How Much Power and Money Can a Full Plate of Hate Buy for the Oligarchy?

The Republicans’ “one big beautiful bill” will be a real test of how much MAGA voter animosity toward civil rights and human rights can buy Trump.  

Will the Convicted Felon's all-in support for crushing migrants, marginalizing minorities with Jim Crow 2.0, othering LGBTQ people, re-subjugating women, and destroying the separation of church and state be enough to keep poor white undereducated voters quiet about grandma being kicked out of the nursing home (due to Medicaid cuts), groceries more expensive or no long available (food stamp and SNAP funds cut), and the national debt being put on steroids (to pay for massive cuts for the top 1 percent).

New Mainstream Research on Racist, Classist ACT and SAT

New research shows us what the old research has been saying for decades: wealth is its own qualification for getting the best education, just as poverty is its own disqualification.  Text clip and chart below from New York Times:

From the Times:

New data shows, for the first time at this level of detail, how much students’ standardized test scores rise with their parents’ incomes — and how disparities start years before students sit for tests.

One-third of the children of the very richest families scored a 1300 or higher on the SAT, while less than 5 percent of middle-class students did, according to the data, from economists at Opportunity Insights, based at Harvard. Relatively few children in the poorest families scored that high; just one in five took the test at all.

The researchers matched all students’ SAT and ACT scores for 2011, 2013 and 2015 with their parents’ federal income tax records for the prior six years. Their analysis, which also included admissions and attendance records, found that children from very rich families are overrepresented at elite colleges for many reasons, including that admissions offices give them preference. But the test score data highlights a more fundamental reason: When it comes to the types of achievement colleges assess, the children of the rich are simply better prepared.

The disparity highlights the inequality at the heart of American education: Starting very early, children from rich and poor families receive vastly different educations, in and out of school, driven by differences in the amount of money and time their parents are able to invest. And in the last five decades, as the country has become more unequal by income, the gap in children’s academic achievement, as measured by test scores throughout schooling, has widened.

“Kids in disadvantaged neighborhoods end up behind the starting line even when they get to kindergarten,” said Sean Reardon, the professor of poverty and inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.

“On average,” he added, “our schools aren’t very good at undoing that damage.”

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision ending race-based affirmative action, there has been revived political momentum to address the ways in which many colleges favor the children of rich and white families, such as legacy admissions, preferences for private school students, athletic recruitment in certain sports and standardized tests.

Yet these things reflect the difference in children’s opportunities long before they apply for college, Professor Reardon said. To address the deeper inequality in education, he said, “it’s 18 years too late.” . . . .

TN House Demonstrates Desperation to Preserve White Rule

In a Tennessee institution literally constructed, block by block, upon white supremacy, treasonous behavior, and political treachery, what happens when its soulless, hateful, semi-literate guardians are faced with two democratically-chosen black and young representatives who are much more intelligent and much more articulate than the entire biscuit-gravy band of dim-witted hillbilly fascists? 

Being confronted, day in and day out, with their own well-groomed intellectual and moral inadequacies finally became too much to take, especially when it became clear that their own supporters were starting to notice--and starting to listen to the passionately-rational arguments set forth by these young black men determined to enact laws to protect Tennessee's children, rather than Tennessee's gun industry.

So what did they do? The Tennessee T---- Party did what their ancestors would have done, given the present legal constraints against barbarous acts. They chose televised political lynching.  

Given their cognitive limitations, TN's supermajority of idiots could not see beyond the ends of their pointy noses, which they had just cut off to spite their seething red faces.  

Today, Congressmen Justin Jones and Justin Pearson are viewed as heroes by both young and old people who are intent upon ending the slaughter of Americans to protect the bankrupt ideology that, nonetheless, generates billions in profits for the amoral manufacturers and merchants of death, as well as their political representatives.  

Overnight, Mr. Jones and Mr. Pearson have become inspirations for an entire generation of thoughtful progressive citizens around the entire globe.  In short, the fools of the Tennessee Taliban have done more to bring about their own political demolition than the two Justins could have ever conceived just two days ago.

Stuyvesant High School's Talented .00878 Percent

A hundred years ago W.E.B. Dubois advocated for selecting that most "Talented Tenth" of African Americans to receive the best education available and, thus, become the leaders for efforts to integrate a virulently-racist American society. 

Today black youngsters seeking to attend New York City's best high schools must view Dubois's goal as purely aspirational.

Like thousands of other school systems in America, New York City's public school system is using the same standardized testing techniques that public and private schools (and colleges) have been using for over hundred years to keep back the black, put down the brown, and detour the poor. 

The students pictured above (from the New York Times) are some of the 29 black students of the 3,300 students of Stuyvesant High School.  Story here.

U of Missouri Students and Faculty Force President's Resignation

Students at UNC should learn from the faculty and students experiences of U of Missouri: