Biden Promised to End Standardized Testing in Schools—It Was Never Going to Be Easy

Read the rest at LA Progressive.

In education policymaking in Washington, D.C., the “bean counters” are still in charge.

By Jeff Bryant

Barely a month after President Biden was inaugurated, educators and public school advocates reeled in dismay when his administration announced it would enforce the federal government’s mandate for annual standardized testing in public schools. During the Democratic Party’s presidential primary, Biden had expressed strong opposition to the tests. In a video taken at a December 2019 forum for public school teachers, Biden, when asked, “Will you commit to ending the use of standardized testing in public schools,” replied, “Yes… You’re preaching to the choir.”

Although the decision was made before he took office, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, confirmed the Biden administration would not allow states to skip the exams.

So what happened to “the choir”?

It’s not like there was a groundswell from across the country to resume the tests.

Prior to the Biden administration’s announcement, Chalkbeat’s national correspondent Matt Barnum reported, “Several states, including California, Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York, [had] already asked for or said they planned to request a waiver from this year’s testing requirements entirely.” As of March 29, three states—Georgia, Oregon, and South Carolina—that had requested to offer alternatives to a statewide standardized test were denied, according to a later report by Barnum, but Colorado will be allowed to cut the number of tests it administers by half.

“The two national teachers’ unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers—have urged that waivers be given,” Valerie Strauss reported for the Washington Post. “At least [11,000] people have signed a petition by the Center for Fair and Open Testing, a nonprofit organization known as FairTest, calling for waivers to be granted.”

A Backlash to the Biden Decision

The announcement on testing triggered an immediate backlash. “Critics reacted swiftly to the decision to require the exams, flooding social media with condemnations,” Strauss reported for the Washington Post. A notable critic, she pointed out, was New York City’s outgoing school chancellor Richard Carranza, who “urged parents to refuse to let their children take the tests.”

In surveys and widespread commentaries, teachers have long said the tests are of little to no use for their own teaching.

As education historian Diane Ravitch explains in the Washington Post, teachers see the scores months after the students have moved on to another grade, they’re not allowed to see the questions on the tests or how their students answered questions, and the tests don’t tell them which students need extra help, how their students compare to their classmates, or how they should change their teaching methods.

The tests are of little use to parents too, Ravitch states, because, other than ranking their children, the tests don’t inform parents about more urgent concerns for their children’s progress in school, such as how they’re keeping up with and understanding the work, participating in class, and engaging with other students and with the school community as a whole.

The tests have their detractors among state and local policymakers too, reports Barnum. Although “many states” had already been planning to go forward with the tests, Barnum reports, numerous state and local education officials signaled they may ask the federal government for “additional flexibility, or appear to have disregarded the department’s clear language entirely.”

More than 500 education researchers have asked Cardona to reconsider the mandate. Cardona has claimed that test results will “ensure that we’re providing the funds to those students who are impacted the most by the pandemic,” even though plans for distributing the funds have already been determined.

Members of Congress have also spoken out against the tests. Several Democrats led by Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York have urged Cardona to reconsider the decision, Politico reports: “Bowman said that requiring testing this year would add stress to kids who are already traumatized and divert school administrators’ resources and attention away from reopening safely.”

This ‘Mentality’ Isn’t Going to Work

So who believes we need the tests?

One of the congressional Democrats who signed Bowman’s letter to Cardona, Rep. Mark Takano of California, previously gave me an interesting explanation for that.

In 2015, when President Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was such a huge proponent of testing he insisted test scores be used to evaluate teachers, I interviewed Takano, who, like Bowman, had been a public school teacher before being elected to Congress.

When I asked Takano about what he called the federal government’s “test and punish” approach to education policy, he stated that the testing mandate, which began when No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002 but still dominates today, wasn’t “designed for the types of realities in [his] school.”

What do colleagues in Congress say when he tells them this? He told me the problem in Congress is that there are two types of people who tend to dominate Beltway ideology and the philosophy that drives problem-solving.

Most people, he explained, are either from the worlds of business and finance or they’re attorneys. The former, due to their work experiences, tend to be driven by numbers and production outputs, while the latter, due to their advocacy interests, want to remedy societal problems, including those that are obvious in the education system, by “putting into place a law with all these hammers” to make someone accountable for any statistical evidence of injustice and inequality.

Neither “mentality [is] going to work in education,” he told me, because at the heart of the education process is teachers being able to build trusting relationships with students and strategizing with other teachers on how to engage students. Having to hit a mark on the annual test or worry about an accountability measure closing your school or ending your employment just gets in the way.

A Pressure Campaign

Someone who fits the mold of those wanting to drop a hammer on educators is acting Assistant Education Secretary Ian Rosenblum, who signed the letter informing state education departments of the decision to carry on the testing mandate.

Rosenblum came to his position having previously served as executive director of Education Trust–New York. Prior to that, he had worked in the administrations of two governors who pushed standardized testing in their states, Andrew Cuomo in New York and Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania.

Rosenblum’s previous organization is part of the national Education Trust, which is currently led by John King, who was secretary of education in the Obama administration after Duncan.

