SESSIONS, Jefferson Beauregard III (Jeff), (1946 - )

In the coming days, Congress will decide if a states rights segregationist from Alabama will be the next Attorney General of the United States.  

Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III has a long history of working to fortify the commitment to white supremacy in his state, and if Donald Trump gets his way, Sessions will bring his racist reading of the law to the national stage.  

If you have not seen this piece on Sessions' role in maintaining separate and unequal schools in Alabama, please take a moment to read it in order to understand why the Sessions appointment must be stopped.  

During the early 90s, Sessions, as State Attorney General of Alabama, led an effort to overturn a state court decision aimed to establish more equity in public school funding. 

. . . .Attorney General Sessions led the battle against the decision. He argued that Judge Reese had overreached. It was a familiar war cry on the segregationist right: An activist court was usurping the power of the state’s duly elected officials to solve the problem on their own. For the next two years, Mr. Sessions sought to discredit Judge Reese and overturn his ruling. In one of the twists of austerity budgeting in the mid-1990s, Mr. Sessions had laid off 70 lawyers in the attorney general’s office, and had to find outside counsel to handle the case. Lawyers working on contract for the office were to be paid no more than $85 per hour, but for the challenge to the equity case, the fee cap was lifted. . . .

Sessions' work on behalf in educational inequity earned him high marks among Alabama Republicans.  And even though Sessions' side lost the case when the Alabama Supreme Court sustained Judge Reese's ruling for more equitable funding, Sessions took his seat in the U. S. Senate, where he has raged against racial and social equality ever since.

I believe that stopping this appointment is much more important than stopping the DeVos nomination; DeVos or anyone else that Trump picks will be a puppet of the Walton Foundation, while Sessions will have at his disposal the legal assets of the federal government to promote injustice in every American institution.

Over 1,100 law school professors agree that Sessions has to be stopped:

A group of more than 1,100 law school professors from across the country is sending a letter to Congress on Tuesday urging the Senate to reject the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) for attorney general.

The letter, signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states, is also scheduled to run as a full-page newspaper ad aimed at members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be holding confirmation hearings for Sessions on Jan. 10-11.

“We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation’s laws and promote justice and equality in the United States,” states the letter, signed by prominent legal scholars including Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Geoffrey R. Stone of the University of Chicago Law School, Pamela S. Karlan of Stanford Law School and Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California at Irvine School of Law. . . .

Alabama Leads the Way toward 19th Century Education

Ever heard of an adjunct K-12 teacher?  I had not, either, until Alabama defined it for me, as someone with at least a high school diploma teaching part-time in an Alabama public school.

Someone who is not a certified teacher can now teach your children in Alabama.

The State Board of Education approved a new category of educators called adjunct teachers.

The board says it is a way to solve the teacher shortage in Alabama for certain subjects.

An adjunct teacher is someone who has worked in a career field other than education, will work part time under a licensed teacher and has a high school diploma or equivalent.

Katy Bryan is a mother of two elementary school kids in Huntsville.  In theory, under the new resolution, her kids could soon be taught by someone who does not have a state teaching certification. Bryan has some concerns with the idea.

"I think that they probably need to have a teaching certificate because just because they're knowledgeable about a subject might not mean that they're skilled at teaching techniques," Bryan said.

Mary Scott Hunter sits on the State School Board who approved the resolution. Hunter represents District 8 which includes Madison, Limestone, Jackson, DeKalb and Etowah Counties in Alabama. She says the goal is to find people to fill specialized classes like welding, because those can be hard for a district to fill.

Beverly Sims is the District 3 Director for the Alabama Education Association, who represents Madison County, Madison City, J.F. Drake Technical College and John C. Calhoun Community College.

Sims says she is okay with the idea of adjunct teachers for career tech classes, but is worried that some of these adjunct teachers might not be fully prepared to handle the challenges of a classroom.

"Classroom management and the various learning styles of the kids and the biggest problem is going to be learning the federal laws and the state laws," Sims said.

While Bryan says she has concerns as a parent, she says there could be a place for adjunct teachers.

"I think there could be advantages like a lot of engineers in our area are good at mathematics, physics and those types of topics," Bryan said.

WAAY 31 reached out to some area school districts.  Huntsville City Schools and Madison City Schools spokesmen say the resolution is on their radar, but the people who can talk on the issue weren't available Monday.

Federal Court Rules Against Huntsville's Segregated Caste System of Schools

From Alternet, a clip:

. . . . "The record in this case is not as clear as the Board suggests, and the fact that the district integrated the student bodies of many of its schools in the early 1970s does not automatically lead to the conclusion that the district does not currently operate a dual system," she wrote. She pointed out that not only were many schools still segregated, but the opportunity to take advanced classes also appeared linked to race.

She noted testimony from a white mother who withdrew her child from a predominantly black high school because it offered fewer advanced academic courses than other schools.

"While private choices seem to have precipitated the existing racial polarization of the district's schools, it is not clear...that the district has not contributed to the situation," she wrote. "There is a significant disparity between the educational programs in the district's predominately African-American secondary schools and the educational programs in the district's predominately white schools."

That disparity, she said, could even be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

Huntsville schools had taken several steps to improve educational outcomes for black students, including adopting universal school breakfast programs and increasing pre-kindergarten classrooms. But the judge's ruling seemed skeptical of whether the district would continue these efforts once court oversight ended.

"The Board submits that the district's conduct over the past 50 years demonstrates good faith. Recent events, though, have hurt the board's record," she wrote. She catalogued Huntsville's 20-year failure to file required reports, its track record of missing data and incomplete information, and its public criticism of a requirement in the order that the district allow students to transfer into schools where they are a racial minority.

Haikala set two magistrate judges to the task of gathering information and to work with the district and the Justice Department to come up with a plan to address any other issues needed to get the district in compliance with the order, and ultimately, to end it.

Huntsville's children, she wrote, "have no control over where they live now, but giving them a strong education is the surest way to ensure that they will have choices about where they will live in the future and what they will do when they become adults."

You can read Judge Haikala's entire order here. You can search ProPublica's database to see whether your district is, or has ever been, under a school desegregation order and check school segregation in your hometown.

Alabama Concerned About Charter School Segregation: Massachusetts Goes Full Ahead

As the pressure to bow to the bribes heats up in the Obama/Gates/Broad Race Over the Cliff, states like Alabama without charter laws are feeling the pressure from the Oligarchs to open their doors to "innovation." So far charter schools have brought us innovations like more scripted teaching, uncertified or undercertified teachers with lower pay and no job security, the elimination of libraries, no food service or transportation or athletics, no like art or music, the undermining of public school funding, and a hearty embrace of apartheid schooling. Now that's what Sam Walton would call innovation!

As states like Massachusetts under a black Dem governor move forward with plans to make sure that more charter chain gangs are opened in poor neighborhoods to control and contain the minority populations, states like Alabama under a white Republican governor are actually taking the time to ask if charter schools could benefit anyone outside the corporatocracy, while bringing real harm to the civil rights gains of the past 5o years. Not only that, but there is at least one newspaper in Alabama, unlike in Boston, that includes news stories that express these reservations so that the citizens may make an informed decision about charters.

And so I salute the Montgomery Advertiser, which published "Push for Charter Schools Sparks Segregation Concerns:"

. . . .“I think superintendents would be willing to look at and explore what possibilities there are,” he said. “But what I’m afraid of is that if we rush this we will write a bad law that basically creates a dual system.”

The re-segregation of schools has been one of the most voiced concerns when it comes to charter schools. And a new report from The Civil Rights Project at the University of California Los Angeles has enumerated those concerns. The project has made an ongoing study of charter schools and the lack of civil rights policy concerning them. The report, “Equity Overlooked: Charter Schools and Civil Rights Policies,” [Equity Overlooked: Charter Schools and Civil Rights Policy] finds that charter schools can raise the danger of further escalating the re-segregation of public schools, a phenomenon that is already taking place in traditional public schools in the South.

The authors of the report, Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, write that, “Tying education stimulus dollars eligibility to charter numbers unfairly pressures states to ramp up efforts to authorize and open charter schools without considering the impact on racial and economic segregation.”

. . . .

Funding charter schools also is another hot-button issue. Former Booker T. Washington Magnet High School principal and current state Sen. Quinton Ross, D-Montgomery, said he attended Riley’s education symposium, where U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan spoke about Race to the Top and how charter schools would be a prerequisite to access those funds.

While Race to the Top no longer has that same emphasis, Ross said he knows it’s important to the Obama administration. But he’s not sure if the state is financially ready to have charter schools.

“When you think of charter schools, they can be another innovative way of delivering education,” he said. “But you have to keep in mind that there are many things draining our education dollars. We could open the door to fund these types of initiatives (charter schools), so that we can access these Race to the Top funds, but just like the stimulus money this money is going to go away.”

Ross, who is also on both the Senate’s education committees, said when the federal money runs out, it will be up to the state to pay for its charter schools and they could be in the same situation that many of the state’s initiatives are in now — strapped for cash.

In addition, Ross said charter schools typically handle their own finances and school districts would essentially be turning over the dollars they’re allocated and held responsible for to these schools with little, if any, say in how that money is spent. He said if a charter school closes down because of financial mismanagement or because it doesn’t have the resources to stay open, that’s state money that disappears.