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!

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

Kavanaugh Confirmation Begs the Question – Does Truth Matter?

October 9, 2018October 10, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Congress, Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Election, Obama, Politics, President, Propaganda, protest, Republican, Social Justice, Supreme Court, voting 1984, Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election, feminism, George Orwell, Politics, post truth, reality, Republicans, SCOTUS, sexism, Sexual Assault, sexual harassment, Supreme Court, truth

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

-George Orwell

Does the truth matter?

It seems to be one of the central questions of our age.

We just held a Senate confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

And despite multiple women making credible allegations of sexual misconduct against him…

Despite an FBI investigation so grossly limited in scope that investigators couldn’t even interview either the accusers or the accused…

Despite the withdrawal of support from some of the most conservative organizations including the National Council of Churches representing more than 100,000 congregations, the magazine of the Jesuit religious order, and even former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens…

Despite all that, the Republican majority gave their wholehearted approval.

Only Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski bucked her party and voted against him – while Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia was the only Democrat to vote for him.

The result was a forgone conclusion – a Republican majority who blatantly ignored any evidence and made a decision based purely on party politics.

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified in front of these people only a week earlier about a drunk Kavanaugh’s attempted rape when they were both in school.

She put her life, her security and her family’s happiness on the line to come forward. She still can’t return to her home after multiple death threats.

Yet those in power chose to ignore her.

They looked at the facts presented to them and chose to interpret them in a way that allowed them to do what they wanted to do in the first place.

Many said that they believed Ford was accosted but not by Kavanaugh.

Yet they refused to allow the kind of investigation that might have gotten at the truth.

These are not the actions of lawmakers interested in what happened all those years ago between Kavanaugh and Ford – or between Kavanaugh and multiple other women who they didn’t even give a hearing.

These are not the actions of lawmakers concerned about picking the best person for the job.

Instead, they are the actions of partisans who put power over objective reality.

They’d rather craft a story that fits their desires than the other way around.

It is craven, cowardly and disrespectful to their office and their charge.

This article began with a quote from George Orwell, author of 1984. Let me offer another:

“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become tolerant or intellectually stable.”

That is what happened here. A ruling class resorting to force and fraud to broaden its power.

Republicans already have control of two branches of government. Now they have stolen a third – a power grab that will echo down the halls of history for decades to come.

This is a senate majority representing fewer people than the so-called minority, lead by a President who lost the popular vote.

It is not democracy or a just republic. It is a coup.

As Orwell warns, when we ignore an inconvenient reality, we are on the road to totalitarianism.

It didn’t matter to those senators whether Kavanaugh was a blackout drunk, whether he still drinks to excess, whether he engaged in sexual harassment or attempted rape.

Heck. He could have attacked Ford on the floor of the Senate, itself, on live TV.

None of it would have mattered.

He was simply a means to an end – the increased power of the Republican Party and the donor class it represents.

GOP senators (and even Kavanaugh, himself) complained about dark money influencing the nomination process, yet the overwhelming majority of that money came from conservative backers!

They raved and foamed at Democrats for stalling the nomination yet refused to take responsibility for sabotaging Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland.

Instead they offered bad faith distinctions between what you can do during an election year vs. a presidential election year – as if it made any difference.

It is not just the spirit of the Constitution that lay in tatters on the Senate floor – but the fabric of reality, itself.

Thankfully, voters have an opportunity to have their voices heard in a few weeks.

We can take to the polls and let these people know how we feel about it.

Honestly, this may be our last chance.

I am absolutely devastated by these events.

I find myself at the ripe old age of 44 chiding myself for being naïve.

I watched the hearing as if it were a TV show or a Frank Capra movie. At the last minute, goodness will prevail.

That didn’t happen.

I, too, was blind to reality.

Well, the blinders are off.

Like so many of you, I am in mourning for a country that never really existed.

But the wake is in November.

Let’s hope it will be the start of a rebirth.

Click here to find ways to get involved in the November 6 midterm election.