In the run-up to Rosenblum’s announcement, the Education Trust organized a pressure campaign with a coalition of other like-minded organizations to advocate for the tests. As the campaign rolled out, the coalition expanded from a dozen civil rights and disability advocates to more than 40 groups with a broad spectrum of interests, including business, civil rights, charter schools, politics, and so-called education reform policies.

In a series of three letters sent to education department officials—in November 2020 and on February 3 and February 23, 2021—the argument the Education Trust and its allies put forth was that the “data” generated by the tests were “imperative” to determine how “scarce resources can be directed to the students, schools and districts that need them most” and “to address systemic inequities in our education system.”

In his letter upholding the testing mandate, Rosenblum repeated the identical theme: “we need to understand the impact COVID-19 has had on learning and identify what resources and supports students need. We must also specifically be prepared to address the educational inequities that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.”

There are three reasons this argument is mistaken, at best, or, at worst, purposefully deceptive.

First, throughout the pandemic, it has been well understood that students who chronically struggle the most in schools—students of color, Indigenous students, English learners, immigrant students, students with disabilities, students from low-income families, and students experiencing homelessness—are the ones who have been further disadvantaged by the crisis. No one needs test scores to inform them of this harsh reality.

Similarly, the assertion that test data are needed to reveal the inequities of the nation’s education system is absurd. The inequities of the nation’s education system were stark and apparent to all before the pandemic. Obviously, a historic health and economic crisis will only worsen inequities.

Finally, the belief that standardized testing will lead to allocating education resources more effectively is simply not borne out in the history of standardized testing.

As New York City art teacher Jake Jacobs states in the Progressive magazine, “Not only have achievement gaps persisted or widened throughout the standardized testing experiment, so-called ‘help’ has never come, year after year. In fact, the original No Child Left Behind Act meted out escalating punishments, defunding and closing low-scoring schools, or placing them on closure lists to the delight of charter school developers and investors.”

The Biden administration has said that the test score data will not be used to discipline or punish low-performing schools, states, or districts. But does anyone really believe predictably low scores won’t become fodder in the ongoing campaign to dismantle public schools?

Follow the Money

Because of these flawed arguments behind the demand for testing, public school advocates are suspicious that federal officials are simply doing the bidding of private foundations and political groups that tend to influence education policy.

As evidence of that, Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, posted on Ravitch’s personal blog the names of all the organizations that signed on to the Education Trust’s pressure campaign and included the amounts of funding each has received from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation, two of the most influential philanthropies that have spent billions in an effort to transform K-12 education to conform to market-based policy ideas. Most of the organizations have taken donations from Gates and Walton foundations, and some have gotten tens of millions of dollars.

Another source of financial pressure could be coming from the testing industry itself.

Assessment companies have been estimated to rake in over $1.7 billion annually, according to findings from a 2012 Brookings Institution assessment, as reported by Education Week. A 2015 article by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post reported that testing companies spent more than $20 million on lobbying state and federal government officials from 2009 to 2014 and frequently hired them to do their lobbying.

When former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, under Trump, allowed states to cancel tests in 2020, one of the larger test companies, Cambium Assessment, took a revenue “hit,” the company’s president told a reporter for Education Week’s Market Brief.

That article also notes that testing companies may take on additional “cost burdens” in 2021 because the Biden administration’s requirements allow states to make some modifications to the length of tests and when they can be given.

Regardless of the money trail and its influence, it’s not clear why the Biden administration made the decision to continue enforcing the testing mandate, and the effects of this perplexing call to continue testing during such an unprecedented school year could have far-reaching impacts, most of which, on balance, seem negative, while few seem positive.

One thing that appears to be certain though, is that, as Takano also told me, “If you liken education to bean counting, that’s not going to work.” And so far, the bean counters still seem to be in charge.

Read the rest at 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: albertogp123/Flickr

Pandemic May Have Left Over 250 Million People With Acute Food Shortages in 2020

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

Click to read the full article online.

As Black and Latinx families experience disproportionate food insecurity, experts warn of famine in dozens of countries.

By Robin Scher

February 23, 2021

Beyond the questions surrounding the availability, effectiveness and safety of a vaccine, the COVID-19 pandemic has led us to question where our food is coming from and whether we will have enough. According to a United Nations World Food Program (WFP) report, COVID-19 might have left up to 265 million people with acute food shortages in 2020. The combined effect of the pandemic as well as the emerging global recession “could, without large-scale coordinated action, disrupt the functioning of food systems,” which would “result in consequences for health and nutrition of a severity and scale unseen for more than half a century,” states another UN report.

In the United States, “food insecurity has doubled overall, and tripled among households with children” due to the pandemic, states a June 2020 report by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University, which relied on data provided by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. In a recent interview with CBS News, IPR Director Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach warned that these statistics would likely “continue to hold,” with the numbers indicating particularly dramatic rises in food insecurity among Black and Latinx families. Indeed, families of color are being disproportionately impacted. According to an analysis of new Census data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), 22 percent of Black and 21 percent of Latinx respondents reported not having enough to eat, compared to just 9 percent of white people.

