Duncan comes out against "forced integration." What year is this?

Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus,  1958

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

"The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government. --Alabama Gov. George Wallace, 1963

"...the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty." -- Ron Paul, 2004

"So whatever we can do to continue to increase integration in a voluntary way – I don’t think you could force these kinds of things – we want to be very, very thoughtful and to try to do more in that area quite frankly." -- Sec. of Education Arne Duncan, 2013

So now it seems, despite the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement, we've come full circle from 1964, when Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox stood in the doorway of his restaurant with an ax handle to prevent its "forced integration." It's 2013 and the current U.S. Sec. of Education seems to be assuring those "across the aisle" that he's not for forcing school deseg down white people's throats.

As if...

Duncan's latest blurt came out on NPR's Diane Rehm Show during a back-to-school panel discussion which also included National Journal's Fawn Johnson, Mike Petrilli from the right-wing Fordham Institute, and  economist Richard Rothstein. 

Duncan tipped his hat to the concept of racial diversity before assuring those who needed to be assured, that the administration was not going to break ranks by forcefully pushing school desegregation or affirmative action.

This at a time when Duncan's home town is facing several civil rights suits in response to Rahm Emanuel's mass closing of schools in the black community, and when the segregation of black students is increasing, not decreasing.

Why  Duncan would make such a pathetic statement more than half a century after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation illegal, is beyond me. Is there really somebody out there (even from within the Obama administration) trying to "force" the racial integration of schools?  What exactly are Secretary  Duncan and the Obama administration really afraid of?

Daley's man, Duncan,  fought Chicago's consent decree. 

We should recall that it was Arne Duncan, acting as Chicago Mayor Daley's hand-picked schools chief back in 2009, who went before a federal judge and successfully pleaded for an end to the thirty-year-old consent decree which "forced" some affirmative action on CPS. Duncan made his case by arguing that the district had already done all it could do and that the imposition of the consent decree was too costly.

Thankfully Rothstein was there to challenge Duncan. Certainly none of the others would have such an inclination.  Rothstein said he couldn't blame Duncan for thinking that integration is desirable only because it is good for students to experience diversity.

"His views on racial matters only reflect conventional thinking, including that of most liberal policymakers. As a society, much as we celebrate the achievements of the civil rights movement 50 years ago, we have abandoned racial integration as a goal and not only maintain segregation but have taken steps towards re-segregating children and communities."

Rothstein deepens his criticism of Duncan's "troubling" remarks on a blog post at EPI website (How Much We Have Backslid). It's re-posted on Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet at WaPo.

Secretary Duncan’s comment on integration was even more shocking for another reason. He stated that we should “increase integration in a voluntary way—I don’t think you could force these kinds of things.” Secretary Duncan is young (only 48 years old) and may not realize that in 20th century discussions of integration, “voluntary” was a code word for massive resistance to desegregation, and saying you can’t “force these kind of things” was the most common rationale for maintenance of black subjugation.

He's not that young, Richard. He knows his history. He's a Harvard grad. Remember, it was Duncan who repeatedly told us that his version of ed reform was "the civil rights issue of our time." He just didn't say which side he was on.

Duncan pleads ignorance on Justice Dept. civil rights suit against La. school vouchers

Louisiana school deseg suit? He claims he never heard of it. 

Arne Duncan came close to channeling the old-line southern segregationists last week, by publicly opposing so-called, "forced racial integration."  That was bad enough. But it also brought back horrifying memories of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, when Duncan called the devastating storm that killed thousands and displaced thousands more, “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” 

What had enamored him with the storm was that by laying to waste the city's public education system, Katrina opened the door for Duncan's mentor Paul Vallas to crush the teachers union, fire every teacher in the district, and implant a system of privately-run charter schools. Post-Katrina New Orleans under Bush, would soon become the model for "reforming" school districts like Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Duncan would later apologize for the transparency of his Katrina outburst. I know that there are some in his camp who are counseling him to "clarify" his forced integration statement, even as I write this. But Duncan said something else in that same radio interview which all the king's horses and men will not be able to put back together again.

Holder goes after La. resegregation. Arne pleads ignorance. 

When asked about the Justice Department's recent lawsuit to block Louisiana's school voucher program, Duncan pleaded ignorance. "I'm not familiar with that lawsuit," he told radio host Diane Rhem. "That's between the Department of Justice and the state of Louisiana."

What?

According to the lawsuit, filed two weeks ago by the Justice Dept., vouchers "appeared to impede the desegregation process" in Louisiana.

Was Duncan really as ignorant as he sounded? Of course not. But he just couldn't very well come out in opposition to "forced integration" in one breath and then support Eric Holder's legal assault on Gov. Bobby Jindal's re-segregation juggernaut, in the other. So the Secretary did the next best thing. He pleaded ignorance.

But that didn't go far enough for disappointed conservative pro-voucher and segregationist Duncan allies who expected at least a tepid statement of support. A Wall Street Journal editorial, which called Duncan "one of the better" of Obama's cabinet members, came close to calling for his ouster.

But if he really did first hear about the Louisiana lawsuit from a reporter, then maybe it's time he returned to Chicago. He's clearly not interested in his job anymore. 

Rupert Murdoch's boys at WSJ were really upset when they learned that former Justice Department Civil Rights chief Thomas Perez, who is now Labor Secretary, was "nosing around" the state of Louisiana earlier this year.

If Mr. Perez is now also running education policy, it really is time for Mr. Duncan to leave.

I would say, it's time for Duncan to leave precisely because HE IS running education policy. But not back to Chicago, please. We've had enough.

