Why DeVos is making Florida's charter system her 'model'. She practically owns it.

Betsy DeVos husband Dick, who own the Orlando Magic, spent millions buying pro-"choice" politicians.

Florida's charter schools are among the worst in the nation. The state's so-called "choice" system of charters and vouchers is highly segregated, riddled with corruption and mismanagement (like FL state government in general) and has been rocked by scandal after scandal. 

Gov. Rick Scott has diverted hundreds of millions of dollars away from public schools to bankroll politically connected charter operators. Scott, who's been advised on school policy by Michelle Rhee, is privatization crazed and even tried to privatize FL's health-care system as well as the state's prisons.

Therefore, I was not surprised to hear Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos point to Florida's "choice" system as her model and "blueprint" for K-12 education. 

This from EdWeek

"I would point to Florida as being one that has had a variety of options for the longest period of time," DeVos told Frank Beckmann, a conservative radio talk show host on WJR, based in Michigan. She said the state, which has charters, also offers both a tax credit scholarship, something DeVos and company may push in Washington, potentially through legislation previously introduced by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican, and vouchers for students in special education.

Billionaire DeVos, who owns a home in FL and who's part owner of the Orlando Magic, has more good reasons to favor the state's charter/voucher system. She helped pay for it. She's used her wealth to underwrite the election campaigns of pro-choice, anti-union school board candidates (both Republican and Democrat) across the state. The Sunshine State is second only to Michigan in the number of individual candidates DeVos or her husband wrote checks to during the past five years. Overall, members of the DeVos family, including Richard DeVos Sr., have donated more than $2 million to Florida candidates for state office and committees since 1996, according to the state database.

The money DeVos sent to the Volusia school board candidate back in 2014 was part of an effort to boot an incumbent she viewed as hostile to Florida's biggest school voucher program, which now pays to send to more than 97,000 children from low-income families to private schools. The strategy worked. The candidate DeVos backed won. So did another school board candidate she contributed to that year in Indian River County, for the same reason.

An NPR report found that Florida charters openly and illegally violate the rights of disabled students.  In fact, a recent Miami Herald investigation found that few charter schools in Florida  even try to serve students with severe disabilities. Statewide, 86% of charter schools do not have any students classified as severely disabled. That's despite state and federal laws that require charter schools to give equal access to these students.

Florida saw more charter schools shut down than any other state last year, according to a new report from the pro-charter National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Charters in the state are closing at nearly the same rate they are opening.

Florida might be expected to have a large number of closures since it has 656 charters, the third-most in the country, but the report shows the Sunshine State’s closure rate is disproportionately high. Florida is home to slightly less than 10 percent of the charters operating in the country, but accounted for nearly 14 percent of closures last school year.

Some charter advocates, like the National Alliance, argue that school closings are a good thing, a measure of accountability. But they ignore the great harm done to children and parents when schools close, especially in mid-year and lives are disrupted, student/teacher relationships broken and student mobility increased. All these negatives hit hardest of course, on the state's black and Latino families.

The Orlando Sentinel ran a series on Florida school re-segregation via charter schools. 

According to Sentinel writer Dave Weber:

Segregation is making a comeback in Florida's public schools with the new wave of charter schools springing up across the state. One out of eight charter schools has a student body with 90 percent or more of a single race or ethnicity, an Orlando Sentinel analysis of the state's 456 taxpayer-financed charters shows. That compares with one out of 12 traditional public schools.

Florida parent activist Rita Solnet did this interesting little research project.

Out of curiosity, I googled "successful charter schools" and "failing charter schools." About 20,200 results (0.22 seconds) related to "successful charter schools". About 76,600 results (0.23 seconds) related to "failing charter schools."

My favorite Florida charter scandal story had to do with the great Academica Charter hustle. It's my favorite because it carried way beyond FL and even involved celebrities like Pit Bull and Rep. Erik Fresen, a Tea Party Republican who chairs House Education Appropriations hearings on charter expansion. Fresen's sister Maggie, and brother-in-law, Fernando Zulueta run Academica Charter Schools, one of the country’s largest and wealthiest for-profit charter school management firms, with more than 90 schools in Florida alone.

Read all about it here and here. 

Can't you see why Sec. DeVos would find FL's charter system so attractive?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. -- The Nation

Rick Ayers

Threats and bluster might work when you are building a casino but they don’t really work on the world stage. -- Huffington Post

Betsy DeVos

"Critics want to make my life a living hell." -- Washington Post

DeVos flees D.C. school protest

“I said I’d like to visit a public school with her, and then I’d like her to visit a choice school with me,” DeVos told Axios Thursday, recounting a recent phone call with Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). -- The Hill

Former WaPo Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein
 “Trump's attacks on the American press as 'enemies of the American people' are more treacherous than Richard Nixon's attacks on the press...We are into terrible authoritarian tendencies." -- CNN

Teacher/Author Tim Mullen

The rhetoric about “fixing” failing schools is only political posturing until the real discussion about what is happening in the communities and homes of those students is addressed. -- AJC, Get Schooled

This is what Sec. DeVos said about our teachers after her visit. Needless to say, we're about to take her to school... @dcpublicschools pic.twitter.com/Wcx1YyqDHL

— Jefferson Academy (@JATrojans) February 18, 2017

TUNE IN THIS MORNING

Our in-studio guest, Bill Ayers. 

The Klonsky brothers are back on the air this morning at 11 (CST), live and streaming on Lumpen Radio, WLPN 105.5 FM from Bridgeport (the Daley's old hood) on the south side of Chicago.

We’re trying to stay profanity-free, according to FCC regs this morning, so I’ll try and refrain from using the word “PUZDER” while we talk education, politics, education, and social justice, and whatever else is whirling around the Trumpisphere.

You can tweet your comments or questions using hashtag #HittingLeft17 and we'll try and read them on the air.

Our in-studio guest this morning is distinguished scholar, prolific author, and long time radical political activist, Dr. William Ayers. 

Why are Democrats smearing peaceful anti-Trump protests?

DeVos protest in D.C.

“Nothing about a firm commitment to free expression obliges us open our doors to (much less to provide platforms for) those who incite hatred and violence against refugees, immigrants, and minorities—that is, against our students, teachers, co-workers and neighbors.” -- Letter from coalition to IOP Director David Axelrod.

This morning's Sun-Times has columnist Mark Brown imploring Univ. of Chicago students to "Let Loathsome Lewandowski Speak", as if they had any official say in the matter.

A coalition of organizations, which includes groups such as UofC Resists and Graduate Students United, protesting former Trump campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski’s scheduled visit tomorrow, asked the school’s Institute of Politics, run by Democratic Party operative David Axelrod, to withdraw its invitation to Lewandowski and to “stop providing a platform to surrogates of the Trump administration” -- a reference in part to last month’s visit by Trump press secretary Sean Spicer. 

Axelrod claims he welcomes "peaceful protest" but refuses to "shut down" Lewandowski, implying that Trump's guy is just another campus walk-on and that violence-prone students are trying to deprive him of his free speech.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Lewandowski is a highly-paid provocateur who, along with the likes of racist creep Milo Yiannopoulos, are speaking everywhere, raking in big bucks in campus speaking fees and attracting massive militant protests whenever they appear. 

Anti-DeVos protests in Alaska

Citing recent incidents that included Neo-Nazi posters appearing on campus, the UC coalition criticized the university for not doing more in response. If the Lewandowski event proceeds as planned, the groups say they will protest to “express outrage at the normalization of racism, bigotry and violence.”

That's exactly what students everywhere ought to be doing. It's their most fundamental constitutional right and duty as citizens to speak out against racism and injustice. There's never been a more important time in history to exercise that right.

Along with Brown, it's powerhouse liberal Democrats like Axelrod,  AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten and former Obama schools chief Arne Duncan, who are directing their main blows leftward, as they did throughout the presidential campaign, and doing their best to discredit the so-far peaceful anti-Trump protests.

It's what they do. It's what they did in response to the youth movement around the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Black Lives Matter. It keeps them respectable in the eyes of their patrons.  It's also among the things that cost them the election -- by alienating lots of young activist voters -- and could do the same in 2018 and 2020.

Weingarten ran with a fake news story and condemned protesters opposed to Betsy DeVos' visit to a D.C. middle school. She falsely claimed that the demonstrators had "almost knocked down" DeVos as she tried to enter the school. But a CNN video debunked her claim.

Just heard a protester blocked & almost knocked Secy @BetsyDeVos down at Jefferson.We don't condone such acts.We want her to go to pub schls

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) February 10, 2017

Duncan joined in the condemnation and praised DeVos for her photo-op visits to the very schools she claims she wants to privatize and Christianize.

Agree or disagree w @BetsyDeVos on any issue, but let's all agree she really needs to be in public schools. Please let her in.

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) February 10, 2017

No, it's not a matter of agreement or disagreement on "any issue". Trump and appointees from DeVos to Sessions, to Pudzer, along with Alt-right and white supremacist allies are perpetrating a racist, neo-fascist coup and total takeover of government. They should be resisted at every turn.

It's right to rebel against injustice.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

A demonstrator wears handcuffs Saturday, as thousands rally in Washington Square Park to protest the immigration raids and New York City's policing policy. Photo Credit: Steven Sunshine

Chicago activist Ja'Mal Green tells Chris Hayes 

"Nobody has really said it, but his name is Rahm Emanuel. This mayor that we have in the city of Chicago does not care about black people. I want to put that on the record. ...We're walking past boarded up schools, boarded up houses, they're knocking down with red Xs with no plan to redevelop, mental health facilities shut down, the unemployment rate is the highest in Chicago than it is around the country. If you want to talk about violence, you've got to talk about the economics, not police." -- Washington Free Beacon

Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream

“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one." -- Washington Post

 Gillian Christensen, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security

"ICE dislikes the term 'raids,' and prefers to say authorities are conducting 'targeted enforcement actions.'” -- Washington Post

Obamacare opponent, Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA)

Says he doesn’t want to hold town halls because “since Obamacare and these issues have come up, the women are in my grill no matter where I go.” -- Think Progress

Donald Trump 

"Trust me, I’m like a smart person.” -- Answer Sheet

Brother Fred & I will be HITTING LEFT & streaming live this morning.

Ald. Munoz

Tune in this morning at 11 (CST) for week 2 of Klonsky Brothers, HITTING LEFT on Lumpen Radio at 105.5 FM and streaming live here. Fred and I will be joined by Chicago's 22nd Ward Ald. Rick Munoz, who definitely hits lefty.

He's a member of both the Progressive Caucus and the Latino Caucus in the City Council. His Little Village ward is the main debarkation point for Chicago's one million Mexican immigrants.

It's a perfect time to talk to Rick as #PEEOTUS blames "immigrant gang members" for Chicago's rising murder rate. Says he wants to invade our Sanctuary City, round up immigrants and have posse of sheriffs running the city.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel says he's willing to deal with Trump. But what possible deal could he make? If Trump agrees to "give us more resources", will Rahm agree to... do what? Abandon Sanctuary City? What?