Globally, the effects of COVID-19 on food security are equally, if not more, severe. According to a CBS News report, WFP Director David Beasley told the UN Security Council in April 2020 that the world is on “the brink of a hunger pandemic.” He added, “In a worst-case scenario, we could be looking at famine in about three dozen countries, and in fact, in 10 of these countries we already have more than one million people per country who are on the verge of starvation.”

“The number of chronically hungry people increased by an estimated 130 million last year, to more than 800 million—about eight times the total number of COVID-19 cases to date,” wrote Mark Lowcock, the under-secretary-general and emergency relief coordinator at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), and Axel van Trotsenburg, managing director of operations at the World Bank. “Countries affected by conflict and climate change are particularly vulnerable to food insecurity. Empty stomachs can stunt whole generations.”The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) warns that climate change “is likely to diminish continued progress on global food security through production disruptions that lead to local availability limitations and price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety.” The same might be said about the pandemic, which has made it abundantly clear: climate resilience, food security and global health are closely intertwined.

Read the rest at Truthout.

Robin Scher is a writer based in South Africa. He is a graduate of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. Find him on Twitter @RobScherHimself.

Photo Credit: neukomment/Flickr

Bridging the Gap: When Students from Two Very Different Campuses Find a Path to Understanding Each Other

This article describes the efforts of the Face to Face project’s Bridging the Gap initiative. Read more about it here.

Two reputations, two narratives, one goal: to listen, learn and value each other.

By Kevin Brown and Meredith Raimondo

This fall, America experienced a presidential election like no other. For many college students, this was their first opportunity to vote, and what a way to enter the democratic process. After four years facing a difficult political polarization, America reminded us on Election Day, and (even more dramatically) in the days since, that we are a deeply divided nation. As a result, we demonize each other in our divisions.

From our vantage point as deans of student affairs (at two very different small liberal arts institutions), the process toward healing the divides in our nation could only be achieved through finding our collective humanity, not through vanquishing our alleged enemies.

As leaders at our respective campuses, we know that there are powerful forces in politics, media, and culture that advance the notion to disagree with the “other”—that these disagreements should be reviled and ridiculed. According to that narrative, students at Oberlin College (a renowned bastion of liberal thinking in Ohio) are elite, intolerant “snowflakes.” Students at Spring Arbor University (a private, Christ-centered, liberal arts school in Spring Arbor, Michigan) are seen through prejudiced lenses often as reactionary, intolerant, mean-spirited evangelicals.

Each is supposed to view one another as the irreconcilable opposition.

This spring, students from five colleges and universities (Cornerstone University, Hamline College, and Bethel College, in addition to Oberlin and Spring Arbor) have launched a new program called Bridging the Gap: Dialogue across Difference—a three-week project to “challenge” views that depend upon increasingly limiting labels. We felt that if our students could come together across lines of difference, it would be good for them and our institutions.

This was not a kumbaya idea animated by a naive hope that we would all just “get along.” Instead, it would build on the values and programs of our institutions while building from an experiment that began last spring by Oberlin and Spring Arbor, to “Bridge the Gap.”

There were precedents for this experiment at both institutions: In the spring of 2017, Spring Arbor began work on the “Courageous Conversations Project” through the Office for Institutional Diversity and the Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Committee as a way to foster communication and dialogue across campus. A year later, Oberlin launched a 14-week sustained dialogue program built around listening to understand and designed to help students engage productively with perspectives and experiences different from their own. Both initiatives were widely embraced at each campus.

Even with ongoing outreach programs on both campuses, students said, “more work needs to be done.”

As John Walter Parker, a fourth-year East Asian studies major at Oberlin, said, “there are a lot of people at Oberlin who think that engaging conservative, evangelical ideas is bad discourse.”

Bridging the Gap was led by Simon Greer, a nationally renowned facilitator who began with a simple prompt: take seriously the things that others hold dear. If it matters to you, then it will matter to me; we are not here to convince anyone they are wrong or try to change them; and, we are curious why people think the way they do, and rather than thinking we are diminished by listening carefully to ideas we might disagree with, we trust that we are enhanced by it.

The pilot program consisted of more than 125 hours of combined classwork, fieldwork, and homework. Over three weeks, 17 students invested a great deal in this journey. They learned and practiced skills such as listening, providing feedback, and telling their stories. Kristina Grace, a senior business major from Spring Arbor University, commented, “we focused on how to have hard conversations.”

Our students spent eight days living together. They explored each other’s values, worldviews, political ideas, faith traditions, and much more. Elizabeth Stewart, a junior communications major from Spring Arbor, explains:

“We all knew it was a safe space to learn, and that meant it had to be a safe place to disagree. Simon designed it based on hearing the other perspective and made sure it was natural to disagree. Our goals were things like curiosity and intellectual humility, and it was a safe route because of the setup.”

Students were encouraged to hold to their convictions and not to blur differences or seek watered-down compromises.

The results exceeded our expectations. Elizabeth recalls, “I had a hesitancy to share my faith because I wasn’t sure if they would allow room for me to express it; my encounter was the opposite of my expectations. They respected me. They asked questions about my faith. They sought to find common ground and even encouraged me in my Christianity.”

The last phase of the program was an application of Simon Greer’s approach to a policy issue. The issue they focused on was criminal justice reform. They began the deep dive by meeting all the stakeholders in the criminal justice system, from state legislators, to corrections officers, to formerly incarcerated individuals and advocacy organizations. They even toured a prison.

Our students reminded us that whether you are secular or Christian, conservative or liberal, we all have our own stories that make us human. As Darielle Kennedy, a second-year law and society student from Oberlin, shared, “One of the biggest bridges I had to gap was talking about prison reform with corrections officers [COs]. In hearing the voices of those working in corrections, the skills I learned from Bridging the Gap, such as active listening and being curious, both helped me when I met COs who really do care about the safety and well-being of prisoners. And now in thinking about prison reform more broadly, I believe that all impacted voices, including the voice of officers, are needed if we are ever really going to improve the system, and I am hopeful that by hearing from all voices we can start to imagine a road forward that benefits all sides so no one is suffering.”

We would not be writing this op-ed together if our pilot program had been a complete success. Much more work needs to be done. But we are excited that today, despite the global pandemic, more campuses and more students are expanding on the pilot program. Engagement across differences can help us clarify and strengthen who we are, illuminate things we may not have understood, and by bringing a bit of humanity to how we understand the “other” instill some spiritual and moral health to a society in need of healing.

Our students taught us that as our future leaders, they want much more than what’s being offered today. They are ready to honor each other’s humanity and to engage across lines of difference. They want a chance to solve real problems together—by bridging the gaps that divide us.

To watch the Bridging the Gap film, click here.

Kevin Brown is the chief diversity officer at Spring Arbor University.

Meredith Raimondo is vice president and dean of students at Oberlin College.

Reformers Seek Sweeping Changes to Fortify American Democracy

The Independent Media Institute and Voting Booth project are grateful for the support of Carla Itzkowich, in honor of her father, Moises Itzkowich, to produce special reports like these.

By Steven Rosenfeld

The Trump presidency is over and the Biden presidency has begun. The 2020 election’s legacy will now turn to examining how the institutions and laws that govern voting can be fortified, after a bruising season where Trump attacked the process as illegitimate and enlarged the GOP myth of massive voter fraud.

Normally, after every presidential election, every sector involved in elections issues post-election reports and prescriptions. While Trump’s refusal to admit defeat has delayed that process, the emerging analyses and recommendations so far have two focuses. The first concerns the maze of laws and rules governing elections. The second focus is arguably harder to solve, as it concerns the personal and societal factors that allowed the narratives of stolen elections and underlying conspiracies to take hold among tens of millions of Americans—such as 15 percent of Republicans who still support the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

“This anger on the part of some people has been building for a long time, and there can be a separate discussion of why it is that people are feeling frustrated and that leads to a willingness to engage in violence,” said Michael Chertoff, former U.S. secretary of homeland security and a leader of the bipartisan National Task Force on Election Crises, which was convened last year as Trump escalated his attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election. “But the fuse that lit this particular explosion was a big lie.”

“It was the lie propagated by Donald Trump and his supporters that this election was rigged and stolen and fraudulent,” Chertoff said, speaking on January 15 as the National Task Force on Election Crises issued its recommendations. “Even though, repeatedly, when evidence was requested, no evidence was provided, and every court rejected these claims. But the big lie nevertheless continued to propagate and reflects a challenge in our society in terms of truth and willingness to trust our [electoral] institutions.”

In the short run, Chertoff believes that those individuals who led the lie-based attacks on 2020’s elections—Trump, those storming the Capitol, elected officials seeking to override swing-state popular votes, pro-Trump lawyers filing falsity-filled lawsuits—must be held accountable. That near-term step will help revive factual baselines and trust in electoral institutions, he said. But the body’s recommendations, like other “what next?” discussions by legal scholars, policymakers, election officials and advocacy groups, concern other foundations of American democracy.

The task force made 28 recommendations in several areas, including: election administration, with regard to how states helped voters both to get a ballot during the pandemic and to ensure their votes were accurately counted; legal reforms, ranging from clarifying federal laws governing the Electoral College and presidential transitions to urging that states modify their post-Election Day procedures to allow more assurances that votes were being counted accurately; and social media platforms, which would do better to delete false posts, not merely add warning labels.

As extensive as this to-do list seems, it is not the full democracy reform agenda. In July 2020, a 25-member expert panel based at Harvard University and the Washington-based Brookings Institution issued a report calling for mandatory voting. As María Teresa Kumar, founding president of Voto Latino, who participated in that panel and the bipartisan task force, said, universal voting was one way to dilute the power of the most extreme political factions.

“Universal voting, in countries that practice it, actually tones down the extremism on both sides because it involves everybody,” she said. “If there are methods to promote that type of practice in the country, we will see not only fair elections but more participation… with the hopes of toning down that extremism that we are witnessing today.”

An even longer-standing reform effort led by voting rights advocates is calling for swift passage of H.R. 1. That 791-page House bill addresses election intricacies, campaign finance and ethics. It is comprised of reforms proposed mostly by Democrats from more than 50 bills that failed to pass during the past decade when Republicans controlled at least one chamber in Congress. A growing coalition of 170 center-left groups are pushing for H.R. 1, even though most of it was drafted before the pandemic dramatically altered how 2020’s general election was conducted, including greatly expanding the use of mailed-out ballots and early in-person voting. One day before Biden’s inauguration, a version of H.R. 1 was introduced in the Senate.

On the same day, Marc Elias, who led the Democratic Party’s voting rights litigation, published his initial ideas based on the 2020 election. They include “shoring up the weak points in our system that Trump and his allies exploited,” such as streamlining post-election certification of winners, improving access to ballots, minimizing bureaucracy surrounding mailed-out ballots, and better audits and transparency to assure voters are not being disenfranchised.

“As we transition to an America without Trump as its president, the days are still dark—an epidemic is raging and the assault on democracy continues,” he said. “Although the man will leave the White House, it has become clear that Trumpism will remain, now deeply embedded in the Republican Party. The damage that it has done and, until rooted out, will continue to do to our nation and its institutions and values is structural and will not be easily repaired.”

Where to Begin?

The early post-election reports, related briefings and other discussions suggest bold action is needed to counter the damage done to the institutions and procedures undergirding American democracy. Even though Trump and his allies lost 64 out of 65 post-election lawsuits (and gained no votes in the suit they won), the constitutional roles surrounding who regulates elections must be clarified. The steps instituted to help voters during the pandemic have not been codified into law—and may even be rolled back in red-run states. The architecture of online media that spread Trump’s stolen election lies remain in place.

Every new presidency has a window to pass a fraction of its agenda. When it comes to dealing with the damage done to America’s elections, the emerging question is what steps are likely to most immediately fortify democratic institutions. Put another way, if the bedrock of American democracy was shaken and tested, what steps—possibly beyond what was on the table in 2020’s elections—are needed to strengthen representative government?

On January 14, a dozen of the nation’s leading constitutional scholars met on Zoom for an Ohio State University forum, “Picking Up the Pieces of the 2020 Election.” Two divergent focal points drove the discussion. The first was what to do about the millions of Trump voters who believe that one of the best-run national elections in memory (record turnout, more voting options, more verification of vote counts, etc.) was illegitimate. And second, what should most immediately be done to fortify the laws and structures behind elections to restore public trust?

The country faced a crisis that was bigger than the fine print of election law and procedure, said University of California, Irvine School of Law professor Rick Hasen. Laws and election reforms can only go so far—as both are based on facts and rules of evidence—if people rejected the law, or felt that their identity as citizens had somehow been threatened and required patriotic rebellion.

“There is only so much that election law can do if people are not willing to comply with the rules of the game,” he said. “We can structure rules that try to create fair elections and that, if people are willing to believe the truth, should give assurances that elections were conducted in fair ways. But if you’ve got a significant part of the population [unwilling to believe the truth], led by someone who is spouting lies about the integrity of the election, it turns out it is very difficult to fight against that.”

Others said that the county was not quite at the abyss, but agreed that the moment called for remedies other than what many democracy advocates are coalescing around, which was the swift passage of H.R. 1.

“Some of the things in H.R. 1 are good and we should think about them, as well as things that came up in this election related to mail balloting and the like,” said Nathaniel Persily of Stanford Law School. “The impact that they’re actually going to have on some of the problems that we are seeing in the short term is relatively minimal. You can support gerrymander reform, [party] primary [election] reform and the like, as I do, but I don’t think that it’s going to respond to our current crisis.”

“There are things that can be done now, though, that are worth spending political capital on, like [Washington] D.C. statehood, Puerto Rican statehood, and the like,” Persily said, “that I think would have a dramatic effect on the composition of Congress, as well as the Electoral College.” He went on to say that Congress must regulate online speech, as it has in other settings depending on time, place and manner, instead of allowing “Google, Twitter and Facebook to be those judges.”

Others at the Ohio State University forum were more measured. They pointed to clarifying the constitutional questions involving the Electoral College and state certification of winners. They said that administrative decisions and emergency rules that helped voters during the pandemic should be codified—put into law. They suggested that political parties, especially Republicans, might rein in extremist flanks by revising their rules for primary elections. They agreed American public education lacked a sufficient focus on civics.

Looming overhead during the forum was an unnerving question posed by several scholars. Democrats could use their control of Congress and the White House to impose their vision, as the Republicans have done for years—such as red states imposing barriers to Democratic voting blocs after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. But doing so might further provoke a violence-prone right wing, some scholars said, suggesting that progressives might have to step back to allow moderate Republicans to reclaim control of their party and return to respecting elections.

“Prior to November 3, I thought where we would be now is, conceptually, having the Democratic Party having control of the Senate, control of the House, control of the presidency, [and the leadership] asking itself to what extent it was appropriate, and how could it impose its conception of fair play and fair elections on the system, because it would have the ability to do that,” said Edward Foley, who directs Ohio State University’s election law program. “This was the moment. Use the power. And just have a new Voting Rights Act and new reform agenda that would come out of the Democratic Party and its values.”