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Wagner Spouts Trumpian Lie About Education at Gubernatorial Debate

October 2, 2018October 2, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Corbett, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Media, Obama, Pennsylvania, Pension Reform, Pensions, Philadelphia, Philadelphia Schools, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Propaganda, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Scott Walker, Students, Teachers, union busting, Unions, voting Alex Trebek, Corbett, Debate, Democrats, Donald Trump, education, Election, Governor Tom Wolf, Pennsylvania, Republicans, school funding, Scott Wagner, voting

The defining moment of Pennsylvania’s one and only gubernatorial debate wasn’t made by incumbent Tom Wolf or his challenger Scott Wagner.

It was made by former Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

At least it was made by him seven years ago.

Before voters overwhelmingly choose the Democratic Wolf to replace him, Corbett told a whooper about his administration and education funding – namely that he DIDN’T cut almost $1 billion from the poorest schools in the Commonwealth.

Yes, ten thousand teachers were furloughed. Class sizes ballooned. Children literally died for lack of nurses.

But Corbett wanted us all to believe it wasn’t him or his administration that took that money away.

It was untrue then, and it’s untrue now.

Yet that didn’t stop Wagner from dusting it off before 1,700 people and moderator Alex Trebek at the annual Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry dinner in Hershey:

“Trebek: What you have not mentioned is education suffered immensely about seven years ago when Gov. Corbett knocked off about a billion dollars. And…

Wagner: That’s totally false.

Trebek: Oh, it’s false.

Wagner: That’s totally false. Those were federal stimulus dollars. Gov. Wolf went around and told that. It was a lie. Gov. Corbett … (Clapping)… And the stimulus money came in during Gov. Rendell’s administration. And so Gov. Corbett’s here tonight. People need to know that Gov. Corbett did as much for education as really any governor. (Clapping) And he needs to be remembered for that. He didn’t cut the billion dollars. It was a billion dollars of stimulus money that came in and they were told – the education system – I wasn’t there – Don’t hire teachers, don’t… They did all that. Guess what? Here’s the problem with the system, Alex. The billion dollars. It’s gone. We have nothing to show for it.”

Here’s the crux of the bedtime story he’s telling.

The big bad federal government gave us money, and when that money was spent, we didn’t have it anymore. So what mean ol’ Gov Wolf calls a budget cut was no one’s fault.

The problem is it’s baloney.

The federal government DID give Pennsylvania stimulus dollars for its schools for one-time infrastructure improvements. However, the state legislature reacted by reducing the amount of state money it used to fund schools at the same time forcing districts to use the stimulus for operating costs.

It’s as if someone gives you a couple hundred dollars for your birthday and then your boss stops paying you your salary. That may work this week, but next week you need your paycheck. Otherwise you don’t have money to pay the bills.

Your boss can’t say to you: I’m not cutting your wages. Look I gave you just as much money this week as last week.

That won’t fly. But it’s exactly what Corbett tried to sell voters almost four years ago and they weren’t buying it.

And now Wagner is pulling out the same moldy lie, brushing off the flies and trying to pass it off as the truth.

This is troubling for two reasons.

First, it shows Wagner is as deceitful as his heroes Corbett and Donald Trump.

Second, it shows he’s playing from the same morally bankrupt playbook.

Corbett didn’t stop at saying he never cut the money he cut. He went so far as to say he actually RAISED school funding!

That’s like urinating on someone and telling them it’s raining.

And he did it with dishonest accounting – lumping pension funds for teachers in with classroom funding and pretending they were all the same.

He took a bill that was already due (pension costs) and pretended like that money was paying to run the state’s classrooms.

It wasn’t.

So children throughout the keystone state suffered and some even died.

Apply that to Wagner’s rapidly changing position on education funding.

He has long been an advocate for slashing school budgets. In fact, he was a popular surrogate for Corbett when this whole catastrophe was going down.

But now that his campaign has seen how unpopular that position is, very recently he’s changed his tune.

Suddenly he says we should increase education funding.

And good for him.

However, if he’s using the Corbett playbook, it seems that “increase” really won’t be anything of the sort.

It will just be more creative accounting and fantasy storytelling. He’ll pay for pensions and say he’s increasing school funding. Or maybe he’ll fudge something else from column A and pretend it’s funding column B.

