put on a different hat and rake in the cash! The only difference is what hat you’re wearing at the time! You get to claim to be a nonprofit while enjoying all the advantages of being for-profit.

You can even buy things with public tax dollars through your for-profit management company and then if your “nonprofit” school goes bankrupt, you get to keep everything you bought! Or your management company does.

So the public takes all the risk and you reap all the reward. And you’re still called a “nonprofit.”

But let’s not forget real estate shenanigans.

If I own property X, I can sell it to my own charter school and pay myself whatever I want. And I can do the same thing with a nonprofit charter school, I just need to sell it to my for-profit management company which will still buy my property for whatever I decide to pay myself.

Face it – charter schools are a scam.

They are a failed policy initiative.

It’s time they were ended.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we simply throw away the people who work there or the students who are enrolled there.

We need to look at each charter on a case-by-case basis and decide how best to transition them to an authentic public school system.

In some cases, it may make sense to rehabilitate charters into fully public schools with all the transparency and regulations that means. However, in most cases it will mean eventually closing them.

If there are any charters that actually provide valuable services for students and their families wish to keep children enrolled there, we should allow these students to finish their academic careers there. But let the present classes be the last.

In schools that do not offer better outcomes than the neighborhood public school (i.e. the overwhelming majority) students should be transitioned back to the neighborhood schools.

If there are any charters that do not wish to abide by such changes, they should have the opportunity to become what they already are except in name – private schools. The only difference is that taxpayers will no longer take up the tab.

And when it comes to charter school teachers, they should not be punished for having worked in the industry. In fact, we should find ways to bring them into the authentic public schools.

Our public schools need more teachers. Charter teachers who are fully certified should be given first chance to fill some of those vacancies. And charter teachers who are not certified should be given the opportunity to go back to school and complete their education degrees.

Any sane solution to the charter school mess would include these measures with the ultimate goal of ending school privatization in all its forms financed at public expense.

We don’t want privatized prisons. We don’t want privatized mercenary armies like Blackwater. We don’t want privatized schools.

Tax dollars should go to our authentic neighborhood public schools so that we can make them even better than they already are.

Our students deserve the best we can give them – and we can’t give them the best when we’re needlessly paying for two separate school systems and passing legislation with more of an eye on private investors than the welfare of the next generation.

It is my sincere hope that this push for real charter school reform becomes an effort to solve this problem once and for all.

Are we brave enough to do it?

Do we have the courage and conviction to take that on?

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Busing and School Segregation Used for Politics not Policy

July 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Learning, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Supreme Court, Teachers, Technology, voting, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege Bernie Sanders, busing, charter schools, Democrats, education, education policy, Joe Biden, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, neoliberal, Politics, Privatize, public schools, school segregation, schools, segregation, standardized testing

If children of all races went to the same schools with each other, it would be harder to treat them unequally.

Moreover, it would be harder for them to grow up prejudiced because they would have learned what it’s like to have classmates who are different from them.

And though most people agree with these premises in principle, our laws still refuse to make them a reality in fact.

Perhaps that’s why it was so astounding when Kamala Harris brought up the issue of school segregation and busing at the first Democratic debates.

If you’re anything like me, for the first time these debates made Harris look like a viable contender for the party’s Presidential nomination to face Republican incumbent Donald Trump in 2020.

But then she immediately contradicted herself when people actually started to take her seriously.

During the debates, Harris called out front runner and former vice president Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing in the 1970s as a way of combating school segregation.

The California Democrat and former federal prosecutor rightly said that 40 years ago there was a “failure of states to integrate public schools in America,” so “that’s where the federal government must step in.”

But her star-making moment was when she made the whole matter extremely personal.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “That little girl was me.”

The tactic was so successful that Biden has been fumbling to apologize and explain away a history of obstructing desegregation ever since.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the debate showed Biden had lost half of his support among black voters since earlier in June.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was quick to cash in on the political capital she earned by selling t-shirts with a picture of herself when she was in school with the emblem “That Little Girl Was Me.”

It could almost be a masterclass in how to make a political point to both boost your own campaign and change the narrative to improve national policy.

That is if Harris actually backed up her rhetoric with action.

Unfortunately, she has been tripping all over herself to keep this a criticism of Biden and not let it become a policy prescription for today.

While perfectly happy to support busing as a measure to stop segregation in the past, she seems much less comfortable using it to stop our current school segregation problems.

Because even though the landmark Supreme  Court decision that found racial segregation to be unconstitutional – Brown v. Board of Education – is more than 60 years old, our nation’s schools are in many places even more segregated now than they were when this ruling was handed down.

So the question remains: in some areas should we bus kids from black neighborhoods to schools located in white ones and vice versa to ensure that our classrooms are integrated?

Since the debates, Harris has waffled saying busing should be “considered” by school districts but she would not support mandating it.

In subsequent comments, she said she’d support a federal mandate for busing in certain situations where other integration efforts have not been effective or when the courts have stepped in to provide the federal government that power. However, she does not believe that either of these conditions have been met.

Frankly, it sounds a whole lot more like someone desperately making things up as she goes along than someone with a true plan to fix a deep problem in our public education system.

She rightly attacked Biden on his record but then came up short trying to prove that she would be much different, herself, if elected.

However, that doesn’t mean all Democratic candidates are so unprepared. A handful have detailed integration policy proposals.

The most obvious is Bernie Sanders.

In fact, it is a cornerstone of his “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Education.” Not only would he repeal the existing ban on using federal transportation funding to promote school integration, he would put aside $1 billion to support magnet schools to entice more diverse students. However, the most ambitious part of his desegregation effort goes beyond legislation. Sanders promises to “execute and enforce desegregation orders and appoint federal judges who will enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act in school systems.”

Sanders understands that the courts have largely sabotaged most desegregation efforts in the last 40 years.

At least two Supreme Court rulings have taken away the federal government’s power to enforce Brown v. Board. The first was 1974’s Milliken v. Bradley ruling which established that federal courts could not order desegregation busing across school district lines. They could only do so inside districts. So in big cities like Detroit – where the case originated – you have largely black city schools surrounded by mostly white suburban ones. The ruling forbids busing from city to suburban districts and vice-versa thereby destroying any kind of authentic desegregation efforts.

More recently, in 2007, the Supreme Court’s Parent’s Involved decision put even more constraints on voluntary busing programs.

Sanders is acknowledging these problems and promising to select judges to the bench who would work to overturn these wrongheaded decisions.

To my knowledge, no one has yet offered a more comprehensive plan.

However, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro comes in at a close second.

As you might expect, his school integration plan focuses on real estate and housing issues. According to his Website, Castro’s plan includes:

“Fulfill the promise of Brown v Board of Education through a progressive housing policy that includes affirmatively furthering fair housing, implementing zoning reform, and expanding affordable housing in high opportunity areas. These efforts will reduce racial segregation in classrooms.”

In other words, Castro hopes to work around the courts by incentivizing integration in neighborhoods which would also increase it in our schools.

It’s a good plan – though perhaps not enough in itself.

Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt Castro’s sincerity here. Unlike Sanders’ plan, Castro’s education policy statement is littered with jargon right out of the school privatization, edtech and high stakes testing playbook. These are, after all, the same people who have worked to increase segregation with the promotion of charter and voucher schools.

For instance, the second point of his plan is called “Reimagining High School” – a monicker stolen from the XQ Superschools program, a philanthrocapitalist scheme to rebrand school privatization funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.

This shouldn’t be surprising coming from  Castro. In 2013, the mayor went on a tour of cities sponsored by Education Reform Now – an arm of Democrats for Education Reform, a school privatization lobbying network. In the same year, he was also a featured guest at a ribbon cutting ceremony for IDEA charter schools. In 2010, he admitted he had no problem taking money with strings attached – a reference to the Obama administration’s chief education initiative of offering education grants if states increased reliance on high stakes testing and charter schools. In particular, Castro said: “I would have taken the Race to the Top money if I was mayor, dogcatcher, or whatever.”

And speaking of standardized testing and edtech, there are other telling hints that he’s on the neoliberal bandwagon in his current education plan:

“Provide educators and public schools flexibility in defining success, including competency-based assessments and support for transitions away from seat-time requirements. Provide maximum flexibility for school leaders, teachers, and students to work together to develop rigorous, competency-based pathways to a diploma and industry recognized credentials,” [Emphasis mine].

These terms “competency-based” and “rigorous” have strong associations with the privatization industry. “Competency-based” education programs usually mean making kids do daily mini-standardized tests on iPads or other devices and other untested cyber education programs. “Rigorous” has been associated with topdown academic standards like the Common Core that provide students with few resources or even taking them away and then blaming kids for not being able to meet arbitrary and developmentally inappropriate benchmarks.

Castro has some good ideas, but his troubling associations and language give any person familiar with these issues reason to pause.

Of course, Castro has not yet made a real mark among those Democrats seeking their party’s nomination.

Perhaps more important is the relative silence of a more popular candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

She hasn’t spoken much about integration efforts on the campaign trail. Along with Sanders, she is a co-sponsor of the Strength in Diversity Act, the leading congressional vehicle for school integration. However, that legislation is deeply flawed because it not only increases grant money for desegregation but also gives a big chunk of change away to charter schools.

In the past, Warren has supported a kind of school voucher program to separate where a student is enrolled in school from where they live entirely, but you can add it to the list of education issues she has not seen the need to clarify as yet.

It’s no surprise that so few Democratic hopefuls want to address the issue of desegregation – especially doing so through busing.

White middle class and wealthy people generally don’t support it.

They simply don’t want their kids going to schools with large numbers of black and brown students.

And this is a real moral weakness in white culture.

I went to an integrated school from Kindergarten to high school. My daughter goes to the same district. I teach at another integrated school.

The benefits of attending such a school far outweigh any negatives.

If students have to spend more time getting to and from school via buses to reach this goal, it wouldn’t matter if we valued the outcome.

In fact, many white parents don’t mind putting their kids on buses or driving them to get away from minority children.

Certainly we should try to minimize the time it takes to get to and from school but that shouldn’t be the only consideration.

They say we get the leaders we deserve.

If white people really want to defeat Trump, they may have to start by defeating the bigot inside themselves first.