And what's up in the upcoming race for mayor? In the last election, Rick backed his mentor, Chuy Garcia. What about this time around?

Can't wait to hear Rick's response.

Tune in and Tweet us at #HITTINGLEFT17.

Remember the battle over the Marine Academy? Look what's happened since.

Community activists like Delia Borillas, worked hard to rally neighbors against plans to turn Ames into a military academy.

Back in 2014, after the Mayor and then school CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett promised not to close any more schools, they instead pushed for their militarization. Chicago had already led the nation in publicly financed military academies but soon-to-be-indicted BBB decided to ignore parent protests and turn our neighborhood middle school, Ames, into a Marine Academy.

It was later discovered that the Marine Academy was part of the scheme that would profit her personally and later lead to the fraud convictions of BBB and her Synesi/SUPES partner in crime, Gary Solomon.

Ames Middle School, was originally built to house Small Learning Communities focused on personalization and experiential learning. After first threatening to move a Marine Academy into the "underutilized" Ames building, Rahm and BBB, with help from then Ald. Roberto Maldonado, shifted gears and came up with a plan to militarize the entire school elevating military programs at the expense of music, sports, and art and sparking protests from the the mostly-Latino community and parents. In a neighborhood referendum, community members voted overwhelming (97%-3%) against the militarization of Ames.

Lauren Fitzpatrick wrote in the Sun-Times:

In April 2013, grant applications were submitted for Carver Military Academy, Corliss, Farragut and what then was called Marine Math and Science Academy, now the Marine Leadership Academy at Ames. Each planned to pay Synesi $270,000 per year for its help, according to the schools’ proposals.

Fast forward...Byrd-Bennett and Solomon are on their way to prison. But the Marine Academy at Ames is still a thing -- barely.

This week, CPS announced another round of devastating mid-year budget cuts amounting to $46M. The school in our neighborhood, hit hardest by the cuts was -- you guessed it -- the Marine Academy, which, according to DNAInfo,  stands to lose $227,402.

If you appreciate irony, that's nearly the exact amount that would have been funneled to Synesi.

Setting the table for fascism, American-style

After Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, nearly a half-century ago, there was an attempt by the dominant culture to turn him into a harmless icon. That often happens to revolutionaries when they die. But if you ever doubted the power of King's ideas, yesterday's Senate hearings on the appointment of racist Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as AG should put those doubts to rest.

When Sen. Elizabeth Warren attempted to enter an appropriate, brief, and relatively mild letter from King's widow Coretta Scott King, criticizing Sessions' record on civil rights, Warren was immediately silenced by her trembling Republican colleagues,who charged that she was "impugning his integrity."

The silencing of critics, media, judges and legislators, combined with a propaganda blitz based on big lies and "alt-facts" have become central features of the Trump regime. Every day we're fed more and more until the cynicism runs so deep that the lies all becomes normalized and the war drums become ambient noise.

But make no mistake. There's a method to this madness. The lies aren't just pathological, they're political as well. The latest example was Trump's big lie yesterday, at a confab of county sheriffs. He claimed, without any evidence, that the U.S. murder rate is now the "highest in 47 years." In fact, the murder rate, while horrific, is at its lowest point in decades. It remains as high as it is, not for want of more cops and federal agents, but for the flood of cheap guns, which Trump encourages.

Why make such a provocative and easily debunked fib? The answer lies in Trump's follow-up statement, “If you ran Chicago, you would solve that nightmare.”

If that isn't an open call for a police state, I don't know what is.

Remember, Trump's selling this BS to whip up the same group of sheriffs who were mobilized to put down the water protectors protests at Standing Rock. I should point out here that several sheriffs and deputies refused to take part in the violent suppression of those protests. Look for more of the same by police professionals in the months ahead.

Despite its populist window dressing, this is a regime that can't rule based on popular will. Its base is too narrow and there are too many internal divisions. Trump unexpectedly won the election while losing the popular vote by 3 million, because of a perfect storm. But the global threat of Trumpism is existential and would be there even if Trump had lost and didn't have the extra burden of running the government.

Running the country and trampling the bureaucracy, the other branches of government (including the courts and even the military leadership and intelligence organizations), will require not only a policization/militarization of society, but an ideological assault on the truth (alt-facts) as well.

To put it more bluntly, The Trumpians are setting the table for the global, direct neo-fascist takeover they've only just begun. I say "neo-fascist" only because its features may not look the same as the Hitler/German brand from the 1930s.

Best Tweets...

Contrast: While a hero of white supremacists has the president's ear, the words of the widow of MLK are silenced on senate floor. https://t.co/9IjcncPKz5

— Kevin B. Blackistone (@ProfBlackistone) February 8, 2017

.@SenatorLankford commemorated Martin Luther King on MLK Day.
Yesterday, he voted to silence @SenWarren for reading letter from his widow https://t.co/YV1NfWtojl

— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) February 8, 2017

Death by 1,000 cuts at CPS

"Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." -- Frederick Douglass

Donald Trump thinks Frederick Douglass is still alive. In one sense (certainly not the one intended) he may be right. Douglass' words, his warning, that if we don't resist oppression, we will get it's full measure, are alive and as relevant today as they were more than a century-and-a-half ago. They were ringing in my head this week as I watched our Trumpian Gov. Rauner veto a bill that would have put $215M back in the schools.

We're now in our third year without a state budget and Rahm Emanuel's schools CEO Forrest Claypool has just announced another $46M in cuts at CPS and I'm asking myself just how much more of this death by 1,000 cuts of public space are we willing or able to endure?

The cuts have created more chaos throughout the system, forcing principals to re-engineer their budgets in the middle of the school year and give up as much as half of discretionary money for textbooks, field trips, technology and hourly workers who staff recess and after school programs. CPS is also cutting $5 million in teacher professional development funds.

As expected, Claypool put all the blame for the cuts on the more-than-deserving, "Trumpian" Rauner. But Claypool, Rahm and the Democratic Party leadership in Springfield have blood on their hands as well. They've acceded to Republican demands for more and more cuts with little more than a whimper, and Sen. Pres. John Cullerton is currently colluding with Rauner in the Grand Plan to loot the pension fund and weaken the unions.

They are also unwilling to tax the state's wealthiest for badly-needed revenues and instead are considering other ways to save money, including shortening the school year. How ironic, considering that Rahm made the unfunded, compulsory longer school day the centerpiece of his first campaign for mayor.

Taking the biggest hits...As I scroll down the list of CPS schools to see which ones are affected the most, something jumps out at me. It's how Claypool wielded his sword in favor of the mayor's pet selective-enrollment high schools, which were hardly touched. Compare for example, Walter Payton (.049% of its budget was cut) or Northside Prep (0.13%)  with Clemente (4.20%) or Juarez (4.14%). Newly opened Dyett, the product of a community hunger strike, took a 5% hit.

I haven't seen the list yet of charter schools. I've read that charters could see their funding cut by a total of $18 million in April to match the spending freeze and furlough days imposed on district-run schools. But charters are also benefiting from outside funding streams that remain inaccessible to most public schools. The also pay their non-union teachers less and push out veteran teachers in favor of less-experienced, lower-paid TFAers.

I know in some cases, I'm comparing apples and oranges here, due to size of the schools and their overall budgets. For example, Lane Tech, the city's largest high school, stands to lose about $890,000, by far the largest of any school. But Lane also had the largest pool of discretionary funds to begin with. Forty other elementary and high schools are targeted for an average of $300,000 for cuts.

But percentages and sizes of cuts are still indicators of the two-tier system of schooling Rahm is building, by attrition and subtraction, here in Chicago, where privately-run charters and selective-enrollment continue to supplant community-based schools according to policy.

Back to Frederick Douglass -- The heart of the resistance is still the public employee unions, AFSCME, CTU and SEIU, along with parent and community groups.

The CTU used one of Claypool's 4 forced, unpaid furlough days to protest the cuts and call for his resignation. AFSCME #31 is taking a strike vote as I write this.

CTU Pres. Karen Lewis summed it all up nicely,

"Rahm and Rauner are both to blame, There's no separation between their intention to destroy publicly funded, public education in Chicago."

### 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Kellyanne Conway 

"I misspoke one word." -- Chicago Tribune

Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly

Respectfully but firmly, the retired general told Bannon that despite his high position in the White House and close relationship with President Trump, the former Breitbart chief was not in Kelly’s chain of command. -- Washington Post

Donald Trump tells O'Reilly...

 “There are a lot of killers. We have a lot of killers. Well, you think our country is so innocent?” -- Washington Post. 

Susana Mendoza

IL Comptroller Susana Mendoza

“We are now going into a third year without that balanced budget proposal. He hasn’t done it once. He hasn’t done it twice. As a result of that, my office is responsible for having to pay $11.2 billion in bill backlogs. That’s how bad of a situation we’re in. We’ve had six downgrades to our credit since Gov. Rauner has taken office." -- Chicago Tribune

Jim Durkin, Rauner's House leader threatens AFSCME families

"But the fact is, if you cross him... if you do that, you're crossing a governor who's, I think he's going to do what he thinks is best at the end of the day, which is not going to be in the best interests of AFSCME members and their families and loved ones." -- Chicago Tribune

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R., Alaska)

“I have heard from thousands—truly thousands—of Alaskans who shared their concerns about Mrs. DeVos. They’ve contacted me by phone, by e-mail, in person.” -- Wall Street Journal

Michael Petrilli, conservative think-tanker on DeVos' blunder

"It's impossible to argue that most online charter schools are high-performing because most are performing abysmally." Petrilli should know. He once worked for K12 Inc.,. -- NPR

Hitting Left Week 1

Week 1 crew. 

Well, we pulled it off on Week 1. We were, as they say, a little rough around the edges. Messed up a few transitions, forgot to reintroduce our in-studio guest, Troy LaRaviere after each break, things like that,.. But I think we did pretty well on the Klonsky Brothers' first live Hitting Left show on Lumpen Radio.

Our producer, Logan was impressed. He says our first show drew an audience, second only to the Beer Show, earning us the permanent (is anything really...?) 11-noon slot on Fridays.

If you missed it, you can listen to it here.

Special thanks to Logan Bay and Leah Menzer at Lumpen Radio and to Jeff Spitz and his assistant Scott Hoelzer for doing the video. Clips should be forthcoming.

Tune in next week for more Klonsky Brothers and guests hitting from the left side of the plate.

Tweet us, using hashtag #HittingLeft17 or go to our Hitting Left FB page to send us comments, questions or suggestions for future shows.

Klonsky Bros. Radio

This morning at 11, my brother Fred and I kick off our new radio show, Hitting Left on WLPN, 105.5 FM. In Chicago or not, we'll be streaming galaxy-wide at LumpenRadio.Com. Or, you can download the app and hear the show with a click on your phone.