Trump orders DeVos to do a study. Why?

Today's Washington Post reports that Trump will sign an executive order requiring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to study how the federal government “has unlawfully overstepped state and local control."

This raises some obvious questions. First, why does the president need an executive order to make his hand-picked ed secretary do a study? Can't he just pick up the phone and say, "Hey Betsy. Get one of your peeps to knock out a study for me by next week showing... blah blah blah"?

Secondly, why do they even bother calling it a "study" when the conclusions are known in advance? I know what you're thinking: Klonsky, stop being naive. This is the nature of education research these days.

Yes, you're right, with some exceptions (Congrats Kevin Welner). That's why we need to look at all research with a critical eye--especially studies coming from contracted think-tanks and university centers. But this Trump-ordered study is farcical on its face, although the topic of federal overstep is worth talking about.

No Child Left Behind was clearly federal overstep, with Bush's D.O.E. leveraging its relatively small amount of federal dollars to mandate overuse of standardized testing. The same can be said for Arne Duncan's Race to the Top, which imposed massive school closings, teacher/principal firings and the unrestrained growth of privately-run charter schools on local school districts.

But clearly, those aren't the target of Trump's executive order. What he's aiming at are the system's already dwindling civil rights protections.

According to WaPo:

Obama’s Education Department was notably aggressive on civil rights in schools, not only in directing schools to allow transgender students to use the bathrooms matching their gender identity, but also in pushing for school-discipline reforms and in pushing colleges to overhaul their handling of sexual assaults on campus.

Those efforts, coupled with the department’s sometimes wide-ranging investigations into thousands of complaints of alleged discrimination against students nationwide, also led to complaints of federal overreach in some quarters. But advocates who welcomed the attention on civil rights fear that the Trump administration’s campaign to shrink the federal role in education will translate into weaker protections for vulnerable students.

The only thing I would disagree with here is this praise for Obama's Ed Dept's "aggressive" stand on civil rights. My take is that Arne Duncan's D.O.E. was halfhearted in its enforcement of federal law and that Duncan, despite his oft-repeated claim that school reform was the "civil rights issue of our time," didn't do nearly enough.

I'm thinking here, about the time when Duncan undermined Obama's Justice Dept. just when Atty. General Eric Holder was about to take legal action against Louisiana's voucher program which discriminated against minorities. Duncan pressured Holder to pull back his federal lawsuit for fear it would interfere with "choice" (charters and vouchers). Duncan also admitted that he was opposed to "forced integration."

But forced integration was exactly what much of civil rights law was all about -- as opposed to forced segregation. Rather than federal overstep, what we saw from Duncan's D.O.E. was federal conciliation with racists and school segregationists such as then-Sen. Jeff Sessions and then-governor of Louisiana Bobby Jindal.

Trump's latest executive order is aimed at eliminating what's left of Brown v. Board of Ed and the rest of existing civil rights oversight of public education.

Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg

Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 New York City School Boycott

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

For most of the 20 Democratic Party candidates onstage Wednesday and Thursday nights, or for the debate moderators, education wasn't an important enough campaign issue to deserve a mention. Not a word was spoken about the hottest ed issues like charter schools, vouchers, pensions or testing. Common Core Standards, ESSA, it seems, were yesterday's news. There was not even a poke at Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos or at Trump himself.

That's nothing new for party presidential campaigns. I remember the 2015 debates when education issues never came up. At the time, Prof. Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote in the Progressive,

Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.

If anything has changed in the past four years, that hasn't. This week, hardly an ed word was spoken. Not a word, that is, until Sen. Kamala Harris stole night two with her devastating "That little girl was me," confrontation with Joe Biden. After prefacing her obviously well-planned punch to Biden's mid-section with "I do not believe you are a racist," Harris laid bare his role in the busing battles of the '70s.

Biden seemed totally unprepared or ill-prepped. He sputtered and lashed out at Harris personally.

I was a public defender. I didn’t become a prosecutor. I came out and I left a good law firm to become a public defender, when, in fact — when, in fact, my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King, number one.

What the hell all that has to do with anything is beyond me. Was this whiter-than-white, male, former vice-president of the United States really throwing shade at an African-American woman for becoming a successful lawyer and prosecutor? Yup.

Then after invoking Dr. King's name and recounting his long history of civil-rights advocacy and his relationship with Pres. Obama, Biden actually doubled down on his opposition to the Dept. of Education's role in enforcing the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The argument went like this:

HARRIS: But, Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

BIDEN: I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. 

HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.

HARRIS: So that’s where the federal government must step in.

BIDEN: The federal government ——

HARRIS: That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the E.R.A., because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.

This exchange brought back nightmarish memories of  Obama's former Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan claiming that he was for school integration but not "forced integration." Then there was his assistant, Peter Cunningham's apologia for school segregation in U.S. News & World Report, which claimed that "integration is expensive and takes money away from other necessary improvements."

In other words. Biden, while ill prepared, wasn't speaking out of school. He was simply repeating, in his own stumbling, bumbling way, the party line going back decades. It's just that his timing was off.

And it's not like any of the other candidates had Harris's back when push came to shove. The silence on their part (including on Bernie Sanders's part) was deafening.

How can they all be running against Biden, yet be so afraid to take him on?

Peter Cunningham's reform apologia: 'Fighting segregation and poverty too expensive'.

White ladies' signs read: "We want equal & segregated schools"

Peter Cunningham's latest apologia for school segregation, in U.S. News & World Report, is basically a defense of current reform policies that have been shown to re-segregate schools. It represents more than just the opinion of a lone education gadfly. Cunningham is paid millions to speak for some of the most powerful and wealthiest among those who influence national ed policy.