Betsy DeVos’s Right Wing School Indoctrination Program

March 2, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, church and state, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Florida, home school, immigration, Learning, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Refugees, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Students, Teachers alternative facts, Betsy DeVos, Democrats, education, Florida, free thought, indoctrination, Pennsylvania, Politics, Republicans, school vouchers, separation of church and state, Students, Tax Credits, teachers

What do you do when thinking people reject your political ideology?

You get rid of thinking people.

That’s Betsy DeVos’ plan to rejuvenate and renew the Republican Party.

The billionaire heiress who bought her position as Donald Trump’s Education Secretary plans to spend $5 billion of your tax dollars on private, religious and parochial schools.

This would be federal tax credits to fund scholarships to private and religious institutions – school vouchers in all but name.

It’s a federal child indoctrination program to ensure that the next generation has an increasing number of voters who think science is a lie, white supremacy is heritage and the Bible is history – you know, people just gullible enough to believe a reality show TV star who regularly cheats on his many wives with porn stars is God’s chosen representative on Earth. A measure to make child kidnapping, imprisonment and wrongful death seem like a measured response to backward immigration policy. A measure to make collusion and fraternization with the world’s worst dictators and strongmen seem like global pragmatism.

To make matters even more galling, consider the timing of DeVos’ proposal.

In the beginning of February, Donald Trump Jr. criticized “loser teachers” who he said were indoctrinating school children into – gasp – socialism.

At the end of that same month, DeVos proposed funding Christian madrasas from sea-to-shinning-sea.

Apparently indoctrination is just fine for conservatives so long as it’s the right kind of indoctrination.

But even beyond the blatant hypocrisy, this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between public and private schools.

Florida’s GOP Governor Ron DeSantis tweeted that if a school receives public funding – whether it be a charter or voucher institution – it is a public school.

To which DeVos tweeted her glowing approval.

This makes a few things strikingly clear: either (1) these folks have no idea what happens at authentic public schools or (2) they’re pretending not to know so as to further their political and financial ambitions.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate children into socialism or any other ideology.

They’ll teach what socialism is and how it has functioned historically without commenting on its merits or deficiencies. It’s up to individual students to decide whether it’s a good thing or not.

Public schools are supposed to be ideologically neutral.

At most, they teach children how to think. They teach media literacy, skepticism and critical thinking skills.

If that leads kids away from Republican orthodoxy, it’s not the fault of the teacher or the child. It’s a problem with your orthodoxy.

You can’t proclaim the benefits of a marketplace of ideas and then decry that too many ideas are on display.

Nor can you conflate the way a school is funded with what that school actually does and how it teaches.

There is a world of difference between authentic public schools and their market based alternatives – especially the parochial and religious variety.

It’s the difference between telling students the answer and getting them to think about the answer. It’s the difference between total certainty and doubt, between trite truths and useful skills that can help you arrive at deeper truths.

When you ask children to think, you never know what conclusions they’ll draw. When you tell children what to think, you know exactly what conclusions you want them to hold.

Authentic public schools do not indoctrinate. Conservatives graduate from these hallowed halls the same as liberals, moderates and the politically checked out. The difference is that in a world where facts are prized and logic is exercised, conservatism becomes less appealing.

I’m not saying liberalism or progressivism is guaranteed, but they are certainly more fact-based world views than their opposites.

The same cannot be said of the kinds of institutions DeVos wants to bankroll.

They educate kids behind closed doors with little to no transparency for the public about how their money is being spent. But word seeps out of the cracks in the system.

We’ve seen the textbooks they use to teach. Their graduates have returned to the public square to tell us about the instruction they received.

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.

In their pages you’ll find glowing descriptions of the Ku Klux Klan, how the massacre of Native Americans saved many souls, African slaves had really good lives, homosexuals are no better than rapists and child molesters, and progressive attempts at equal rights such as Brown vs. Board of Education were illegal and misguided. You know – all the greatest Trump campaign hits!

We should not be funding the spread of such ignorance.

Frankly, DeVos’ ambitions have little chance of coming to fruition.

Two years ago, when Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, she wanted to spend $20 billion on the same nonsense. Her party refused to back her.

Now with Democrats in control of the House, it seems even more unlikely that her plan will pass.

But sadly smaller scale versions of it have been allowed by state legislatures throughout the country – often with full support from Democrats.

My own state of Pennsylvania spends $125 million in taxpayer dollars on the Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) programs to send children to private/religious schools. And every year legislators ask for more.

Why any Democrat would support conservative indoctrination programs is beyond me.

And this is true even though indoctrination is sometimes unavoidable.

To a limited degree, it may even be desirable. You might even say it’s a normal part of growing up.

Even the most fair-minded parents often want their children to hold at least some of the same values as they do. They want to be able to relate to their kids and view them as a continuation of the kinds of lives they lived.

But what’s okay for parents is not okay for governments.

If Mom and Dad want their kids to have a Biblical education, they should pay for it. The burden should not be shouldered by society since it’s not in society’s interest.

Governments have no right taking public money and using it to prop up private interests. And that’s exactly what this is.

It is political and religious interest. It is a way to circumvent skepticism and free thought.

It’s a way to ensure that in a time where information flows freely and dogmas crumble, people like Donald Trump continue to be elected.