We're not taking phone calls today, but you can Tweet us at #HittingLeft and we'll try to get to your questions and comments.

This morning, Fred and I will be talking Trump, ed/politics and much more, with our in-studio guest, Troy LaRaviere. If you follow this blog, you know Troy well. He's the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Assoc. and was the principal at Blaine Elementary before the mayor took revenge on him and had him fired for "insubordination", meaning, Troy's open criticisms of Rahm's policies were having an impact. His hard-hitting Tribune commentary ("Why does Rahm Emanuel put business ahead of our children?") really pissed off the mayor. Plus, Troy being a Bernie Sanders campaigner may also have had something to do with it, according to the IG. 

But, as they say, the tables are turning. Troy landed on his feet and won the PAAA election. Now there's even talk about him running for mayor. Of course, we're going to ask him about that and a lot more.

Tune in.

Chicago has widest racial/wealth/income gap in the nation.

With the next mayor's race on the horizon and early stirrings around possible candidates to take on Rahm Emanuel, the issue of Chicago's gun violence pandemic and rising murder rate will once again, move to the top of the list.

And if you want to talk about Chicago violence, here's a good place to start the conversation. At least a much better place than talking about more cops or a Trump military invasion.

Our city has the widest racial income divide in the nation.

A report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development has identified the divide between the incomes of white households and minority households as wider in Chicago than the nation as a whole. And the national divide is large. Not only do Chicago's white households on average far exceed African-Americans, Latinos and Asians in income, but there is a sharp difference in the city between the wealth held by whites and that held by minority communities. -- Chicago Tribune

Medium income for whites in the city is more than double that of African-Americans.

Since whites make up only about a third of the city's residents, a continuation of the income and wealth disparity will weigh on the strength of the city, says Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, the director of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative.

"With less ability to consume, it has an affect on businesses and it impacts taxes and the strength of city services — everything from schools to sewer services."

Factor in that nearly half of young African-Americans are unemployed compared with 20% of Latino men and 10% of white men in the same age group, according a report commissioned by the Alternative Schools Network and the numbers begin to tell a story.

Why won't Rahm go there? He and his top cops are still talking "gang-bangers", "Facebook" and police "demoralization" for the record murder rates during his watch. As long as violence in the city continues to be discussed by the mayor and the media as a police vs. gangs issue, look for crime and violence to continue and for Trump to take full advantage in his war on the cities.

DeVos appointment is central part of Trump's coup. Say 'NO'!

Alaskans gathered outside U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s Anchorage office urging her to oppose the nomination of Betsy DeVos as education secretary Monday. (Bill Roth / Alaska Dispatch News)

Unless the vote is postponed, today is the day of decision on Betsy DeVos. There are many reasons to oppose the appointment of right-wing billionaire DeVos, from her ignorance of and disdain for public education, her extremism in pushing privatization and "choice" (privately-managed charters and vouchers) to her imposition of religious fundamentalism into the schools, crossing the constitutional separation of church and state.

But more importantly, the DeVos appointment, along with the rest, should be seen as part and parcel of the Trump/Bannon/corporatist/white nationalist coup d'etat. This is not simply a matter of her competence as an administrator or policy adviser to the president.

Senate Democrats, who've been rendering unto Caesar on previous Trump appointments, appear to have united in opposition to DeVos. It's about time. But it's unlikely that they will pick up enough Republican votes to stop her.

Therefore, building the resistance movement to save and transform public education remains the charge of teachers, unions, parents, students, civil rights groups and community activists as it was under the Duncan-led D.O.E.. Only this time around, the stakes are even higher.
#Resist

CREDO Action said Monday that 1.45 million people had signed a petition urging the Senate to block DeVos' nomination.

Why Trump will fail... Former Bush State Dept. guy, Eliot Cohen, writes in the Atlantic,

 He will fail most of all because at the end of the day most Americans, including most of those who voted for him, are decent people who have no desire to live in an American version of Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, or Viktor Orban’s Hungary, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

O'hare Airport Saturday night. 

Donald Trump  

 [Muslim ban] "is working out very nicely, and we’re going to have a very, very strict ban, and we’re going to have extreme vetting, which we should have had in this country for many years.” -- Washington Post

Naomi Klein

Let us be clear: This is not a peaceful transition of power. It’s a corporate takeover. -- The Nation

Yonatan Zunger

 The inner circle is actively probing the means by which they can seize unchallenged power; yesterday’s moves should be read as the first part of that. -- Trial balloon for a coup?

Bill Moyers

"In just a few days, Donald Trump seems to have set out to wreck government and turn over the remains to his plutocrat friends." -- Moyers & Company

Trump/Devos

Jeff Bryant

 What's sadly ironic is that these rural communities that will perhaps be most devastated by the school choice plan DeVos and Trump are about to foist on the nation are the very communities that voted Trump into office. -- Linkedin

Betty Downs, parent and ed activist in Athens, GA

 After years of supporting traditional Republican corporate education reform ideas, many Democrats seem to now realize how bad her [DeVos'] policies to “voucherize” American education would be for teaching and learning as well as the principle of educational equity. -- The Answer Sheet

Trump election has reformers reconsidering 'groupthink'.

Credit: Creative Commons/AFGE

"Ed reformers are just waiting for their turn to talk. They only want to talk about themselves. Anything you say, they just want to tell you, 'Charter schools are great.' A parent can tell them, 'I broke my foot.' And a reformer will say, 'You know what's good for that? Charter schools!'" -- Education Post's Chris Stewart 

For most of the past three decades, school reformers have been focused on dismantling traditional, mainly urban public school systems, replacing traditional public schools with a hodgepodge of market-oriented, tech-driven, resegregated and union-free "choice" options -- mainly, privately-run charter schools and school vouchers.