“I now think that would be a terrible mistake,” Foley continued, “because it will embolden the Trumpian right wing of the Republican Party to say, ‘The system is rigged. It’s their system. It’s not our system. It’s not a shared system. And we’re not going to play by your rules. We’re not going to play this game.’” Foley said that Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell needed “to build a bilateral conception of what America needs by way of an electoral system that both sides can buy into and accept. It can’t be one side’s vision. It can’t be the other.”

The possibility of ceding ground to Republicans to get their post-Trump party to heed facts, and to follow the law and evidence in elections, disturbed Franita Tolson, a University of Southern California Gould School of Law professor. She said such a response lent false credibility to years of Republican lies that elections were fraudulent unless Republican candidates emerged victorious.

“This agreement that we have to appease those who believe in election security [to overly police the process], while also expanding access to the ballot, to me, it just seems like an odd starting place because it gives credence to this idea that on the election integrity side that we have an equal problem there—similar to the problem that we have with access to the ballot,” Tolson said. “I may be in the minority here, but I actually don’t think that’s a good starting point. I think that to the extent that we are worried about people questioning the legitimacy of this election, we have to stop pretending that there are problems with the legitimacy of this election. This is a narrative that’s been building, really, for over the past two decades.”

Clear Frames and Goals

These big questions and frames offer ways to assess post-election recommendations. In the meantime, other key voices have yet to weigh in.

In presidential battleground states, election officials have yet to submit reports to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and to private foundations about how they used millions in grants to better conduct elections during a pandemic, said Tammy Patrick, a member of the National Task Force on Election Crises and senior adviser to the elections program at the Democracy Fund.

“The election itself was a raging success, in the midst of a raging pandemic and some of the worst rhetoric around the integrity of elections that the Republic has ever seen,” said Patrick, who counseled against fast federal action, such as passing H.R. 1, despite its many laudable elements—including reliable federal funding.

“There’s so much going on,” she said. “If the states take the false narrative of the 2020 election as a reason or a way to implement regressive law [as GOP-majority legislatures in swing states may do], I think we will have to have some sort of baseline federal legislation get passed in order to make sure that all Americans have some semblance of equal access to the ballot.”

Meanwhile, others, such as Stanford’s Persily, said now was not the right time to talk about election intricacies, especially with Trump’s upcoming impeachment trial in the Senate.

“Now’s not a time to be talking about ballot drop boxes and absentee ballot signatures, when… the basics of American democracy and government are under assault,” he said. “I believe the Biden folks when they say that they are worried that a trial sometime soon after he takes office will make it very difficult for the Senate [to focus elsewhere].”

In other words, the odds that constitutional or electoral reforms will emerge quickly depends on how the impeachment unfolds—including whether or not Republicans vocally reject Trump’s false claims about election fraud—and the outcome, which could include barring Trump from running again for federal office. In the meantime, influential players will keep weighing in.

“It is difficult to overstate the danger that this kind of violent rhetoric poses for our democracy—not only to election officials themselves and the future willingness of Americans to help run our elections [as poll workers], but to the stability of our system,” said Trevor Potter, a Republican, ex-Federal Election Commission chair and founder of the Campaign Legal Center.

“Are we ruled by voters and laws, or by force and violent threats?”

Read the rest at National Memo.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

Joe Biden Has a Golden Opportunity to Strengthen Public Education

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

Click to read the full article online.

After years of federal policy malpractice, the nation is eager for a fresh agenda for public schools.

By Jeff Bryant

January 19, 2021

In picking Connecticut Commissioner of Education Miguel Cardona to be his nominee for U.S. secretary of education, President-elect Joe Biden appears to have made a Goldilocks choice that pleases just about everyone. People who rarely agree on education policy have praised the decision, including Jeanne Allen, CEO of the Center for Education Reform, a nonprofit group that advocates for charter schools and school choice, who called Cardona “good news,” and education historian Diane Ravitch, who also called the pick “good news” because he does not seem to be aligned with advocates for charter schools and vouchers. Sara Sneed, president and CEO of the NEA Foundation, a public charity founded by educators, called Cardona an “ideal candidate,” in an email, and hailed him for “his emphasis on the need to end structural racism in education and for his push for greater educational equity and opportunity through public schools.”

But as Biden and Cardona—should he be approved, as most expect—begin to address the array of critical issues that confront the nation’s schools, there’s bound to be more of a pushback. Or maybe not?

After decades of federal legislation that emphasized mandating standardized testing and tying school and teacher evaluations to the scores; imposing financial austerity on public institutions; incentivizing various forms of privatization; and undermining teachers’ professionalism and labor rights, there is a keen appetite for a new direction for school policy.

Due to the disruption forced by the pandemic, much is being written and said about the need to “restart and reinvent” education and a newfound appreciation for schools as essential infrastructure for families and children. With an incoming Biden administration, Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress, and the influence of incoming first lady Jill Biden, a career educator, we may be on the cusp of a historic moment when the stars align to revitalize public schools in a way that hasn’t happened in a generation.

Read the rest at EdPolitics.