Still can’t get enough Gadfly? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Hey, Teachers’ Unions, Let’s Get This One Right – No Early Presidential Endorsements & Lots of Membership Engagement

February 18, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, AFT, Bernie Sanders, bloggers, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Hillary Clinton, Labor, Local Control, Media, NEA, Politics, President, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized, Unions 2020, American Federation of Teachers, Democrats, Donald Trump, education, Election, endorsement, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, National Education Association, Politics, President, public schools, Randi Weingarten, Republicans, schools, teachers, unions

Let’s not mince words.

The last Presidential election was a cluster.

And we were at least partially to blame for it.

The Democratic primary process was a mess, the media gave free airtime to the most regressive candidate, and our national teachers unions – the National  Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) – endorsed a Democratic challenger too early and without getting membership support first.

This time we have a chance to get it right.

Edu-blogger Peter Greene spoke my feelings when he took to Twitter:

“Just so we’re clear, and so we don’t screw it up again—- NEA and AFT, please wait at least a couple more weeks before endorsing a Democratic Presidential candidate for 2020.”

He’s being snarky.

No one would endorse two years before people actually enter a voting booth.

But fairness. Evenhandedness. Moderation.

Let’s be honest. That didn’t happen in 2015.

So let’s take a brief trip down memory lane and review our history for just a moment in order to prevent these same mistakes.

The NEA represents 3 million educators. It is the largest labor union in the country. However only about 180 people made the decision to back Hillary Clinton last time around.

In October of 2015, the NEA Board of Directors voted 118 to 39 in favor of the endorsement with 8 abstentions and 5 absences.

The 74 member PAC Council voted to endorse Clinton with 82% in favor, 18% against and some of the largest delegations – California and New Jersey – abstaining.

Check my math here. So 61 PAC votes plus 118 Directors plus one President Lily Eskelsen Garcia equals 180 in favor.

That’s about .00006% of the membership.

We may call it such, but that is not an endorsement.

We need more than just the leadership to support a candidate. We need that to translate to actual votes.

When you circumvent membership, you see the result – Donald Trump.

To be fair, some NEA directors may have polled state union leaders. But according to NEA by-laws, the organization need go no further to obtain input from individual members for a primary endorsement. Even these straw polls are a formality.
The 8,000 strong Representative Assembly (RA) did not get a say. This larger body representing state and local affiliates did get to vote on an endorsement in the general election when the field was narrowed down to only two major candidates.

But anything like a poll of individual members was apparently not desired by leadership – now or later.

We can’t do that again.

The process at the AFT was likewise perplexing.

The AFT endorsed Clinton in July of 2015 – a half year before the primaries and more than a year before the general election.

This much seems certain:

1) The AFT executive board invited all of the candidates to meet with them and submit to an interview. No Republican candidates responded.

2) Democrats including Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley and Clinton were interviewed in private.

3) The executive committee voted to endorse Clinton.

4) THEN the interviews were released to the public.

How can the AFT claim its endorsement was a result of membership opinion when the organization didn’t even release the interviews to members until AFTER the endorsement?

Ostensibly, the executive council used these interviews to help make its decision. Shouldn’t that same information have been available to rank and file members of the union before an endorsement was made?

Which brings up another question: were AFT members asked AT ALL about who to endorse before the executive council made the final decision?

According to the AFT press release, they were:

“The AFT has conducted a long, deliberative process to assess which candidate would best champion the issues of importance to our members, their families and communities. Members have been engaged online, through the “You Decide” website, through several telephone town halls, and through multiple surveys—reaching more than 1 million members.

Additionally, over the past few weeks, the AFT has conducted a scientific poll of our membership on the candidates and key issues. The top issues members raised were jobs and the economy and public education. Seventy-nine percent of our members who vote in Democratic primaries said we should endorse a candidate. And by more than a 3-to-1 margin, these members said the AFT should endorse Clinton.”

So the AFT claims union members said to endorse Clinton on-line, on telephone town halls, surveys and a scientific poll of membership.

But did they really?

I’m not a member of the AFT but I know many teachers who are. Very few of them have ever been surveyed.

The press release says AFT members preferred Clinton 3-1. Yet to my knowledge they never released the raw data of any polls or surveys of membership.
This can’t happen again.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said something similar during an interview Friday on C-SPAN.

She said the executive council passed a four step process just last week to ensure members were behind whoever the union eventually endorsed this time around:

“Our Executive Council just passed a process last week which has four components. Number One is what do the members want? What are their aspirations? What are their needs in terms of Presidential candidates? And so we will be doing a lot of listening and engaging with members.

Number Two – There’s a lot of candidates that want access to our membership. What we would like them to spend a day with our members. We would like them to see the challenges in classrooms. The challenges that nurses have. [The AFT also represents nurses.] Listen to the challenges of adjunct professors who have student loan debt that is well beyond what salaries they get per month.

Number Three – People are really active these days. So we don’t want them to wait until there is a nationwide endorsement to involve or get engaged with candidates. So there’s going to be an ability to be involved or engaged as delegates to do these kinds of things.

Number Four – At one point or another we’ll get to an endorsement.”

Frankly, this seems kind of vague to me. I hope this new process gets better results than the last one.

We need to be able to trust our unions.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my union. I bleed collective bargaining and labor rights.