It’s disingenuous, dishonest and Pennsylvanians aren’t going to put up with it.

Perhaps that’s why Wolf is leading in the polls.

Wagner may have found a way to get his supporters into the debate hall – they certainly clapped loud at his points – but they are a minority among voters.

I wish Trebek had called him out on it.

I wish Gov. Wolf had challenged him.

But time was running short and Wagner still had to complain about a college swimming coach with too high a pension, and he had to whine about mean old Wolf demanding the Marcellus Shale industry pay its fair share of taxes.

There were plenty of other sparks at the debate.

Wagner raged about this and lied about that. He thinks running a state like Pennsylvania is like managing his $75 million garbage hauling company. But if given the chance, it will be our children’s future’s that are left in the trash.

Meanwhile, Gov. Wolf looked like the adult in the room, soberly explaining the improvements he’d overseen in his term in office (a balanced budget, healing some of the Corbett education cuts, etc.) and outlining where we need to go in the future.

Every time Wagner slammed him for taking support from unions, I wished he’d spoken up. But he just let it pass like Casey at Bat looking for a perfect pitch.

“You keep talking trash on unions,” he’d say. “Yeah, many of my supporters are union workers, union teachers, nurses, letter carriers, construction workers. Yes, I’m supported by working people and I support them in turn. Labor is the backbone of this nation and that’s true here in Pennsylvania as it’s true everywhere.”

But, no. He didn’t say that.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Pennsylvania voters have a clear choice here – the sane, sensible Wolf vs. the blowhard and capricious Wagner. But how I wish Wolf had shown more fight!

The only thing the media seemed moved to report, though, were the antics of Trebek.

Twitter squeaky wheels thought the Jeopardy host’s moderation was weird. I’ll admit a tangent into the Catholic church and pedophile priests may not have been necessary. But he made the entire event more watchable and he called out Wagner’s lies more often than not.

The question is: What will voters do in November?

Watch the whole debate HERE.

Here’s a video I made about Corbett’s budget cuts – a story so simple even Wagner and Corbett could understand it:

Brett Kavanaugh is the Link Between Rape and Abortion

September 30, 2018September 30, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Compassion, Congress, Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Feminism, Healthcare, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Propaganda, protest, Republican, Schools, Sexism, Social Justice, Students, Supreme Court, voting abortion, abuse of power, Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, Congress, consent, dehumanization, Donald Trump, human rights, male, male privilege, men, patriarchy, Politics, Rape, religion, Republicans, Senate, sexism, Sexual Assault, sexual harassment, Supreme Court, women

I think I will always associate Brett Kavanaugh with the taste of vomit in the back of my throat.

I couldn’t watch his sham of a confirmation hearing without my gag reflex going into overdrive.

Here was one of the most privileged of people on the planet alternatively weeping and raging that he was being denied his due.

Here was a man bemoaning that no matter what happened, his reputation forever would be ruined, but who likewise refused to call for an investigation to exonerate himself.

At least three separate women have accused him of sexual assault, yet Congressional Republicans are still planning to ram through his nomination to the Supreme Court – a lifetime appointment where he will almost certainly be the tie breaking vote to overturn Roe vs. Wade.

How fitting.

What perfect symmetry.

You couldn’t have planned it any more poetically.

A man accused of multiple attempted rapes who is doing everything in his power to make abortion illegal.

An overgrown frat boy crying into his beer that we can’t take away his God given right to take away women’s rights.

A confederacy of almost exclusively male lawmakers ready to discount women’s reports of violence so that they can limit women’s freedom to make decisions about their own bodies.

If there is one good thing to come from this farce, it is the spotlight it has shown on the relationship between rape and the movement to recriminalize abortion.

These two things are essentially intertwined.

On the one hand, we have sexual intercourse carried out under threat of violence, sex without consent or in direct violation of consent – a crime invariably perpetrated by men on women.

On the other hand, we have the removal of female consent from the birthing process.

They are almost the same thing, or at least two sides of the same coin.

In both cases, we’re removing or ignoring female permission, agreement, approval, agency. We’re saying it doesn’t matter what the woman wants. It only matters what men or a patriarchal society wants.

