How to Win the Nation’s Highest Minimum Wage

Click here to read the article on the Left Chapter.

It took more than two years of hard work and relentless campaigning for LA’s tourism workers to win $30 an hour. Here’s how they did it.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Tourism workers in Southern California just won a historic battle for the highest minimum wage in the nation—a perfect counterpoint to the Republican-led tax bill that rewards billionaires at the expense of low-income Medicaid recipients. The union-backed campaign is a powerful lesson in creative, proactive, and long-term mobilizing for economic justice.

Southern California’s tourism industry has been salivating at the prospect of an influx of visitors during the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics, both of which Los Angeles will host. Why shouldn’t low-wage workers exploit the opportunity as well?

In April 2023, unions, faith groups, and advocacy organizations formed into a coalition called Tourism Workers Rising and cleverly labeled their demand for an “Olympic/Paralympic wage.” They proposed that the Los Angeles City Council pass an ordinance raising the minimum wage for all workers in the tourism industry to $30 an hour. This includes airport workers and workers at all hotels with more than 60 rooms.

Reverend Jennifer Gutierrez, an elder in the United Methodist Church and the executive director of CLUE (Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice), who worked closely with campaign organizers, explained that “some of the more conservative council members requested a study to see how this [$30 an hour minimum wage] would affect the economy in the area, and of course a study came back saying it would be good for the economy.”

Gutierrez was referencing an economic impact study commissioned by the City Council, which found that a wage hike would be good for the local economy and benefit individual workers, small businesses, and local government. The study concluded that the “estimated 23,000 workers directly and indirectly impacted by the proposed increases are expected to spend a large portion of their new earnings stimulating the local economy by purchasing goods and other services.”

Two unions, Unite HERE Local 11, which represents hotel and hospitality workers, and SEIU USWW, whose members work at the Los Angeles International Airport as janitors, security guards, and other workers, joined forces to win the measure. “Any time unions can collaborate together, it makes a big impact,” said Gutierrez.

The coalition used social media to showcase how workers struggle to pay their bills on time in an economy where the cost of living continues to rise while wages stagnate. “I need to pay my electric bill on time,” said Maria Romero, an airport worker and member of SEIU-USWW, in an Instagram post shared by Tourism Workers Rising. Maria Gonzales, an airline catering worker, said she needs higher wages just to be able to pay rent on time. Laura Banuet, an airport worker, maintained that “we need a raise to have a dignified living wage.”

The fight took place at the intersection of economic and racial justice, with Los Angeles Council member Curren Price estimating that “nearly 9 out [of] 10 tourism workers are people of color.” The multiracial campaign, reflecting the city’s racially diverse populations, was relentless in pushing and cajoling members of the City Council to vote yes on the ordinance when it came up for a vote in May 2025. Coalition partners recorded social media messages urging council members to vote in favor of the measure, marched and protested in the streets on May Day, and mobilized outside City Hall while a council committee deliberated the ordinance.

In a letter to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the president of FIFA, Unite HERE Local 11 leaders urged them to support the fight for a higher minimum wage, and called out the hypocrisy of global institutions that claim their massive sporting events are good for the economy. Signatories pointed out that “Both FIFA and the IOC have committed themselves to promoting sustainable economic development and humanitarian values… Yet to date, actors like the IOC, LA28, and FIFA have done far too little to ensure that our communities will actually benefit.”

More than two years after launching the campaign, on May 14, 2025, workers testified to the LA City Council about the need for an “Olympic wage” ahead of a full vote on the ordinance. Councilors passed the vote 12 to 3, and, according to the Los Angeles Times, this “translates to a 48 percent hike in the minimum wage for hotel employees over three years. Airport workers would see a 56 percent increase.”

There was no recourse for the City Council, no good reasoning to hinge a “no” vote on, and nowhere to hide from the hundreds of people who gathered regularly to hold them accountable. While local politicians faced tremendous pressure from the hotel and tourism industry, they had to contend with 25 months of grassroots campaigning, fueled by the wrath of workers and their allies. Ultimately, they gave in to the greater pressure—a reminder that political organizing is well-summarized by the adage, “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.”

But moneyed interests will not back down. Hotel chains are enraged at the ordinance and have threatened to withdraw from agreements to offer blocks of rooms at discounts during the 2028 Olympics. Mark Beccaria of Hotel Angeleno told a local channel KTLA, “Common sense says you cannot raise wages over 30 percent in less than a year when revenue is flat.” What he didn’t add is that when revenues spike, shareholders generally pocket the profits—this is by design—rather than voluntarily giving workers increased wages.

If profitable years for hotels translated into higher wages for workers, there would be no worker struggles to pay rent or electric bills. Common sense is precisely what workers are driven by when their unions campaign for higher wages.

Local business leaders are also urging the council, ahead of a final vote, to hold off on the wage increase because of the federal government’s tariffs championed by President Donald Trump. And while it’s true that tariffs have impacted Los Angeles’s local economy, that’s not the fault of tourism workers. Why should workers pay the price of Trump’s tariff-related damage?

The Tourism Workers Rising campaign offers an “Organizing 101” course on how to effect change. The dynamics between politicians and their constituents is one of push and pull, of requests, gratitude, public pressure, and uncompromising demands. And, although $30 an hour is the nation’s highest minimum wage, “it is still not enough for a family to live on in Los Angeles,” said Gutierrez. “It is not a living wage. One job should be enough, and it’s still not enough.” For as long as there is predatory capitalism, there needs to be worker pushback.

Click here to read the article on the Left Chapter.

Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly subscriber-funded television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her books include Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible (Seven Stories Press, 2025) and Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and was a senior editor at Yes! Magazine covering race and economy. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Photo Credit: outinthetrenches, via Flickr

Trump’s Global Tariffs Are Meant for China

Click here to read the article on Asia Times.

The latest tariff blitz has China in the crosshairs. Building on earlier efforts by previous administrations, Trump’s abrasiveness risks weakening Washington’s hand.

Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” on April 2, 2025, marked the formal launch of sweeping global tariffs, capping months of escalatory announcements since returning to office. Amplifying the economic nationalism of his first term, it marks the culmination of Trump’s decades-old advocacy for raising tariffs and reviving American industry.

His latest push builds on more than two decades of previous presidential efforts to recalibrate trade, in a far more aggressive form. Influenced by Project 2025’s chapter on fair trade by longtime adviser Peter Navarro, it calls for rapid, uncompromising trade action to reduce deficits, lower debt, and reshore manufacturing. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has similarly framed tariffs as part of a larger economic realignment to restore U.S. industrial and economic dominance.

Though rarely stated outright, Trump aims to break the dominance of China’s export-led economic model, with the understanding that there will be some consequences for the U.S. economy. While his strategy builds on former efforts to reshape trade, the public’s understanding of Trump’s agenda and impression of its execution enjoys only modest domestic support. The gamble carries the risks of global economic destabilization, blowback from allies, and handing China even more power on the global stage.

Protectionism, Free Trade, and Resurgent Skepticism

From 1798 to 1913, tariffs covered 50 percent to 90 percent of income and shielded American industry from foreign competitors. After World War II, however, the U.S. aimed to rebuild allied economies and draw them away from communism by opening its consumer, industrial, and capital markets. Trade deficits emerged by the 1970s, but abandoning the gold standard in 1971 let the U.S. print dollars more easily and sustain the imbalance.

The Cold War’s end in the early 1990s left the U.S. confident it could continue steering global trade on its own terms. It pushed for global tariff cuts and free trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), while U.S. corporations helped build up foreign manufacturing, particularly in China, which benefited from preferential trade terms under its most-favored-nation trade status. American consumers absorbed global overproduction, and corporate profits soared, but many American workers were increasingly left behind.

These policies added to the anti-globalization movements of the late 1990s, most visibly at the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) summit in Seattle, prompting a rethink of trade policy. Domestic industries like steel had collapsed under cheap imports, and former President George W. Bush briefly imposed steel tariffs in 2002 before the WTO struck them down. The 2008 financial crisis brought bipartisan calls for economic restructuring, with the Obama administration pledging to reshore manufacturing jobs. Obama later distanced himself from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a free trade agreement—a move echoed by Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign.

Trump’s first-term trade agenda broke from the previous caution. Favoring unilateral action, he withdrew from the TPP in 2017, clashed with the WTO, and renegotiated NAFTA. He then imposed tariffs on key trade partners, especially China. By then, the cost of offshoring had become clear. With U.S. corporate assistance, China had gained capital and technology expertise to become the “world’s factory.” Low-tariff access to the U.S. market gave Beijing a $300 billion surplus over America in 2024, and it emerged as the world’s top exporter and creditor.

President Biden struck a less confrontational tone upon assuming office in January 2021, yet he similarly raised tariffs on China. Like China, the EU and Japan had established large trade surpluses with the U.S., an issue he sought to address, but geopolitical unity with the U.S. on the global stage tempered criticism. Despite lowering tariffs on Europe, Biden nonetheless passed the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS and Science Act, both criticized by the EU as protectionist.

Trump’s second-term focus has again hit allies, yet the attention remains squarely on China, with individual tariffs on other countries being paused on April 9, while tariffs on Beijing have increased. Aside from direct exports, Washington also seeks to target China’s role in global trade. Biden’s push to “nearshore” manufacturing to countries like Mexico exposed the limits of decoupling, as Chinese companies quickly established themselves in new Mexican industrial parks.

Many imports shipped to the U.S. from other countries also contain Chinese components, meaning Trump’s 10 percent “baseline” tariff hike on all imports is meant to counteract other countries serving as conduits for Chinese goods.

In Project 2025, Peter Navarro emphasized the role of non-tariff barriers, like strict safety standards, customs delays, and local content requirements, in obstructing U.S. exports. The U.S. uses these, too, and in early February 2025, Trump cited fentanyl smuggling as justification for raising tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada.

Even if a more conventional president follows, Trump’s tariff hikes and resulting supply chain rerouting may prove difficult to undo. Critics question whether this transition can be fast, affordable, or effective, but the COVID-19 pandemic proved supply chains can reorient under pressure relatively quickly, just as China showed its agility by setting up operations in Mexico during the 2020s.

Internal Risks

A tariff war will nonetheless raise prices for consumers and businesses, ending the era of cheap global goods that the U.S. economy has depended on for decades. Countries maintained friendly ties to keep consumer market access and reinvested U.S. dollars into American stocks, bonds, and real estate. Uncertainty over Trump’s policies saw a fake tweet about tariffs on April 7 trigger multi-trillion-dollar swings. Prolonged stock volatility or declines would reduce pensions, household wealth, and corporate valuations.

Some argue that if the stock markets crash, money could flow into and lower the price of U.S. treasuries, reducing their prices and allowing the government to refinance long-term bonds with cheaper debt. However, many traditional U.S. debt holders may demand concessions before continuing to finance it. Treasury yields have already risen, making new debt more expensive, and China, the second-largest holder of U.S. debt, is suspected of shedding bonds to help do so.

China has also retaliated by raising its own tariffs and recently halting exports of rare earths and critical minerals essential for modern technologies. Its state-backed firms can flood global markets with cheap goods and advanced tech, squeezing out competitors. With a growing presence in international institutions and trade blocs, Beijing could increasingly shape global economic norms if these institutions and agreements become more fluid and the U.S. steps back.

Trump also wants to devalue the dollar to make U.S. exports more competitive, but insists on keeping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which eases access to cheap debt. His approach is undermining global confidence in the dollar, even if no clear alternative has emerged yet. Trump’s pressure on a resistant Federal Reserve to cut interest rates further reflects limited borrowing options and coordination in U.S. financial policy as he embarks on major economic upheaval.

Democrats have largely avoided serious condemnation of Trump’s policies, recognizing it may be a losing political strategy. Still, some top members like Chuck Schumer and Gavin Newsom have marked early opposition, along with seven GOP senators who recently voted against Trump’s Trade Review Act.

Trump’s policies have some support from the U.S. business class, which once saw China as a promising market but now sees it as a rival. No longer limited to cheap goods, Chinese companies like Temu, Shein, and BYD increasingly threaten giants like Amazon and Tesla. Any success in bringing manufacturing back will mostly come through automation instead of high-paying jobs, benefiting major U.S. corporations. Still, decades of cooperation with China means that these businesses remain exposed, with major corporate figures expressing public concern and Elon Musk publicly criticizing Peter Navarro’s role in the tariff push.

Trump has, in turn, framed tariffs not only as leverage over trading partners but also as a source of revenue to offset other taxes. His 2024 campaign called for cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, down from 21 percent, already lowered from 35 percent during his first term. However, the promised economic boom was not evident before COVID-19 hit, and his suggestion of replacing personal income tax with tariff revenue is also unlikely to generate enough funds to do so, even in an optimistic scenario.

And while the U.S. needs to expand production for both domestic use and exports, current capacity falls far short. Tariffs might push companies and consumers toward new habits, but blanket protection without government initiatives in infrastructure development, skills training, and research and development risks doing more harm than good, and leaves the private sector to act with little guidance.

Compared to Trump’s unpredictable approach, China and the EU have positioned themselves as stable anchors of the global economy. U.S. calls to coordinate with major economic allies like the EU and Japan to limit dealings with China, including reducing Chinese imports and preventing its companies from establishing themselves, risk falling on deaf ears as tariffs have strained ties.

Global Risks

Reducing access to U.S. consumers also threatens a major pillar of global economic stability. The U.S. accounted for roughly 13 percent of global import consumption in 2023, acting as a safety valve for global overproduction by absorbing excess goods.

China, facing a property crisis, high youth unemployment, and mounting local government debt, has pledged to “vigorously boost domestic consumption,” according to the People’s Daily, to help replace American consumers. But its $300 billion trade surplus with the U.S. exemplifies its reliance and more limited leverage for retaliation. The EU has signaled it will not tolerate a flood of Chinese goods, as it, like the U.S., increasingly finds itself competing with China in high-end products.

The EU and Canada have similarly raised tariffs on the U.S. The Trump administration has tested EU unity by courting globalization-skeptic allies like Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, though tensions are likely to deepen before they ease. Europe’s struggle to sustain support for Ukraine against Russia has shown the perils of deindustrialization, a trend the U.S. now seeks to radically reverse ahead of others. And, by targeting allies with tariffs too, the U.S. ensures that any self-inflicted economic pain is matched abroad, making the cost of reshaping trade a shared burden.

Forcing a global trade war—an escalating Canada-China tariff clash in 2025 is one encouraging sign—is likely to further weaken China’s export-led model. As the U.S. signals a reduced role in safeguarding global maritime trade, already strained by disruptions like Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and rising piracy, geopolitical tensions could disrupt other key routes. Without U.S. intervention, free trade will face rising shipping and insurance costs.

Trump frequently changed tactics in his first term, mixing threats with negotiations. If his tariff strategy falters, voices like Kent Lassman’s in Project 2025, calling for a return to free trade, may gain traction. But Trump has been warning of trade imbalances since the 1980s, when Japan and West Germany were his main targets. He seems determined to make reversing it central to his legacy, this time focusing on China.

Scrapping the old, in his view, unreformable system, and embracing whatever follows is based on the belief that the U.S. is best positioned to shape the new system. The question now is which countries will support that shift or be forced to. Whether a complete globalization teardown occurs or not, he appears ready to push as hard as possible within constraints. As evidenced by much of MAGA’s merchandise still being made in China, dismantling Beijing’s advantages in global trade will not be easy.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Click here to read the article on Asia Times.

Photo Credit: The White House, via Wikimedia Commons

Are Community Schools the Positive Disruptor Public Education Needs?

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

Trust in public schools has eroded, but community schools in La Crosse, Wisconsin, may show how it can be restored.

It’s important for people to know they can trust schools,” Jenna Fernholz told The Progressive during a call over Zoom in early March. “That’s a hard thing in this time and in this administration. But there are people on the ground who are really working hard for our families and our kids.”

When Fernholz, a school principal in La Crosse, Wisconsin, talks about “people on the ground,” she undoubtedly includes herself and her colleagues at Hamilton Elementary School. The administration she referred to is, of course, the presidential administration of Donald Trump, which has accused K-12 public schools of “radical indoctrination” and has proposed redirecting government money for public schools to privately operated alternatives.

Although surveys have found that a vast majority of parents throughout the country trust public school teachers, evidence suggests that the public’s trust in the nation’s public education system is being eroded by years of culture-war attacks on schools and an oft-repeated narrative that public schools are failed institutions filled with educators who are lying to parents to cover up that failure.

But for Fernholz, trust isn’t just a sentiment—it’s essential for the success of the difficult work of school improvement. Her school is implementing an approach to improvement commonly referred to as community schools.

The community schools approach looks different depending on location, but the basic idea is that schools should serve as local hubs not only for education services, but also meet the broader needs of students and families such as physical and mental health, housing, transportation, after-school care, and neighborhood improvement. To provide these services, schools partner with local organizations, including nonprofits and businesses. And students, parents, community members, and school staff help to determine school policies and activities, such as curriculum offerings and sports programs.

Fernholz knew Hamilton was a community school when she became principal in 2022, but she wasn’t certain about what that designation entailed. “I kind of felt like all schools were community schools, because they’re in a neighborhood,” she recalled. “But I didn’t fully realize how the model works and how impactful the approach is.”

“In my previous school, we did things like food drives and handed out free clothing, like we do at Hamilton. But the community schools approach requires us to dive in deeper, to look for what is at the root of the academic and social-emotional problems our kids are having, and what we need to do to help address those problems,” Fernholz said.

Fernholz knew, for instance, that Hamilton serves generally low-income families—nearly 85 percent are considered economically disadvantaged—and has an unusually high percentage of students, nearly one in three, with disabilities. But she was surprised to learn how many of her students and their family members struggle with mental health, and how challenging it can be for some Hamilton students just to get to school.

“We want students to learn to read and do math,” Fernholz said. “But there is a whole other side we have to tackle first in order for them to be ready to learn.”

Fernholz and her colleagues wouldn’t have learned any of this about their school’s community if Hamilton students and families didn’t trust them enough to speak up.

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Bluesky @jeffbinnc.

Photo Credit: Mariquitas CK via Wikimedia Commons

States Are Doing a Terrible Job Enforcing Laws Meant to Protect Farmed Animals

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Lack of law enforcement leads to needless suffering for sentient beings.

By Reynard Loki

Farmed animals in the United States have minimal legal protections, and much of the abuse they endure is legal. Unfortunately, the federal Animal Welfare Act—which establishes protections for pets and nonhuman animals used for exhibition (like in zoos) and research—does not apply to farmed animals. Moreover, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a poorly conceived regulatory framework regarding animal rights and the enforcement of the few protections that exist for animals raised and slaughtered for human consumption.

“The failure of regulatory oversight in the U.S. slaughter industry is actually multifold, negatively affecting workers, animals, and the environment (including the communities that live near slaughterhouses),” wrote Delcianna J. Winders, an associate professor of law and director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute Vermont Law and Graduate School, and Elan Abrell, the vice president of community planning and partnerships at the Phoenix Zones Initiative, in 2021 for the Health and Human Rights Journal.

Most state anti-cruelty laws also exempt farmed animals or allow standard practices that are patently cruel. No federal law in the United States explicitly regulates the treatment of animals on farms, except for the small percentage raised organically.

“Cattle are subject to many unique forms of legal bodily exploitation,” wrote Katalina Hadfield, former editor-in-chief of Ecology Law Quarterly, in 2022. “Perhaps the most well-known form of exploitation is, of course, the slaughter of cattle to produce beef. Another common endeavor is to forcibly impregnate cows and collect their milk for processing and distribution. Cattle are also routinely branded, sometimes on the face, for humans to lay legal claims to their bodies. Cattle are subject to agitation, mutilation, and general discomfort in rodeos across the United States. Nearly all these practices are completely legal—and sometimes encouraged—in U.S. law.”

Even more concerning are the claims—some made by former USDA employees—that animal welfare officials purposely ignore breaches in animal welfare regulations in favor of business interests. In 2021, National Geographic reported that former USDA employees said, “inspectors were discouraged from documenting poor welfare,” revealing “a pattern of federal officials’ failure to act on potential welfare violations.”

While federal protection for farmed animals is largely nonexistent, the few instances of protection that do exist are on the state level. Since the turn of the 21st century, several states have enacted measures to improve the welfare of farmed animals. These laws are often the result of public concern, and in many cases, they are reflected in citizen-initiated ballot measures.

Factory Farms: Cruelty to Animals on a Massive Scale

Cows, pigs, and chickens—the most common animals in factory farms—are intelligent, emotional, and curious. They experience the same basic emotions as we do: joy, happiness, sadness, loneliness, and fear. But despite being sentient beings, they are treated like mere property on farms where they are raised and killed for human consumption.

Factory farms do not provide environments where animals can express natural behaviors, leading to frustration and psychological distress. They are forced to endure various forms of abuse and poor living conditions, including being kept in confined, unsanitary, manure-filled spaces with little or no room to move. This leads to stress, injuries, and infection, and animals are often given antibiotics to stave off the spread of diseases caused by these poor conditions.

To prevent animals from harming one another in crowded and stressful conditions, practices like debeaking, tail docking, and dehorning are performed without anesthesia. On top of this, workers often use rough and violent methods to move animals, causing further pain and injury.

According to a 2011 study published in the Journal of Dairy Science, 52 percent of farmers agreed that disbudding led to prolonged pain, “but pain management was rare” during the procedure.

Along with being selectively bred for productivity, animals are often given hormones and other drugs to promote rapid growth, which can cause health issues like chronic pain and lameness. Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rBST), a synthetic bovine growth hormone, may cause “an increased risk of adverse reproductive effects, clinical mastitis, foot and leg problems, injection-site reactions, and udder edema,” writes John B. Gaughan, an associate professor in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability at the University of Queensland, in “Metabolic challenge: How does it affect welfare?” a chapter in the 2018 book Advances in Cattle Welfare.

However, many of these animals do not receive adequate medical attention when sick or injured, leading to prolonged suffering. After a life of continual distress, they must also endure stressful and sometimes long-distance transportation, followed by a traumatic death.

Widespread abusive practices in factory farms raise significant ethical concerns and have led to calls for more humane treatment and better welfare standards for farmed animals.

The Challenge of Passing Animal Welfare Laws

Passing legislation to protect the welfare of animals trapped in our food system is not easy. In the United States, it is incredibly challenging due to several key factors.

Economic Interests

The agricultural industry plays a significant role in the U.S. economy. In 2023, agriculture, food, and related industries added about $1.53 trillion to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), making up 5.6 percent of the total GDP. Of this amount, the output from U.S. farms contributed $203.5 billion, representing around 0.7 percent of the GDP. Large agribusinesses have substantial financial interests in maintaining current practices, as implementing stricter animal welfare laws can increase costs and reduce profitability.

However, as a 2022 Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences policy brief states, “Improving animal welfare can lead to improved profitability for farmers through, for example, higher prices for more in-demand products or higher production from healthier animals. … can imply healthier animals and that veterinary costs and the work of treating sick animals are thereby reduced… [and] can make production smoother, which in itself also has a positive impact on the farm’s financial outcome.”

Lobbying Power

Agribusinesses and industry groups wield considerable influence in politics through lobbying. They spend substantial amounts of money on lobbying efforts to sway lawmakers and resist regulations that could negatively impact their operations.

Between 2019 and 2023, “agribusiness interests spent a huge sum of money—$523 million—lobbying Congress,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of a May 2024 report about corporate lobbying on the Food and Farm Bill. “In just the last five years, the agribusiness sector’s annual lobbying expenditures have risen 22 percent, from $145 million in 2019 to $177 million in 2023. And each year, agribusiness spends more on federal lobbying than the oil and gas industry and the defense sector,” stated the report.

Lack of Public Awareness and Pressure on Lawmakers

A 2024 study by the NSF, a nonprofit testing agency that establishes and enforces food sanitation and safety standards, found that many consumers are worried about the treatment of animals in the food industry and where animal products come from. According to the study, 67 percent of U.S. respondents said animal welfare is “very or extremely important in purchasing decisions.” Additionally, 68 percent of consumers value companies that follow animal welfare standards throughout their global supply chains and are transparent about it. These concerns are important since meat consumption in the U.S., by some estimates, is expected to rise through at least 2032.

However, while there is a fair amount of public awareness about the horrific conditions in which factory-farmed animals are raised, it does not necessarily result in public pressure on lawmakers to enact animal welfare laws. 

Legal and Regulatory Framework

The USDA oversees most aspects of animal agriculture and is mandated to promote and regulate agricultural production. However, it prioritizes productivity over animal welfare.