I teach in Homestead, Pennsylvania, just a few miles away from the site of the famous steel strike.

I want a union that represents me and my colleagues.

We must do better this time around.

We need a candidate that has broad popular support of members, not just leadership. Broad popular support will lead to engaged members at the polls and that engagement will translate into actual votes for our endorsed candidate.

So NEA and AFT leaders, your members want to know:
What is your process for selecting our next U.S. presidential candidate?

What questions will you ask potential candidates?

How will members have a democratic voice in the process?

Please be transparent and publish your process to share with members through multiple sources.

And my union brothers and sisters, get involved. Engage in the endorsement process now! Call on our NEA and AFT leadership to invite early and widespread, as well as transparent, involvement in the endorsement process.

Do you know your NEA Board Members?

http://www.nea.org/home/1686.htm

NEA Leadership Contact INFO here:

http://www.nea.org/home/49809.htm

AFT Leadership:

https://www.aft.org/about/leadership

AFT Contact Info:

https://www.aft.org/contact

Let’s get it right this time.

Everything is riding on it.

Our vote is our future.

Special Thanks to Susan DuFresne for inspiring this article.

Rahm Emanuel’s Non-Apology Apology for Being a School Privatization Cheerleader

February 10, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Arne Duncan, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, California, capitalism, Charter Schools, Chicago, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Cory Booker, Credibility, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Hillary Clinton, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, principals, Racism, Rahm, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, small class size, Social Justice Unionism, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, union busting, Unions, voting charter schools, Chicago, Chicago Schools, Chicago Teachers, Democrats, education, Local Control, neoliberal, Politics, Privatize, public schools, rahm emanuel, rebranding, Republicans, schools, unions

Rahm Emanuel’s recent op-ed in The Atlantic may be one of the dumbest things I have ever read.

The title “I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor” seems to imply Emanuel has finally seen the light.

The outgoing Chicago Mayor USED TO subscribe to the radical right view that public schools should be privatized, student success should be defined almost entirely by standardized testing, teachers should be stripped of union protections and autonomy and poor black and brown people have no right to elect their own school directors.

But far from divorcing any of this Reagan-Bush-Trump-Clinton-Obama crap, he renews his vows to it.

This isn’t an apologia. It’s rebranding.

Emanuel had been White House Chief of Staff at the beginning of President Barack Obama’s first term. He’s a former U.S. Representative, and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton.

Yet he’s persona non grata.

Now that the extremely unpopular chief executive has decided not to seek re-election, he’s trying to secure his legacy – to make sure the history books don’t remember him as the Democrat In Name Only (DINO) mayor who closed an unprecedented number of schools serving mostly minority students while catering to the will of rich investors. He doesn’t want to be remembered as the lord on a hill whose own children went to private school while he cut services and increased class size for black and brown kids. He’s trying to save a series of abysmal policy failures so that he and his neoliberal pals like Cory Booker and Arne Duncan can still hold their heads high in Democratic circles. In a time when authentic progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders have won the heart of the party, he wants to ensure there’s still room for that old time corporate education reform he is infamous for.

Like I said – dumb.

To quote the Principal in Billy Madison:

“…what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

If only he’d respond like Madison:

“Okay, a simple ‘wrong’ would’ve done just fine, but thanks.”

But like that straight man school administrator in an Adam Sandler movie, I’m going to give you the long answer. I’m going to explain why what Emanuel said was supremely stupid.

He begins the piece with a lengthy description of how he got one over on those darn teachers unions.

He wanted what was best for children, but those pesky teachers just wouldn’t do it until he twisted their arms and got them to play ball.

And keep in mind – this is the softer, gentler Emanuel who wants you to like him! This is the Emanuel who’s trying on progressive clothing to look more appealing!

Hey, Rahm, attacking working people while casting yourself as a savior is so two years ago. We’ve had a conservative Supreme Court hobble unions’ ability to stop free riders and a teacher uprising since then. Union educators from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Los Angeles, California, have gone on strike demanding Republican and Democratic chief executives like yourself make positive change for children.

No one’s buying your fairytales anymore.

But it leads into a series of important points he wants to make:

“For most of my career, I preached the old gospel of education reform. But now research and experience suggest that policy makers need to embrace a new path forward and leave the old gospel behind. Principals, not just teachers, drive educational gains. The brain-dead debate between charter and neighborhood schools should be replaced with a focus on quality over mediocrity. To get kids to finish high school, the student experience should center on preparing them for what’s next in life. Finally, classroom success hinges on the support that students get outside school. If other cities follow Chicago’s lead in embracing those ideas, they’re likely to also replicate its results.”

Oh and what results those are! But we’ll come back to that.

He reasons that principals drive educational gains. In fact, this is his a-ha moment. Don’t focus on teachers, focus on principals.

He pats himself on the back for raising principals’ salaries and recruiting only people who think and believe just like him. Then he didn’t have to watch over them so closely and they were even promoted to higher administrative positions.

Wow. What an innovation! Stack your school system with yes-people and your initiatives will get done. Great. No room for diversity of thought. No one who thinks outside of the box. Just functionaries and flunkies who do what you say.

This is sounding like a great case for progressive education reforms already! If you’re a fascist dictator.