The unintended, or sometimes intended, consequence of these reforms is a steady rollback of the genuine reforms won by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s (the second Reconstruction period in our history). It was those reforms, limited and fleeting as they may have been, which, from 1968-88, generated the greatest educational gains for poor children this nation has ever seen.

But what we're seeing now is an increasingly racially re-segregated, two-tiered system made up of unregulated selective, heavily-resourced, high-performing schools for the few, and a collapsing infrastructure of resource-starved public schools for the many, especially in areas of concentrated urban and rural poverty.

Market-driven reform crosses traditional party lines and is based within a handful of conservative think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Fordham Institute, and underwritten by high-powered philanthropists like billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg,  the Walton Family, the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and others.

It's actually difficult for me to call them "reformers" since, for the past 16 years, they have captured (or been captured by) the U.S. Dept. of Education bureaucracy, which under a string of ed secretaries (Paige, Spellings, Duncan, and King),has become a bulwark of standardization, privatization and failed top-down initiatives. In other words, the status quo.

But the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of choice supporter Betsy DeVos as the next secretary of education, have ironically thrown the current corporate and choice reformers into a state of panic and confusion. Why? Because even though they and Trump/DeVos share a common view of choice, charters and vouchers (a sticking point for some), throwing in with Trump's confederacy of alt-right white nationalists and educational know-nothings would widen the chasm between themselves and their potential customer base. A no-no for anyone working in the corporate world.

That potential base is mainly the sea of dissatisfied, largely black and Latino public school parents, many of whom have looked to charters and vouchers as potential escape routes from their faltering, underfunded and shuttered neighborhood schools.

The election of Trump has also thrown a monkey wrench into their efforts to organize, co-opt, or at least engage with that base as well as with union teachers, young progressive educators and policy people (ie. Teach for America alums) and school/community activists who are repulsed by Trump and the Republicans.

This hoped-for dialogue with progressives was a task assigned to former Duncan assistant Peter Cunningham and his on-line Eli Broad-funded journal Education Post.

So far, Cunningham's "let's find common ground" approach to the progressives has been little more than a veil. A trap set to draw them in without budging on any important issues. And the real problem is that it hasn't produced the hoped-for results. That's because the reformers are self-critical about style, but so far, not about content.

Sensing this failure, Cunningham has dropped all pretenses and sharpened his attacks on teacher unions, opt-out parents, and polemicising against school integration efforts. He's really sharpened his polemical knife for any and all who want caps on charter school expansion. Since the campaign began, national civil rights groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have actually hardened their stance against charters and vouchers.

So much for "common ground"...

More proof that forced integration didn't work. @mikeklonsky Lamenting segregation is just an excuse to avoid improving schools.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

@leoniehaimson Recruiting a small percentage of POC doesn't change the fact that opt out is largely driven by middle class whites.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) April 24, 2016

At a recent AEI conference, choice reformers appeared to taking a self-critical approach and re-evaluating their strategies. Among the hottest topics was, what they called, "race-based" reform.

AEI's Rick Hess, who hosted the conference, writes: 

There was a willingness to talk frankly but in measured tones about disagreements. Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out that, for more than a decade, education reform has been approached as a race-based endeavor and questioned the wisdom and the desirability of this shift...

 There was a recognition that groupthink is a problem for all of us. AEI's Andy Smarick observed, "We all tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with our views. Then we wind up with an echo chamber. 

It's nice to know that some reformers are reconsidering groupthink, at least for now, in the face of Trumpism. Maybe others will follow. As for civil discourse about race and reform...I'm not holding my breath.

But the Trump/DeVos assault on public education should push choice, charter and voucher proponents to reconsider, not only their style, but substance as well.

Trump's war on the cities

Why does Trump hate the cities? It's because that's his enemy's stronghold. Just listen to him, still pissing and moaning about his 3-million vote loss of the popular vote. He's a man obsessed.

He blames "millions of illegals" who supposedly voted illegally for Hillary. But deep down, he knows the truth. There wasn't one major city with a large black or Latino population that went for Trump in November.

This is the first time since 1920 that the Census has recorded that more people living in urban than in non-urban areas. And urban has become synonymous with black and Latino.

As Ronald Brownstein observed in The Atlantic:

Of all the overlapping generational, racial, and educational divides that explained Trump’s stunning upset over Hillary Clinton last week, none proved more powerful than the distance between the Democrats’ continued dominance of the largest metropolitan areas, and the stampede toward the GOP almost everywhere else.

Trump and the Republicans know they can only govern the cities with an iron fist. Four days in and Trump is already threatening to invade Chicago with federal troops to supposedly end the "carnage" of violence there. But threats of outside military and other interventions only build on Mayor Emanuel's failed policing and mass-incarceration strategies.

But the real "carnage" in Chicago took place during Trump's own election campaign. His being run out of town by 25,000 protesters at UIC back in March still gnaws at him. His experience in New York City was similar.

Then on Saturday, the largest protests in this nation's history kicked his inauguration off the front pages. Not counting the national Women's March in D.C., 250,000 turned out in Chicago. 600,000 in New York. 750,000 in rainy L.A.

Trump and the Repubs want to take revenge on the cities by 1) strangling them into submission economically, leveraging federal dollars and cutting even further their corporate tax base, 2) limiting their voting power with stricter voting measures, 3) shrinking the size of the cities through mass deportations of immigrants, and 4) challenging their sovereignty with federal intervention.