“Undercover investigations by animal protection organizations in the early 2000s exposed mistreatment of chickens and turkeys in some of the nation’s largest poultry slaughter establishments,” according to an extensive AWI report released in December 2023, “The Welfare of Birds at Slaughter in the United States.”

The group reported, “The USDA responded by issuing a Notice in September 2005, reminding the poultry industry that birds ‘must be handled in a manner that is consistent with good commercial practices [GCP], which means they should be treated humanely.’ Shortly thereafter, the USDA began issuing records to plants observed violating GCP. However, no additional regulations were written. As a result, compliance with GCP remains effectively voluntary; in most cases, USDA inspection personnel do not take enforcement action for violations, even when intentional abuse is involved.”

Unsurprisingly, the department’s strategic plan for fiscal years 2022-2026 contains no mention of animal welfare.

Political Climate

Animal welfare issues can be polarizing, and achieving consensus on new protections in a politically divided climate can be difficult. Some lawmakers may fear backlash from constituents or industry groups if they support stricter animal welfare laws.

These factors create a complex environment in which economic, cultural, and political considerations make the passage of comprehensive laws to protect farmed animals difficult at the federal and state levels, especially since many do not view them as sentient individuals but merely as property or a means of making a profit.

Sadly, passing new farmed animal protection laws—which have only been done at the state level in the last 45 years—doesn’t necessarily improve the lives of nonhuman animals. Proper enforcement of these laws is necessary to ensure they are afforded the necessary protections. Moreover, how these laws are drafted—including the specific powers given to a state agency and the instructions for that agency to carry out investigations and prosecutions—has an enormous impact on their efficacy.

We must ensure that these hard-won protections are maintained during implementation.

State-Level Farm Animal Protection Laws and Lack of Enforcement

State laws protecting farmed animals can be grouped into three main categories. Firstly, some laws set minimum standards for the care of animals on farms (such as providing food, water, shelter, and veterinary care). These laws usually grant the state authority to investigate complaints made by citizens or other agencies and differ from state cruelty laws, which often offer limited protection for farmed animals.

Secondly, laws prohibit specific conventional industry practices (such as keeping pregnant sows in small crates or housing egg-laying hens in battery cages). Thirdly,  laws prohibit the sale of products based on these practices.

A report published in July 2024 by the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), a nonprofit animal advocacy organization, documents how state-level farmed animal welfare laws are minimally enforced, even though such laws are meant to improve the lives of the 10 billion farmed animals raised and killed in the U.S. each year.

As of February 2023, 44 farm animal protection laws were in place in 18 states. AWI surveyed each state to determine whether and to what degree the provisions of those laws and regulations were being enforced.

To conduct this research, AWI submitted public records requests for documents related to all enforcement activities between September 2019 and February 2023. In response, AWI received records indicating some level of enforcement for only 12 of the laws in 10 states.

Similar to what AWI documented in its 2020 report—the first-ever comprehensive analysis of the enforcement of farmed animal protections by states—the 2024 report also showed that minimum animal care standards overall had the most evidence of consistent enforcement. Ohio, New Jersey, and Indiana supplied the most extensive evidence of enforcement.

In Ohio, for instance, the state’s agriculture department investigates complaints and enforces the rules, including levying fines or seeking injunctions through the court. State records show that during the survey period, the department conducted more than 100 investigations—the most of any state—and fined multiple producers, including one penalty totaling $15,000.

Lack of Enforcement of Laws

Several states have established animal protection laws but have yet to enforce them actively. For example, at the legislature’s direction, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture adopted farmed animal care standards in 2014 (which included a prohibition on veal calf crates after 2018). Yet, the department provided AWI with no enforcement records.

In Nevada, the legislature passed a law in 2021 to “phase out battery cages and the in-state sale of eggs from caged hens.” At the time of the survey, eggs produced or sold in the state must have come from hens afforded at least one square foot of space each (with the full cage-free requirement effective January 2024), a minor yet remarkable and welcome achievement. Animal activists are right to scoff at such a paltry improvement in the lives of imprisoned hens. But seen against the long arc of nonhuman rights, it demonstrates a willingness by lawmakers—and presumably the voters they represent—to move toward more space, and thus, more personal freedom, for hens.

Yet a records officer from the Nevada Department of Agriculture informed AWI that—contrary to a legislative directive—the department leaves it up to retailers to ensure compliance. This approach to enforcement is certainly not the way to ensure that the law is being followed.

In Massachusetts, there is a ban on the sale of certain animal products where they are confined in a way that “prevent [them] from lying down, standing up, fully extending [their] limbs, or turning around freely.” The department responsible for compliance with these requirements doesn’t need to conduct routine assessments but is only required to ensure “complaint-based enforcement,” according to the AWI report.

In Oregon, there is a requirement to ensure cage-free housing for hens regardless of whether the eggs are procured from within the state or outside, but there is minimal enforcement of the compliance of these housing standards. Equally problematic is Washington’s enforcement mechanism for its battery-cage egg sales ban, which only requires distributors to attest that they understand compliance is required without needing proof.

Out of the 30 state laws or regulations banning a specific industry practice, AWI received enforcement records for only two: Ohio’s tail docking ban and Colorado’s hen housing standards. One possible reason for this lack of enforcement is that most laws do not have any “mechanism” to check compliance proactively.

“[S]ince AWI’s [2020] survey, new farmed animal protection laws and regulations have taken effect in six states, but there has not been a dramatic increase in the overall enforcement of such laws,” said Adrienne Craig, senior policy associate and staff attorney for AWI’s farmed animal program, in the July 2024 report prepared by her.

The most significant changes included sales bans in states like California and Massachusetts on animal products derived from animals confined in spaces that did not meet minimum size requirements. However, these laws have faced lengthy legal challenges, delaying implementation and enforcement. It should also be noted that while they may avoid the torture of extreme confinement, these animals will nevertheless continue to endure physical and emotional pain and suffering.

“Legislation establishing any standards for the care of animals or related to the sale of specific products must include a clear enforcement mechanism that requires the appropriate state agency to proactively ensure compliance, as well as the obligation to investigate complaints and follow up on violations,” said Craig.

Important Factors to Ensure More Ethical Food Practices

Lawmakers must consider many elements when drafting the most effective farmed animal protection laws.

Legislation establishing minimum standards for livestock care must include language clearly providing a mechanism for complaints and an obligation for the appropriate state agency to investigate and follow up. Severe violations—such as failure to seek veterinary care for injuries or causing an animal to become emaciated—need to be prosecuted and not merely left to the agency’s discretion.

The agency responsible should be required to periodically review minimum care standards to ensure they reflect the latest animal welfare science.

For sale bans, legislative bodies should direct a single responsible agency to require producers and distributors to prove compliance through on-farm inspections, which a competent third-party certifier can perform.

Fines need to be established to penalize noncompliance, and the penalties must be high enough to discourage violations rather than allow producers and retailers to treat them merely as the cost of doing business.

“We can and must reduce the vast amount of avoidable suffering that animals raised for consumption endure,” said Craig. “Lawmakers, as representatives of the people who elect them, should do what they can to ensure their communities’ ethical and moral standards are reflected in the laws and in their robust enforcement.”

It takes all of us—as consumers and voters—to play an active role. An excellent first step is knowing how the food on your dinner plate arrives there. A significant next step is to find out who your elected officials are so you can determine precisely where they stand on animal protection laws and start a conversation about how they can improve them. Across the globe, cities are launching healthy eating campaigns based on plant-based diets, and for many good reasons, vegan diets are on the rise worldwide. Plant-based alternatives not only prevent animal cruelty but are better for the environment.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life.

Reynard Loki is a co-founder of the Observatory, where he is the environment and animal rights editor. He is also a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute, where he serves as the editor of Earth | Food | Life.

Photo Credit: Scattare61 / Wikimedia Commons

How Republics Succeed, Falter, and Fail

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.


The United States today faces inherent challenges that have weakened the republic, making lessons from the Roman Republic even more necessary to avoid greater political instability.

The U.S. enjoys many strengths that give it an edge over other republics, such as a decentralized and innovative economy that draws global talent and unmatched military strength. Yet the Roman Republic, which had its own comparative advantages, ultimately fell to autocratic rule, and the U.S. faces a similar fate if it fails to protect institutional integrity and unchecked power continues to grow.

Reform is crucial to the continuity of republican governance, yet history shows it is often compromised by entrenched power. Political dysfunction and the growing influence of corporate interests threaten to undermine the foundational principles of the U.S., posing a risk to its long-term stability.

From its inception, the United States has struggled to address its internal contradictions in ensuring fair treatment for its inhabitants. Autocratic tendencies also emerged early, with second President John Adams’s Alien and Sedition Acts targeting political dissent, immigrants, and free speech. Abraham Lincoln later expanded executive power during the Civil War, bypassing Congress to preserve the Union and abolish slavery, the most contentious and significant political question since the country’s founding. Despite such departures from Constitutional procedure—sometimes for good reasons—the system’s checks and balances ultimately resisted later executive overreach, like FDR’s failed Court-Packing plan.

Individual political challenges to republican systems are concerning, but the erosion of republican culture also leads to irreversible shifts in the political framework. Political bribery, unchecked imperialism, and government serving corporate interests over citizens combine to steadily capture the system. A select group of actors has crafted a continuous, increasingly scripted cultural-political spectacle, contributing to civic decline. As a result, the public has reduced active participation in governance in exchange for the passive right to cheer or criticize from the sidelines.

The fall of the Roman Republic, which endured for centuries before giving way to tyrants and emperors, offers useful context—lessons on not only what values to uphold but also on how reform attempts can backfire. Half-hearted efforts to fix inequality and instability often strained the system, pushing it closer to dysfunction and leading it to autocracy. Understanding Republican Rome’s successes and failures offers lessons for addressing today’s challenges.

A balanced republican political system encourages elites to compromise, build consensus, and compete for public approval, qualities the early Roman Republic struggled to develop after its establishment in 509 BC.

The Senate, dominated by the patrician aristocracy, functioned as an advisory body in theory, but in practice, it exercised significant control over finances, foreign policy, and much of the legislative process. Nonetheless, there was strong competition among patrician families for the two annual consulship positions. These roles, filled through the cursus honorum (course of honor), ensured that two capable leaders rose to the position in an established hierarchy, and shared short-term executive authority, limiting any concentration of power.

Consuls often entered the Senate or assumed other political positions after their terms, where they could be prosecuted for misconduct. This rotation and accountability meant leaders’ interests lay in the smooth running of the state, rather than amassing personal prestige for their role or for past glories.

The design of Roman statues also supported this culture, celebrating the civic virtue of individuals over personal achievements. Statues portrayed aging and imperfections, in deliberate contrast to the idealized perfection of Greek art. The Republic also barred actors from government, viewing their imitation of life as deceptive and unworthy of public office.

Like other effective republican city-states, Republican Rome thrived on political engagement, though participation was uneven. The Republic’s seasonal political process, shaped by agricultural cycles, military campaigns, and religious festivals, advantaged wealthy landowners who could afford to leave their estates for politics, perpetuating uneven and inconsistent efforts to address problems. Political advancement in turn often hinged on military successes, making military campaigns common and sometimes pursued for personal ambition rather than strategic necessity.

Yet this seasonal structure still created predictable opportunities for many citizens to travel to Rome to participate in political affairs, ensuring concentrated and focused decision-making during key periods. It also provided ways to reduce the power imbalance between the patricians and plebeians, or commoners. The Conflict of the Orders (5th to 3rd centuries BC) brought about significant gains for plebeians. Mass strikes disrupted Rome’s economy and soldiers refused to fight, forcing reforms such as the creation of another legislative assembly, the Concilium Plebis, alongside the Comita Tributa.

Additionally, after 451 BC, legal safeguards via the Twelve Tables and the establishment of the Tribunes of the Plebs—two annually elected magistrates with executive power to protect plebeian interests—were also won.

During the 4th century BC, plebeians gained greater social mobility, including the right to intermarry with patricians, opening access to the consulship, Senate, and positions of religious authority. After 338 BC, the Latin Rights extended certain privileges to non-Roman communities in Italy, such as intermarriage and participation in commerce. While full citizenship came gradually, these measures integrated new populations while preserving the identity of Roman citizens.