It's run up the flag pole at a time when corporate-style "reform" has come under attack from civil rights groups and teacher unions, and appear to be losing their cachet, even within the Democratic Party establishment.

Cunningham tries to come off as a tormented soul, torn between his personal and "pragmatic" side, the latter arguing that ending poverty and integration are just too "politically difficult and financially expensive" and therefore, instead of spending hundreds of billions more to reduce poverty and reduce segregation, we should just "double down on our efforts to improve schools."

At a recent DFER-sponsored forum at the DNC, Cunningham laid out his anti-deseg line in an obvious attempt to influence Clinton's education agenda. He answered a question about school integration this way:

"Maybe the fight's not worth it. It's a good thing; we all think integration is good. But it's been a long fight, we've had middling success. At the same time, we have lots and lots of schools filled with kids of one race, one background, that are doing great. 

There nothing original in Cunningham's comments. If they strike you as a throwback to Plessy v. Ferguson and the separate-but-equal doctrine, you're definitely on to something. As we learned back then, when it comes to schooling, separate is never equal. Following the Brown v. Board decision in 1954, the difficulty and protracted nature of the struggle against de facto segregation and poverty has caused some to throw in the towel.

Cunningham is basically echoing the call of his boss at the D.O.E., former Sec. of Education Arne Duncan. It was he who tried to put the kibosh on a Justice Dept. civil right suit against the state of Louisiana, which would have blocked expansion of the state's school voucher system.

When asked about the suit being pushed by his fellow cabinet member, Attorney Gen. Eric Holder, Duncan said he was opposed to "forced integration," echoing the language of the old southern segregationists. The suit was then dropped, to the applause of segregationists.

Current battles are going on in states like N.C. where privately-run charter schools are being used to promote re-segregation and evade civil right law. The Voting Rights Act itself has been dismembered by a conservative-led Supreme Court in 2013. And now, the new K-12 Education law, ESSA, has shifted much more authority back to the states and away from federal oversight, setting the stage for even more school deseg efforts.

It's in this context then, that Cunningham's "pragmatic" call to abandon the cause of school desegregation is all the more pernicious.

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.

How I get my news

At Fight For 15 rally in Chicago

Funny way to get the protest news. This morning's traffic report on NBC News warns me to watch out for Fight for 15 protests tying up downtown traffic. Thanks @KyeMartin. I'll rush right over.

More breaking news from CJR. Arne Duncan and his replacement at DOE, John King discover there's actual school segregation in Pinellas County, Florida.

 ...the US Department of Education opened a civil rights investigation into the district, the Times reported. Top department officials had first visited the district after reading the original Times series, which made clear that these aren’t just any struggling schools—they’re schools where student performance plummeted beginning in 2007, when the district abandoned an integration plan that had been in place for decades and the schools became resegregated.

Remember, it was then-Ed Sec. Duncan who, in 2013, came out firmly against what he called, "forced integration".  Shades of  "Bull Connor" and Orville Faubus.

CJR and local media have labeled re-segregated, impoverished Florida schools as "failure factories", a term more appropriate for the Duncan/King Dept. of Ed.

Duncan's reign was marked by his misuse of federal funding to favor (even mandate through Race To The Top) the spread of privately-run charter schools.

This from Phi Delta Kappa:

The fact is we don’t have to guess about the consequences of one of the Obama Administration’s most visible policies: the national expansion of charter schools. We need only turn to a large body of relevant research showing that charter schools, on average, don’t have an academic advantage over traditional public schools (Gill et al., 2007; Gleason, Clark, Tuttle, & Dwoyer, 2010), but they do have a significant risk of leading to increased segregation (Booker, Zimmer, & Buddin, 2005; Gulosino & d’Entremont, 2011).

Remember too, that it was Duncan, while CEO of Chicago schools back in '07, who lobbied to have the city's deseg consent decree thrown out, which it finally was in 2009.

So the next time you hear these guys say that "education is the civil rights issue of our time", nod and ask them, "which side are you on?"

NOW: dual marches of home care and fast food workers converge on Loyola campus! #Fightfor15 pic.twitter.com/zoU256BruM

— Fight For 15 Chicago (@chifightfor15) April 14, 2016

It was Duncan who launched Chicago schools on the trail of tiers

Rahm's closing of 50 schools, a stab in the heart for the city's black community, may be the very act that brings him down in 2015. Latest polls show that it's the mayor's (and Byrd-Bennett's) mishandled school closings, along with (related) pandemic gun violence, largely in those same communities, which account for his single-digit ratings among Chicago's African-American voters.

But the mayor's disastrous mass school-closing debacle (this according to a report, issued last month by the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force) should be seen as a continuation of a two-tier schooling and gentrification strategy that goes back to the Daley/Duncan years. Then it was called Renaissance 2010, a plan hatched in the offices of the Civic Committee, focusing on the rapid growth of privately-run charters and selective-enrollment alternatives to neighborhood schools. That same Civic Committee would later attack its own plan as an "abysmal failure."

It was the Civic Committee's chosen one, Arne Duncan, trained and nurtured by his predecessor Paul Vallas, who initiated the move to compel Judge Kocoras to get CPS out from under the desegregation decree. In 1980, the federal government had sued the Chicago Board of Education, arguing that the city ran a segregated public school system in violation of both the U.S. Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was under that federal mandate that the city had been forced to consider race as part of magnet school admission policy and take other significant steps to undo decades of conscious racial segregation and discrimination. But Duncan argued that deseg was "too expensive" and that the city had already done all it could to remove the barriers of racial segregation. One of the great lies ever told.

AFTER DUNCAN DEPARTED to D.C. to push his opposition to "forced integration" nationally, Ron Huberman was brought in to seal the deal. Kocoras agreed and in 2009 Chicago's puny attempt at school desegregation formally came to an end (see Matt Farmer's excellent 2009 Huffington Post piece). Kocoras also halted the court's monitoring of the district's bilingual program which now is just a shadow of its previous self. 

Five years later, with Rahm Emanuel in charge of the schools and with no elected school board, minority enrollment is sinking in the city's 10 selective-enrollment high schools leaving the aldermen in black wards wringing their hands as election day approaches. The city and city schools are more segregated than ever, African-American families are leaving the city in droves, and the school system is on the verge of bankruptcy. 

The verdict is in as well on Rahm's school closings. Not only have they failed to save the system any money, but the gap between the tiers continues to grow. A new Root Shock report, by UIC researchers, shows public school closings have had a negative impact on students as well as parents who "played many important and varied roles in their closed schools"and now "feel excluded from new schools." Privately-run charters continue to get the lion's share of a dwindling school budget while neighborhood schools have to bite the bullet. 

Polls now show that CTU Pres. Karen Lewis will give Rahm a run for his money in 2015. There's a growing cry nationally for Duncan's firing. The chickens are coming home to roost. 

What? Is Duncan really bailing out on Common Core?

“I believe the Common Core State Standards may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education.” -- Arne Duncan, June 25, 2013

“I’m just a big proponent of high standards. Whether they’re common or not is sort of secondary.” -- Arne Duncan, April 8, 2014 report to House Appropriation Committee

Stephanie Simon at Politico reports that Common Core is losing it biggest supporter, Sec. of Education Arne Duncan. 

It was less than a year ago that Education Secretary Arne Duncan delivered a no-holds-barred defense of the Common Core in a speech to newspaper editors. He cited example after example of the benefits of common standards: Teachers in different states could use the same lesson plans; children of military personnel could move across country “without a hitch” in their schooling; and, first and foremost, “a child in Mississippi will face the same expectations as a child in Massachusetts.” In short: “I believe the Common Core State Standards may prove to be the single greatest thing to happen to public education in America since Brown v. Board of Education,” Duncan said.

 -- That was then. This was Tuesday: “Just to be very clear with this group,” Duncan told the House Appropriations Committee, “I’m just a big proponent of high standards. Whether they’re common or not is sort of secondary.”

 I don't believe that Duncan was ever bought into all that Mississippi/Massachusetts rhetoric. This latest distancing dance is in fact, Duncan's way of placating his friends on the right who are leery of anything that even smells like big gummint enforcement of civil rights law. While Duncan has consistently ignored critics of CCSS on his left or progressive side, his ear is finely tuned to the right where denunciations of Common Core, and especially of Duncan using federal funds to incentivize the standards, are growing louder.

CIVIL RIGHTS ACT AT 50... It was a half-century ago that Pres. Lyndon Johnson, who was in the habit of referring to African-Americans as "n....s", signed the Civil Right Act, that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. An amazing event I remember well. I'm sure that there will be plenty said by the press and politicians this week about how much or how little progress we've made since then. If you look at the state of Louisiana, where racial segregation and discrimination has moved from law (thank you LBJ but mainly the Civil Rights Movement) to policy (thanks to Gov. Bobby Jindal), it seems like we've even regressed in many ways.

Duncan never had Holder's back in La. 

The second part of Simon's Politico post today is about Atty. Gen. Eric Holder's suit against Jindal and La.'s use of vouchers to roll back attempts at racial balance in public schools.  Simon reports that a federal judge ruled late Tuesday that Louisiana must give the Department of Justice spreadsheets identifying the thousands of students who apply for vouchers so each year, so DOJ can monitor whether the program upsets racial balances in public schools. That's a small victory (I think) and all well and good.

But while we're on the subject of Sec. Duncan, the man who more than anyone else is fond of telling us that corporate-style school reform is the "civil rights issue of our generation", it's significant that Duncan has never had Holder's back on this. Remember Duncan's radio interview on Sept. 14, 2013, when he proclaimed loud enough for Jindal to hear him, that he was opposed to "forced integration." When asked if he supported Holder's civil rights suit, Duncan pleaded ignorance.

If indeed, education is the civil rights issue of our time, it should be clear by now that Arne Duncan isn't the one to lead that struggle. He needs to go.

Trump's empty statements on education

Trump's vapid speech to the Joint Session of Congress last night revealed, among other things, that he is an educational know-nothing. As you might expect, the speech was void of any real vision for the future of public education or school reform. It amounted to little more than a sound-bite ad for market-driven schooling.

But as he read from the teleprompter, a few lines caught my attention.

First, was the often repeated cliche used by former Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan, that education is "the civil rights issue of our time." It was hollow enough when Duncan first claimed it while often, in the same breath, stating his opposition to "forced integration".

But if Duncan's civil rights phrase mongering was tragedy, hearing it again from Trump, an open racist and rabid opponent of civil rights, was farce. Especially, coming as it did, a day after he and Ed Sec. Betsy DeVos held up Historic Black Colleges and Universities as their model of "choice" without once mentioning HBCUs' history as a response to Jim Crow and racial segregation policies which prevented black and other minority students from attending many white-only universities.

In other words, a throw-back to Plessy v. Ferguson kind of choice.

DT presented an image of children growing up in "a nation of miracles", as in, it will take a miracle for many of them to grow up. But as we have learned, there are no miracles in successful schooling. Just the hard work of teachers, parents and communities in a supportive and well-funded system of public education.

Trump's call for "members of both parties to pass an education bill that funds school choice for disadvantaged youth, including millions of African-American and Latino children" was a waste of time and words.

A bill, which allows states to shift millions of federal dollars from public schools into privately-run charters, was already passed a little more than a year ago in the form of ESSA. On top of that, Trump has proposed another $20B for charters.  That coupled with huge federal grants already flowing to state for vouchers, charters and "choice" programs, eliminates the need for any further legislation. So one would think.

What's wrong with this list?

...families should be free to choose the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school that is right for them.

Are students really going to be able to choose a home school that's right for them? The inanity of the statement didn't escape Stephen Colbert who said he would pick Trump's home for his kids. "It seems very nice."

Finally, there was this great, telling, non-sequitur:

Every American child should be able to... attend a great school and to have access to a high-paying job.

But to create this future, we must work with — not against — not against — the men and women of law enforcement.

Yes children. If you want a great school, support law and order.

No, don't leave minimum wage, testing, or school deseg to the states

Just got a robocall from CTU organizer Brandon Johnson reminding me to call my state senator (Iris Martinez) and push for passage of HB557, the elected school board bill. So I did. Thanks Brandon.

Donald Trump now says, he supports a raise in the minimum wage. Good thing I'm wearing my flood pants. The campaign bullshit is already ankle-deep.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump told Chuck Todd, “I don’t know how people make it on $7.25.” Soon after, on ABC’s “This Week,” the Republican added, “I haven’t decided in terms of numbers, but I think people have to get more.”

 TODD: Right. You want the fed– but should the federal government set a floor, and then you let the states– 

TRUMP: No, I’d rather have the states go out and do what they have to do. And the states compete with each other, not only other countries, but they compete with each other, Chuck. So I like the idea of let the states decide. But I think people should get more. I think they’re out there. They’re working. It is a very low number. You know, with what’s happened to the economy, with what’s happened to the cost. I mean, it’s just– I don’t know how you live on $7.25 an hour. But I would say let the states decide.

I haven't heard so much states-rights pandering since the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Ed in '54,  when the big scare in Dixie was that the federal gov't was going to force school desegregation at gun-point upon the states. That sure as hell didn't happen. Did it?

Ironically, it was Pres. Obama's right-hand man in education, Arne Duncan, who undercut the Justice Dept's own move against Louisiana's use of vouchers and charter schools to promote re-segregation. Duncan's argument against "forced integration" echoed those of AR Gov. Orville Faubus and AL police chief "Bull" Conner in the '50s.

Trump says, let the states compete over minimum wage with corporate-tool govs like Bobby Jindal in LA, Bruce Rauner in IL, Scott Walker in WI, or John Kasich in OH leading the charge. Great plan, Trumpf. Isn't that what we have now? MW will be down to a dollar a day.

As a direct result of the Fight For 15 Movement, several cities have already passed $15/hr. minimum-wage ordinances on their own. And guess what? The Golden Gate Bridge hasn't fallen into the bay. In fact, biz is booming wherever the MW is the highest. Companies are not fleeing San Francisco, Pittsburgh, L.A., or N.Y.  A federal minimum-wage floor would ensure that they can't.

But Trump isn't the only one raising up the new states-rights banner. After all, isn't that the gist of the new national education law that even the teacher unions are raving about?

Pres. Obama signs new ESSA law. 

ESSA supposedly ends the years of testing madness imposed by the DOE (good) and greatly limits the federal government’s control of education policy that began in 1965 when the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

I guess the war is over. Poverty won.

But there's no indication that leaving testing (or poverty) in the hands of the states will eliminate or reduce testing madness or improve learning outcomes.

Arguments for or against federal power mean little without content. Yes, keep big gov't (state and federal) hands off our cell phones, churches and out of our bed rooms. Cut the Pentagon war machine, yes.

But on things like environmental protection, federal lands and national parks, enforcement of civil rights law, gun control, and protection of our drinking water (Flint, MI) -- hands on.

As for unrestricted states power over education, take a look at what's going on in IL.

Chicago Public Schools are now 10 months without a budget. Gov. Rauner continues to hold the budget hostage, hoping for a pro-business, "grand bargain" with Boss Madigan that includes draconian cuts to social services and the neutering of the state's teacher unions. State colleges universities like Chicago State, are on the brink of collapse and corrupt charter school networks like UNO are laughing all the way to the bank.

Where are you feds?

Duncan's legacy

"It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education." -- Diane Ravitch

Arne Duncan says he will remain at the D.O.E. "until the final bell". At this point, no one really cares.

The damage is already done and with billions of Race To The Top money no longer in his back pocket, he has no more juice with states, school districts, or with Congress. According to most surveys, his version of school reform has been badly discredited (I hope I helped a little) and many feel he will be remembered as the worst ed secretary ever. 

Diane Ravitch documents the destruction left in his wake:

*He used his control of billions of dollars to promote a dual school system of privately managed charter schools operating alongside public schools; 

*He has done nothing to call attention to the fraud and corruption in the charter sector or to curb charters run by non-educators for profit or to insist on charter school accountability or to require charters to enroll the neediest children;

*He pushed to require states to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, which has caused massive demoralization among teachers, raised the stakes attached to testing, and produced no positive results;

*He used federal funds and waivers from NCLB to push the adoption of Common Core standards and to create two testing consortia, which many states have abandoned;

*The Common Core tests are so absurdly “rigorous” that most students have failed them, even in schools that send high percentages of students to four-year colleges, the failure rates have been highest among students who are English language learners, students with disabilities, and students of color;

*He has bemoaned rising resegregation of the schools but done nothing to reduce it; [Here, I would add that Duncan openly opposed, what he referred to as "forced integration" and abandoned fellow cabinet member, AG Eric Holder on his deseg suit in Louisiana--mk].

*He has been silent as state after state has attacked collective bargaining and due process for teachers;

*He has done nothing in response to the explosion of voucher programs that transfer public funds to religious schools;

*Because of his policies, enrollments in teacher education programs, even in Teach for America, have plummeted, and many experienced teachers are taking early retirement;

*He has unleashed a mad frenzy of testing in classrooms across the country, treating standardized test scores as the goal of all education, rather than as a measure;

*His tenure has been marked by the rise of an aggressive privatization movement, which seeks to eliminate public education in urban districts, where residents have the least political power;

*He loosened the regulations on the federal student privacy act, permitting massive data mining of the data banks that federal funds created;

*He looked the other way as predatory for-profit colleges preyed on veterans and  minorities, plunging students deep into debt;

*Duncan has regularly accused parents and teachers of “lying” to students. For reasons that are unclear, he wants everyone to believe that our public schools are terrible, our students are lazy, not too bright, and lacking ambition.

Diane could have also included Duncan's unflagging support for autocratic mayoral control of urban school districts. He made mayoral control an essential piece of his top-down school reform model and went so far as to say he would consider his time as education secretary a “failure” if more mayors didn’t take over city school systems by the end of his tenure.

They didn't. It was and he is.

Final Note: According to a report in the S-T, while Duncan remains in D.C., is wife and two daughters returned to Chicago with the children to attend the expensive and private University of Chicago Lab School.

I leave it to Valery Strauss at WaPo to point out the obvious:

…now his children will attend a progressive private school in Chicago, a school that does not follow key school reform policies that his Education Department has set for public schools.

It does not, for example, use the Common Core State Standards (though many teachers there support them). It does not bombard its students with standardized tests or spend weeks each semester in test-prep mode. It does not evaluate teachers by student standardized test scores. In 2013, 20 Lab teachers signed a letter to Duncan protesting his policies that promote standardized test-based school reform. Also among the signatories were teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school founded by a team of people that included Duncan.

[...]
Another irony is that Duncan will be sending his children to a private school in a city where he ran the public schools for seven years; he then went on to control federal oversight of the nation’s public schools for another seven years. One wonders if there is not a single public school — or public charter school — that Duncan could have chosen after being personally responsible in some way for the improvement of the public education system in Chicago.

Arne Duncan chooses a school free from his influence http://t.co/NIA1aWRXNf Because you know he has to do what is BEST for his kids

— linda (@breezydayz) July 10, 2015

LIFE IN THE 'POST-RACIAL' ERA

A SMALLTALK SALUTE goes out to NBA Players Assoc. Pres. Chris Paul and the rest of the L.A. Clippers players who hung together in protest against the racism spewed by club owner Donald Sterling. Even though they were beaten by Golden State last night, they acted with dignity and grace. Though their protest was silent, nobody could mistake the clarity and forcefulness of their message.

STERLING -- "Don't bring them to my games."  EMANUEL -- "Don't bring them to my selective enrollment schools."  WHAT'S THE DIFF? Somebody tell me please.

From the Sun-Times:

The increase in the number of white students fulfills the predictions of education observers that minority students would be edged out of slots at the city’s top schools as a result of a 2009 ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras lifting a 1980 consent decree that had required Chicago’s schools to be desegregated, with no school being more than 35 percent white. -- "White students getting more spots at top CPS high schools"

Kocoras' 2009 decision came only a long, intense campaign to have the consent decree vacated, led by Arne Duncan, his successor Ron Huberman and Mayor Daley, who saw the deseg struggle as futile and as a drain on district funds.

I'll say one thing about Duncan. He's consistent. He's against "forced integration." Although he did support a little affirmative action for the daughter of billionaire Bruce Rauner.

CAROLYN EDGAR @SALON.COM:

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it is a good time to acknowledge that the tools that dismantled Jim Crow 60 years ago are inadequate to address systemic inequality today. We need new tools to repair a socioeconomic, political and judicial system that, despite the numerous gains made in the last 60 years, remains separate and unequal. -- Modern racists just repeat conservative talking points: Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy and the ugly face of GOP policies

John King's 'worries' about DeVos don't include "choice" or vouchers

Duncan & King

As N.Y.'s Education Commissioner, John King's top-down imposition of corporate-style reform policies, including Common Core testing mania, led to a revolt among parents and teachers.

As Arne Duncan's appointed successor to a short-lived stint as Pres. Obama's Ed Secretary, King continued Duncan's push for mass closings of public schools in black communities and replacing them with privately-run charters. In many ways, the Duncan/King failed Race to the Top program, set the table for Betsy DeVos' current school "choice" agenda which now threatens to decimate public schooling altogether.

As his reward for causing all this mayhem and division, King landed softly at the top of the Education Trust, which supposedly looks out for poor and minority children but instead has been a bulwark of destructive, top-down imposed testing madness going back to the now thoroughly-discredited No Child Left Behind law.

While King and Duncan have been critical of DeVos, they have steered clear of saying anything strongly critical about the bedrock of her "reform" strategy -- privatization, "choice" and vouchers.

In an interview with EdWeek's Alyson Klein, King reveals his and Ed Trust's affinity with Trump/DeVos on ed policy by omitting any criticism or even mention of their push for privatization and school vouchers. While King shares some of his legitimate "worries" about the DeVos administration's funding cuts to education and it's recent moves when it comes to civil rights enforcement, his concerns sound rather tepid.

"All of those things suggest that there's not a full commitment to civil rights protection," King said.

Not a full commitment? A duh statement if I ever heard one. Especially when you consider the lengths to which Trump/DeVos have already gone to turning the Office of Civil Rights into its opposite. 

And then there's the reality that King and Duncan's regimes also failed (by Duncan's own admission) on what Duncan called "forced integration", at times disparaging Obama's own Justice Department on civil rights enforcement.

But King's main concern isn't about the Trump regime's bent toward white supremacy. Rather it's that DeVos may not be tough enough on states and school districts when it comes to enforcing test-score accountability,

He tells Klein that he concerned that DeVos and even Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown aren't intervening severely enough in low-performing (high poverty) schools --"intervening" meaning labeling them as failures, closing them, and replacing them with charters.

"I am worried about the clarity for parents about school performance ... I'm very worried about the California dashboard," he said, referring to the state's proposed accountability model, which considers school performance on a host of factors, but doesn't come up with an overall rating. "I think it's very confusing."

While in previous interviews, King has called the voucher issue a "distraction", his list of current concerns expressed in the EdWeek interview include not even a mention of "choice" or school vouchers. This omission is most revealing. 

DeVos has turned her Office of Civil Rights into its opposite

Under the direction of Betsy DeVos, the DOE has become little more than an engine for driving school privatization, religious fundamentalism, racism and gender discrimination. Trump's appointment of DeVos to oversee this country's public education system threatens a roll-back of every hard-won gain by the Civil Rights Movement in the past 70 years.

DeVos in turn, has named Candice Jackson to head the Office of Civil Rights and turned that office into its opposite. It should be renamed, the Office of Maintaining White Male Supremacy. Jackson's recent comments normalizing campus rape are but the latest indicators of the direction the DOE has taken in regards to civil rights enforcement. DeVos has also slashed OCR budget, basically neutering the office when it comes to enforcement.

DeVos claims she wants to focus on civil rights claims "individually" rather than on institutional racism and discrimination, thereby ignoring this country's legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial segregation and their impact on public education.

What this means in practice is often giving equal weight to or favoring the complaints of individual white men who feel discriminated against by race-based affirmative actions; to Christian fundamentalists who feel that civil rights laws impinge on their religious practices; and to men's rights groups who feel oppressed by feminists or by women who have accused them of rape.

All has brought DeVos into direct conflict with Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. who's among 34 Democratic senators who signed a letter which read:  "You claim to support civil rights and oppose discrimination, but your actions belie your assurances."

They gave DeVos a deadline of July 11 to provide a list of all open Office for Civil Rights cases involving a transgender student, open cases involving sexual assault or sexual harassment, and cases that have been closed or dismissed since Jan. 1. DeVos ignored the deadline.

DeVos is also being sued by IL Atty. General Lisa Madigan and 18 other state attorneys general who want the DOE to hold for-profit schools (like Trump Univ.)  accountable for unscrupulous practices/ These include lying about accreditation and job placement, and luring millions of Americans to enroll in programs that ultimately leave them trapped in a lifetime of paralyzing student loan debt.

The problem with the Dems' is that the Department under Obama's appointee, Arne Duncan, was also weak on civil rights enforcement, especially in the area of school desegregation. Duncan proclaimed that he was opposed to "forced integration" recalling memories of 1950s southern segregationists. Other appointees, like former Asst. Sec. Peter Cunningham, have been outspoken in opposition to school desegregation being a front-burner issue.

It's telling that Sen. Murray and her Democratic colleagues never mention race or racism, English language learners, or students with disabilities in any of their polemics with DeVos and confine their criticisms almost entirely to issues of gender and transgender discrimination.

A serious blind spot.

Thoughts on the 11th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans family waits to be rescued. 

On this date 11 years ago, the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina, hit the Gulf Coast, leaving more than 2,000 dead and thousands more homeless or displaced in its wake. But as Chicago poet Roger Bonair-Agard @rogerbonair tweets, "The tragedy only began with the hurricane."

He's right. What followed was not so much a tragedy -- as caused by the gods in Greek drama -- but rather a manmade disaster, still being felt, especially in the poorest black communities in Louisiana and Mississippi. For more on this, see Gary Rivlin's excellent N.Y.T. Magazine piece, "Why New Orleans’s Black Residents Are Still Underwater After Katrina".

However, not everyone saw it as disaster, or at least not entirely. Univ. of Chicago free-market economist Milton Friedman said of Katrina:

"This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system". 

His statement was immediately taken as a call for groups of ed-entrepreneurs to flock to New Orleans where charters for publicly-financed, privately-run schools were being handed out to all comers. Shades of the California gold rush of 1850.

The ed-privateers came to town on the heels of the mass firing of every teacher in the city, basically wiping out the largest sector of the city's black middle class. Next came the de-certification of UTNO the first integrated teachers' union in Louisiana

Their dream was to replace the storm-battered, public school system, which had educated generations of New Orleanians since the city's public school system was founded in 1870, during the Reconstruction Period, with networks of non-union, privately-run charters.

It's worth noting that for the first seven years under the Reconstruction government, the public schools were racially integrated. I bring this up in response to those who claim that racial desegregation is "too difficult" or those who claim they want to "take politics out of education." More on that below.

Then Sec. of Education Arne Duncan took Friedman's meme and ran with it. telling interviewer Roland Martin:

I spent a lot of time in New Orleans, and this is a tough thing to say, but let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.

An embarrassed Pres. Obama forced Duncan to walk back his racist remarks and he did. Duncan told TV host Joe Scarborough that the remarks were a "dumb" thing to say and that he had expressed them in a "poor way."

Friedman's and Duncan's sentiments have been echoed in recent months here in Chicago. Tribune columnist and editorial board member, Kristen McQueary @StatehouseChick wrote,

"Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth." 

And then this:

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops. That's what it took to hit the reset button in New Orleans. Chaos. Tragedy. Heartbreak.

Yes, the great storm has been the battle cry for top-down reformers and disaster capitalists everywhere, a rationale for the most gross anti-democratic putsches, seizures of power and school takeovers from Louisiana to Michigan. They are all justified in the name of efficiency and product quality.

I was reminded of this, this morning when Duncan's former assistant at the D.O.E., Peter Cunningham @PCunningham57, posted this.

Pivotal moment for New Orleans comes with risks and rewards. Patrick Dobard on restoring local control: https://t.co/DZqD5Hwyp1 #Voices4Ed

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 29, 2016

Cunningham has lately been on the attack against what he and fellow reformers call "local control", meaning popularly-elected local school boards which he fears could undermine systems of top-down authority and "accountability" imposed on schools. Examples of these top-down accountability systems include, Duncan's Race To The Top, mayoral control of the schools in Chicago, or Gov. Snyder's state takeover of schools and entire elected local governments in Michigan.

He even blames this country's legacy of public school segregation on "local control" and then asks the question: "Is School Integration Necessary?,

I'll deal with that one more in coming posts. But Patrick Dobard, who succeeded Paul Vallas as superintendent to the Recovery School District in New Orleans, takes off and runs with Cunningham's anti-local control theme. He calls local control, "the rallying cry for many folks on all sides of education debates, from Tea Party libertarians to Bernie Sanders progressives."

Funny, I haven't heard this rallying cry from either of those sides. The closest to a rallying cry I've heard is from 90-something percent of Chicagoans who come out and vote regularly for an elected school board to replace Mayor Rahm Emanuel's autocratic rule over the schools.

If that's what they mean by local control--yes, bring it on.

Dobard claims that local control is "political" (meaning elections) and overriding local parents and teachers can be justified when it produces "quality schools."

The risk, of course, is that a newly elected school board will default to many of the same practices that produced one of the most troubled school systems in America prior to 2005, rife with corruption, instability and academic stagnation.

Have the hundreds of charter school corruption and financial mismanagement stories blown right past him? Maybe watching John Oliver's charter school takedown might help him back down to earth.

But what I really take issue with is what I would call the Dobard Rationale -- that the raison d'etre for public education is efficiency or "high quality schools" outside of any political or social context. I'll credit Dobard with what appears to be, a (self?) criticism of top-down reformers.

Shortly after the 10th anniversary of Katrina, several of us started to work together on the governance question. Our goal was to avoid the mistakes of the early reform movement where change was more often done “to” people rather than “with” people. Our larger goal was to keep New Orleans on track to excellence.

But his (their) goal now seems simply to "redefine local control" so that an elected board is powerless when it comes to challenging the reformers' control over the schools.

I think Doubard's got it backwards or maybe inside-out. The road to "excellence" can only be traveled with the people. Excellence and school quality are not "larger goals," abstract entities that can be done TO people.

Democracy necessitates that public schools educate students as future participatory members of that society. Overriding participatory democracy in the name of "quality" is to deny both quality and democracy. And that principle cannot be washed away by a storm.

Lots of candidates but no real debate on school deseg

Even though I have a lot is issues with Kamala Harris, I thought she was bold in confronting frontrunner Joe Biden and calling him out during the televised debate, for his opposition to "forced" school integration back in the '70s. Actually, as he pointed out, his position hasn't changed. He is still against a federal role in enforcing the Brown Decision.

His opposition to busing and his partnership with avowed "states-rights" segregationists like Eastland and Talmadge, seemed like fair game during the debate. Thanks to Harris, Biden himself was finally forced to apologize for touting his work with the racist senators.

In fact, I was surprised that not one of the other candidates, particularly white progressives like Sanders and Warren, had Harris' back at the time. None would even dare mention Biden's name during either of the two debates. This even though the road to the nomination obviously runs through him and the DNC leadership. If you're not willing to take on Biden, what's the point of running? Unless of course, you're just a stalking horse for Biden, trying to dissipate the opposition or an unprincipled kiss-ass, hoping for a V.P. slot or cabinet appointment if Biden wins.

Such is the intimidating power of the Pelosi party leaders who are really running Biden against young insurgents like Reps Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley, rather than any of the announced primary candidates who were on stage those nights.

Pelosi, it seems, would rather lose the election to Trump than risk losing the leadership of the party to the leftists.

Then yesterday, out comes Tulsi Gabbard (who I liked before this) with a blistering attack on Harris, calling her confrontation with Biden, "a political ploy' to get attention".

Here's my tweet to Sen. Gabbard...

Questions for @TulsiGabbard (who I like)... A"political ploy"? Aren't you running for political office?

To get attention? Isn't that why you take part in televised political debates with the top dog?

What's your gain in attacking Harris, defending Biden on school deseg??? https://t.co/bLBvnIly0i

— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) July 10, 2019

Gabbard also claimed Harris has been "levying this accusation that Joe Biden is a racist — when he's clearly not — as a way to try to smear him."

But Harris never called Biden a racist. In fact, she pointedly prefaced her critical remarks by stating, "I do not believe you are a racist and I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground."

In fact, a week later Harris revealed that she has essentially the same position as Biden on deseg being a local issue.

Common ground, indeed.