And the justification is an ancient text – the New Testament – that doesn’t mention abortion once. And the Old Testament actually gives instructions on how to conduct an abortion (Numbers 5:11-31).

Not that it really should matter. The United States is not a theocracy.

But it IS a patriarchy.

That’s what this is – an attempt by the most insecure, power hungry men to control women.

It is about keeping and strengthening a caste system where men are allowed to be fully realized people and women are allowed only secondary status.

It is about dehumanization clothed in piety and false morality.

All those people crying for the lost lives of a cluster of cells in female uteruses care not a wit about the thousands of women who will die from unsafe abortions once safe procedures become unlawful.

We’ve been here before. Abortion was illegal in the US from the early 1800s until 1973, and we know what will happen. There is actual history on this – back alley procedures conducted by quacks using sharp implements to pierce the womb – and there is no reason to think it won’t repeat itself.

Changing the law won’t stop abortions. It will just make them unsafe for everyone except rich women who can afford doctors willing to take a chance on going to jail for a big payday.

If these people really wanted to stop abortions, they’d support handing out free contraception. They’d turn every orphanage into a palace. They’d each adopt as many children as they could. They’d make neonatal care free, expand services to help women raise children, increase maternity leave, pay for free childcare, expand education funding.

But they don’t do any of that because despite their crocodile tears, their objection has nothing to do with unborn children.

It has to do with mature women making decisions for themselves. It has to do with conceptualizing them as people equal to men and with minds capable of consent.

It’s about allowing women the right to choose – choose whom to have sex with and what exactly the consequences of that sex will or will not be.

I am so thankful that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward with her testimony. What bravery! What grace under pressure!

To be able to share with an entire nation her personal trauma at the hands of Kavanaugh. Such courage boggles the mind almost as much as those who refuse to accept her story as genuine.

They say that this is political. That it’s a hit job. Yet they pound their fists onto their ears to drown out Kavanaugh’s words in self-defense where he makes it entirely clear how partisan he is and will be once he takes the bench:

“This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. And millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.”

These are not the words of a fair arbitrator. They are the ravings of someone with an axe to grind.

But they do well to point out the elephant in the room – Donald Trump.

The man who nominated Kavanaugh has had at least 19 women accuse him of sexual assault. He even admitted to it on video in the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

Yet a minority of Americans elected him President through a legislative loophole kept open by centuries of neglect, apathy and moneyed interest.

I don’t know how this all will end. The FBI will conduct a limited investigation this week – probably stymied as much as possible by the Trump administration.

But the road that lead us here is achingly clear.

This is a tantrum of the patriarchy.

It is the weakest, most twisted men and their Stockholm syndrome suffering accomplices.

It is not about defining when life begins.

It’s about defining who gets to count as fully human – who gets the freedom to choose.

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Republicans, Democrats – Let’s Scrap Them Both!

July 29, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Democrat, Election, Election Reform, Green Party, immigration, Local Control, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, protest, Republican, Schools, Social Justice Alexander Hamilton, Dark Money, Democrats, founding fathers, George Washington, Gore Vidal, history, John Adams, political parties, Politics, Republicans, third party, Thomas Jefferson, trickle down economics

Political parties are a huge mistake.

Our founding fathers knew this.

Though it was their constant squabbling and political power struggles that gave way to the party system in the first place, they also were incredibly vocal about the errors they, themselves, were committing.

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison preferred state power that would protect southern interests including slave-holding. George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton favored federal authority that would benefit the north and manufacturing.

But in taking sides to protect their own power, they split into the very factions they knew would poison the newborn Republic.

At his farewell address in 1796, Washington put it this way:

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

His successor, Adams wrote:

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

In 1789, Jefferson put it more succinctly:

“If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.”

So why do we today enshrine political parties in our system of government?

In short, it keeps the wealthy in power.

Nothing robs democracy of its populism so much as the party system.

Backward legislation and regressive court decisions equating money with speech only make this worse. But they are simply exacerbating a sickness that’s already there.

Political parties condense the world of advertising and commerce to that of government.

Political ideas are sorted and processed until they can become tasty sound bites – one accorded to one group and the corresponding response to another.

Federalism vs. States.

Taxation vs. Business

Guns vs. Regulations

It’s all bullshit.

No one really cares whether rules are made by an aggregation of the entire nation or merely an aggregation from each individual state. We only care that laws are fair and just.

No one really wants businesses to be taxed to death, nor do they want individuals to be unfairly burdened. They want a just system of taxation where everyone pays their fair share and supports an equitable distribution of the wealth.

No one really wants to unilaterally prohibit individual freedoms – including the freedom to own a gun. They want sane regulations so that killers and maniacs can’t as easily destroy innocent lives.

But political parties obscure these simple truths and sort us all into one of two teams. Yet both sides support the same unchangeable status quo.

As writer Gore Vidal put it:

“Officially we have two parties which are in fact wings of a common party of property with two right wings. Corporate wealth finances each. Since the property party controls every aspect of media they have had decades to create a false reality for a citizenry largely uneducated by public schools that teach conformity with an occasional advanced degree in consumerism.”

Part of this is due to our insistence that the party system be limited to two groups – Republicans and Democrats. We make it incredibly difficult – nearly impossible – for any third party candidate to appear on the ballot less than win a major election.

But increasing the party system would only minimize the damage. It wouldn’t stop it.

When issues are divided into political camps, they obscure basic similarities about voters.

Fairness and justice are not political. They are human.

By making them political, we obscure basic truths to convince subsections of the populace onto our side.

And these are rarely legitimate differences of opinion. They are often a matter of truth or falsity.

For instance, take trickle down economics. Either it is a fair and just distribution of wealth or it is not. Either it provides both rich and poor with a means of equitable economic advancement or it does not.

We have tried this policy for decades. There is a plethora of evidence that this system does not work. It unjustly favors the rich and starves the poor.

To understand this, one need not have an advanced degree in political science. A simple understanding of mathematics will suffice.

If there were no political parties, this would be self-evident. But the rich have used both parties to obscure this fact and make it a game of policy football. You support whichever team you’ve signed up for regardless of how doing so impacts you, personally.

It is the victory of tribalism over common sense.

The same goes for almost every issue facing the nation.

Should schools be public or private?

Should LGBT people be allowed the same rights as cis citizens?

Should we spend the majority of our federal budget on the military?

Should there be a path to citizenship for those wishing to immigrate?

Each and every one of these questions could be decided on facts. Instead evidence is hardly mentioned at all. We use the issues to elect the legislators who then can’t do anything about them for fear that action one way or another would upset the political power struggle against them.

Some economists suggest that the principle behind Democrats and Republicans, the principle behind liberals and conservatives, really comes down to economics.

It is an innate psychological reaction to scarcity and abundance.

In times of little food or resources, conservative tendencies are ascendant because they help us survive the lean times. However, in an era where there is enough for all, liberal tendencies flourish because they help the growing population thrive.

Even if this were true, it is a factual question of whether we live in times of abundance or scarcity.

In the 21^st Century United States, we have more wealth than we have ever had. There is enough food for everyone. We grow more than we can eat and end up throwing much of it away. Yet a tremendous amount of us live in abject poverty. More than half of public school students live below the poverty line.

This is not because we live in a time of scarcity. We live in a time of abundance where we keep much of that surplus away from the majority in order to create a false sense of scarcity so that the richest among us can horde as much as they possibly can.

That is the ugly truth hidden behind the party system.

It is a truth that could not be maintained without the easy marketing and tribalism of political parties – Republicans, Democrats, Whigs, the Judean Peoples Front or the People’s Front of Judea.

Until we remove the stranglehold of political parties, until we set up a government that makes factionalism difficult, until we establish a government that welcomes candidates regardless of party – our politics will be forever immobilized by wealth, sectarianism and voter apathy.

This could mean holding nonpartisan primaries where all candidates irrespective of party who meet a certain signature threshold are welcome, followed by a general election of the two highest vote-getters. Or it could mean something radically different like not voting at all but filling government with ordinary citizens randomly drafted into public service.

The point is that we can do better than party politics.

If we’re to survive as a nation, we’ll need to find a more just way.

Or as Hamilton put it:

“Nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.”

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