Despite the Republic’s growing wealth and territories, inequality remained rife. Plebeians were the backbone of the army and bore the brunt of imperial expansion but reaped few rewards. Longer military service in support of campaigns left them unable to tend to their farms, indebting many. Patricians often capitalized on this by purchasing their lands, while the use of enslaved labor from conquests diminished plebeians’ bargaining power as essential workers. Many moved to Rome, swelling the urban poor.

Earlier republics, including Rome, had periodically erased debts and eased slavery to reset economic balances, but such measures waned in the Late Republic. Expansion also strained governance, as new territories were home to communities who had fewer rights than Roman citizens and paid heavily in taxes, further exposing the Republic’s systemic inequities.

Policies aimed at addressing inequality often ended up exacerbating it. The Lex Claudia (218 BC), for instance, barred senators and their sons from owning large commercial ships to prevent them from dominating Rome’s expanding maritime trade. But this mostly benefited wealthy plebeians and other elites who could afford their own fleets, widening economic disparities.

Richer plebeians also disproportionately benefited from privileges like access to higher office, enabling only some to join the senatorial elite. Meanwhile, the equestrian order emerged as a distinct wealthy class rooted in Rome’s cavalry. Though largely lacking formal political power, members enjoyed elevated benefits and economic strength that deepened Rome’s social stratification.

Many new elites became populist reformers, or populares (“for the people”) who were opposed to the senatorial elite, known as optimates (“best men”). Distinctions between the two groups were not always strict—the populares included both new aristocratic elites and sidelined senatorial factions seeking to reclaim influence lost to dominant optimates. The motivations of populares-aligned politicians ranged from genuine reform to self-serving opportunism, and they used plebeian support to shift the power dynamic in their favor. Alliances were fluid, showing how Roman politics often prioritized status and influence over rigid ideology.

Elite infighting further motivated the plebeians to demand greater equality by leveraging their numbers and citizenship powers. Political gridlock became more frequent, and violence escalated. Prominent pro-plebeian leaders like Tiberius Gracchus (133 BC), Gaius Gracchus (121 BC), and Publius Clodius Pulcher (52 BC) were assassinated, alongside many of their supporters. In this way, Roman politics devolved into a zero-sum struggle where the defeated often faced death.

The use of violence and intimidation to damage plebeian interests, coupled with ongoing inequality, made them more inclined to break with political customs and precedents when it suited their cause. Power was increasingly extended in executive positions, with populares-aligned Gaius Marius holding seven consulships, and citizen soldiers showing increasing loyalty to individual commanders rather than the state.

Marius’s eventual defeat by patrician-allied Lucius Cornelius Sulla led to a dramatic overcorrection. During his dictatorship (82–79 BC), Sulla’s constitution aimed to curb instability by empowering the old aristocracy and Senate, severely weakening the tribunes, and restricting the powers of citizenship.

The emboldened aristocracy did little to address underlying economic inequality. Ambitious figures like Pompey, through military power, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, through immense wealth, exploited these tensions to consolidate power and play kingmaker. Sulla’s reforms ultimately collapsed under Julius Caesar, whose plebeian-friendly policies bypassed the Senate by leveraging popular assemblies, exposing the new fragility of Rome’s legal system.

The growing glorification of individual leaders reached a turning point when Caesar became the first living Roman to appear on a coin, a stark departure from tradition. After being declared dictator for life, his assassination by senators angered the public and triggered a power struggle and civil war. This ultimately led to the rise of Caesar’s adopted heir, Octavian, who centralized authority in 27 BC and later became known as Augustus.

A facade of republican governance was maintained, but many Romans, associating it with chaos and instability, willingly traded their political rights to escape oligarchic rule, violence, and uncertainty. When rumors spread of Octavian relinquishing his special powers, public sentiment opposed the idea. With the establishment of the Roman Empire, an urban proletariat dependent on state-sponsored food distribution and entertained by spectacles like gladiator games became increasingly pacified under the strategy of “bread and circuses,” solidifying the new order.

A reshuffling of the nobility, suppression of opposition, and unchecked territorial expansion fueled instability in Republican Rome. However, persistent inequality remained the Republic’s core weakness for its 500-year existence, coupled with flawed attempts to address it.

These pose lessons for the U.S. today. Inequality remains a core challenge in the U.S. Once marked by strong social mobility, at least for white residents, it has declined since the 1940s, initially due to the end of the post-war boom but now reflecting deeper systemic flaws. Compared to the EU, U.S. social welfare lags, while policies like corporate bailouts underscore how citizens bear the debt burden while large corporations profit from government intervention and lucrative contracts. A culture of consumerism encourages U.S. citizens to take on debt, mirroring the problems of the Roman Republic, instead of building a more efficient economic system.

Though there are notable similarities between Republican Rome’s challenges and those faced by the U.S., the latter faces its own unique set of issues. In Rome, the wealthy were directly involved in political life, using their influence to shape decisions. In contrast, U.S. elites exert control through representatives, who, while not typically from the uppermost of the wealthy social classes, are incentivized to serve their interests. This indirect control reduces the accountability of the elite, as their influence is masked by the modern U.S. political structure and hidden from public view. Though corrupt or inefficient politicians can be removed or prosecuted, those truly pulling the strings remain largely untouched, allowing the pay-to-play political system to continue unabated.

Rome’s political processes grew opaque and less respected, a trend increasingly seen in contested U.S. elections in recent decades. While skepticism arose among Democrats after George W. Bush’s controversial victory in 2000 and Trump’s 2016 win, these doubts remained within institutional boundaries. However, election denial escalated dramatically with Trump’s response to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and the ensuing 2021 insurrection marked a major challenge to the peaceful transfer of power and trust in electoral integrity.

Restoring trust in the process requires clear rules on voting, role assignment, and transparency in procedures. Laws crafted through open processes rather than private deals are crucial, allowing citizens to view the electoral process and governance as fair, smooth, and rooted in mutual understanding.

However, the dangers of unrelenting public political engagement have become more pronounced. Modern technology enables 24/7 politicization, and constant campaigning distracts from governance and risks citizen burnout. Public apathy allows organized elites to dominate politics, and, according to legal scholar Ganesh Sitaraman, expanding the electorate can even amplify factional power since only well-resourced groups can effectively mobilize and strategize.

The U.S. judiciary remains distinct in its reliance on common law, a system shared by a few English-speaking countries, allowing adaptability through evolving precedents as new cases are brought forward. The use of juries places foundational responsibility on citizens’ moral and legal judgment, ensuring public participation. However, this system is increasingly vulnerable to politicization, as judicial appointments and voting processes for judges and other judicial/law enforcement positions risk undermining impartiality and fairness.

The Founding Fathers meanwhile opposed political parties, fearing factionalism would fracture national unity. Today, the two major parties and their supporters increasingly treat politics as a sports rivalry, prioritizing spectacle over policy debate. Both parties leverage entertainment for engagement—Ronald Reagan became the first actor-president in 1981, followed by entertainer Trump in 2017, while Democrats have consistently relied on the power of celebrity to attract voters. This reliance on high-profile public figures allows citizens to disengage, as these amplified individuals are granted tacit approval to shape policy—even when they lack the expertise to do so—reducing the public’s role in democratic governance to passive spectatorship.

Violent rhetoric undermines the culture of compromise essential to republics. While Trump is commonly associated with this trend in the U.S. (and remains its most persistent voice), Democrats have also contributed. Political violence, once largely directed at major figures in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, now increasingly threatens local officials as well.

Comments about the existential danger posed by political opponents have been consistently undercut by post-election embraces. President Obama welcomed Trump to the White House after the latter’s election victory in 2016, just as Biden did in 2024, while Trump also softened his tone toward them after victories. These radical shifts in messaging reveal the performative nature of politicians’ language and weaken the credibility of political discourse.

A healthy republic resorts to war as a last option, relying on public support and deliberation. Yet although Congress holds the constitutional authority to declare war, it has not done so since 1941. Instead, executive war powers have expanded through the abuse of emergency provisions, sidelining public influence in decisions of war and peace. Numerous presidents have labeled major recent wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan as mistakes, eroding trust in leadership to responsibly conduct war.

The Trump administration now faces the challenge of addressing immigration and undocumented populations. Past policies like Reagan’s Amnesty Bill and Obama’s executive action for so-called Dreamers caused friction and had far-reaching political consequences. Immigration was a central issue in the 2024 election, with Trump likely to enjoy strong support for a crackdown on undocumented people.

Solutions, however, must go beyond piecemeal fixes or mass deportations, which risk violating human rights and republican ideals. Similarly, less draconian approaches, such as those pursued under Biden, also fail to resolve the core issues of immigration reform and enforcement. Rome offers a cautionary tale: patricians and plebeians showed rare unity in the Late Republic when they united against Gracchus after he pledged to extend citizenship rights to other populations. The issue demonstrates the need to widen responsibility. The U.S. economy benefits from labor tied to undocumented populations, and the root causes of migration, including decades of U.S. intervention in Latin America, must also be acknowledged.

The U.S. was originally founded as a republican league of states but quickly recognized the need for national unity to ensure defense and economic unity. Over time, the growing centralization of authority in Washington eroded the balance of this system and led to fears of ever-expanding executive power, particularly over matters of war. This consolidation of power enabled a more assertive and interventionist foreign policy, allowing the federal government to project power globally.

Yet U.S. states retain significant rights, functioning in a federated system with distributed powers that allow states to experiment with their own agendas. The areas in which they can do so include health care reforms, voting rights, and working together to counterbalance federal authority.

American citizens also benefit from strong protections enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which, despite historical flaws in terms of racial and gender equity, established safeguards against government overreach. However, a hesitance to fully leverage these rights remains, partly due to ignorance. Rights intended to benefit all citizens, such as the right to bear arms, or judicially determined issues like access to abortion, frequently evolve into sources of contention, framed as victories for one side rather than universal benefits. This risks turning benefits into partisan battlegrounds, undermining their broader societal purpose. Many rights Americans enjoy were secured not by courts interpreting the Constitution but through legislative action driven by social movements, showing that the true source of rights lies within the collective efforts of citizens and lawmakers.

U.S. presidents have been generally unable to radically alter the nation’s political system, though the Jacksonian era proves there are exceptions. Andrew Jackson’s presidency (1829–1837), as well as the years immediately before and after, solidified the two-party system, expanded the use of veto power, and centralized executive authority, reshaping the role of the presidency. Jackson, a populist, challenged corrupt elites and the political establishment but also aggravated tensions between the federal and state governments. Democratic participation was broadened, but it was limited to white men, and resulted in officeholders being replaced with people loyal to individuals, with support for the continuity of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.

Concentrating authority away from the executive in a few oversight bodies or enlarged bureaucracy can also backfire, often encouraging corruption rather than transparency. For example, legislative reforms for campaign finance in the 1970s, intended to increase transparency, inadvertently fueled an increase in lobbying, attack ads, and exploitation of the electoral process. This shift, intended to curb corporate influence, instead deepened it, allowing corporations and interest groups to find new ways to wield power. The Founding Fathers, while focused on preventing tyranny through checks and balances, could not foresee the enormous role that corporate interests would play in shaping political outcomes, creating a system where legal monetary contributions increasingly dictate policy.

The U.S. faces a major struggle in adapting its republican system to the realities of the 21st century. While executive power has been pivotal in addressing monumental issues, such as the abolition of slavery, it also carries a risk of abuse. Efforts to forcefully reform republics from the top down, like those seen in Rome, often impose rigid systems that fail to meet society’s evolving needs. On the other hand, an over-reliance on populist people power without the necessary safeguards can lead to impulsive decisions and destabilized governance.

Rejecting populism does not equate to diminishing civic engagement; rather, it calls for more sophisticated participation for constructive political processes. U.S. citizens retain significant power, including the right to gather, protest, and exercise free speech and association. Realizing the full potential of these rights and their responsible use requires a deeper understanding of the political system and a commitment to responsible use. This can be achieved by learning from other countries that cultivate republican values through education and habits from a young age, supported by public funding, and promoting political legitimacy through transparency and participation. Ignoring the need to address the decline in civic culture and public understanding of the system of government will further weaken the foundation of democratic practices.

Reforming the U.S. republic is essential, but institutions like the Bipartisan Policy Center, despite their efforts to bridge divides, have been criticized for being compromised by corporate interests, which exposes the system’s vulnerability to such interference. Over time, bipartisanship has become entrenched as a long-term alignment in support of big-money interests and an imperialist foreign policy, sidelining efforts for systemic change and diverging sharply from the best aspects of the early U.S. vision.

