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What I Told My Students About Yesterday's Attempted Trump Coup
January 8, 2021 January 8, 2021 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Compassion, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Gun Control, Guns, Hate Crimes, history, Learning, Pittsburgh, Police, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Funding, school segregation, school violence, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, student action, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Voting Rights, White Privilege	education, George Floyd, Guns in Schools, Politics, Riot, school funding, school segregation, Students, teachers, test-based accountability, Trump, Washington D.C.
The moment I had been dreading happened.
Student names started popping up on my screen waiting to be admitted into this morning's first Zoom meeting.
What was I going to say to them?
Yesterday in Washington, DC, thousands of Trump supporters charged into the Capitol Building at his urging in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying his Presidential defeat.
What would I tell my middle schoolers?
What COULD I say?
We can't offer you equitable resources. We can't stop judging you with biased standardized tests. We can't desegregate your schools. We can't protect you from gun violence. We can't even give you in-person classes because of a global pandemic the government has given up even trying to control!
And now I'm supposed to say that even the semblance of our democracy is up for grabs?
I started clicking on their names.
I only had a few moments before I had to speak.
I cleared my throat and began welcoming them, one-by-one as always.
And then it was time.
I stared at all these empty black boxes, and began.
"We've got to talk about yesterday," I said.
"Not yesterday in class. That was fine. Everyone did an outstanding job on yesterday's assignment.
"We have to talk about what happened yesterday in Washington, DC. Does anyone know what that was?"
And I waited.
Eventually I saw a few messages that individuals had their hands raised.
A few kids said that people had charged the Capitol. But that they didn't know why.
So I explained it to them.
I told them how Trump was refusing to accept the results of the election. That he had lost, but continued to challenge it in the courts. Both Republican and Democratic judges had turned him down saying that he had no proof. So Trump spoke outside of the White House yesterday telling his followers to march on the Capitol, which they did.
At this point I noticed something strange on my screen.
The rows of empty boxes had turned into windows. No more memes or messages or generic names. Most of my kids had turned on their cameras and were meeting my eyes – in some cases – for the first time.
So that's what Kelsey looks like, I thought. Wow! Marquis is really built. Is that little kid in the grey hoodie really Caulin?
I got flustered and stopped talking, but the students took up the narrative for me.
Some of them mentioned watching videos on-line of the riot. They saw a guy with horns in the President's chair?
"No, I said. "That was the Vice-President's chair in the Senate."
"Wasn't there someone at someone's desk?"
"Yes, that was Nancy Pelosi's desk," I said. "A rioter broke into her office and put his feet up. She's the Speaker of the House."
And so it went on for a few minutes. They brought up things they had seen and I either clarified or supported them.
As a whole, they were wealthy in details but poor in meaning.
Most of the white kids seemed to be taking it ironically. The black and brown kids were more quiet and subdued.
A white boy wrote in the chat that it was "Civil War 2: electric bugaloo."
I said, "Yes, you've hit on an important point. Some of these folks may have been trying to start a new Civil War."
I tried to put the event in historical context.
I told them how nothing like this had ever happened in my lifetime. That the last time people broke into the Capitol Building like this was during the War of 1812 when the British tried to force the US to become a colony again. However, that was a foreign power invading our country. Wednesday was our own citizens seeking to overturn the results of an election, trying to overwrite the will of the people.
That's when the first black student spoke up.
"Mr. Singer, why were they waving Confederate flags?"
"Yes! That's true, Jamal. Many of them DID have Confederate flags and that's really important."
Before I could say more I got a series of rapid-fire questions from the same group who had been silent up to this point.
"Why didn't the police stop them?"
"Why'd they steal stuff? I saw some guy walking away with a podium."
"Why they so mad?"
I smiled and said that these were all excellent questions.
I asked if any of them knew who George Floyd was.
No one responded.
I told them he was a black guy who was murdered by police when an officer knelt on his neck.
After that happened, there were protests by Black Lives Matter activists and others in several cities including Pittsburgh. The police showed up in riot gear. As these protestors demonstrated almost entirely peacefully – certainly more peacefully than what we saw in DC yesterday – more than 14,000 people were arrested.
"How many people do you think were arrested yesterday?" I asked.
"Didn't someone die?"
"Yes, a woman was shot in the Capitol and three others died of medical emergencies. How many people were arrested?"
"None," said a student of color who hadn't participated before.
"Why none?" I asked.
"Because they was white."
I told him that he right and wrong. Out of thousands of rioters who broke into the Capitol, thirteen people were arrested. And the reason there were only 13 was because they were white.
I told them that this whole affair needed to be investigated. That we needed to know how and why the police responded the way they did. That we needed to hold the rioters accountable. That we needed to make sure those who instigated this violence were made to pay for it, too.
"Is Trump still President?" Someone asked.
"Yes," I said. "For about two more weeks. But there are a lot of people who think he should have to step down sooner."
So we talked about how he could be removed from office. We talked about impeachment and the 25th Amendment. We even talked about how Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook – how he couldn't post or tweet but still could send a nuclear missile anywhere he wanted.
And then it quieted down.
I asked them if there was anything more they wanted to know or if there was anything else they wanted to say.
They were still.
A few cameras clicked off.
I told them that I was there if anyone needed anything, that their teachers were here if they were feeling anything and wanted someone to talk to.
And then that was it.
I made one of the most abrupt and inelegant transitions in my career and we returned to our normally scheduled lesson.
Did it help any?
I don't know, but I told them what I could. I told them the truth as I saw it.
There was a time when I would have been more reticent about it.
But the day after domestic terrorists try to steal our system of government isn't the time to hold back.
As a teacher, sometimes I feel so helpless.
There's so much I'd like to do for my students.
I want them to get the resources they need. I want to stop the unfair testing, integrate their schools, keep them safe from gun violence and control Covid-19 so we can return to the classroom.
I want to live in a country where majority rule is cherished and protected, where no one thinks the collective will should be trumped by white privilege.
But when all those things are out of reach, I still have one thing left to give.
The truth.
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Five Reasons to be Cautiously Optimistic About the Biden Presidency
November 8, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, AFT, Arne Duncan, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Healthcare, history, John King, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, NEA, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school segregation, School to Prison Pipeline, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Value Added Measures, voting	2020, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrats, Donald Trump, education, education policy, Election, Georgia, Joe Biden, Politics, President, progressive, Republicans, Senate, Stacey Abrams
Go ahead and say that aloud once.
If you're like me, it feels pretty good.
And to be honest I never expected that it would.
Sure, I voted for Joe. I gave money to the campaign. I volunteered.
But Biden was far from my first choice. In fact, looking over the field of Democrats seeking the party's nomination, he might have been my last pick.
I was a Bernie Sanders guy and probably will be until the day I die.
But damn if it doesn't feel good to say "President-elect Joe Biden!"
Before today, I would have said the best thing about Joe was that he isn't Trump. And, frankly, I think that is mainly the fact that won him the election.
It was a repudiation of Trump more than a celebration of Biden.
However, now that the dust has cleared and all the states but Georgia, Alaska and North Carolina have been called, I'm starting to have some thoughts about what a Biden administration might actually look like.
And it might not be too bad.
So here are what I see as the five main hurdles coming up for the Biden administration and why we might be cautiously optimistic about their outcomes:
1) Trump Will Fail to Successfully Challenge the Election Results
As of this writing, Biden has 290 electoral votes to Trump's 214.
Alaska will probably go to Trump and North Carolina is a bit of a toss up. Georgia will almost certainly go to Biden.
It actually doesn't really matter.
The world and the media have already accepted the results.
Biden has been elected the 46th President of the United States.
In the absence of solid evidence of massive voter fraud in multiple states – many of which are controlled by Republican governments – it is unlikely that these results can be successfully changed.
Many Republican leaders like Pat Toomey, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have already accepted this fact. Far right leaders of other countries like Boris Johnson and Benjamin Netanyahu have already congratulated Biden.
And if there were any doubt about it, the Trump administration accidentally booking a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia instead of the Four Seasons hotel – and then pretending that's what they intended all along – should put the final nail in the coffin.
You don't know Four Seasons Total Landscaping? It's a landscape gardeners located between a crematorium and a dildo shop.
That is not the work of people capable of running an effective challenge to a national election.
Yes, there are enough far right justices on the Supreme Court to pull off this Coup d'état. But I don't think even they would have the guts to do it in light of the world's acceptance of Biden, the acceptance of many in the GOP and the blatant incompetence of the Trump administration.
I admit that I could be wrong. And I certainly don't think we should underestimate these neofacists.
Trump is a cornered rat, and that is when rats are at their most dangerous.
However, I think there is good reason to think he will not be able to steal this election no matter how many tantrums he throws on the floor of the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago.
2) Control of the Senate Rests on Georgia
It appears that the election will not, by itself, change the balance of power in Congress.
The Democrats have lost seats in the House but not enough to lose a majority. They do not appear to have picked up enough seats in the Senate to rest control away from the GOP.
However, on January 5th there will be runoff elections for both U.S. Senate seats in Georgia.
Yes, you read that right – Georgia!
If Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Osoff both win, Joe Biden will have a congressional majority to actually get his policies passed.
No more Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority Leader.
No more obstruction.
It would be HUGE.
And it is incredibly positive that this is taking place in Georgia where Stacey Abrams has done an amazing job organizing grassroots efforts to turn the state blue.
We have a real chance here.
No doubt Republicans will try to throw whatever they have left to stopping the Dems in these races. But how much do they really have after being beaten nationwide?
Will momentum and an existent grassroots network be enough to flip the script for Dems?
Chances are good. It all depends on what we do in the next few months.
3) Progressives Will Not Let Neoliberals Ignore Them
A huge hurdle for the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party will be how we try to move forward together.
Biden won a huge national majority of votes – 75 million – the most any candidate ever has received.
However, a similar record was true of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and she still lost because of the electoral college.
Thankfully things are not playing out that way in 2020. But they could have very easily.