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 by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr

Seeking Translators for Globetrotter

Dear Reader,

After three years, Globetrotter is a success. The work is essential—Globetrotter tells the stories of people’s movements and the struggles and challenges facing the majority of humanity in the Global South; the journalism is relatable across the world, because multinational corporations and globalized capitalism create the same problems everywhere. The world needs more journalists from the Global South talking to each other—the societies of the world need an alternative to hearing from the small number of journalists whose perspectives match the prerogatives of Western financial interests.

Our authors are read in more than 200 publications in more than 50 countries on five continents, for the most part in English-language publications—and now it is time to grow. We can reach many more people with our work through quality translation, and that’s where hopefully some of you come in—we are looking for translators, not just anyone; we want to reach out first to people who know our work and understand the mission.

If you have some background and experience in journalism, are naturally fluent in English and other languages, have a politics rooted in people’s movements, if you are dependable, easy to work with, and know you have some free time in your life to contribute and make a difference—if you see the potential of this work to be a key ingredient for a better future for humanity, please reach out to us.

Our priorities are naturally the languages most commonly spoken on Earth, but by no means are we limited by the top 10 or even 50—please reach out. We look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks,

The Globetrotter Editors

[email protected]

Announcing the Launch of the Bridging the Gap Initiative

Bridging the Gap is a pilot program designed to support college students from very different walks of life to cultivate the will and the skill to communicate effectively across lines of difference.

In response to the deep divisions we see across our country, and in higher education more specifically, this program provides training and the opportunity to practice developing a deeper understanding of the “other.”

The goal is not to seek watered-down compromises or a kumbaya belief that there are no real disagreements. But rather, Bridging the Gap believes deeply in people, believes the brave work is sitting face to face with those we disagree with and staying firm in our values and open to their humanity at the same time. 

We envision a transformed culture where the heroes are the bridge builders. With Bridging the Gap, these skills are also then applied to issue and policy challenges where we take a multi-stakeholder approach to understanding uses such as criminal justice and where diverse groups of students are charged with developing blueprints for reform on those issues.

Watch the trailer:

Enjoy watching the full documentary film about the process here. You can also read more about Bridging the Gap in USA Today and on Philanthropy.com. 

In America, Business Profits Come First Over the Pandemic

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

Click to read the full article online.

Blaming the deadly virus surge on individuals and their risky behavior ignores that the real fault lies with a government that chooses to prioritize the health of businesses over that of humans.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

January 10, 2021

Los Angeles, California, is now considered one of the worst COVID-19 hotspots in the nation. LA mayor Eric Garcetti assessed grimly that there is one new infection every six seconds and a death every 10 minutes from the virus. Hospitals are turning away ambulances, and health facilities in LA County are quite literally running out of oxygen. But last spring, as the pandemic was first declared, the city was an early adopter of mandated mask wearing and benefitted from California enacting the first statewide shelter-in-place order that helped curb the worst spread of the virus. So, what happened?

There is a possibility that the deadly surge in cases may be a result of a new, more transmissible strain of the virus circulating in the area. But more likely the spread is the result of the message that authorities are sending of a premature return to normalcy. As social media platforms are filled with angry Angelenos blaming and shaming one another for brazenly vacationing and flouting social distancing guidelines, in truth, the burst of infections is the price that officials are willing to pay for ensuring that corporate profits are protected.

California’s latest shelter-in-place order is quite different from its first one. Whereas in March 2020 the state ordered all non-essential businesses to remain closed, in early December, at the peak of the holiday shopping season, all retail stores were allowed to remain open, even as outdoor parks were closed. So outraged were Californians by the obvious double standards that state officials caved and reopened parks—instead of shutting down retail stores.

Predictably, infections at malls soared as shoppers, eager to salvage Christmas, rubbed elbows with one another in their rush to fulfill holiday wishes. After all, authorities had okayed such actions, so they must be safe, right? Rather than enact strict rules to prevent such congregating, some Californians rightfully terrified of the disease simply blamed the shoppers. Even LA County health services director Dr. Christina Ghaly told the Los Angeles Times, “If you’re still out there shopping for your loved ones for this holiday season… then you are missing the gravity of the situation that is affecting hospitals across LA County. Though they may seem benign, these actions are extremely high-risk.” LA County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said to Angelenos, “stay home,” but has refused to consider shutting down non-essential businesses.

In other words, officials kept retail stores open but then chastised residents for shopping. There are two ways to interpret the muddled messaging. If authorities are allowing all businesses to remain open, surely it must be safe to frequent them. Or, authorities are being driven by financial stakes, not public health, so surely it is not possible to trust them.

Read the rest at Newsclick.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations.

Photo by Marco Verch Professional Photographer, (CC BY 2.0), via Flickr

House GOP Recited Trump’s False Vote Theft Claims—Even After Historic Attack on Congress by His Supporters

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on Big News Network.

Click to read the full article online.

The 2020 presidential election may be over. But Trump’s lies and doubts linger.

By Steven Rosenfeld

January 9, 2021

It was past midnight on Thursday, January 7, when the House began its debate on whether to accept Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes.