Next comes my favorite – a further commitment to school privatization hidden behind the flimsiest rechristening in history.

Stop talking about charter schools vs. authentic public schools, he writes. Talk about quality schools vs. mediocre ones.

What bull crap!

Imagine if pirates were robbing ships on the high seas. Would you talk about good pirates and bad pirates? Imagine if vampires were attacking people in the night and draining their blood. Would you talk about good vampires and bad vampires?

I mean Dracula did suck Mina dry, but he spends the rest of his nights reading to orphan children. Long John Silver may have stolen hundreds of chests of gold from merchant ships, but he donates every tenth doubloon to fighting global warming!

Hey, Rahm, you can’t escape from the argument of whether school privatization is good or bad. Charter schools drain funding from authentic public schools and give it to private investors. They allow unscrupulous operators to cut services and pocket the profits. They increase segregation, decrease democracy and transparency, give choice mainly to business people who get to decide if your child is allowed to enroll in their school – all while getting similar or worse results than authentic public schools.

If you stopped taking corporate money for one second, maybe you could understand this simple point – no system will ever be fair that allows theft and then protects the thieves.

But on to your next point. You want to focus the student experience on what comes next in life. You want to focus on jobs and career readiness.

This is just dumbing down what it means to get an education. Going to school shouldn’t be reduced to a career training program. If we only teach kids how to manufacture widgets, what will they do when the widget factory closes?

We need to teach them how to think for themselves. We need to offer them real opportunities for self-discovery and challenge them to think deeply through an issue.

When kids graduate, we don’t want to have simply made a generation of workers. We need them to be thinking adults and citizens who can participate fully in our democratic process and help lead our country toward a better and brighter future – not just learn how to code.

Finally you talk about the support students get out of school. That’s stupid because…

Actually it’s not.

You’ve got a point there. We do need to support programs to help students succeed outside the classroom – summer reading, after school tutoring, etc. However, making kids sign a pledge to go to college in order to be eligible for a summer job? That’s kind of cruel when many have no way to pay for college in the first place. Moreover, it completely ignores the huge section of children who have no desire to go to college and would rather go to career or technical schools.

And that brings me to his dismal record of failure described by neoliberals as success.

Emanuel pushed forward a policy that in order to graduate, Chicago seniors must prove that after 12th grade they’re going to college, trade school, an internship, the military or would otherwise be gainfully employed. OR ELSE they can’t get a diploma!

Rahm’s all about adding more hoops for poor minority kids to jump through. Very rarely is he about providing any help for them to make the jump.

He’s a pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps Democrat. Or what we used to call – a Republican.

Emanuel wants to tout his record as “proof” that his methods worked.

Let’s look at them.

He has closed 50 public schools – 46 of which serve mostly black students. Southside residents had to resort to a month-long hunger strike to keep their last neighborhood school open. He laid off hundreds of teachers and staff – many just before school opened. Yet he always had money for state of the art charter schools like the $27 million new charter school for the University of Chicago as part of the Obama Presidential Library. In addition, his economic policy consisted of closing public health clinics for the poor and installing red light cameras to increase fines – none of which actually boosted the economy.

And then we get to the scandal that made a third term as mayor impossible. Emanuel actually covered up the police killing of unarmed black teen, Laquan McDonald, so it wouldn’t hurt his re-election campaign.

In October of 2014, Officer Jason Van Dyke shot the 17-year-old 16 times. Most of those bullets went into the teenager after he was already flat on the ground and the officer was at least 10 feet away.

Emanuel quickly issued a $5 million settlement to McDonald’s family on the condition they keep quiet about the incident. It wasn’t until after Emanuel had won re-election, that an independent journalist put two-and-two together and asked for the officer’s dashcam video to be released. It took the full power of the media and a lawsuit to accomplish this resulting in charges against Van Dyke for first degree murder. Just last year the officer was found guilty of second degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, but was found not guilty of official misconduct. He was sentenced to 6.75 years in prison.

This is not a sterling mayoral record. It is not a proven record of success.

He says graduation rates are up as are rates of Chicago students who go on to college. He neglects to mention that they’re up nationwide. He neglects to mention that the quality of education these kids receive is often watered down to whatever will help them pass the federally mandated standardized test. He neglects to mention the loss of teacher autonomy, and the rise in class size.

Face it. Emanuel is a crappy mayor. Chicago and the nation will be better if he fades into the sunset.

His political career was backed by the same big money conservatives that back Republicans like Chris Christie, Mitt Romney and Bruce Rauner. He was a puppet of charter schools, hedge fund managers and the Koch Brothers.

In fact, his corruption was so bad that during the 2016 primary, he became an issue for Democratic Presidential contenders.

Bernie Sanders actually called him out in a tweet saying: “I want to thank Rahm Emanuel for not endorsing me. I don’t want the endorsement of a mayor shutting down schools and firing teachers.”

Emanuel had endorsed Hilary Clinton, and her education advisor Ann O’Leary wrote in a private email to senior campaign staff that this might actually hurt the candidate’s primary chances. She wanted Clinton to distance herself from the troubled mayor or at least explain how she differed from his troubled policies.

They eventually settled on saying nothing. That didn’t backfire at all!