Contrastingly, the current discourse around reform is often filtered through partisan lenses, populism, or authoritarian impulses, with many advocating for quick fixes rather than substantive solutions. Meaningful reform, however, will be a slow and contentious process, and progress will remain elusive without addressing the root causes of major problems and accepting a collective responsibility to solve them.

This article was produced by Human Bridges.

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

Photo Credit: Diliff via Wikimedia Commons

How a Struggling Boston School Found Success in the Roots of its Haitian American Community

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on the Progressive.

Click to read the full article online.

The school’s success is a counterpoint to Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign and a testament to the resiliency of public schools when they embrace their local communities.

In 2016, Boston’s Mattahunt Elementary was a school on the brink. A letter from the Massachusetts state education commissioner sent to Boston superintendent Tommy Chang threatened to use “state receivership”—essentially, a takeover of the school—unless the district could present “an effective plan” to “move the [school] out of underperforming status.” 

As WBUR, Boston’s public radio station, reported that year, Mattahunt had scored in the bottom 1 percent of public schools in Massachusetts for at least three years in a row. And since 2012, Mattahunt had been classified as a “turnaround school,” a designation given to schools and districts that have to be monitored by the state because of chronic underperformance.

Flash forward to 2024, and Mattahunt is one of only three finalists for a School on the Move prize, an annual award given by local nonprofit Edvestors that “spotlights the most notable school-wide improvement efforts happening across Boston Public Schools.”

Being considered for the prize, which includes a $100,000 cash award, is “like the Super Bowl of Boston Public Schools,” Alphonso Campbell tells The Progressive. Campbell is Mattahunt’s community hub school coordinator, a position he has held for the past three years after previously working as a paraprofessional in the school. Mattahunt is no longer designated as a turnaround school, he says.

How did Mattahunt go from being a school on the verge of a state takeover to being considered a district champion?

Although a number of factors have contributed to Mattahunt’s improvement, one overriding variable has been the school’s determination to search for solutions within the surrounding community—the largely Haitian American neighborhoods in Boston’s Mattapan district—rather than bring in an outside management firm or adopt a reform model drawn up by a policy think tank.

At a time when Haitian Americans are being targeted by an anti-immigrant campaign, driven largely by presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, Mattahunt’s success story is a positive counterpoint and a testament to the remarkable resiliency of public schools when they embrace the local communities they serve. 

[…]

Read the rest of this article on the Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office (by John Wilcox)

Chicago Teachers Want to Transform Their City into a ‘System of Care’—Will Dems Go Along?

Charles Edward Miller from Chicago, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Headbutting and friction continue in the battle of big ideas vs. entrenched leadership.

There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.

He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.

That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption.

Nowhere has that neoliberal agenda been more controversial than in Chicago, where Democratic political leaders such as Duncan and the city’s former Democratic mayors, including Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, imposed deeply unpopular policies largely driven by budget austerity, business narrowmindedness, complicated financial deals with Wall Street banks, and the privatization of public assets.

In the city’s newest political flare-up, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are engaged in a contentious contract negotiation in which the union has called for a progressive agenda that not only includes pay increases for teachers and school staff but also steps to mitigate climate change, end the gender pay gap for CPS employees, eliminate homelessness for families of CPS students, provide paid parental leave for CPS employees, and aid new immigrant families.

So far, negotiations over pay have drawn the most media attention. The union has asked “for a 9 percent pay increase,” Chalkbeat reported in August 2024. The CPS CEO Pedro Martinez appeared poised to offer raises of “between 4 percent and 5 percent,” according to WBEZ. However, CTU stated in its September 9 contract negotiations update that CPS has yet to address about 50 percent of the union’s proposals.

CPS’s resistance is especially frustrating to progressive advocates in Chicago who’ve been advocating for strengthening the public schools system since at least the 1990s. Despite their success, the hurdles these advocates continue to face have left them frustrated.

Over the decades of their activism, CTU and public school advocates fought for and won previous contracts that resulted in reduced class sizes, salary increases for teachers and school staff, funding for more social workers, nurses and librarians in schools, and a commitment from the district to fund and pilot the community schools approach.

CTU and its supporters doggedly opposed and finally toppled adversarial mayors to elect one of their own in Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former school teacher and CTU organizer. They advocated and pushed through progressive policies such as enacting a moratorium on new charter schools, transitioning school governance from mayoral control to an elected school board, and “ending student-based budgeting” that formed the basis of the city’s school choice agenda.

While Chicago teachers were successfully making progressive change in Chicago, Democrats took control of the Illinois state legislature, and with the election of J.B. Pritzker in 2018, elected one of the nation’s most progressive governors, although he has rejected calls for the state to help make up the budget shortfall for CPS.

Despite these wins, Chicago teachers and public school advocates find themselves in the same position they’ve long been in—butting heads with an entrenched leadership status quo, created largely by Democrats.

What’s at stake is enormous for Chicago but also important to the Democratic Party nationally as it attempts to remake itself into the party that now claims to care the most about workers and families.

‘Good Enough’ Schools

What’s stymieing negotiations between CTU and the district, according to Chalkbeat and other media outlets, is that the union’s “demands come as the district and city face budget deficits, with no clear path to securing extra funding for schools.”

Martinez has claimed that CTU’s contract proposals would “result in a deficit of at least $2.9 billion for the 2025-26 school year,” WBEZ reported, leading to “a hole more than five times the current projection and growing as large as $4 billion by 2028.”

And although the state increased funding for CPS in 2024 by $25.8 million, Chalkbeat reported, that’s still “$1 billion short of what the state’s formula considers adequate funding.”

Yet not everyone agrees that money is the issue.

According to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, who Our Schools interviewed, “The push and pull you’re seeing in CTU’s negotiations with the district is mostly indicative of a years-long struggle to remake the district into a system of care.”

“It’s about challenging an education system that, from the beginning, was designed to be just good enough,” she said. “‘Good enough’ meant [providing] workers for the business elites who wanted the district to operate as a system to train future workers for their factories and stockyards. But ‘good enough’ doesn’t really work for [today’s] families.”

Remaking schools into better systems of care was not on the agenda when Chicago leaders closed Englewood and scores of other Chicago schools. Those schools were closed due to “underperformance” (although displaced students often fared even worse in their new schools) and financial inefficiency (which was also not alleviated by school closures).

Davis Gates conceded that what her union is asking for will cost the city and the state a lot more money. But she expressed frustration with how any political regime that claims to care about the well-being of families and children’s academic success could not come up with money to address the adverse conditions that Chicago families often face.

“My experience teaching social studies… clarified that the work I did in the classroom as a teacher was only a percentage of what was needed for students to have a full opportunity to access high-quality education,” she told Our Schools. “For instance, we have 20,000 students in our district who are unhoused. This creates many challenges for how we educate them when they spent the night in a car, a shelter, or couch surfing with relatives or friends. Being unhoused also creates social and emotional challenges for students.”

When questioned about the need to spend more money on innovations like community schools, she pointed to Cameron Magnet School of the Arts, an elementary school in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. When an influx of about 100 migrant students suddenly enrolled in the school, Cameron could respond more effectively because it was reorganized and funded to operate as a community school.

In a system of care, Davis Gates said, “You have a restorative justice coordinator in every school. You have librarians, nurses, and social workers in every school.”

‘They Fired All of Us, Even the Lunch Ladies’

Davis Gates began her teaching career in 2004 at Englewood High School and was in her second year when Duncan announced the school would be shut down and replaced by smaller schools, a neoliberal policy fad that many big-city school districts fell for at the time.

Jackson Potter, current vice president of CTU, started teaching at Englewood in 2002 and told Our Schools what it was like to have Englewood shut down.

“It was extraordinarily traumatic for our families,” he recalled. “Duncan called our school a ‘cultural failure,’ which was deeply felt as an insult by the entire community. Yes, Englewood was a school with problems. But Duncan inflicted deep trauma on teachers and students.”

“The mantra at the time was all about low test scores and graduation rates. As a new teacher it struck me as absurd,” he said. “So you’re saying I caused this, and you’re blaming these veteran Black teachers? And these were incredible teachers with deep roots in the community who knew our families and knew just what to do when one of our students was in a crisis.”

“The years of disinvestment our school had endured, the economic dislocation of our community, and the racial disparities of the city, all of that was discounted,” he said. “So they fired all of us, even the lunch ladies.”

Like Davis Gates, Potter said that in the current union contract negotiations, “Money is a piece of the puzzle but not the whole issue.” He brought up examples where CTU has collaborated with the district to acquire additional funding from federal and state sources, including a federal grant of $20 million for electric buses. “But we always have to push for it,” he said.

Potter told of how CTU proposed, as a cost-saving measure, for the district to change its teacher evaluation cycle from every two to three years. Due to its limited staff, the district already fails to evaluate some 2,000 teachers each year, Potter explained, so why not stretch the limited number of evaluators over a longer period? “But they won’t agree to that,” he added.

He also questioned why CPS has never applied for grants given out by the state’s Illinois Shines program for retrofitting public school buildings with solar panels.

“It’s not just lack of funds. It’s obstinance,” he said.

Potter agrees that more recently there’s been a turning away from some of the past school reform ideas that drove CPS policymaking. But he questions why staff positions created during the reform era are still there, such as an Office of Portfolio Management, a reference to a neoliberal approach in which school leaders run school districts as if they were Wall Street managers overseeing a portfolio of investments.

“A lot of resistance has hardened over decades, and we’re trying to create a new pathway forward. But that’s going to mean the city has to take on local power brokers, big banks, and powerful opponents in state government,” he said.

Both Sides Are Right

Which side is right in this back-and-forth on funding between CTU and the district? “Both,” said Ralph Martire in an interview with Our Schools.

Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a Chicago-based think tank that analyzes public policy through a social and economic justice lens. He also served on the legislatively established Professional Review Panel that was charged with monitoring the implementation of Illinois’s evidence-based funding (EBF) formula for the state’s K-12 public schools.

“In 2017, Illinois went from the worst to the best in education funding by enacting EBF,” he said.

According to Martire, EBF identifies a funding adequacy target for every school based on 27 research-based targets that include factors like the presence of students from low-income households, the percentage of students who are English language speakers, and school staffing levels.

“The priorities CPS is pushing for in its contract negotiation are all good,” he said. “In fact, many are the very things that EBF prioritizes in its funding formula. And there’s no doubt that the state’s funding of CPS is not adequate even as defined by the EBF model.”

“But under current circumstances, it would be really tough for CPS to come up with the necessary funding to support [all of the union’s priorities]” he said. “Unless the state makes a big jump in funding, it’s hard to see how the district gets out of this situation.”

What’s preventing that “big jump,” according to Martire, is that both the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois don’t have a graduated income tax. Every tax and fee that governments have available, he explained, are regressive except for two: a graduated income tax and an inheritance tax. But when Illinois voters had the chance to change the state’s income tax from a flat rate to a graduated tax in 2020, they rejected it.

“Illinois taxation is still mostly overreliant on local property wealth,” Martire said. Consequently, “growth in funding is not keeping pace with public needs.”

Cassie Creswell, executive director and president of Illinois Families for Public Schools, generally agrees with Martire’s assessment.

“[CPS’s] fundamental fiscal situation, created by decades of privatization on top of under-resourcing its schools, isn’t truly in the CPS board or CTU’s hands,” she wrote in an email to Our Schools. “Illinois’s structural deficit means we are underfunding all of our social and human services, and until we have the ability to levy a graduated income tax at the state level, I’m not optimistic about [CPS’s] finances, and, as a result, [the district’s] ability to make the resources available that CPS students need and deserve.”

Yet, despite the fiscal difficulty of paying for the schools “CPS students need and deserve,” to use Creswell’s words, there are other political dynamics at play as well.

Paul Zavitkovsky former CPS principal and retired EdD program leadership coach for the Center for Urban Education Leadership told Our Schools it’s not clear to him why CTU isn’t finding common ground with the current CPS board.

Since 2019, there have been new CPS board appointees and central office staff hires who would embrace greater collaboration with teachers, according to Zavitkovsky. “They are working hard to redress problems of assessments that weren’t working. They’ve recognized that sanctions alone aren’t helpful.”

He doesn’t disagree that what the teachers are asking for would make positive contributions to student achievements and create much greater academic gains than seen during the neoliberal reform agenda.

But he wonders if CTU isn’t trying to push a political advantage.