Trump signed directives Wednesday to build his $15B wall on the southern border and to begin his round-up immigrants. He's threatening to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities that act to protect their immigrant citizens from deportation round-ups, forced registration, and internment camps. While the threat probably won't be taken seriously in the biggest cities, especially in those where Trump has, or plans to have, his own personal investments (hotels and casinos), it will weigh heavy on smaller ones like New Haven, CT.

I must interject here... I think he learned this tactic from former Ed Secretary Arne Duncan who established a precedent when he used Race To The Top to threaten to withhold federal education dollars from states like WA that opposed privately-run charter schools or Common Core related standardized tests.

Several Democratic mayors and other pols, are still playing footsie with Trump, hoping against hope that his threat to invade and impose some form of martial law will somehow turn into a money invasion to pay for more cops and infrastructure repair, and relieve city debt,  rather than a militarization. So far, there's no evidence for this.

Resistance... In a press release yesterday, Chicago City Council Black Caucus Chair Rod Sawyer called for resistance to Trump's threats to militarize urban communities.

“The threat to militarize our communities will be met with the same spirit of fierce resistance as efforts to increase ‘stop-and-frisk,’ register and ban Muslims, and deport millions of immigrants.

“We remain committed to working with all levels of government to fight for resources for our communities--but not at the cost of our civil liberties or our very democracy .

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Quarter-million marched in Chicago

Donald Trump

Mentioned education only once in his inauguration speech, referring to, "...an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge." -- Transcript

 Elizabeth Warren

We Can Whimper, We Can Whine, Or We Can Fight Back. -- Huffington

Conway 

KellyAnn Conway on Alt-facts

"You're saying it's a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that," she told NBC's Chuck Todd. -- NBC News

Dan Rather

These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. -- Facebook post on Alt-facts

Valerie Strauss

But the record shows that Democrats can’t just blame Republicans for her ascension. It was actually Democrats who helped pave the road for DeVos to take the helm of the Education Department. -- Washington Post

Lindbergh

American First-er Charles Lindbergh in 1941

The “greatest danger” Jews posed to the U.S. “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." -- L.A. Times

Peter Leyden,  founder & CEO of Reinvent

I think the backlash will be fast and furious. And it won’t just be Trump that goes down — it will be large swaths of conservative Republicans who will be almost helpless to stop Trump or distance themselves from him. -- Medium

Day One of the #resistance. Took us 5 years to get numbers this big against G.W. Bush. Only 24 hours against Trump. pic.twitter.com/h6RMm5bkkn

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) January 22, 2017

Global anti-Trump protests

Brit protesters hang banner across the Thames. 

"It’s growing by the day," says Politico's Natasha Korecki in Illinois Playbook. She's talking, of course, about Saturday's Women's Marches in D.C. and cities around the country.

Here in Chicago, 24,000 people have RSVP’d on social media for the rally in Chicago. Organizers are expecting more than 200,000 in Washington D.C. while New York City and L.A. are likely to attract some 70,000 each.

Actually, now more than 50,000 are expected to turn out in Chicago. I'll make it 50,001.

SMALLTALK SALUTE goes out to the students at Glenbard East H.S. who have organized an anti-Trump walkout. They're also publishing The Glenbard Underground. Don't miss.

Chicago Public School students will walk out after their 7th period classes and head to the Resist Trump rally in Daley Plaza at 3:00pm.

CHICAGO (1/20) - The Chicago Students Union has coordinated a walkout across Chicago Public Schools today after 7th period to demonstrate to the Trump administration that the students of Chicago are prepared to defend their schools and communities.The nomination of vastly unqualified cabinet members like Betsy DeVos and the President's promises to deport their undocumented brothers and sisters has sparked widespread resistance. 

Following the walkout, students will head to the Chicago Movement for the 99%'s "ResistTrump" rally in Daley Plaza at 3:00pm. Sabah Hussain, a student activist, will give a speech at 4:10.

Email: chicagostudentsunion@gmail.comTwitter: @StudentUnionChiFacebook: Chicago Students Union

'NO TO TRUMP' shouted around the globe...In Buenos Aires,  a women's march is due to take place - one of hundreds planned across the world to coincide with the main marches in Washington D.C.

The “Marcha Solidaria de Mujeres: Edición Buenos Aires” will start in the neighborhood of Palermo at Plaza Intendente Seeber, near the U.S. embassy.

“We wish to make known that hateful and divisive speech and actions are not acceptable from anyone, and even less from our elected governors. We wish to announce our support for minority groups whose rights and safety are threatened by the policies and principles of this new administration in the U.S.,” organizers said of the event via Facebook.

“No to Global Trumpism” took place in Berlin, where protesters held a sign “Mr. President, Walls Divide. Build Bridges,” next to the remains of the Berlin Wall. Similar protests were expected in Paris, Madrid, Brussels and Prague.

While we take to the streets in cities around the world, the wealthiest and most powerful of the global elites sip their Cabernet at Davos in the Swiss Alps and try to come up with a response to the rise of global Trumpism, populism, and neo-fascism. It's really all about keeping the world in one piece long enough for them to spend their money.

There was even a panel on "Middle Class Anger".

“I want to be loud and clear: populism scares me,” Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio said. “The No. 1 issue economically as a market participant is how populism manifests itself over the next year or two.”

George Will in the NYT:

It has been well-said that Davos is where billionaires tell millionaires what the middle class feels.

Trump's bikers on security. A 'wall of meat' or load of B.S.?