Earlier on Wednesday, allegations of illegal and fraudulent voting in Pennsylvania and other swing states where President Trump lost led his supporters to storm the Capitol. The mob came after a Trump rally, where the president recited numerous falsehoods that long have been debunked.

It was a stunning spectacle. More than a dozen Republican congressmen rose and condemned the violence. Then, as if the cause of the rampage lay elsewhere, they opposed certifying Pennsylvania’s votes by reciting many of the same allegations that Trump uttered that day—atop innuendo that Democrats had widely cheated.

“To sum it up, Pennsylvania officials illegally did three things,” said Rep. Ted Budd, R-NC. “One, they radically expanded vote by mail for virtually any reason. Two, they removed restrictions when a ballot could be sent in. And three, they removed signature verification on those very ballots.”

Budd did not mention that Pennsylvania’s Republican majority legislature had approved the election reforms that laid the ground rules for 2020’s election. Nor did he note that the Republican National Committee had pushed Pennsylvania’s Republicans to vote with absentee ballots—and hundreds of thousands did.

Instead, Budd and other Republicans said that the election was illegitimate because Democratic officials—such as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state—issued rules to make it easier for voters and election officials to manage in a pandemic. They said the Constitution had been violated because the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had agreed with those steps. Only state legislatures could set election rules, they said, making a novel argument that ignored decades of election law and court rulings.

“I rise in support of this objection and to give voice to the 249,386 men and women of Ohio’s 6th Congressional District,” said Rep. Bill Johnson, R-OH, “who have had their voices silenced by the rogue political actors in Pennsylvania, who unilaterally and unconstitutionally altered voting methods to benefit the Democratic candidate for president.”

“Secretaries of state and state supreme courts cannot simply ignore the rules governing elections set forth in the [U.S.] Constitution,” he fumed. “They cannot choose to usurp their state legislatures to achieve a partisan end, Constitution be damned.”These representatives were joined by others who said that Trump’s mob was “shameful,” “unacceptable” and “un-American.” Yet they went on to recite many of the same claims that Trump made before his mob acted. These claims filled the 60-plus lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies since the election—claims federal and state judges have overwhelmingly rejected as baseless and lacking in evidence.

Read the rest at Big News Network.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

US Capitol by Richard Ricciardi, (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0), via Flickr


Special Report: Decades of Inequality Shadow Voter Turnout in Rural Georgia

The following is an excerpt of an article that was originally published on BillMoyers.com.

Click to read the full article online.

Decades of Inequality Shadow Voter Turnout in Rural Georgia

A small-town voter drive reveals why only trusted family, friends and local leaders can boost turnout in the Senate runoffs.

By Steven Rosenfeld

December 15, 2020

Commerce Street, once the heart of downtown Hawkinsville, Georgia, is easily overlooked. A visitor following state highways through the Pulaski County seat would glance at a row of faded brick buildings, awning-covered storefronts and dusty windows. Parking and getting out feels like stepping into an old postcard. In the sunlight’s glare and morning quiet, you might not know that Black businesses were once barred from the street. Or that the Ku Klux Klan held some of its largest rallies in America nearby. Or the street’s cluster of Black-owned businesses as a small-town triumph.

But quick assessments are out of sync with the rhythm of life and pace of change here. Below buildings painted in pastels, antique-style streetlamps and blue banners labeling Hawkinsville as a “Historic River Town” are two barbershops, a Southern bar and grill, a Caribbean takeout restaurant, clothes and gift shops, a small accounting firm, and a tobacco vape store. Most intriguing of all is what lies below the street’s largest sign, “The Newberry Foundation.”

The Hawkinsville African American Heritage Center is a Black history museum with a faded pine board saying “COLORED ENTRANCE” above its door. Next to it is the Plough and the Pew Reading Room, a ballroom-size space with a dozen large tables and shelves of leather-bound books. Its volumes range from Jet magazine, to the Journal of Negro Education, to The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. A block away is the county courthouse and its large Confederate monument.

On a recent Saturday before the December 7 registration deadline and the December 14 start of early voting, this crossroad of past and present rural Georgia was the setting for a voter registration drive for the upcoming Senate runoffs on January 5. That contest will determine which political party holds the Senate’s majority and with it, the fate of legislation proposed by President-elect Joe Biden. While the biggest concentrations of Democratic voters surround Atlanta, voting rights groups believe that rural communities of color could tip the balance or cement Democratic wins, if they voted.

A small colorful caravan drove to the center of Pulaski County, where the early unofficial results showed that 4,081 of its 5,687 registered voters cast ballots in the November 3 election. Most were white voters backing Republicans. Like the 1960s’ Freedom Riders, whose buses crossed the South to register voters, the registration drive had a similar task: engage and turn out voters.

Read the rest at BillMoyers.com.

Steven Rosenfeld is the editor and chief correspondent of Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has reported for National Public Radio, Marketplace, and Christian Science Monitor Radio, as well as a wide range of progressive publications including Salon, AlterNet, the American Prospect, and many others.

Map of the results of the 2020 Georgia Senate elections, by TheSubmarine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons