Sanders on "Enormous Neglect" and "Ultimate Failure" of Democratic Party

Please share with the BATs and NPE and AFT and NEA and FairTest and Basecamp bloggers and all the other pathetic asshats and hangers-on who have supported the demise of teaching and public education by loyally supporting the failed policies embraced by the DNC and the Clintons. 

No more complicity, collaboration, or compromise.  Your way has brought us the horrors of Trump, and your day is done!

Sen. Huffines: Businesses Should Decide How Inadequately to Fund Public Ed

Here is a great example for students and parents all over the nation to see what political enemies of public education really have in their hearts, once the politeness is brushed away.  

This Texas senator is incensed at the suggestion that school vouchers, if offered, should be large enough for students to attend high quality private schools.  

Turn up the volume and listen to the name-calling,berating, and haranguing of students and parents seeking answers from someone who does not care what these folks think.



More on the story from Texas Monthly.

Jersey Jazzman: NJDOE Fail (Again): Camden Community Charter Schoo...

Jersey Jazzman: NJDOE Fail (Again): Camden Community Charter Schoo...: Camden's schools open this year on Monday, September 9 -- a little more than two weeks. But when Camden Community Charter School opens, ...

Dem Epiphany: Public Education Under Siege

In 2001, Democrats joined Republicans to create a massive school privatization corporate welfare plan known as No Child Left Behind.  With fanciful performance targets and unbending rules, which every education policy person knew would detonate thousands of the poorest public schools over the coming years, NCLB ushered in the charter school era in a way that allowed the gradual ramping up of the paternalistic "no excuses" corporate reform school industry.

It wasn't until 2008, however, that privatization via charter school really took off.  When Obama was first inaugurated, U. S. schools had about 1.4 million students in charters.  By the time Obama left office in 2017, the charter population had more than doubled to 3.1 million students, and the federal commitment, alone, to charters was over $250,000,000 per year.

During the steady build-up of the charter industry before and during the Obama Era, the corporate teachers' unions continued to lend support for segregated charter expansion and discredited value-added evaluation schemes.  

The strategy of gradual privatization was cemented by the bipartisan reauthorization of Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which replaced NCLB with Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).  ESSA serves as a multi-billion dollar charter stimulus, while magnifying the power of charter school support groups and the charter industry, by making sure that 5 percent of the lowest-scoring schools are turned over for charter conversion each year.

None of this was troubling to Democratic think tanks until Hillary Clinton lost the election.  Within a couple of weeks, however, the Dems had rallied the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) to begin publicizing research on the horribly-negative effects of the charters that had been ignored for the past decade and a half.  

In November, EPI published research that Bruce Baker had been doing for years on the damaging effects of charters, and most recently EPI has joined other corporate Democrats to publicize research on the failed voucher experiments.

If Dems could have continued to oversee, at their own pace, the privatization of schools to benefit their own band of underemployed Teach for America (TFA) Ivy Leaguers, we never would have come to share the corporate Democrats' blinding insight as to the moral repugnance and anti-democratic nature of school privatization.

"I wanted to shake her, like I like to shake my wife"

From Eclectablog:

Gary Naeraert is the Executive Director of the Great Lakes Education Project (GLEP). GLEP was founded and largely funded by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to influence policy and law in Michigan with the aim of promoting charter schools and the elimination of traditional public schools. The group consists of a PAC, a foundation, a 501(c)(3) group, and a 501(c)(4) group. 

While giving testimony before a Senate Education Committee meeting yesterday, Naeyaert revealed that he likes to “shake” indecisive women, including his wife. It was an astonishing moment:

DeVos Takes Racist Stupidity to New Heights

White lady billionaire, Betsy DeVos, has moved beyond grizzly bears and guns to explore a whole new territory in the Trumpist landscape of racist delusion.  In describing the origins of historically black colleges and universities as an example of "school choice," DeVos shows that, 1) she is as ignorant as most people suspect, or 2) she is ideologically driven to turn a huge element of the historic black struggle for education into a minstrel sideshow to mis-educate an audience stupid enough to believe what she says.  This is from the Press Release yesterday:

. . . .A key priority for this administration is to help develop opportunities for communities that are often the most underserved. Rather than focus solely on funding, we must be willing to make the tangible, structural reforms that will allow students to reach their full potential.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have done this since their founding. They started from the fact that there were too many students in America who did not have equal access to education. They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution.

HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice. They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish. . . .

What DeVos and the Trump crumbs demonstrate is a clear attempt to justify segregation as a choice that existed when segregation was the only choice.  One option a choice does not make.  

In pretending that Jim Crow Era black citizens preferred segregated schools, DeVos attempts to rationalize the expanding resegregation of the poor, black, and brown in corporate welfare reform charters, or private schools desperate enough to accept a cheap voucher that no quality private school could accept as payment.

Such a public statement shows in ghastly detail what a civil wrong looks like when painted as a civil right.

Trump and Russia Connection? Watch This.

As Maddow says at the end of this 20 minute segment, I think I am finally beginning to understand this.  You will, too.  Make a cup of tea and watch:

KY Has Worst Charter Bill Ever

Last September when Trump's loss look assured, Kentucky's Tea Party governor, Matt Blevins, threatened violence if his angry white wingnut supporters did not get their way at the ballot box.

“I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don’t have to do it physically.  But that may, in fact, be the case.”

Now Blevins and the enemies of democratic institutions in Kentucky are threatening violence against public schools, with a bill that must break a record in the ways that charters are to be allowed, if the bill passes, to steal from public education. From Lexington Herald Leader:

House Bill 520 is the latest version of charter school legislation that is bad for Kentucky. The worst aspect is that it would require public school monies to be handed over to charter schools.

For example, if a charter were created in Fayette County with 400 students, the Fayette County public schools would be required to cut its budget by $5.2 million and hand it over to the charter each year, possibly requiring 100 teachers to be laid off.

Under HB 520, a charter school could be created in three different ways: a local public school board could authorize it; if an application were rejected, the state board of education could authorize it; and if 60 percent of the parents of a public school voted to convert it to a charter school.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/opinion/op-ed/article134755024.html#storylink=cpy

In this last case, the charter school would continue to be housed in the same public school facility and have the option of using the existing assets of the school.

The proposed legislation makes all employees and teachers of charters eligible for Kentucky state retirement in a system that is already $8 billion underfunded. And they would also be eligible for health and life insurance.

Incredibly, HB 520 would require public schools to transport charter-school students to their schools at the expense of public schools. And more incredibly, it allows charter schools to fine public schools.

Charter school students would be allowed to engage in public school extracurricular activities, even if the public school cannot afford more students to participate. And charter students would be allowed to compete in statewide athletic activities. Just think of a charter school that could recruit the very best high-school athletes from anywhere in the state to create a powerhouse championship team.

HB 520 would allow charter schools to be exempt from zoning and land-use regulations. So, a charter might be able to build an apartment house or bar adjacent to the school, regardless of zoning laws.

The burdens placed on public schools by HB 520 are awesome. For example, If a public school teacher decides to teach in a charter school, the public school would be required to offer a two-year leave of absence. This means that the public school would need to fill that teacher’s position but then two years later might be required to fire the teacher who was then in that position.

In addition, after a charter applicant submits an application, the school board must complete a thorough review process, conduct an in-person interview with the applicant, provide a public forum for local residents’ input, provide a detailed analysis of the application, allow an applicant a reasonable time to provide additional amendments to its application and then approve or deny the application.

But if a school board rejects an application for a charter, the paperwork and bureaucracy required is enormous. If the applicant completes the paperwork required, the local school board must almost automatically accept the application.

If not, the arduous procedure in rejection requires massive paperwork, appeals to the board of education, extensive documentation as to the reasons for the rejection, re-appeals to the board of education then more documentation and finally a decision by the state board.

This legislation could result in fierce court battles costing public-school districts huge amounts in legal fees.

The bottom line is that none of this is necessary to improve K-12 education in Kentucky.

Charter schools offer two things: choice and innovation. But both are now available to public schools through the relatively new legislation called Districts of Innovation. To see how it is already working go to: ket.org/episode/KEDMA_000802/

Marty Solomon, a retired University of Kentucky professor, can be reached at mbsolomon@aol.com.

Deconstructing Steve

It doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind blows, and the winds blow off the high plains of this country, through the prairie and lights a fire that will burn all the way to Washington in November.  --Steve Bannon, 2010
 
Christopher Caldwell, senior editor at the right-wing Weekly Standard, offers an op-ed in the Times that tries to recast the pseudo-intellectual bomb thrower, deconstructionist dilettante, and institutional arsonist, Steve Bannon, into a kinder, gentler image--one that does not remind us of death every time his blotchy, spider-veined visage appears below another headline announcing the latest Trump atrocity.  

It is hard to say why a Weekly Standard guy would come to the defense of Bannon, especially since Bannon is so far Right that he describes the Weekly Standard as a left-wing magazine that he wants to destroy, too.  Bannon made this threat in the same Daily Beast article that quotes Bannon as a self-described Leninist: “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."

White nationalist booster, Steve Bannon, is the worst example of what can happen when a Goldman Sachs insider, turned Hollywood propagandist, morphs into a postmodern Rasputin-Svengali hybrid hellbent on fitting the white male American oligarchy with tinfoil hats.  

Sadly, Bannon has used and continues to use the most desperate and impressionable elements of the American economic underclass as the muscle to build the walls for his philosophical outhouse.  And worse, he and his reality theorist chums and climate science deniers seem willing to sacrifice modern civilization to demonstrate their conspiratorial ramblings about history are correct.

Trump Dodges Correspondents' Dinner

Oh well.  It's probably for the best, anyway--someone with Trump's thin skin could go home afterwards and kill the world.  Oh, I forgot--he's doing that already.  

All we have, then, are these tidbits from 2011, long before Trump's disaster fantasy became our disaster reality.

First up, O gives it to the Birther-in-Chief at that time, Donald Trump.  Followed by Seth Meyers.