Frankly, the fact that Biden didn't beat Trump by an even greater margin is extremely troubling.
Almost half of the voting public – 71 million – support this racist, neofacist, incompetent fool. And only a slight majority oppose him.
I believe firmly that this is because of the Democrats' strategy in this campaign.
Both this year and in 2016, there was very little positive policy being offered – very little popular positive policy positions that would have directly impacted the majority of Americans.
Many folks voted for Trump out of despair. They wanted a change – any change – burn it all down if necessary.
Had Medicare For All or the Green New Deal been on the ballot, things might have gone differently – or more emphatically – our way.
But, instead, it was all about getting rid of Trump.
Thankfully, that was enough. But had the party actually offered voters something more – things that are overwhelmingly popular with everyday people but unpopular with party elites and their wealthy backers – the results could have been a landslide in Biden's favor.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke for many progressives in a New York Times interview.
She said that every candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district was reelected. Even Mike Levin, who many thought had committed political suicide by co-sponsoring the Green New Deal, kept his seat.
Supporting progressive policies did not sink anyone's campaigns. In fact, that's how insurgent Democrats have been unseating centrists across the nation.
"I've been unseating Democrats for two years," Ocasio-Cortez said. "I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That's how I got to Congress. That's how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That's how Jamaal Bowman won. That's how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns."
This is a fight for the heart and soul of the Democratic party.
We cannot continue to move to the right and expect the base – which are much further left – to continue to vote for increasingly conservative candidates.
There is already a party for that – it's the Republicans.
"I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy," she said. "And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare For All is not the enemy. This isn't even just about winning an argument. It's that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they're just setting up their own obsolescence."
We will see if the Biden administration learns these lessons or not.
I think there is good reason to be cautiously optimistic here. It is in the party's own self interest.
But only the future will tell.
4) Biden will Take Steps to Control the Coronavirus
Unlike his predecessor, Biden has been a consistent voice of sanity on the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yesterday, he tweeted:
"We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life's most precious moments — hugging a grandchild, birthdays, weddings, graduations, all the moments that matter most to us — until we get this virus under control."
And true to his word, this appears to be the first thing on his agenda.
Tomorrow he is expected to name a group of leading scientists and experts as transition advisers so his administration can get started combating the virus on inauguration day, Jan. 20, 2021.
The Coronavirus Task Force is expected to be led by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy and Dr. David Kessler, who led the Food and Drug Administration during the 1990s.
Specifically, Biden's plan calls for empowering scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help set national guidance based on evidence to stop outbreaks, work on a vaccine, testing, contact tracing and other services.
His administration would use the CDC to provide specific guidance — based on the degree of viral spread in a community — for how to open schools and businesses, when to impose restrictions on gathering sizes or when stay-at-home orders may be necessary.
He would create a national "pandemic dashboard" to share this information with the public.
He would work with every governor to make mask-wearing in public mandatory in their state – a measure that, alone, could save more than 100,000 lives.
He would make sure that everyone has access to regular, reliable, free testing.
He would hire 100,000 additional public health workers to coordinate with local organizations around the country to perform contact tracing and other health services. These people would help with everything from food insecurity and affordable housing to training school officials about when and how to make it safe to reopen buildings.
He proposes the federal government cover 100% of the cost of Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) coverage for the duration of the crisis for people who get sick from the virus. If someone loses employer-based health insurance, they would still have health insurance through this plan.
He also will push to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, expanding coverage by making more people eligible.
He'd use the Defense Production Act to increase production of masks, face shields and other personal protective equipment so that supply exceeds demand.
I don't know about you, but to me this seems a breath of fresh air. It is what the federal government should do and what it hasn't been doing under Trump.
And I see no reason why the Biden administration can't get it done.
5) Biden Can't Afford to Re-up Betsy DeVos' Education Policies
When it comes to public education, neither party has really been an ally to teachers and students.
Betsy DeVos was worse than President Obama's Education Secretaries – Arne Duncan and John King. But let's not fool ourselves that these Democratic functionaries were any good, either.
They all supported charter schools, high stakes testing, increased segregation, the school-to-prison pipeline, evaluating teachers on student test scores, targeted disinvestment to schools in poor neighborhoods serving mostly students of color, and more.
Duncan and King were competent at destroying public education while hiding behind neoliberal rhetoric. DeVos was incompetent in every conceivable way and could barely hide her glee at the prospect of destroying public education.
Since Biden's wife, Jill, was an actual teacher, he has more to lose than previous chief executives if he gets this wrong. He can't take schools for granted and he can't appear to be doubling down on the same policies of Trump and DeVos – which to be honest were mostly the same as those of Obama and Bush but on steroids.
Biden promised a public school teacher would be his next education secretary and Politico is already making predictions. The media outlet suggests ex-National Education Association (NEA) President Lily Eskelsen Garcia, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten or Stanford Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond.
Frankly, we could do much worse than any of these people. Hammond, in particular, was Obama's education policy advisor UNTIL he was elected and changed courses to the neoliberal set.
Of all the hurdles coming his way, I have the least hope Biden will overcome this one.
Pressure will be huge for him to pick another supply side hack with little actual education experience.
But who knows? The stakes are high. Jill has his ear.
We can make our voices heard, cross our fingers and hope for the best.
At a time when teachers are struggling just to have a safe environment in which to work, actual education policy is almost a distant luxury.
For the meantime, I'll give Joe a chance and remain cautiously optimistic.
The ball is in Biden's hands. He deserves the right to make a shot.
And if he misses, at least we can celebrate the end of the Muslim ban, reinstating the DREAM Act, rejoining the Paris Climate Accords, rejoining the World Health Organization and the restoration of a functioning federal government to the USA.
An Originalist Reading of Public Schools
October 17, 2020 October 17, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Antonin Scalia, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, church and state, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Election, Gun Control, Guns, Healthcare, history, immigration, Judicial Reform, Learning, literature, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, President, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Sexism, small class size, Social Justice, Students, Supreme Court, Teachers, voting	absurd, Amy Coney Barrett, Antonin Scalia, Donald Trump, education, founding fathers, freedom of speech, Gun Control, Healthcare, history, language, linguistics, originalism, Politics, public schools, Republicans, SCOTUS, Students, Supreme Court, teachers
Let's say you went to a restaurant and ordered a big ol' meat sandwich only to find nothing but straw between two pieces of bread.
"Waiter!" You say, calling over a server.
"What's wrong, Sir?"
"There's no meat in my sandwich."
"Oh, Sir?" He says smiling, examining your plate. "Here at Scalia's Bar and Grill we adhere to a strict originalist interpretation of language."
"What does that have to do with my sandwich?"
"Well, Sir, in Old English 'meat' meant any solid food, anything other than drink. As in 'A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland' (1775), Samuel Johnson noted, 'Our guides told us, that the horses could not travel all day without rest or meat.'"
"But that's not what I ordered!"
"Oh yes it is, Sir. You ordered the meat sandwich. Enjoy your fresh hay and oats."
In everyday life, you wouldn't put up with that kind of nonsense.
But for some reason, far right ideologues think it's exactly the right way to interpret the U.S. Constitution.
The meanings of words change over time.
But ignoring that fact allows disingenuous crackpots to sweep over centuries of judicial precedent in favor of what they pretend to THINK the words meant at the time the law was written.
It's not even about what the writers of the law SAID it meant. It's about what today's justices decide some hypothetical average Joe of the distant past would take certain words to mean.
The most obvious example, according to Pulitzer Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis, is District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), which reversed 200 years of precedent on gun regulations.
Before this ruling, the Second Amendment was interpreted to be referring only to service in the militia. The Militia Act of 1792 required each able-bodied male citizen to obtain a firearm ("a good musket or firelock") so he can participate in the "well regulated militia" the Amendment describes.
It was about the obligation to serve your country, not the right to own a gun. However, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia – the most infamous proponent of judicial originalism – orchestrated the majority opinion in this case changing all that. By doing a thought experiment about what words might have meant in the 1700s, he papered over two centuries of established law. He was so proud of it that he even described it as "my masterpiece."
THAT'S judicial originalism.
And now that Scalia fanboy and federal judge for not even three whole years, Amy Coney Barrett, is being rammed through Senate Confirmation Hearings, that preposterous ideology is about to have another proponent on the highest court in the land.
Just imagine if we interpreted everything like people living in the 18th Century!
Black people would lose any semblance of equal rights even being forced back into slavery.
Women couldn't get checking accounts, their own healthcare, make decisions about their own bodies, even vote (least of all hold positions on the Supreme Court).
And our public schools wouldn't even exist!
After all, there was no widespread, comprehensive system of public education in the country before John Dewey championed it in the 1930s.
Sure, Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison all spoke at length about the importance of education to a free and just democratic society.
But remember, originalists don't care about the writer's intent. They only care about what regular people would understand by the terms. And regular people wouldn't even understand the words "public" and "school" used together as a single concept at the time.
The first school that opened in what would become the United States was The Boston Latin School in 1635.
Its mission, and that of other colonial schools, was not to teach academics like math and literacy. It taught religion, family values and community spirit kind of like many parochial schools today.
Moreover, most schools were for boys only. If they deigned to teach girls at all, they taught them how to read but not write. No reason to give people a voice who weren't seen as worthy of being heard.
Academics didn't become something schools were responsible for until the mid-1800s. And even then, how they went about achieving it differed greatly from region to region of the country.
In the South, education rarely had anything to do with anything we'd call a school today. Rich families paid private tutors for their children. Everyone else was expected to work as soon as they were able.
In fact, it wasn't until the Civil War ended and the Reconstruction era began when public schooling really became a thing in the South.
And even when it did, it didn't look much like our schools of today. These were often one-room schoolhouses where a single teacher tried to educate children of various ages, grades and abilities.
Moreover, these schools weren't solely supported by taxes – if at all. These Common Schools were more like private or parochial schools of today. Parents paid tuition, provided housing for the teacher, or contributed other commodities in exchange for their children's education.
Even then, the learning students received wasn't nearly as comprehensive as our kids routinely expect in even the most under-funded urban public schools today. And special education services was non-existent. Kids with special needs were routinely left out of education altogether.
Only 31 states passed laws requiring children to go to school by 1900, and kids only went from age 8-14. It wasn't until 1918 that every state even required elementary school.
But let's not forget segregation.
It was the law of the land until Brown vs. Board in 1954, and even then it took until the late 1970s to become even moderately enforced.
Subsequent rulings have weakened school integration efforts to such a degree that today many districts are as segregated – if not even more – than they were in the 1950s.
Just imagine if Barrett gets together with the wingnut Republican majority on the court to reevaluate that ruling!
Imagine how many centuries of slow progress she could overturn by appealing to the common man – of 1776.
Imagine if she and the regressive right examined free speech cases! After all, many of these laws were written during the time of the Adams Administration's Alien and Sedition Acts which radically cracked down on free expression.
We could expect a rush to return to the mire and muck that many of our enlightenment heroes were trying to escape in the first place.
But originalists like Barrett claim only they can interpret what the language in these laws originally meant. Yet their training is in law, not literacy or antiquity. They're not linguists or historians. They don't have some shortcut to what people used to mean by these words. They're just playing with the language to make it mean what they want it to mean so they can rule however they so choose.
Even if they could figure out the original meaning of the words in these laws, that doesn't guarantee it would make sense in today's world. How, for example, do the founding fathers views on medicine have anything to do with today's healthcare system that didn't exist in the 1700s and that the founders couldn't even comprehend? How do the founders views on gun rights relate to today's firearms when they knew only of muskets and not automatic weapons?
Finally, why should we give preference to antiquated ideas over modern concepts? The laws of yesteryear may have been suited to the days in which they were written. However, if a law cannot grow to encompass the world as it exists, it has no right to continue to exist.
Judges are not supposed to overturn precedent based on lingual folderol. They're supposed to uphold the law based on logic, reason and sound judgement.
Any judge that disagrees has no place in our courts.
It's ironic that such degeneration would come from the Republican Party.
After all, the GOP platform is certainly different today than it was when Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as their first President.
They used to stand for abolitionism, immigrant rights and progressive values.
Now they're the party of plutocrat neofascist Christian fundamentalism.
If anything were to revert back to its original meaning, I wish it were the Grand Old Party, which is now neither grand, barely a party and merely old.
Trump Has COVID. What That Means For Public Schools
October 3, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Junk science, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teach for America, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, voting	coronavirus, COVID-19, disease, Donald Trump, education, pandemic, Politics, public schools, schools, virus
It had to happen eventually.
Donald Trump, the ultimate science denier, got bit in the butt by science.
He's got Coronavirus, and is in Walter Reed National Medical Center fighting for his life.
Apparently the virus isn't a hoax.
You don't catch it by testing for it.
You don't treat it with hydroxychloroquine.
It's a global pandemic, and the only way to fight something like that is with rationality and logic.
You have to wear a face mask, dumb-ass.
You have to practice social distancing.
You can't just reopen the economy and pretend that this won't cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
You can't steamroll over more than 200,000 Americans lost simply because most are elderly, poor and/or brown skinned. And they don't matter to you.
Eventually your ethos of pretending to be what a weak man thinks a strong man is evaporates into thin air.
Your entire persona is as fake as your elaborate combover.
The lady's man who has to pay for sex.
The billionaire who's broke.
The stable genius who refuses to believe the facts.
And while there is a certain poetic justice in this buffoon getting a taste of his own medicine, its ramifications for our country will be dire indeed.
With only four weeks before the election, no one can predict what the outcome will be politically.
Will he live? Will he die? Will this mean a boost for his opponent Joe Biden? Or will people wrap themselves in the flag and come to his side?
No one knows.
But one thing is undeniable – we cannot continue to live this way.
The reality tv rollercoaster must stop, its constant flood of outrages, disasters and season finale moments!
Being a public school teacher, I see its impact on education most clearly.
Long before Trump went from being a clown to a contender, policymakers tried reforming our schools with only wishful thinking and a marketing plan.
High stakes testing, charter schools, voucher plans, value added measures, Teach for America – whether proposed by Democrats or Republicans, it is all nothing but science denial wrapped in a stock portfolio.
These are the ways Wall Street has cashed in on schools pretending to be saviors while hiding the reality of their vulture capitalism.
And Trump has been no different.
Except that his instrument – billionaire heiress Betsy DeVos – made it harder to deny.
She barely even tried to pretend to be anything other than what she is – an unimaginative opportunist dead set on destroying the public in public schools.
Now that her spray tanned master has – through inaction and ineptitude – unleashed a plague upon the nation, our students are suffering worse than ever.
Many schools are shuttered from sea to shinning sea, their students forced to learn via the Internet.
Others are open part time while trying desperately to make shrinking tax revenues pay for the quantum leap in costs to even pretend to keep people safe in their buildings.
In some places, the adults don't even do that much and just try to run a full day schedule, rolling the dice as outbreaks appear at every turn.
In a few places, the virus is under control and schools function almost as normal – though the fear that one infected child could change all that sits in class with every student and teacher.
Nowhere is there uniformity.
Nowhere is there consensus.
Nowhere do we all admit the simple truth – in areas of moderate to high infection, online learning is the best that can be done to balance safety with academics.
Instead, leaders deify choice – letting us decide between these different models – without a basic understanding of citizenship, governance or economics.
That, I think, is what must change.
After all, if the virus can reach the most powerful person in the world if he doesn't take adequate precautions, it can get your kids, too.
So now that Trump is receiving an experimental antibody cocktail that would not be available to you or me to fight the disease, we can no longer pretend that personal choice is the answer to every problem.
Freedom is a wonderful thing and should be preserved as much as possible.
But your freedom ends where mine begins.
Your choice not to wear a mask in public increases the infection rate in my community. Your decision to eat in a restaurant, go to a bar or spend a weekend at an amusement park puts not just you and your family at risk, but me and mine as well.
And if you send your child to a school building in an area of moderate to high infection rates, you are increasing the likelihood that someone I care about will get sick and perhaps die.
We have both rights and responsibilities.
If you live out in the woods all by yourself, you don't need to constrain your personal freedom. You can do whatever you can get away with.
But if you live in a community – as nearly all of us do – you have to give up some of that freedom to the rest of us.
This is simple civics – something you would have known had our schools not stopped teaching it because it wasn't on the big annual standardized tests.
Just as many of us would have known about how pandemics work if we hadn't narrowed the curriculum because science doesn't count on the test, either.
When all knowledge is only instrumentally important because it will get you a certain score, none of it has value.
Science, logic, critical thinking, empathy – all lost because someone thought they could make more money by removing them.
We can't do that anymore, either.
We have to respect knowledge. We have to respect each other.
And we have to understand economics instead of being slaves to one stunted view of how they operate.
Economics is about how to best divide resources for the survival of communities. In times of scarcity, there are certain best ways and in times of abundance there are others.
However, we live in a time of abundance but continue to use the rules for scarcity. In fact, we create scarcity just to ensure an antiquated and ineffective distribution of resources.
Those with the most have refused changes that would be best for everyone including themselves. And many of us can't even think outside of the conceptions of economics we're propagandized to believe.
This has to stop, too.
A new world is possible. In fact, it is inevitable.
We will either all die on a scorched wreck of a planet that we have systematically destroyed so that a few will live longer and in more luxury than the rest.
Or we will all move forward into a new, better world together.
I know times are hard – harder than they've ever been in my lifetime.
But this is what I see in the light shinning through the crack in the maelstrom of nonsense we have been living in lately.
We can all come together and create schools that serve everyone regardless of race, religion, creed, sexuality, gender or difference. We can teach facts, thought, history, science, arts and humanities.
And armed with such tools, we can recreate society in that image.
That is the lesson of Trump's diagnosis.
You can lie and cheat and steal.
You can fool people into believing that you're not a liar and a cheat and a thief.
But eventually, the truth will catch up to you.
Politics puts blinders on us. Propaganda inculcates us. And stunted education makes it harder to see what's really there.
However, reality exists independent of our ability to recognize it.
If we stumble forward blindly for long enough, we will fall into the pit before us – irrespective of whether we recognize it is there or not.
How much better to open our eyes!
The Everyday Exhaustion of Teaching During a Global Pandemic
September 13, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Election, history, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Philosophy, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, protest, Refugees, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Student Mobility, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, voting	child safety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, exhaustion, online, online learning, police brutality, Politics, reopening schools, safe schools, teachers, teaching, tired
Teaching is one of the few things in life that is not concerned with now.
It is essentially about the future.
We put all this time and energy into helping kids learn. Why?
Not so that they'll be able to do anything today. But so that they'll be able to do things tomorrow.
Sure they may be able to read better or solve math problems, but the reason we want them to know that isn't so much about what they'll do with it as adolescents. It's how those skills will shape the people they grow up to be.
It's an investment in their future and ours.
We take a bit of today and invest it in tomorrow.
And during a global pandemic that can be especially hard.
The west is on fire. Storms are threatening our southern coasts. Police brutality is out of control and bands of neofascist thugs are given free rein to beat and murder protesters. We've separated immigrant families and put their kids in cages. The President has lied to us, disparaged our troops, bragged about breaking countless laws and the government is powerless to stop him. Our political system and social fabric is coming apart at the seams. And everyone from the average Joe to the lawmakers who represent him can't get up the gumption to take precautions against the killer virus that has already put more Americans in their graves than every war since WWII.
You look at the raging dumpster fire around you and wonder – how do we invest in the future when we aren't sure there will be one?
I've had students in my on-line class for only two days so far.
And it's been great.
They show up in record numbers smiling and ready to learn.
We talk, they tell me about their summers, and I remember how much I love teaching.
But I had to fight almost every day from June through August just so the school building wouldn't become an incubation center for COVID-19 and classes could be conducted through the Internet.
I'm not saying it was all me that did it, but I fought and worried and cajoled and wrote and begged and did everything I could think to do. And it very nearly didn't happen.
Summer is supposed to be a break after the stresses of a long school year. And 2019-20 was perhaps the most difficult year I've ever had teaching.
But 2020-21 has already promised to be much more challenging.
After all, when you have to fight just for the safety of your children and yourself as a prerequisite to everything that happens in your class, how much strength is there left for actual teaching?
My district has committed to being on-line only through September, so the fight continues month-by-month.
Where are the local newspapers that would have reported on each school district as people test positive for the virus and others are contact traced? We closed most of them and downsized the newsrooms of others to make up lost advertising revenue.
If you're not a supersized district serving millions, they only report on bed bugs, poorly trained security guards or whatever public relations statement the superintendent released today.
So we trudge on in silence just hoping to get through the day.
And what days they are!
Teaching on-line is a heck of a lot more work.
You've got to plan for just about everything. You put the assignments on Google Classroom and set up the Zoom meetings and make your handouts into PDFs and try to digitize your books and figure out how classroom policies designed around a physical space can be revised for cyber space. You answer countless questions and concerns, videotaping your lessons for those who can't be there in person. You try to make things interesting with new apps, new software, new grading systems, new approaches to the same material you've been teaching for over a decade.
And it never ends.
By the time the day is supposed to be over, the emails are still rolling in, the assignments are still being submitted, administrators are making pronouncements, and you haven't even finished all the things you have to do to get ready for tomorrow yet.
When is there time for my family? When do I have time to make dinner or check on my own child's progress in her own online experience?
What's worse is that when things go wrong, I'm afraid to bring them up for fear that some decision maker long removed from the classroom will simply shoot from the hip and end on-line instruction.
We had all summer to plan how to do this better, but we spent all that time diddling about WHETHER we should teach on-line or not. We should have just bit the bullet and worked on improving the quality of instruction instead of putting all our chips on the gambit that it wouldn't be necessary.
Now – as usual – it's all in the hands of everyday classroom teachers. We're left to just figure it out.
And we do!
Part of me really enjoys it!
I love finding new ways of doing things and seeing if they'll work out better. I'm excited about seeing how my students will react to a Bitmoji classroom or a new Kahoot or this video or not being hassled if they keep their cameras off in Zoom.
I know on-line teaching can never really hold a candle to in-person instruction. But that's not an option right now. And pretending like reality is something different than it is will do no one any good.
But just saying something positive about cyber schooling gets the technophobes coming down on you.
They're so scared that online teaching will replace real, live educators that they can't admit of any positive qualities to the new normal.
Don't get me wrong. My heart is with them. I fear that, too. But it's a war we have to wage later. Just like the election.
Biden is not great on education. Trump is worse. So we have to support Biden while we prepare to fight him in January. And that's IF we can both defeat Trump at the polls and somehow avoid a constitutional crisis if he refuses to leave the Oval Office willingly.
Everything is one fight after another. We have to win this battle before we can wage the next one.
No wonder we're so exhausted.
Everyone is worn out, but no one more so than classroom teachers.
We're caught at the crossroads of nearly every conflagration in America.
I sit here on a Sunday afternoon and my bones feel like boulders under my skin.
I sleep like a beaten boxer – all bruises under the sheets.
But I'll wake up on Monday, make myself a cup of tea and trudge back to my computer screen ready to begin again.
Because despite it all, there is a core part of me that still believes.
I still believe in the future.
I still believe in teaching.
I still believe my students are worth it.
Why Does Trump Hate COVID Testing But Love Standardized Testing?
September 7, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Eugenics, Learning, NAACP, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, private schools, privatization, Propaganda, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, small class size, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers	Betsy DeVos, charter schools, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, high stakes testing, Politics, school vouchers, standardization, standardized testing, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy, Trump
When it comes to COVID-19, Donald Trump sure hates testing.
But when it comes to public schools, his administration simply adores standardized testing.
Why the discrepancy?
Why is testing for a virus during a global pandemic bad, but giving students a multiple choice test during the chaos caused by that pandemic somehow good?
When it comes to the Coronavirus, Trump has made his position clear.
In a June 15 tweet, Trump wrote that testing "makes us look bad."
Five days later at his infamous campaign rally in Tulsa, he said he had asked his "people" to "slow the testing down, please."
At one of his White House press briefings, he said, "When you test, you create cases."
In his infamous Fox News interview with Chris Wallace, he seemed to be saying that the U.S. had just as many new cases now as it did in May. However, since there were fewer tests done in May and more are being done now, it only appears that the infection is spreading when it actually is not.
It's pure bullshit.
How would he know how many cases existed in May other than through testing?
He is simply trying to gas light the nation into believing that his abysmal job as Commander-in-Chief has nothing to do with the pandemic raging out of control on our shores.
He is trying to distract us from the fact that the US has only 4 percent of the world population but more than 25% of all COVID-19 cases. He wants us to forget that more Americans have died of COVID-19 than in any war other than WWII – 200,000 and counting.
So that, at least, is clear.
Trump hates COVID testing because – as he puts it – it makes him look bad.
So why is his administration pushing for more standardized testing in public schools as those same institutions struggle to reopen during the pandemic?
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos – everyone's favorite billionaire heiress turned public servant – sent a letter to state education leaders on Thursday saying high stakes testing probably would be required this school year.
They should not expect the Education Department to again waive federal testing requirements as it did last spring while schools were suddenly closing due to the outbreak.
The reason?
DeVos wrote:
"If we fail to assess students, it will have a lasting effect for years to come. Not only will vulnerable students fall behind, but we will be abandoning the important, bipartisan reforms of the past two decades at a critical moment."
However, this is a rather strange thing to say if you think about it.
Standardized tests are just one of many kinds of assessments students take every year. At best they represent a snapshot of how kids are doing on a given day or week.
But since students are tested all year long by their teachers, they earn end of the year marks, pass on to the next grade or are held back, graduate or not – there are a multitude of measures of student learning – measures that take in an entire year of academic progress in context.
Waiving standardized testing would not make it impossible to tell who learned what. In fact, waiving the tests in the spring did not leave teachers clueless about the students in their classes today.
We still know which students are falling behind because we interact with them, give them assignments, teacher created assessments, etc. And when it comes to vulnerability, standardized tests show us nothing unless we read between the lines.
Students from poorer households tend to score lower on standardized tests. Kids who attend schools with fewer resources and larger class sizes tend to score lower. Minority children tend to score lower.
We don't need any tests to tell us who these kids are. It's obvious! Just look at who qualifies for free or reduced meals. Look at school budgets. Look at student ethnographic data. Look at seating charts. Look at classroom grades.
We don't need standardized tests! We need resources to help these kids overcome the obstacles set before them or to remove those obstacles altogether.
Standardized testing does nothing to achieve this goal nor is there much help from the "bipartisan reforms of the past two decades."
After all, which reforms exactly do you think DeVos is referring to?
It's not hard to imagine since her letter was endorsed by far right and neoliberal organizations such as the Center for American Progress, the National Urban League, the Education Trust and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
DeVos is talking about charter and voucher schools – the same pet projects she spent her entire adult life either funding or trying to wrest funding away from public schools to fund.
In fact, she just had her ass handed to her for a third time by the federal court system for trying to siphon money to private schools that Congress explicitly earmarked for poor kids.
Congress set aside money in the CARES Act to be distributed among public and private schools based on the number of students from low-income families. However, DeVos said the funds should go to private schools BASED ON TOTAL ENROLLMENT.
Uh-uh, Betsy.
In her ruling this week, Dabney Friedrich, the U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia (and a Trump appointee) wrote:
"In enacting the education funding provisions of the CARES Act, Congress spoke with a clear voice… that cannot mean the opposite of what it says."
So why does the Trump Administration support standardized testing?
For a similar reason to why it doesn't support COVID testing.
Testing for the Coronavirus makes Trump legitimately look bad.
Testing kids with standardized assessments makes the public schools (during a pandemic or otherwise) illegitimately look bad. And that can be used as a justification to close those schools and replace them with private and charter schools.
It's not about academia or helping vulnerable children.
It's pure politics. The shock doctrine. Disaster capitalism.
This is another way the Trump administration is trying to rob the American public blind and get away with it.
When it comes to Coronavirus, there are a limited number of tests for infection. Trump is against all of them. He just wants to hide his head in the sand and pretend it will all go away.
When it comes to education, there are multiple measures of student learning. The Trump administration only champions one of them – the standardized variety.
Why? Because that is the assessment most inadequate to measure learning but it's the easiest to spin into an anti-education narrative.
After all, you can't use classroom grades or teacher-created tests to support the narrative of failing schools. Those assessments are in context and too clearly show the link between poor achievement and things like lack of resources and inequality. If kids are failing their classes, it's too obvious when schools are trying to help but stymied by a lack of resources and countless social issues. Shining a light on that will only lead to solving these very real problems.
But if we put the spotlight squarely on standardized test scores, we can spin the narrative that it is the public school system, itself, that is at fault and thus we can better sell the need for privatization in all its profit-driven forms.
That's the whole reason DeVos took this job in the first place.
And shame on Democrats like Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) who praised DeVos's testing pronouncement.
Scott, who serves as chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, said in a statement:
"There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic is having severe consequences for students' growth and achievement, particularly for our most vulnerable students. We cannot begin to address these consequences, unless we fully understand them."'
Um, we do understand them, Congressman. You don't need a multiple choice assessment to see who is failing or why. It's due to targeted disinvestment of the poor and children of color.
Murray, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate education committee, said:
"Especially when it comes to the disparities that harm so many students of color, students with disabilities and students whose families have low incomes, we've got to have data that shows us where we're falling short so we can better support those students."
How does a single test score from a corporation like Pearson show you more than a year's worth of academic assessments from a school?
Standardized tests convey ZERO to us about students falling behind or vulnerable students that we don't already know. And Murray is engaged in pure theater by framing her concern as an issue of racial justice while actual racial justice groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Black Lives Matter movement have explicitly condemned standardized testing.
An assessment system literally designed by eugenicists and pushed by segregationists is NOT a remedy to racial inequality – unless you're proposing getting rid of it.
In short, Trump and DeVos are two peas in a pod committed to avoiding accountability for themselves but determined to destroy public services like public schools based on bogus accountability measures like standardized testing.
Hopefully the American public will boot them both out on their asses in November so that rational leadership in the Department of Education and elsewhere will do what should have been done years ago – waive standardized testing for this year and every year that follows – Coronavirus or not.
America Has Failed in Every Way But One
June 1, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, antisemitism, capitalism, Civil Rights, Compassion, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Election Reform, Hate Crimes, Healthcare, history, Labor, Police, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, protest, Racism, Republican, Riot, Schools, Shooting, Social Justice, Taxation, Teachers, voting	Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, climate change, coronavirus, Donald Trump, economics, George Floyd, Gun Control, Gun Violence, lynching, pandemic, police brutality, police shootings, Politics, post truth, progressive, protest, white supremacist, white supremacy
This year has been a disaster.
We are living through a global pandemic yet have inadequate health screenings, medical equipment or a viable vaccine.
We are witness to public lynchings of black people at the hands of law enforcement yet our legal system continues to be slow to act if at all.
Our schools and hospitals are starved for resources yet police have riot gear, tear gas and army surplus tanks to patrol the streets.
Climate change causes unprecedented storms, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather yet our policymakers refuse to take any action to change it or even acknowledge it's happening.
We're experiencing record unemployment and a stalled economy yet the super rich loot and pillage recovery efforts to record profits.
White supremacists are terrorizing our communities yet we ignore it until someone is killed and refuse to see any pattern, just a series of loners unrelated and unstoppable.
Refugees with nowhere else to go seek shelter at our door and yet we respond by rounding them up like criminals, separating them from their children and caging them like animals…
Guns are unregulated. Truth is uncelebrated. Fascism rebranded.
All while America burns and the President hides in his bunker.
But he is not the only one.
Nearly every leader in America has failed to meet these challenges.
So maybe the problem isn't just our leadership but where these people come from in the first place.
Our politics is so beholden to monetary interests it cannot function for anyone else.
We are left out of the system and told that the only solution is participation in it.
We go door-to-door, organize and hold rallies for our chosen candidates. We navigate political labyrinths of red tape in an edifice labeled "Democracy" but at every turn stifled of collective voice. And sometimes we even win and see our preferred public servants inaugurated.
But every year nothing much changes.
Things get progressively worse no matter who is in office.
And we're told to clutch at changes that are not nearly adequate or which are cosmetic at best.
It's no wonder, then, that so many folks have taken to the streets to express their outrage and demand justice.
No one really wants a revolution we're told, until the streets are on fire and the riot shields and rubber bullets come out.
In frustration we burn the place down begging to be noticed, to be heard, for anything to finally happen.
And the only response is echoes of the past: "When the looting starts, the shooting starts."
America is a failed state.
We are a failure.
But there is at least one thing that gives me hope, and it is this.
There is one major way that our country and our people have not failed.
There is one way that we have surveyed the present scene and responded appropriately.
We have not lost our outrage.
When George Floyd, a black man, was murder in May by Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin who kept his knee on Floyd's neck for more than 8 minutes, we did not look away.
Nor did we forget Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, who in March was killed in Kentucky by police serving a "no knock" warrant at her apartment for criminals they already had in custody.
Nor did we forget Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man jogging near his home in February who was followed and shot to death by two white men who claimed they suspected him of committing some sort of crime.
It would be easy to become complacent about such things.
They happen every year. Every month. Nearly every day.
But we have refused to accept them.
We refuse to shrug and let this just become normal.
America is angry. She is sick and tired of being unheard and unheeded.
She is fed up with unjust systems, gas lighting leaders and political thugs.
To quote James Baldwin, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."
We are trying to face the truth.
Only time will tell whether it destroys us or we conquer it.
Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Joe Biden in the 2020 General Election
April 10, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, bloggers, capitalism, Compassion, Congress, Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Election, Election Reform, Feminism, history, immigration, Journalism, Labor, Local Control, Media, Obama, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, protest, Racism, Refugees, Republican, satire, Social Justice, Uncategorized, voter suppression, voting, Voting Rights, White Fragility	2020, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Election, Joe Biden, Politics
With Bernie Sanders dropping out of the 2020 Democratic Primary, I can think of only these 10 reasons to vote for Joe Biden in the November general election:
10) He's not Donald Trump.
9) He's not Donald Trump.
There Are No Bernie Bros, Just Diverse Supporters Being Made Into What They're Not
February 8, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Bernie Sanders, California, capitalism, Civil Rights, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, history, Journalism, Media, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, Propaganda, protest, Racism, Republican, Social Justice, voter suppression, voting, Voting Rights, Whiteness	2020, Bernie Bros, Bernie Sanders, Election, hispanics, Judaism, latinos, lgbtq, Myths, People of Color, Politics, propaganda, women
It's time to call the whole "Bernie Bros" phenomenon exactly what it is – racist, sexist, homophobic propaganda.
I don't mean that Bernie Sanders' supporters are any of those things.
I mean that the term used to lump us all together is.
There is no monolithic group of angry straight men backing the Vermont Senator's bid for the Democratic nomination for President in 2020. Nor was there in 2016.
A substantial portion of Sanders' supporters are female, racially diverse and/or LGBTQ.
Women under 45 make up a larger share of Sanders' base than do men of the same age, according to February findings from The Economist.
Moreover, women have given more money to his campaign than to any other candidate.
In November, Sanders raised about $17.1 million in itemized contributions, or 40% of his total funds from women, according to Nicole Goodkind of Fortune.
In particular, that's more than $13 million in small donations from nearly 280,000 suburban women. And he took in more than $2 million more from suburban women in large donations.
Women support him just as much as men do, "if not more," according to a Vox analysis of polling between November 2018 and March 2019.
But he's also extremely popular with people of color.
In fact, the same Vox analysis found that Sanders is more popular among people of color than among white people.
Heck! Sanders' polling numbers with black voters were double that of Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) who was also seeking the nomination before dropping out in December, according to a March Morning Consult poll – and Harris actually is a person of color.
Both The Economist's latest numbers and Univision Noticias poll found Sanders was the second choice of Latino and Hispanic voters after former front runner Joe Biden. Moreover, 39% of Latinos in California said they prefer Sanders, compared to 21% for Biden and 5% for Warren, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.
Meanwhile, he also has strong support in the LGBTQ community.
Sanders is the first-choice for 34 percent of Democratic primary voters who identify as LGBTQ, according to the latest Morning Consult poll. That's more than Elizabeth Warren at 19%, Joe Biden at 18%, Michael Bloomberg at 7%, even Pete Buttigieg at 12% – and Buttigieg is openly gay.
Sanders has a long record of supporting gay rights. In the 1980s as Burlington mayor, he proclaimed a Gay Pride Day, while during his tenure in the House, he opposed both the Defense of Marriage Act and Don't Ask, Don't Tell – a law that barred gay and lesbian military service members from proclaiming their sexual orientation. And in 2009, Sanders endorsed marriage rights for gay couples — three years before then-Vice President Biden did the same.
If that's not enough, the Sanders campaign has women and people of color in prominent leadership positions.
Two women of color, Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and San Juan, Puerto Rico Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, are co-chairs of the campaign, along with Indian-American Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Ben & Jerry's co-founder Ben Cohen. Sanders' campaign manager is longtime progressive activist Faiz Shakir.
Are all these women and minorities really Bernie Bros?
The term was coined four years ago by Atlantic writer Robinson Meyer to characterize those backing the Vermont Senator as mansplaining internet trolls – a sexist mob who refused to support Hillary Clinton because of her gender and not her neoliberal policies and anti-progressive history.
And that's really the crux of it.
The Bernie Bros phenomenon is an attempt to use identity politics to minimize the beliefs of people – to paste over their actual identities as real, live women and men, to erase the opinions of diverse people – to create a fake picture of who these people are.
But don't take my word for it. Take that of Barbara Smith, the black feminist author who coined the term "identity politics" and has thrown her support behind Sanders in 2016 and 2020:
"It was absolutely meaningful for Bernie Sanders or for anyone else to say, 'No, I'm going to step away from that white-skin privilege, I'm going to interrogate what is going on here around race. And then I'm going to do what most people never do: I'm going to actually put my body on the line and take a stand and work with those whose oppression we are committed to ending,' That's what Bernie Sanders did."
Bernie's opponents are trying to weaponize the language of civil rights activism against that very same movement.
To dismiss his supporters as "Bernie Bros" is just not true.
It is merely tone policing – an attempt to silence passionate political advocacy because it is too loud, too enthusiastic and – frankly – too nonwhite, lower class and ideologically progressive.
To be sure there are some belligerent Bernie supporters out there – just as there are for every candidate running.
But to suggest that Bernie's supporters are somehow more ill-tempered, rude or unwilling to compromise is to display your own prejudices.
Clinton is not even running for anything in 2020, yet she misses no opportunity to attack Sanders as unliked and has even said she would not support him if he won the nomination. She repeatedly criticizes him as unsupportive once she locked up the party's nomination in 2016, yet Sanders relentlessly campaigned for her in the last two months before the election – appearing at 39 rallies in 13 states on her behalf.
In fact, her supporters tried a similar bit of propaganda back in 2008 when she was running against Barack Obama where Clinton supporter Rebecca Traister ran an article in Salon entitled, "Hey, Obama boys: Back off already!"
This is just more establishment propaganda meant to divide progressive voters who actually care about social justice issues so that the big money candidates can more easily get the party's nomination.
It is insinuation, libel and slander. It is racist, sexist and anti-LGBTQ.
And though most of the remaining Democratic candidates are white, Bernie is also a minority. He's Jewish.
Their carping on his irritating voice and mannerisms border on the anti-Semitic.
But no one talks about that – least of all Bernie who is too busy talking about policies that would benefit us all – often in a Jewish Brooklyn accent.
Moderates complain that regardless of the primary, in the general election we must vote blue no matter who. It is imperative we end the Trump presidency in any way possible.
Erasing the voices of the most energetic and committed constituency in the election is not the way to accomplish this.
A significant share of Sanders supporters — myself included — consider Warren their second choice, and if she wins the party's nomination, would cast a ballot for her with little to no hesitation. And this despite her own foray into bogus accusations of sexism against Sanders that backfired actually increasing his support among women and minorities.
Sanders' supporters willingness to consider other nominees besides their top choice will probably depend to a large degree on the fairness with which the primary is conducted.
As we saw in Iowa, the Democratic Party has not committed itself to ensuring this goal.
If anything is likely to derail a Democratic victory in 2020, it is that partisanship and incompetence.
If we want any chance at uniting behind a common candidate – Sanders or otherwise – we need to stop deleting our strongest allies under such a false characterization.
Let the people decide who they want to represent them against Trump.
And when they support Sanders, respect that decision without degrading them behind a prejudicial and politically convenient lie.
Like this post? I've written a book, "Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform," now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!
Trump Administration's "Junk Food Loophole" is Symptomatic of School Privatization
January 22, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Obama, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, President, privatization, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, School Lunches, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers	charter schools, Donald Trump, education, Healthy, junk food loophole, Michelle Obama, nutrition, Politics, Privatize, public schools, School Lunches, standardized testing, Students, teachers
Who wants children to eat more junk food?
Apparently the Trump administration does.
This seemed to be the Department of Agriculture's concern when it announced plans last week to further reduce regulations for healthy meals at the nation's public schools.
The Department's new scheme would change the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 to include what critics call a "junk food loophole" in meals offered at public schools – usually breakfasts and lunches.
Currently, sweets and fried foods are allowed only once in a while as part of a balanced meal. But this new proposal would permit them to be offered every day.
Students could substitute healthy choices like fruits for things like blueberry muffins and replace green vegetables with French fries.
Source: The National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity.
The media rushed to characterize the changes as an attack on Michelle Obama who championed the original legislation during her husband, Barack's, administration. And – heck – maybe they're right seeing as the Trump administration made the proposal on Mrs. Obama's birthday.
But one needn't guess at political motivations behind the move when it so obviously fits the pattern of school privatization – a way of conceptualizing education supported by both the Obama's and Trump.
Let me be clear. School cafeterias generally are not privatized. They're usually run by local school districts. However, the insistence that such programs turn a profit and make decisions based on sales rather than nutrition are symptomatic of the privatization mindset.
We didn't always require everything to bring in money. We used to see things like education and journalism as public goods and absolved them from the need to generate financial gain.
But that seems like a long time ago.
The current administration's claim that it's rolling back restrictions to stop food waste and help public schools increase lunch profits is a case in point.
If profit is king, that's all that matters. Who cares whether kids are getting better nutrition or not? What matters is the bottom line.
School lunches are not an opportunity to teach kids better eating habits. They are a financial transaction to enrich district budgets at the expense of the children enrolled there.
If children as young as 5 can't make that decision on their own – well, caveat emptor.
The same goes with things like charter schools and high stakes standardized tests. It doesn't matter if these things are better or worse for children. It matters whether they make money.
The invisible hand of the market is our pedagogue in chief.
It turns out that these things are rarely – if ever – in the best interests of children. Charter schools increase the likelihood of fiscal mismanagement, school segregation, prejudicial discipline policies, cherry picking which students to enroll – all while reducing transparency and fiscal accountability. Meanwhile, high stakes testing produces assessments that more clearly illuminate parental wealth than student learning – all while creating captive markets for testing, publishing and software companies.
The "junk food loophole" is just more of the same.
The administration contends that fewer middle and upper class kids are buying lunches at school when the choices are healthier. Meanwhile, among the 30 million students who depend on free and low-cost school lunches that are subsidized by the federal government, they say more are simply throwing away healthy foods than eating them.
The administration maintains that more food would be sold and less thrown out if children were given the choice to buy more cheeseburgers and fries than carrots and yogurt.
There certainly is anecdotal evidence to support this. Kids do seem to like junk food. As a middle school teacher, I've seen far too many kids bring Flaming Hot Cheetos and energy drinks for breakfast than take a free box of cereal, juice or even a piece of breakfast pizza.
And the number of kids who throw away fresh fruit because they're forced to put it on their tray is heartbreaking.
However, we tend to focus on the negative and miss the positive.
This idea that kids don't choose healthy foods actually flies in the face of the Department of Agriculture's own research on the effects of the Obama-era rules. In its 2019 "School Nutrition and Meal Cost Study," the department found no significant changes in the amount of food waste since the healthier rules were put in place, and also found that the healthier choices led to more kids participating in school meal programs.
The study also found scores for the Healthy Eating Index (which measures the quality of the diet) shot up drastically from 49.6 in 2009-2010 to 71.3 in 2014-2015.
So there is evidence that the program is actually increasing students' healthy eating.
If we valued what's best for children, we would continue – and maybe even strengthen – the legislation.
However, this newest proposal to weaken the law is the second time in three years that the federal government has undercut this policy.
In 2018, the Department started allowing schools to stop offering foods lower in sodium and higher in whole-grains.
That decision is being challenged in court by a coalition of six states and Washington, DC, on the grounds that it endangers student health.
If this second set of rollbacks are implemented, they too may be challenged in court.
Unfortunately the problem isn't limited to mealtimes.
This is indicative of the school privatization mindset.
We must stop allowing the profit principle to function as the arbiter of sound academic policy.
Reducing regulations requiring healthy foods in schools is a bad idea. But so are charter schools, high stakes testing, Common Core, runaway ed tech and a host of other market-based school policies.
We can't continue to ignore what's best for children in the name of rampant consumerism.
The purpose of school is to teach children – not to exploit them as a captive market for financial gain.
The Most Important Education Articles (By Me) That You Probably Missed in 2020
Outrunning the Pandemic – Racing Through Gadfly's Top 10 Stories of 2020
Kids Are NOT Falling Behind. They Are Surviving a Pandemic
Will PA Schools Ask Parents to Oversee CDT Testing at Home?
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Make Tons of Money Doing a Terrible Job – Start a Cyber Charter School
African Immigrants Excel Academically. Why Don't African Americans?
I Can't Shield My Daughter From Both Coronavirus AND Edmentum - Our District's Crappy On-line Learning Platform
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White People Need to Stop Snickering at Black Names
Who is Responsible for Student Achievement?
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28 May, 2019 by James Prustman
What to Know Before Attending an MDL Hearing
Several times a year, the United States Judicial Panel on multi-district Litigation meets to determine whether cases spanning several jurisdictions should be consolidated to one federal district for pretrial proceedings. But there are a lot of unknowns for people who have never attended an MDL hearing. For example, did you know that attorneys making oral arguments at the hearing are limited to just two minutes – a very hard time frame to make a valuable point in.
Once the person making the argument has reached the 90-second mark, they are flashed a yellow light alerting them that they have just 30 seconds remaining to make their final remarks. Once their 30 seconds of fame is up, they get the red light which means they must stop talking unless the judges continue with questioning.
Non-MDL goers might be surprised to learn that the Judicial Panel has a sense of humor and at times can be down-right hilarious, making the long hearing more bearable for those in attendance.
Understanding MDLs and Why They Are Important
Multi-district litigation (MDL) is a procedure utilized in the federal court system to transfer all pending civil cases of a similar type filed throughout the United States to one federal judge. The decision whether cases should be transferred is made by a panel of seven federal judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The Judicial Panel on multi-district litigation, known informally as the MDL Panel, was created by an Act of Congress in 1968 – 28 U.S.C. §1407.
Over the past 30-plus years, MDL filings have increased. Congress passed the Class Action Fairness Act in 2005 (CAFA) and as a result, class action suits with national economic implications and involving numerous plaintiffs and defendants from multiple states became more easily removable to federal court. This has been advantageous for both the plaintiffs' and the defense bar for different reasons, but one commonality is that Section 1407 centralization creates huge savings and efficiencies of scale for all attorneys in litigating national cases.
The Panel's work plays an increasingly important role in the distribution and reduction of the judicial workload. Their primary job is:
Determine whether civil actions pending in different federal districts involve one or more common questions of fact such that the actions should be transferred to one federal district for coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings.
Select the judge or judges and court assigned to conduct such proceedings. The purposes of this transfer or "centralization" process are to avoid duplication of discovery, to prevent inconsistent pretrial rulings, and to conserve the resources of the parties, their counsel and the judiciary.
Who's Who of the Panel
The MDL Panel consists of seven sitting federal judges, who are appointed to serve on the Panel by the Chief Justice of the United States. The multi-district litigation statute provides that no two Panel members may be from the same federal judicial circuit.
MDL Resources
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2019 MDL Dates and Locations
May 30 – New Orleans, LA
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September 26 – Los Angeles, CA
December 5 – Austin, TX
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