DT is counting on a right-wing biker battalion to pull security duty at his inauguration. He imagines a horde of thousands of "Bikers for Trump" are rolling into D.C. at this very moment, to save him from what he imagines as an assault from the half-million angry, but peaceful protesters expected at the Women's March on Washington.

Chris Cox, the founder of “Bikers for Trump,” promised “Fox & Friends” on Sunday that the group will attend the inauguration and will form a “wall of meat” if necessary, signaling that biker gangs would try to stop protesters attempting to disrupt the swearing-in ceremony.

It's a neo-fascist wet dream.

This from MediaMatters:

During the Chairman’s Global Dinner pre-inauguration event, President-elect Donald Trump bragged about the “record crowds coming” to celebrate his inauguration, including a group called “bikers for Trump.” Trump regaled his audience with tales of photos showing thousands of bikers purportedly making their way to Washington D.C., a fake news story uncovered by BuzzFeed hours before Trump went on stage.

I saw the bikers for Trump. Boy, they had a scene today. I don't know if I'd want to ride one of those, but they do like me. That's like additional security with those guys. They're rough... And they had a scene today where they had helicopters flying over a highway someplace in this country and they had thousands of those guys coming into town. 

And Trump even had the pictures to prove it. Only...
This picture and many others being tweeted to intimidate protesters, turned out to be fakes. This one, unrelated to Trump's inauguration, was published on a blog in 2013 about how to ride safely in large groups.

Rape, murder! / It's just a shot away / It's just a shot away…

Not to say that there won't be some right-wing bikers coming to the inauguration. But before hiring them to do security, Trump would do well to talk to Mick Jagger and the Stones who have some experience in this area, dating back to their 1969 Gimme Shelter concert at Altamont, CA. The Rolling Stones’ management put the Hells Angels in charge of security and paid them in beer.

Big mistake... four fans died including one who was stabbed by the bikers. The resulting melee was captured in the 1970 film, Gimme Shelter.

I'm sure Team Trump and the Secret Service will come up with a better security plan. But these days, you can't be too sure.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Congressman John Lewis’s bestselling graphic novel March: Book One was inspired by a 56-year-old comic, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, that helped spawn the Civil Rights Movement. 

Rep. John Lewis

It doesn’t matter how Senator Sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you... We need someone as attorney general who’s going to look out for all of us, and not just for some of us. -- Democracy Now

Jean-Marie Guehenno, CEO of International Crisis Group

"Regardless of how you view Trump and his positions, his election has led to a deep, deep sense of uncertainty and that will cast a long shadow over Davos." -- Business Insider

Singer Jennifer Holliday not going

“I was honestly just thinking that I wanted my voice to be a healing and unifying force for hope through music to help our deeply polarized country… Regretfully, I did not take into consideration that my performing for the concert would actually instead be taken as a political act against my own personal beliefs and be mistaken for support of Donald Trump and Mike Pence.” -- Raw Story

Dem consultant Robert Shrum: Hillary's going

“She will have a stiff upper lip.” -- Guardian

Participatory Democracy: When voting is not enough.

Democracy is not a sport where the two teams do battle every few years and we as spectators cheer our team on, hoping for the best and then watching the post-game show on cable. We're told, the best we can hop for in this case, is a "peaceful transition" of power  -- to the new oligarchs.

On the contrary, participatory democracy requires a citizenry that is both active and educated, with the courage to stand up for its rights and freedoms regardless of which party is in power. It's a 24-7 job. That doesn't mean of course, that we neglect the ballot. But you can only win at the ballot box that which you are willing to fight for and defend on your block, in your school, workplace, and in the community.

Case in point... in 2015 Chicagoans overwhelmingly voted for a referendum supported by the teachers union, calling for an elected School Board and an end the mayor's autocratic rule over the public schools.

An elected school board bill passed the IL House in March in bipartisan fashion, by a 110-4 vote. But the measure was blocked by an unholy alliance between Rahm Emanuel, Gov. Rauner and Senate Pres. John Cullerton, who never allowed the bill to come to a needed vote in the IL Senate. You'll notice that two of the three blockers are Democrats.

From DNAinfo:

With the 100th Illinois General Assembly sworn in Wednesday, state Rep. Robert Martwick (D-Jefferson Park) vowed to reintroduce the bill "immediately" and begin working to bring it to a vote in the Senate.

Martwick has said the lack of an elected School Board has "eliminated democracy in Chicago."

The fallout... Today, the mayor's hand-picked, self-interested board basically spit on the recently-signed teachers collective-bargaining agreement and imposed a 4-day, unpaid "furlough" on teachers and staff.

CTU responds:

“It’s the second year in a row they shortened the school year and cut our pay,” said Jesse Sharkey, the union’s vice president, angry that CPS leaders still won’t seek new revenue sources. Sharkey said the days off were to allow teachers to complete grades at the end of each quarter, work he assumes will still have to be finished and handed in.

“I’m hearing hearing from teachers who are outraged because they see this as a reduction of pay without a reduction of work,” he said. “We’re looking into whether it’s wage theft.”

No point in looking into it. Wage theft it is. Question is how will the CTU respond? Bigger question is, how will we force a senate vote on an elected board?

Last point... Donald Trump's victory, albeit with a massive loss in the popular election, followed by shrinking poll ratings, and Republican control of congress, necessitates an electoral strategy for the upcoming 2018 and 2020 elections. But it also calls for mass actions in the streets and in our communities, beginning with mass protests at Trump's inauguration.

Voting is not enough. #Resist