“CTU has had lots of good reasons to be adversarial,” he said. “Perhaps they believe they’ve been beaten up for so long that it’s time to make the best of what advantage they have.”

‘A Philosophical Problem’

Arne Duncan once bragged about what he did to Englewood High School.

In 2011, New York City math teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein caught Duncan at a national conference of Teach for America—a private, nonprofit that flourished, in part, because of policies Duncan enacted as secretary of education—saying that one of the charter schools that had replaced Englewood had produced better results with the “same children.” As Rubinstein explained, that wasn’t really true because the charter, Urban Prep, cleverly manipulated its student enrollment and graduation statistics to make itself look better.

Since 2022, at least, CPS has been trying to shut down two campuses of Urban Prep due to “allegations” that the school had “mismanaged finances and failed to comply with special education laws, as well as accusations that the school’s founder, Tim King, sexually abused a now-former student,” Chalkbeat reported in 2023. Another article by Chalkbeat in 2024 said that a state appellate court allowed the closure to proceed.

Another school that replaced Englewood, TEAM Englewood, was shut down by the district in 2018 after years of losing students and funding.

It’s not at all clear that the current acrimony between CPS and the union resembles a political grudge match, as Zavitkovsky suggested. But what’s obvious is that Democratic lawmakers, both nationally and in Chicago, who claim the party is pivoting to a policy agenda driven by care rather than political calculation will need to prove that the party’s past isn’t a prologue.

Martire, for one, expressed deep frustration with the situation Democratic leaders have put themselves into, calling it “a philosophical problem.”

“Chicago has a fiscal crisis that conservatives had the brilliance to create,” he said. They understood, according to him, that once government institutions have inadequate capacity to pay for things, they will have inadequate outcomes. But paying for improvements is always a problem because tax increases are unpopular.

So they steadfastly fought any tax increases, realizing that eventually cutting off money would rob government systems of the capacity to produce desirable outcomes, make institutions like public schools dysfunctional, and help convince people that pouring more money into them was wasteful.

Conservatives played the long game Martire described so well that even Democrats, like Duncan, started calling public schools “cultural failures.”

“So now,” Martire said, “neither Illinois nor CPS currently has the financial capacity to do the job of educating students.”

This isn’t to say that campaigning to raise everyone’s taxes would be a winning political strategy.

But should Democrats want to make good on their new promise to be a champion for families and working people, patching up the party’s tattered relationship with organized teachers seems like a good idea, and Chicago is a great place to start.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Charles Edward Miller / Wikimedia Commons

Can Vice-Presidential Pick Tim Walz Make Democrats the Education Party Again?

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Harris’s decision to choose a teacher as her running mate creates an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party’s image for public schools.

In choosing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate, Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has not only picked a progressive governor and a Midwestern populist to lead the party’s national ticket but she also may have signaled that the Democratic Party is ready to take back its reputation as the education party.

Walz, a former public school teacher and football coach in Mankato, Minnesota, draws on his experience as an educator to inform his political persona and policy beliefs, saying in a 2007 interview with Education Week—after he was elected to Congress—that teachers are “more grounded in what people really care about.”

As governor of Minnesota, he acted on that philosophy of caring by pushing for and signing into law a $72 billion state budget in May 2023 that significantly increased funding for the state’s public schools, provided for a new $1,750-per-child tax credit, free college tuition for families earning less than $80,000 per year, funding for free school meals for K-12 students statewide, and paid sick leave for workers, as well as a paid family and medical leave.

The “historic” education spending Walz approved included a $5.5 billion increase over the next four years, a substantial raise to the state’s per-pupil funding formula, and an increase in funding for full-service community schools consisting of $7.5 million for two years and then $5 million per year in the future. Community schools practice a holistic education approach that entails attending to the non-academic needs of students and families, including access to technology, social services, physical and mental health care, adult education, and after-school and summer programs.

It’s also telling that in picking Walz to be her running mate Harris rejected Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who prominent centrist Democrats claimed was Harris’s “best chance” of wooing political moderates in an election that is expected to be a close race to the finish.

But Shapiro had set off alarms among public school advocates. In a letter sent in July 2024 to the Harris campaign, which was picked up by numerous media outlets, more than two dozen grassroots education groups warned against selecting Shapiro because of his support for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

The letter stated that Shapiro “has supported education policies mirroring Project 2025,” the right-wing manifesto from the Heritage Foundation that is expected to provide a blueprint for a new Trump administration and “includes measures to funnel federal education funds directly to families through education savings accounts,” stated WITF.

“Through Project 2025,” the letter further read, “[conservatives] have made it abundantly clear the end goal of gutting public education and privatizing what is left via irresponsible voucher systems like those in Florida and Arizona.”

“Walz has pretty much been the best governor on education in Minnesota in decades,” wrote Sarah Lahm in an email to Our Schools. Lahm is a veteran education journalist based in the state and an Our Schools contributing writer. Choosing Walz to be the nominee “is good news,” she said, “especially compared to Shapiro and his school choice record.”

No doubt, in selecting a running mate, the Harris team weighed numerous issues, but the fact that opposition to school vouchers came to the fore is unusual in Democratic political circles where education is often not considered to be an important national issue.

When Democrats Were the Education Party

The last time the Democratic Party had a former K-12 school teacher running for vice president was in 1960, and the candidate was Lyndon Johnson. Although most experts insist that vice presidents have little influence on federal policies, Johnson ultimately became president and was instrumental in pushing through the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965 that is still, in its current version called Every Student Succeeds Act, and is the blueprint for federal education policy today.

The Democratic Party burnished its reputation as the education party in 1979 when then-Democratic President Jimmy Carter approved legislation to create the U.S. Department of Education as a Cabinet-level entity.

In 2004, Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute wrote, “Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a substantial advantage over the Republicans on education due to their support for education spending and their decades-old alliance with unions and public employees.”

But that advantage began to erode in the late 1980s, Hess and Kelly contended, due to “Reaganite critiques of liberalism and expensive social programs.” Democrats responded to those attacks by “seek[ing] a more moderate course on domestic policies, including education,” they noted, and by late 2002, when Congress passed the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, popular opinion on which party was best on education was nearly split.

Nevertheless, Democrats seemed to have regained the advantage by 2012 when polling by Pew Research Center found, “By about two-to-one (53 percent to 27 percent), more [voters] say Democrats can do a better job improving the education system in the country.”

But the Democrats’ resurgence as the favored party for education didn’t last, and when Pew surveyed voters again in 2014, the party had only a 4 percent advantage over Republicans in handling education.

“Taken as a whole, the data suggest that Democrats are struggling more on education than at any other time in the past two decades,” Hess wrote in 2022 when he again examined which party had the best education cred.

The Democratic party’s declining reputation for supporting public schools did not mean Republicans were gaining much favorability, Hess found, but “Democrats have been losing voters’ confidence for a half-decade, and that decline has become noticeably steeper over the past two years,” he wrote, noting that nearly one in five voters didn’t trust either party.

Also in 2022, a poll of voters in key battleground states conducted by Hart Research for the American Federation of Teachers found 39 percent of voters trusted Republicans compared to 38 percent who showed confidence in the Democrats on education issues. Another poll conducted the same year by Democrats for Education Reform, an organization that advocates for privatizing schools with charters and vouchers, found a more lopsided Republican advantage, with 47 percent saying they trusted Republicans “to handle education” and 43 percent saying they trusted Democrats.

What Happened?

Republicans would have you believe that the source for the shift in popular approval on education policy away from Democrats was due to mask mandates that Democratic government officials supported during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Another narrative that right-wing operatives like to spin is that when the pandemic forced students to shift to remote learning, parents saw firsthand that their children were being instructed in so-called leftist ideology and “Democratic indoctrination.”

Although many media outlets have reported these narratives as factual, they really aren’t.

First, surveys of parents during the pandemic years found that they were mostly supportive of how schools responded to the situation, and when schools went back to face-to-face learning, parents remained satisfied with the schools.

Also, as the above survey data from Pew in 2014 show, voters started to sour on the Democratic Party’s education politics before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Without a doubt, the Democratic Party’s declining popularity related to education has something to do with the policies the party supported or failed to support. During the years that Pew was tracking the party’s declining reputation on education issues, the Obama presidential administration’s education agenda and his ham-handed Secretary of Education Arne Duncan were so disastrous that Congress was spurred to rewrite ESEA to rein in some of the federal government’s powers to shape local education policies.

Further, during President Trump’s administration, while Republicans coalesced around so-called school choice policies that give parents taxpayer funds to pull their kids out of public schools, the Democratic Party countered with, well, basically nothing.

It bears noting that when Joe Biden ran for president, he did not continue with the education policies of the Obama administration, and his administration, likely at the urging of the strong public school advocacy of First Lady Jill Biden, returned to a relatively safe narrative of education as an essential “investment.” But he never really gave the Democrats a programmatic education brand the party could hang its hat on.

Having Tim Walz on the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign is an opportunity to change that.

‘Sitting on the Edge of Our Seats’

Based on his accomplishments in Minnesota, Walz has demonstrated his inclination to back education policies that matter most. He also eschews policy gimmicks that have been favored by both parties.

In his 2007 interview with Education Week, Walz criticized NCLB as a “bureaucratic nightmare” and said “the application of it [had] very little impact on real student achievement.”

As governor, he has “stood firmly against school voucher programs,” according to the Baltimore Sun, and opposed Minnesota’s Republican-controlled Senate that wanted to create education savings accounts that give parents taxpayer money to pull their children out of public schools and use other education options.

With Walz now elevated to a vice-presidential nominee, public education advocates and policy experts are “sitting on the edge of our seats to see the policy implications of a teacher as the vice president of the United States of America,” wrote education professor Phelton Moss in an August 2024 op-ed for Education Week. “A Harris-Walz administration could be a historic next phase in education policy,” he wrote.

Of course, it’s still early in the long presidential campaign season to say whether or not education becomes a prominent issue. A Harris-Walz victory is far from being assured, and vice presidents often have little influence over policy directions in a presidential administration.

But Harris’s decision to choose Walz as her running mate creates an opportunity to overhaul the outdated education policies of the Democratic Party establishment and remake the party’s image of being a genuine hero for public schools and children.

Click here to read the article on LA Progressive.

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: Office of Governor Walz & Lt. Governor Flanagan / Flickr

Observatory Special Report on How Investors Are Exploiting Public Education

Click here to read the article on the Observatory.

For-profit operators and their investors use complex business arrangements and networks of related companies to enrich themselves and do little to improve education.

Ever since charter schools were created in the 1990s, there’s been a persistent question1 of whether or not the schools introduce an element of profit-making into the public education sector. In statutory law, legislatures have generally ruled that charter schools must be operated as nonprofits. In fact, only one state,2 Arizona, technically allows for-profit organizations to be licensed to run charter schools. Yet, the charter school industry has proven to be an innovator in developing business arrangements in which third-party and related organizations profit handsomely off a nonprofit charter.

One such entryway for profit-making enterprises to exploit charter schools, according to an in-depth examination conducted by Our Schools in 2021, occurs when for-profit charter school operators partner with private investors intent on turning quick profits from public dollars meant for educating children.

Our Schools examined the relationship between Pansophic Learning, owner of the Accel Schools chain of for-profit charter schools, and Safanad Limited, a private equity firm, originating in the Middle East, with extensive investment holdings in K–12 education, senior living, and other public sector-related enterprises.

What Our Schools found was that for-profit businesses like Pansophic Learning are providing entryways for wealthy investors from abroad to flood the U.S. with money to buy up struggling taxpayer-funded enterprises and put into place elaborate business schemes and networks of interrelated companies that hide their profiteering while doing little to improve the quality of services to the public.

A request for comment regarding Pansophic’s relationship with Safanad and the partnership’s potential for conflicts of interest that was left as a press inquiry at the Pansophic website did not receive a reply.

The combination of for-profit operators backed by private equity has become prevalent in other publicly funded sectors that have traditionally been operated by federal and/or state governments or nonprofit organizations. And the results have not been beneficial to the public or the individuals the publicly funded system was intended to serve.

For example, in the government-funded prison system, “The involvement of private equity firms, which manage large investment portfolios, presents a conflict between the financial and social goals of some investors,” reported Prison Legal News in 2019, citing two studies—one from the nonprofit Worth Rises, which advocates for “dismantling the prison industry,” and the other from the American Federation of Teachers, a national teachers’ union.

Another analysis, by the ACLU, found that for-profit prison operators backed by private investors are more apt to create profit for their investors by maintaining high rates of incarceration, which results in significantly higher social and fiscal costs to the public.

Our Schools found that this combination of for-profit entrepreneurs backed by private investors is having a similarly corrosive impact in the charter school industry.

Ron Packard and K12 Inc.

The genesis of Accel Schools goes back to 2014, when Education Week reported that Ron Packard, the former CEO of K12 Inc., had formed a new education enterprise called Pansophic Learning. K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride Inc. in 2020, was then, and as of this writing still is, the largest for-profit charter school operator in the U.S.

Packard, a former Goldman Sachs executive who specialized in mergers and acquisitions, departed K12 Inc., which he founded, at a time when the company was besieged with negative publicity.

In 2011, K12 Inc. was the subject of a scathing story in the New York Times revealing that “only a third” of the students enrolled in its online charter schools “achieved adequate yearly progress, the measurement mandated by federal No Child Left Behind legislation,” while the company employed multiple ways to “squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload, and lowering standards.”

The withering critique, which ran on the newspaper’s front page, “caused” the publicly traded company’s stock price “to drop precipitously,” Education Week reported in 2012, and prompted a shareholder to file a federal lawsuit accusing K12 Inc. executives, including Packard, of “misleading investors with false student-performance claims.”

More negative publicity came in 2013 when Politico reported K12 Inc. was one among many online charter schools that “posts dismal scores on math, writing, and science tests and mediocre scores on reading.” Another blow came that year when influential hedge fund manager and charter school proponent Whitney Tilson announced he was shorting K12 Inc. stock, betting the company would fail.

In 2014, K12 Inc. became the target of yet another lawsuit accusing the company of “misleading investors by putting forward overly positive public statements… only later to reveal that it had missed key operational and financial targets,” Education Week reported. The lawsuit also charged Packard, whose relationship to the company had become unclear, of selling off his own stock before revealing the negative financials, and, thus, earning a windfall of $6.4 million before the stock price plunged.

But as Packard disengaged from one troubled education enterprise, he started another with a financial partner that would provide the capital to quickly scale up.

As Education Week reported in 2014, Packard’s new company, Pansophic Learning, included a partnership with a holding company, Safanad Education, a subsidiary of Safanad Limited, a New York- and Dubai-based real estate and investment firm. Packard and Safanad spent an unknown sum to purchase part of K12 Inc.’s assets, mostly in higher education, and acquire an international brick-and-mortar private school. The two entrepreneurs were “on the hunt for acquisitions,” according to Education Week.

A Charter School Shopping Spree

Initially, Packard and Pansophic Learning kept a low profile until, in 2016, a visit by then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drew attention to a Cleveland, Ohio, brick-and-mortar charter school “that usually escapes notice,” reported the Plain Dealer, a Cleveland newspaper.

According to the Plain Dealer, the school, the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, was one of 27 schools in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Ohio that had been recently acquired by Accel Schools, a new for-profit network of charter schools owned and operated by Pansophic Learning.

Packard is listed as the CEO of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools. Two other C-suite executives of both Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools are COO Maria Szalay and CTO Eric Waller. Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools also have street addresses within 5 minutes’ walking distance of each other in McLean, Virginia.

Prior to the news about Trump visiting its school, Accel Schools had been “amassing an education empire” in Ohio, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.

Among its acquisitions were, in 2014, the “troubled K-8 schools” of White Hat Management, which had previously been, according to the Akron Beacon Journal, Ohio’s largest charter school chain. In 2018, Accel Schools purchased White Hat’s last remaining online charter school as well.

In 2015, Accel Schools also acquired the assets of another financially struggling charter management firm, Mosaica Education, and bought Cleveland-based I Can Schools, which, Packard told the Plain Dealer, were also “struggling financially.”

The charter school shopping spree Accel Schools went on undoubtedly benefited from the financial support of Safanad.

“We are fortunate to partner with Safanad,” Packard is quoted saying in Safanad’s official announcement of its partnership with Pansophic Learning in 2014. “Safanad’s extensive resources will allow us to pursue opportunities of all sizes,” he said.

The Bahamdan Connection

According to the firm’s website, Safanad’s founder and CEO is Kamal Bahamdan, a Saudi national. Kamal Bahamdan “was the CEO of the Bahamdan [investment Group],” according to his profile.

Kamal Bahamdan’s current relationship with the Bahamdan Investment Group is unclear, but the Bahamdan firm maintains a controlling interest in Safanad. According to its SEC filings brochure, Safanad is “controlled by Bahamdan Investment Group and KB Group Holdings Ltd.” KB Group Holdings Ltd., according to Safanad’s SEC filing form, is owned by the Bahamdan Investment Group.

The Bahamdan Investment Group is a Saudi-based investment firm founded by Salem Bahamdan, Kamal Bahamdan’s father, according to ZoomInfo. Kamal Bahamdan is the grandson of Abdullah Bahamdan, according to Wikipedia.

In numerous online profiles, Abdullah Salem Bahamdan (also Abdullah S. Bahamdan, Abdullah Salim Bahamdan, and Abdullah Bahamdan) is described as a “seasoned banker” and one of “the Middle East’s most prominent and influential financiers.”

Abdullah Bahamdan also spent more than 50 years as the chairman of “Saudi Arabia’s National Commercial Bank, the largest lender in the Arab world,” according to Institutional Investor. National Commercial Bank (NCB), which merged with Samba Financial Group in 2021 to form Saudi National Bank (SNB), was established in 1953 by royal decree, according to the SNB website, with the Saudi government as its major shareholder.

Despite its close relationship to the Saudi government, NCB was one among 16 financial institutions that were fined by the Saudi Monetary Authority in 2019 “for violating principles of responsible finance,” according to Reuters. “[T]he violations were related to exceeding debt burdens imposed on people in proportion to their monthly income.”

In 2020, the U.S. Treasury Department settled a lawsuit with NCB accusing the bank of violating U.S. sanctions against Syria and Sudan between November 2011 to August 2014.

The bank and Abdullah Bahamdan have been the subjects of at least two lawsuits accusing them of financing terrorist groups, which may have been part of what prompted the Saudi government to, in 2017, “crack down on corruption” in its banking industry, Reuters reported.

Perhaps as a result of the crackdown, SNB, as of 2019, claimed on its website that it “developed a Bank-wide Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorist Financing Policy.”

Mixing Charter School Investments With Subpar Senior Care

Aside from its investments in Pansophic Learning, Safanad has made some of its biggest commercial real estate deals in the health care sector, principally in senior care facilities, including assisted living, independent living, memory care, and nursing homes, frequently called skilled nursing facilities.

Senior Housing News reported that Safanad teamed up with investment firm Formation Capital, an Atlanta-based health-care-focused private investment company, to purchase 36 senior care facilities in 2011, and, in 2012, the partners spent $750 million to acquire 68 more nursing homes located in East Coast states. The acquisitions made the two investment firms “one of the United States’ largest standalone skilled nursing portfolios,” according to Senior Housing News, with “more than $1 billion worth of senior care assets in the U.S.”

In 2013, the same two investment firms purchased a “36-property senior housing portfolio for approximately $400 million,” reported Senior Housing News, and in 2014, the two firms struck another deal to buy “14 skilled nursing facilities in the mid-Atlantic for about $150 million,” according to Senior Housing News.

The deals Safanad and Formation Capital struck to acquire senior care facilities are strikingly similar to the business transactions Safanad conducted with Pansophic Learning in the charter school sector, principally, buying up financially struggling service businesses that receive large amounts of public funding—in the case of the senior care sector, from Medicare and Medicaid—and that also happen to include significant holdings of real estate.

The nursing home and senior living facilities industry was struggling financially before the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust. Facilities had been cutting corners for years, skating by with too few staff, due to stagnating wages, and sometimes hiring unskilled workers instead of highly trained personnel.

COVID-19 simply revealed an industry that was already “broken,” reported NBC News, citing “low pay, high turnover, and tough working conditions” as chronic problems in the senior care facilities industry.

Yet the growing presence of private equity investors in the senior care industry has done little to help the industry and appears to have done mostly harm.

A 2020 study3 found that private equity ownership of nursing homes and other kinds of senior living facilities increased costs to the public by 19 percent while shortening the lifespans of patients.

Patients in facilities with substantial private equity backing tended to have less access to nurses, declining mobility, and greater use of antipsychotic medications, the study found. Consequently, “private equity ownership increases short-term mortality by 10 percent,” the authors claimed, “which implies about 21,000 lives lost due to private equity ownership over our sample period.”

As with the for-profit prison industry, many of the problems posed by private investment firms in the senior care industry, according to the study, can be sourced to “high-powered for-profit incentives… [being] misaligned with the social goals of quality care at a reasonable cost.”

The study distinguished private equity for-profit ownership from “generic” for-profit ownership because “private equity ownership confers distinct incentives to quickly and substantially increase the value of their portfolio firms.” It is this form of intense, high-powered profit-maximizing incentives, the authors asserted, “that characterize[s] private equity… [and could lead to] detrimental implications for consumer welfare.”

Investor-driven senior care facilities were especially hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, a 2020 article in the New York Times reported.

“Decades of ownership by private equity and other private investment firms left many nursing homes with staggering bills and razor-thin margins,” according to the article.

“The toll of putting profits first started to show when the outbreak began,” the article continued. “[S]ome for-profit homes were particularly ill equipped and understaffed, which undercut their ability to contain the spread of the coronavirus.”

Among the for-profit operators that appear to have fared poorly in the pandemic is Consulate Health Care, one of the providers that were snapped up by Safanad and Formation Capital in 2014, according to Senior Housing News. In a 2020 report, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project listed Formation Capital as the owner of Consulate Health Care.

Nursing homes operated by Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital have been hotspots for COVID-19 outbreaks, according to numerous news reports from Florida and Virginia. The high incidence of outbreaks prompted, in part, a U.S. House committee to launch an investigation into the country’s five largest for-profit nursing home companies, including Consulate Health Care, Politico reported in 2020.

‘Creative Ways to Wring Profits’

As the New York Times reported in 2020, while senior care facilities often struggle financially, their private equity-backed owners have “found creative ways to wring profits out of them.”

Some of these creative ways include charging their operators “hefty management and consulting fees”; buying the real estate from the operators and then leasing the buildings back to the operators, while upping the rents; and pushing their operators to buy products and services from companies that are controlled by the investors.4

The real estate plays these firms pull off are particularly lucrative, the New York Times noted, because the buildings are often “more valuable than the businesses themselves.”

A 2018 article in the Naples Daily News described how these arrangements work in Consulate Health Care facilities owned by Formation Capital, the state’s largest provider.

Consulate Health Care and Formation Capital both operate a network of other related businesses—including “real estate, management, rehabilitation and other companies”—that they use as subcontractors for the nursing homes they own.

So when “[t]axpayer money flows to Consulate nursing homes,” the article explained, some of the money also goes to subcontractors that are related to the owners, Consulate Health Care and its controlling company, Formation Capital. “[A]nd profits earned go to the chain’s owner, the Atlanta-based private equity firm Formation Capital,” the article stated.

One of the Consulate Health Care nursing homes highlighted in the article pays its owner and management fees to two Consulate companies and also pays its lease payments and rehabilitation service fees to providers that are both related to Formation Capital.

“In each case,” the article said, “the money flows back to Formation Capital and its wealthy investors,” which include Safanad.

Pansophic Learning and Accel Schools operate similar business arrangements that help their organizations maximize their profits, according to a 2021 report by the Network for Public Education (NPE).[2]

Much in the same way Consulate Health Care facilities and Formation Capital push their nursing homes into contracts with their other related businesses, Accel and Pansophic use “a complex web of corporations,” according to NPE, to “control the operations of the school and in doing so, steer business to their related services.”

The report highlighted Accel-managed Broadway Academy, in Cleveland, a charter school previously owned by White Hat Management, according to the Accel Schools contract with the school.

Under the “fees” section in the terms of that contract—originally with for-profit management company Chippewa Community School, LLC, which is now a subsidiary of Accel Schools Ohio LLC—the school, referred to in the contract as the corporation, pays the operator (Accel, by way of its subsidiary Chippewa Community School, LLC) 96 percent of the school’s monthly qualified gross revenue, which is the per-pupil revenue the school receives from the state. In return, Accel is the sole source to provide the school with school staffing and professional development, school management and consulting, textbooks, equipment, technology, student recruitment, building payments, maintenance, custodial service, security, and capital improvements.

In other words, there’s nothing that stops Accel or Pansophic from creating yet more subsidiaries and other related companies that can do business with Broadway Academy. According to the contract, Accel can subcontract services “without the [Broadway Academy] Board’s approval,” and property purchased by Accel “shall remain… [Accel’s] sole property.”

According to NPE, these kinds of contracts, known as “sweeps,” are commonplace in the for-profit charter school industry.

“Sweeps contracts give for-profits the authority to run all school services in exchange for all or nearly all of the school’s revenue,” said the NPE report.

Taxpayer funding for the Broadway Academy that isn’t swept up by Accel’s continuing fee must be deposited into a “Student Enrichment Fund” for “educational services in the areas of student cultural activities[,] … supplemental tutoring services[,] and other programs.” Accel has sole authority to “propose uses for such funds,” and 85 percent “of all Student Enrichment Funds not spent during the fiscal year in which they are received shall be paid over to [Accel].”

While Accel’s contract with Broadway Academy doesn’t include real estate, the authors of the NPE report searched the database of Ohio charter school contracts, called “community schools documents,” and found that “Global School Properties Ohio, LLC holds the leases for many Accel charter schools. The… [landlord] is at the same 1650 Tysons Blvd. address in McLean, Virginia, as Pansophic [Learning].”

Profiting From D- and F-Rated Schools

School choice and charter school advocates are often quick to defend for-profit charter companies and their private investors, arguing that they are “sector agnostic”5 about who owns and operates a school and care only about the school’s “results.”

But what constitutes good results in education is a much-debated topic,6 and studies about the results of for-profit charter schools have found mixed results at best.

A 2017 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that students who attend for-profit charter schools have weaker growth in math than they would have in a district public school and similar growth in reading.7 Students in nonprofit charter schools experienced stronger academic growth in both subjects than their peers enrolled in for-profit charters. The differences were “significant,” according to the study.

Also in 2017, Chalkbeat reported, “studies comparing for-profit schools to nonprofits and traditional public schools in the same area don’t find consistent differences in performance, as measured by test scores.”

None of these studies examined the performance of Accel Schools or the impact of private equity in the for-profit charter industry.

Nevertheless, an ongoing investigation by Our Schools has revealed charter schools operated by for-profit operators like Accel Schools cycle struggling charter schools through a series of private entities that, in turn, strip the schools of resources, run them at bare-bones costs, and reap whatever assets that remain before handing the schools off to the next private operator, or shutting them down completely. The result is charter operators and their investors may achieve the results they want, while the children caught up in this investor-driven enterprise often have their education significantly disrupted, or even permanently impaired, perhaps with lifelong impact.

References

  1. Network for Public Education, “Do Charter Schools Profit From Educating Students?” (April 2021).
  2. Network for Public Education, “Chartered for Profit: The Hidden World of Charter Schools Operated for Financial Gain” (July 2021).
  3. Atul Gupta, Sabrina T. Howell, Constantine Yannelis, and Abhinav Gupta; NYU Stern School of Business; “Does Private Equity Investment in Healthcare Benefit Patients? Evidence from Nursing Homes”​​ (2020).
  4. Matthew Goldstein, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Robert Gebeloff; New York Times; “Push for Profits Left Nursing Homes Struggling to Provide Care” (May 7, 2020).
  5. Nicole Stelle Garnet, Notre Dame Law School, “Sector Agnosticism and the Coming Transformation of Education Law” (April 2017).
  6. W. James Popham, ASCD, “Why Standardized Tests Don’t Measure Educational Quality” (1999).
  7. James L. Woodworth et al, Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), “Charter Management Organizations” (2017).

Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools. He is a communications consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm.

Photo Credit: jonathan mcintosh / Flickr

The Great Archaeological Discovery of Our Time

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

An interview with renowned archaeologist Gary M. Feinman on the emergence of a global data set from our past that humanity can use to prosper—and avoid the biggest mistakes.

By Jan Ritch-Frel

The motives that drove archaeologists of the past included a thirst for glory, a taste for treasure, and a desire to enshrine a new political era with the legitimacy of the ancient past.

Gradually, over the decades leading closer to ours, the discipline matured, gaining an ethical framework, and started asking questions about the societies and lifestyles of the people who had left their traces behind. Archaeologists began to compare their evidence to how we live now and increasingly started hunting for the origins of modern-day problems, from plagues and warfare to inequality. Archaeological research spread beyond the palaces and cities of a few civilizations to six continents, and the rapid growth of evidence in human origins produced a global outlook and a 6 million-year-long clock to record the gradual changes in the human story that led us to the present.

The diligent research of tens of thousands of archaeologists carefully documenting the past all over the planet has accumulated and crossed a new threshold leading to big implications: It’s socially useful information that we can plug into improving our lives.

Our sample size of this greater past dwarfs by many magnitudes what we thought history used to be. Thanks to advances in technology, the data about the human story can integrate and interact with the records we keep today.

Many modern human problems are the result of “evolutionary mismatch”—our lifestyles are at odds with the biological capacities we developed and relied on for millions of years to get here—and range from heart disease to various forms of addiction and ADHD. A synthesis of human origins research and our new understanding of human biology presents a powerful perspective and roadmap for dealing with some of our biggest challenges.

By combining that synthesis with the archaeological record’s increasingly detailed knowledge of human settlement and state formations, from its origins to the present, we can build from a universalizing framework and global data set. This approach can better integrate the wider body of Indigenous knowledge and worldviews than the Western-based historical models and understanding of the human story that continues to hold sway.

One of the first to see the scale of this opportunity is archaeologist, researcher, and professor Gary M. Feinman, MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Feinman and a growing cast of colleagues have turned stereotypes about Mesoamerican societies on their heads—many were cooperative, relatively egalitarian—and they developed an impressive array of frameworks that allow us to compare different aspects of societies from various times and places, including ours.

Feinman has been a prominent advocate for developing better models to interpret the past and for the synthesis of information across time periods and regions of the planet. We are stronger when we can draw from a broader set of parameters, counterexamples, and nuances that prevent the common human instinct to take off on flights of fancy.

I thought readers could benefit from sharing our conversation about the great archaeological discovery of our time: the realization that this new data set is a powerful engine for the betterment of humankind.

Jan Ritch-Frel: Let’s start with a great essay you wrote in 2023, “Learning from History, If We Dare.” You wrote of a “treasure trove of information that just may guide us toward better futures.” We’re in an era, thanks to accumulations of evidence and technology, where humanity has a critical mass of history at its fingertips that it has never had before. Why is this significant?

Gary M. Feinman: As deep-time historians, we have finally gotten the volume and multiple scales of data that permit comparisons across different cultural periods, over long spans of time, and diverse social formations. In a real sense, through archaeology, we can now begin to assess a truly global historical record that is not narrowly restricted to just literate societies or the European past. For a long time, the classical Mediterranean world or medieval Europe—both known from texts—were used as proxies for humanity’s past. Now, we know that is not appropriate, as our past as a species has neither been uniform nor linear.

At the same time, we now have models that help us identify and point ourselves toward understanding what underpins good governance, collective and cooperative behavior, as well as the causes of economic inequality and their alternatives. The social sciences have finally discarded 200-year-old approaches to understanding the past, such as the idea that the nations of Europe are the pinnacle and end-point product of steady human progress. A historical framework pegged to that framework makes useful comparisons across history almost impossible.

Ritch-Frel: Do we have many examples of our leaders and governing circles daring to learn from anything other than cherry-picked history?

Feinman: The problem is that for centuries, scholars interested in drawing lessons from the historical past have looked principally to the classical world, Europe’s recent past, or progressivist models that made unwarranted assumptions about human nature writ large. Many leaders who saw history through a straw have paid a heavy price.

More problematic are the scenarios that presume humans are perpetually selfish or that our leaders are always despotic or militaristic. These scenarios ignore the nuances of human nature, which include both the potential for selfishness and the ability to cooperate with non-kin at scales unsurpassed in the animal kingdom. Human behavior is always contingent on context, and alone, it cannot account for human history. Rather, we must look for the parameters, patterns, and variability in institutions and behavior that account for humanity’s differences, diverse pasts, and changes.

Contrary to prevailing opinion, there is no end to the debates and lessons we can learn from history. Technologies change, but the basic socioeconomic mechanisms and relations that underpin human institutions have broad commonalities and structures. We know this in regard to scale and now another key dimension: the degree to which power is concentrated and distributed.

Of course, pure reliance on education and exposure to democratic institutions and good governance is not enough for these things to take hold. How institutions are financed makes a big difference, and if that does not change, then political realities will not either.

Ritch-Frel: Since we’ve never had so much history to learn from and make use of before, the reality is that the mechanisms for initiating better use of a more comprehensive history have to be produced. What are some of the key starting points?

Feinman: We first have to recognize that when explaining humanity’s past, history itself matters. The path dependence, or sequence of changes, and existing structures matter. In other words, the social sciences are historical sciences—like biology—but without general laws or mechanical explanations like there are in physics. Even though there are no universal laws of history, we can identify useful probabilities.

How do we do that? First, a comparative study of the past has to allow for variation in sequences, speed of development, and change. Then, as we compare different regional sequences of history, we can study the relations between historical factors and key variables under different parameters. One great advantage of history and archaeology compared to the recent past is that we know the outcomes. We already know what happened, and that gives us the opportunity to understand why.

As we build our understanding of humanity’s global past, the strength of the relationships we see between institutions and factors such as population growth, nucleation, and scale will become stronger. Only through a broad comparative lens, made possible with archaeological data, can we construct a genuinely global archive of histories and heritage.

Then there’s the social modeling question—a lot of historical error has been produced by seeing events as driven solely by the elites. High status generally may come with more clout than others have, but in social formations, there are many other groups and forces that have a hand in determining how events unfold. If we’re interested in greater accuracy, we will include the vantages of the wider population and daily life.

Institutions are part of this mix: They perform functions based on earlier embedded history that people have to contend with and sometimes reform.

Most human settlements and social formations are open—population flow and change are near-continuous. This means that membership and affiliations in our communities and “societies” are generally in flux and have mechanisms that reflect that.

Cultural groups are not homogeneous, and cultural traits do not shift in unison. Some aspects of culture, like worldviews or visions of the universe, resist change. Others, such as how people organize politically or what they do for a living, may shift more readily.

This is where it becomes so critical that we can study the past in both granular and scaled-up ways, using a range of new technologies we have available, from isotopes and DNA to satellite mapping.

The methodology of many research disciplines that use individuals as their key metric has continuously let us down the more our questions scale up—this applies to both behavioral ecology and classical economics. They are useful but conceptually inadequate when it comes to explaining the diversity and complexity of the deep past.

Ritch-Frel: Regarding the educational process for future leaders, where would you start?

Feinman: We need a curriculum for future leaders that broadens their perspective on human behavior and the global past. If we’re going to enjoy the benefits of history, behavior in the contemporary West should not be isolated or considered distinct from the rest. A proper dose of a synthesis of anthropology, archaeology, and history will temper the curricula that prepare future leaders in ways that dampen modernist and Eurocentric biases.

The famous Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) courses at Oxford and Cambridge, which have produced almost all the UK prime ministers for many decades, and the Grand Strategy courses taught at the elite campuses of the United States, are deeply imbued in these theories and presumptions.

Ritch-Frel: Do you think the PPE and the Grand Strategy crowd know they’re holding onto an obsolete and reductive bag and will embrace history and biological sciences, or will this have to be a knife fight in the alley?

Feinman: In so many ways, recent policies and beliefs regarding inequality, globalism, democracy, and migration have been birthed from disciplines like economics, politics, and law, which are grounded in Eurocentric ideas and assumptions. These biases are not surprising since Western social scientific thought grew hand in hand with Euro-American colonialism and contemporary paths of economic development.

But now, our mission is to disentangle and refine our conceptual frames, drawing on and broadening it based on what we have learned. The data we have collected in archaeology, anthropology, and history demand an episode of “destructive science,” a new conceptual development that aligns with what we know, in which we expand and integrate theoretical ideas drawn from economics and politics. And we can temper them with the diversity in practices and institutions that have been documented by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists.

Click here to read the article on the Fair Observer.

Jan Ritch-Frel is the executive director of the Independent Media Institute and a co-founder of the Human Bridges project.

Photo Credit: chensiyuan / Wikimedia Commons