Look. Democrats need to learn the exact opposite of the lesson Rahm is selling here.

Corporate education reform is poison. School privatization is not progressive. High stakes testing is not progressive. Hiring like-minded flunkies to run your schools is not progressive. Closing black kids’ schools is not progressive.

Emanuel has learned nothing. Have we?

As LA Teachers Strike Over Charter Schools, Democrat Cory Booker Speaks at Pro-Charter Rally

January 18, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, Budget, California, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Cory Booker, Credibility, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, Education, Facebook, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, union busting, Unions, Yohuru Williams California, charter schools, Cory Booker, Democrats, education, LA Teachers, LAUSD, neoliberal, NOLA, Politics, public schools, Republicans, schools

What a slap in the face!

In California, 30,000 Los Angeles teachers are on strike because charter schools are gobbling up their funding without providing the same level of quality services or accountability.

Meanwhile in New Orleans, Sen. Cory Booker is giving the keynote address at a charter school rally.

That wouldn’t be surprising if Booker was a Republican.

Donald Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is a big time champion of school privatization over public schools.

But like LA Superintendent Austin Beutner, Booker – a New Jersey lawmaker – is supposed to be a Democrat.

The party is supposed to stand for social goods, doing what’s best for everyone not just the few.

However, when Booker gave the keynote address at the “Project LIVE & Achieve” Rally for Excellence today, he made it clear whose side he’s on. And it’s not parents, children or communities.

Organizers estimate 5,000 students from more than 20 city charter schools attended the rally instead of attending their classes.

Traditional public schools aren’t allowed to spend tax dollars or waste class time by forcing students to attend political rallies. But since charter schools like all of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina don’t have to follow the same rules, this is your tax dollars at work.

The rally was hosted by InspireNOLA Charter Schools and U.S. Representative Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana Democrat.

The charter network’s Website describes the rally as part of InspireNOLA’s celebration of Martin Luther King weekend.

What a disgrace!

Dr. Yohuru Williams, a professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut and an MLK scholar, has written extensively about how school privatization and high stakes testing are in direct contradiction with Dr. King’s writings and speeches.

“While it seeks to claim the mantle of the [civil rights] movement and Dr. King’s legacy, corporate education reform is rooted in fear, fired by competition and driven by division,” says Williams. “It seeks to undermine community rather than build it and, for this reason, it is the ultimate betrayal of the goals and values of the movement.”

Dr. King certainly wouldn’t have approved of today’s rally. After all, King said:

“To save man from the morass of propaganda is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.”

Forcing children to go to a political rally and then pretending their mandatory presence is somehow a show of support is exactly the kind of propaganda King was railing against.

“The function of education,” King explained in 1947, “is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”

Booker, who clearly has ambitions of a Presidential run, has violated those principles time and again.

Before he became a U.S. Senator, he was Newark mayor. In that position he accepted a $100 million donation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to implement a series of drastic reforms in city schools.

The people of Newark only found out about it on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show when Booker was a guest and announce the grant. Almost all of that money went to charter schools, according to the New Republic.

Such publicity stunts and mugging for the cameras may be why The Gaurdian even described Booker as a “neoliberal egomaniac.”

While numerous corporate Democrats like Booker share his love of charter schools, his positions go even further to the right. Like DeVos, with whom he sat on the board of pro-privatization Alliance for School Choice, he also is a proponent of school vouchers. This despite any credible evidence that voucher programs actually create better educational outcomes for students.

And Devos isn’t the only radical right privatization-monger in Booker’s circle. Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor known for union busting and a series of reforms that resulted in a citywide cheating scandal, is someone Booker calls “a friend of mine”

Though as a Senator, Booker held the party line and voted against his long-time friend DeVos’ nomination as Education Secretary, he told CNN that he hadn’t changed his position on school privatization:

“When it comes to my record of supporting what I believe that any child born in any zip code in America should have a high quality school and I don’t care if that’s a charter school or a traditional district school. If it’s a bad school I’m going to fight against it just like I supported charter school closures in Newark that weren’t serving the genius of my kids. So I haven’t changed one iota.”

Yet his record flies in the face of his rhetoric.

As Newark Mayor he privileged charter schools and helped them spread throughout the city while underfunding traditional public schools. And though he continually brings up the “amazing” academic record of Newark’s charter schools, he strangely omits the a cheating scandal they experienced similar to Rhee’s.

According to a report by the state Department of Education’s Office of Fiscal Accountability and Compliance, testing documents were not secured at these schools. State investigators flagged at least 15 charter schools for further inquiry because some tests had unusually high rates of wrong-to-right erasure marks. One school had rates more than three times greater than the state average.

Charter schools are often run by appointed officials and not elected school boards. They meet behind closed doors and never have to explain how and why they’re spending taxpayer dollars. Though much hand wringing has been done over charters that are explicitly run for a profit, even those designated “not for profit” can cut students services and pocket the difference. There are a multitude of ways these schools can cheat students out of the resources and educations they deserve while protecting the administrators and business people making a buck off them.

In LA, administrators like Buetner – who has no experience with education but is a millionaire investor in school privatization – actually sabotage the public schools in order to feed the profit-making machine of charters.