"Allina Health Hospice has also been known as ConnectCare Hospice, and prior to that, we were founded by Hutchinson Area Health Care as a Volunteer Hospice program in the 1980's. We have great pride in our heritage as the hospice created by Hutchinson Area Health Care; having served our community members for 35 years. Our passion is to enable quality of life, comfort, and dignity to our friends, our relatives and our community neighbors when families are experiencing the closing days, weeks, and months in the journey of a loved one's life.
We were extremely grateful for the donation and the support of the Hutchinson Health Care Foundation and the entire Hutchinson Community, which helps further strengthen our hospice program. The donation from the Share N' Care dinner will help to fund our hospice bereavement program. Allina provides bereavement services to families and caregivers for thirteen months following the death of the hospice patient, with no fee charged for these services. The bereaved person has the option of individual and on-going bereavement visits with a grief counselor, attending a grief support group, and receiving mailings about grief. Some bereaved choose to receive all support services offered. The grief counselor can also assist with finding additional bereavement services offered in the community.
In addition, all donations to Allina Health Hospice also fund our Massage Therapy program, our Music Therapy program and our Aroma Therapy program for hospice patients. Depending on the needs of the patient, these integrative therapies are offered to help relieve pain or discomfort, stress or anxiety, shortness of breath, feelings of loneliness or isolation, nausea, restlessness, or other types of discomfort that might be experienced at end-of-life. These therapies are not covered by insurance but are provided with the goal of comfort.
Our community truly benefits from donations such as this, as it enables our hospice program to provide services which are not reimbursed by insurance and we wouldn't otherwise be able to provide to the patients and families we serve. In 2018, Allina Health Hospice provided 341 Massage Therapy visits and 222 Music Therapy visits to our patients in the Hutchinson area. Our Aroma Therapy program is expanding, and we are now able to offer Aroma Therapy patches, inhalers and oils to hospice patients to provide symptom management and quality of life.


THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL, SPARKLING, PURPLE/PINK ALL NATURAL, NO TREATMENT OF ANY KIND, SAPPHIRE FROM MONTANA. IT WAS MINED FROM THE ELDORADO BAR SAPPHIRE DEPOSIT. WITH THIS GEMS RARE COLOR AND LUSTER IT WILL MAKE A DAZZLING CENTER STONE OR ACCENT STONE.


text:
var mongoose = require('mongoose');
var Schema = mongoose.Schema;
var bcrypt = require('bcrypt');

var userSchema = new Schema({
    username: { type: String, unique: true, required: true },
    password: { type: String, required: true }
});

/**
 * Verify that the cleartext password successfully compares to the stored hashed password
 */
userSchema.methods.verifyPassword = function(password, cb) {
    bcrypt.compare(password, this.password, function(err, isMatch) {
        if (err) return cb(err);
        cb(null, isMatch);
    });
}

/**
 * Sanitize sensitive data from the user object.
 */
userSchema.methods.sanitize = function() {
    var clone = this.toObject();
    delete clone.password;
    return clone;
}

/**
 * Handle some special cases before saving the user object
 */
userSchema.pre('save', function(next) {
    var user = this;

    // hash password only if it has been modified
    if(!user.isModified('password')) {
        return next();
    }

    // generate a salt
    bcrypt.genSalt(10, function(err, salt) {
        if (err) return next(err);

        // hash the password using  salt
        bcrypt.hash(user.password, salt, function(err, hash) {
            if (err) return next(err);

            // overwrite the password with the hashed one
            user.password = hash;
            next();
        });
    });
});

// Create user model
module.exports = mongoose.model('User', userSchema);

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
El Districte de Teltow-Fläming (en alemany: Landkreis Teltow-Fläming) és un Landkreis (districte) situat al sud de l'estat federal de Brandenburg (Alemanya). La capital del districte recau sobre la ciutat de Luckenwalde.

Geografia
Els municipis veïns són: per l'est els del districte de Dahme-Spreewald, al sud amb els del districte de Elbe-Elster, a l'oest amb els del districte de Potsdam-Mittelmark i del districte de Wittenberg i al nord amb l'àrea metropolitana de Berlín.

Composició del Districte

¹per Amt Dahme/Mark Municipis

Referències

Enllaços externs
 Pàgina Web Oficial del Landkreis Teltow-Fläming
 Regió Històrica Teltow-Fläming
 Voltants del Mellensee

Districtes de Brandenburg

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


We have all the information you need about public and private plastic surgery clinics that provide arm lift in Oxford Circus. Compare all the plastic surgeons and contact the arm lift clinic in Oxford Circus that's right for you.
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Just over 10 weeks I had a breast reduction and some lipo suction with Jan Stanek and I am thrilled and delighted by the results. Thank you, Mr. Stanek. I am so grateful for everything. I couldn't recommend Jan Stanek and his wonderful team more highly. Mr. Stanek immediately put me at my ease and I had complete confidence in him. He listened to what I hoped could be achieved and advised me accordingly. His staff are very discreet and supportive and Frances, his nurse gave me such wonderful post op care and advice. The hospital staff were also extremely attentive. Mr. Stanek is a complete gentleman and a brilliant surgeon. I had negligible bruising (and what I did have disappeared within a few days) and minimal scars which have already started to fade. I probably still have some swelling as I have been told it can take up to 6-12 months to completely disappear, but I am already over the moon with my new shape and so glad Mr. Stanek was my surgeon.
At New Look Cosmetic Surgery we have over 25+ years of experience in cosmetic and plastic surgery. Our clinics are based in London and Manchester. We are able to selectively work in the best clinics in the UK, enabling us to ensure the best care for our clients from your consultation, through to surgery and after care. Our Head of Surgery and Medical Director Mr Borghini specialism is in Plastic Cosmetic and Reconstructive Surgery and he has performed more than 8000 surgical procedures. We understand at New Look that making a decision regarding cosmetic surgery is not a little decision. Our team will work with you along your journey to ensure all your questions are answered and that the right choice is made for you.
Abdominoplasty I can't stress enough how lovely, caring and professional everyone at this hospital is. I had an abdominoplasty 4 days ago and I was very nervous about it all since I never had surgery or general anaesthesia before in my life. The surgeon was incredibly helpful and professional, always explaining everything step by step with a smile in his face to successfully put me at ease. Dr. Marcelino did a great job and I'm incredibly grateful to him and the staff at the Hospital, well I have no words. Just thanks a million for making my stay a wonderful time, I'm contemplating more procedures just to see them all again! (kidding).


If you think this sculpture is just for pretty blooms, think again.
To display your sparkliest jewelry.
To illuminate the dinner table.
To store fresh fruit and veggies.
To organize your out-of-control lipstick collection.
To keep your office supplies in order.


We have just sent you an email with a link to download the requested content.
One of our main objectives is to make learning fun. As children, we all learned by playing. However, as we got older, we gradually got rid of this ability to enjoy learning.
We think that we learn most efficiently when having fun, and we want to recover this way of learning at companies worldwide.


Every year I feel like my kids' school shopping lists get longer and longer. This year, my daughter's list includes everything from dry erase markers to five reams of copy paper. My son's? He's going into fifth grade, but apparently he needs several 16 gigabyte memory sticks and, somewhat inexplicably, small, pointed-tip scissors. I shudder to think why those are required. Being on a budget, I need to get the most bang for my buck. I also like to buy extra when I can, so I found essential back to school items from Amazon for $5 or less so I can provide however and whatever I can.
The cost of sending your children even to public schools can be overwhelming for families. Between supplies, school clothes, shoes, and backpacks, it's easy to spend hundreds of dollars on each child at the beginning of the year. I live in Brooklyn, New York, and even though we're over a month out from the start of school, I've already spent over $120 per child in preparation for school. It's a huge financial burden for many, but thankfully Amazon has lots of essential school supplies priced at or below the $5 mark, making things a bit easier to swallow.
If your child is anything like mine, they will need about one gajillion of these during the school year, both at home and at school. They lose the caps, they use too much glue, they think everything is better with confetti glued to it — no matter the reason, these seem to disappear.
Do they need both sticks and liquid? Of course. You can't make those raindrop pictures with the glue sticks, nor will they work for gluing together popsicle sticks. For that, you'll need the good stuff.
My daughter needs two four-packs of these. Not the most environmentally friendly school supply, but very useful. These can get really pricey, so take advantage of the sale.
I think I should just buy three or four of these packs; my daughter has a sharpening obsession. I don't know why, but she just loves a super sharp pencil, and that means she goes through them pretty fast.
I have to buy 15 of these. Yes, you read that right — 15 between two children. Thank all the sweet heavens that these are on sale. They're also good for journaling and as budget notebooks.
This four-pack of metric/imperial rulers are semi-flexible and ready to be shoved into backpacks and used as a straight edge for making fortune tellers and paper airplanes. They're brightly colored and see through, making lining things up a breeze.
While Trapper Keepers are no longer the binder of choice (sad face), kids still need tabs, and these are easy to write on and bright.
36 dual ended colored pencils with a sharpener for under $4? That's a pretty sweet deal. Imagine all the coloring books your kid could go through with these — the options are nearly endless. My little is going to love these.
These seem ridiculous, but they don't break as easily as regular crayons. This particular set is also scented, but it's the twisting that makes it worth your while.
The NYC Department of Education asks for plastic folders specifically. Unfortunately, they're pricey, and while you can sometimes find them at a discount, it's not often. These are almost $3/folder, but I will tell you that they do last more than one year, and stickers do stick to them, so your kids can decorate.
I know what you're thinking. "$4 for paper?" It sounds high, but look how much you get. It's $4 for 200 pages, not the 50 pages normally sold at the office supply store. You're getting a lot more paper for the price.
These are finely tipped, so your kids won't go highlighter bananas, highlighting everything everywhere, and they also have a nice nib and feel good in your hands. At around $4 for six, they're a major steal.
These work the best and last the longest. They also smell heavenly to me, but I think that's a personal thing. My daughter's lasted all last year and there's still half of an eraser in her art drawer.
Just buy a dozen of these now. It's inevitable you'll have to soon.


SOULJOURNS - RITCHIE LUBNER, IT'S ALL ABOUT LOVE...A MUST SEE INTERVIEW!
This is an astonishing interview for several reasons. Ritchie, a man in his 40s from Australia via South Africa, only came to Sri Sathya Sai Baba a mere six months before this interview was recorded on December 14, 2012.
Weeks ago Ritchie was told by a friend who had zero connections with Souljourns that he would be interviewed by Souljourns, an amazing story all by itself. Suffice to say that as a professional tennis player, a man of the world, a gifted teacher in his own right, Ritchie's world suddenly came tumbling down. At 3 o'clock in the morning half a year ago Ritchie pleaded to the Universe to send him help. That moment was the beginning of Ritchie's new walk with Sai Baba. His story is a must for all who are new to Baba as well as for all long time devotees.
Welcome to Souljourns. This interview was recorded across the street from Prasanthi Nilayam, Dec. 14, 2012.