And now the opposition to these shenanigans is spilling into the streets in both red and blue states. There have been seven major teacher protests in the last year in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and now California.

It’s past time for Democrats to take a stand along with them and oppose school privatization in all of its forms.

Yet when The Intercept asked all 47 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus to weigh in on the LA Teacher strike and charter school proliferation, only 7 responded.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif. have made no bones about the connection. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., also expressed support for striking teachers, even tweeting a link to a Jacobin article about school privatization. Though didn’t mention charter’s directly, he has spoken out about school privatization before, including last year when Puerto Rico announced its plans to open charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

The problem is that many Democrats won’t go that far. They’ll say they support LA Teachers but won’t admit that school privatization is the cause of their woes. They refuse to take a stand against the billionaire backers of the industry and side with the grassroots parents and children fighting for fully public schools.

However, few go as far as Booker to openly champion the industry.

At least, few Democrats.

Dear Non-Voters, Your Country Needs You

October 26, 2018October 26, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Congress, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Feminism, Healthcare, Hillary Clinton, immigration, Labor, Learning, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, protest, Racism, Refugees, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Sexism, Social Justice, Students, voter suppression, voting, Voting Rights Civil Rights, Democrats, Donald Trump, duty, education, Election, Election Reform, Non-voter, Politics, Republicans, Supreme Court, voter supression, voter turnout, voting, Voting Rights, Voting Rights Act

Four in 10 Americans who were eligible to vote in 2016 didn’t do so.

That’s some 92 million U.S. Citizens.

These people weren’t purged from the polls.

They weren’t barred from voting.

They just didn’t bother.

So, the way I see it, the responsibility for President Donald Trump rests with you.

The United States has a Reality TV Show clown in the oval office.

He is a dimwitted narcissist who panders to racists, sexists and xenophobes to stay in power.

He is an incurious liar who constantly trolls the media and the public.

He is an admirer of dictators and fascists across the globe with no qualms about enriching himself and those like him at the expense of you and me.

Everyday he provides aide and comfort to anti-American regimes from Moscow to Riyadh by diminishing our international stature, withdrawing us from treaties and contracts, leaking sensitive information and otherwise pursuing foreign interests over those of American citizens.

And that’s before we even begin to examine his colossal impact on human rights – emboldening terrorists and white supremacists while his own administration throws children in cages and forcibly separates them from their families.

This is on you, non-voters.

You did this.

A democratic republic is like any other machine – it only functions properly if all of its parts are working.

You can’t have majority rule when 40% of voters shirk their duty.

A study by the Pew Research Center found that not only were non-voters likely to be younger, less educated, less affluent, and nonwhite, but 55% of them were Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

If more non-voters under the age of 30 had gotten their acts together in just a few swing states, we wouldn’t all be living through this national nightmare.

So if you think voting doesn’t make a difference, look around.

Look at your bank account for instance.

Wonder why your wages continue to stagnate while the rich pocket more and more of the economy?

Look at your neighborhood. Wonder why our schools, roads, bridges and other public services are crumbling into disrepair?

It’s because you didn’t vote.

I’m not saying everything would have been great under President Hillary Clinton. But Trump sets an awfully low bar for competency.

You think your vote doesn’t matter?

Republicans disagree with you.

They aren’t working overtime to stop people like you from voting because it makes no difference.

Robert Kennedy put it this way:

“The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen’s right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship and the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and 1960 make it the responsibility of the Department of Justice to protect that right.”

Our courts have given up that responsibility.

Since 2013 when the Supreme Court invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act, millions of people have been barred from casting a ballot.

The federal government used to require nine states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval before making such changes. Now that they no longer need to do so, between 2014 and 2016 there’s been a 33% increase in voter purges in these states.

This isn’t just cleaning the polls of the names of people who’ve died. It’s actively preventing people – especially the poor and people of color – from having their voices heard.

In Arkansas, thousands of voters were erroneously flagged in 2016 under the guise of removing people who had been convicted of felonies. In Virginia, voters were wrongly deleted from the rolls in 2013 under the excuse of removing people who allegedly had moved.

And this election cycle more than one hundred thousand Georgia voters were removed because they didn’t respond to a mailer or there was a typo on their registration form.

To make matters worse, the purge was overseen by Secretary of State Brian Kemp, a Republican candidate for governor. Since most of the people being removed from the polls are people of color, the poor and other Democrats or leaning Democrat voters, the move makes it harder for Democrat Stacey Abrams to challenge him.

Kemp and his Republican buddies wouldn’t be going through all this trouble if voting made no difference.

“Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote,” said civil rights icon and U.S. Senator John Lewis.

And people have died for the opportunity that millions of people decide not to exercise.

People like James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered in 1964 while trying to register black voters in Mississippi. People like Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered a year later by the Ku Klux Klan during the Selma march for voting rights.

When you willingly give up an opportunity that was purchased so dear, you disrespect the memories of the dead.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it like this:

“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”

Our country is under attack. Our very freedoms are on the line.

Will you be a willing accomplice by standing idly by and allowing these miscreants to defecate all over the flag?

Or will you take a stand, do your duty and vote!?

“Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don’t vote.”

-William E. Simon

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

Democrats

Betsy DeVos’s Right Wing School Indoctrination Program