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  • New Layers of Dirt on Charter Schools

    by Paul Buchheit

    Despite ever mounting evidence to the contrary, corporate media and corporate-bought politicians continue to proclaim the superiority of charter schools. Meanwhile, “nearly 2,500 charter schools closed their doors from 2001 to 2013, leaving over a quarter million kids temporarily without a school.” The New Orleans school privatization experiment has clearly failed, as has Detroit. Yet, the charter myth persists, backed by big money and lies.

    New Layers of Dirt on Charter Schools

    by Paul Buchheit

    This article previously appeared in CommonDreams.

    “Charter schools have turned our children into the products of businesspeople.”

    An earlier review identified the “Three Big Sins of Charter Schools”: Fraud, a Lack of Transparency, and the Exclusion of Unwanted Students. The evidence against charters continues to grow. Yet except for its reporting on a few egregious examples of charter malfeasance and failure, the mainstream media continues to echo the sentiments of privatization-loving billionaires who believe their wealth somehow equates to educational wisdom.

    The Wall Street Journal, in its misinformed way, says that the turnaround of public schools requires “increasing options for parents, from magnet to charter schools.” Wrong. As the NAACPaffirms, our nation needs “free, high-quality, fully and equitably-funded public education for all children.” For ALL children, not just a select few.

    The NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools. And Diane Ravitch makes a crucial point: “Would [corporate reformers] still be able to call themselves leaders of the civil rights issue of our time if the NAACP disagreed with their aggressive efforts to privatize public schools?”

    Here are the 4 Big Sins of Charter Schools, updated by a surge of new evidence:

    1. Starve the Beast

    Corporate-controlled spokesgroups ALEC, US Chamber of Commerce, and Americans for Prosperity are drooling over school privatization and automated classrooms, with a formula described by The Nation: “Use standardized tests to declare dozens of poor schools ‘persistently failing’; put these under the control of a special unelected authority; and then have that authority replace the public schools with charters.” But as aptly expressed by Jeff Bryant, “As a public school loses a percentage of its students to charters, the school can’t simply cut fixed costs for things like transportation and physical plant proportionally…So instead, the school cuts a program or support service.”

    It’s an insidious and ongoing process, aided and abetted by business-friendly mainstream media outlets, to convince Americans that “every family for itself” is better than the mutual support and cooperation of a public school system.

    2. Cream and Segregate and Discard

    Urban charter schools primarily enroll low-income minority students. That seems admirable upon first reflection, but selective admissions of the best students from ANY community will make an individual school look good, leading to the belief that the concept will work on a larger scale. Success is much harder to achieve if a school accommodates special needs and English-learner students.

    Numerous sources reveal the high degree of segregation in charter schools — white or black, and by income and special need.

    As expressed in the report “Failing the Test,” “School choice is just that — except that charter schools are doing the choosing instead of communities.”

    It gets worse. Prominent New York charter network Success Academy has been accused of“counseling out” students who are low-performing or disruptive or otherwise difficult to teach. Even worse are charters that shut down, stranding hundreds of students, while their business operators can just move on to their next project. Nearly 2,500 charter schools closed their doors from 2001 to 2013, leaving over a quarter of a million kids temporarily without a school.

    3. Scream ‘Public’ to Get Tax Money, Plead ‘Private’ to Hide Salary Data

    Charter schools are increasingly run by private companies, or by private trusts. The National Labor Relations Board affirms that charters are private, not public.

    As private entities, they are unregulated and lacking in transparency, and, as concluded by theCenter for Media and Democracy, they have become a “black hole” into which the federal government has dumped an outrageous $3.7 billion over two decades with little accountability to the public.

    4. Engage in “Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Mismanagement”

    That’s how the Center for Popular Democracy describes charter performance in 2015, during which the schools wasted an estimated $1.4 billion of taxpayer money. The fraud is far-reaching, with examples from around the country:

    The Department of Education audited 33 charter schools and concluded: “We determined that charter school relationships with CMOs (charter management organizations) posed a significant risk to Department program objectives.”

    In California, charter performance is so poor that even the National Association of Charter Authorizers is calling on the state to better control the authorization of such schools. At present, there are almost no restrictions on opening a charter school, and existing schools are restrictive in their enrollment policies.

    Because of charters, Michigan cities have lost nearly half (46.5%) of their revenue over the past 10 years. Detroit, which is surpassed only by New Orleans in the number of charter students,half of the charter schools perform only as well as, or worse than, traditional public schools. A federal study found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the lowest-rated public schools in the state.

    In Louisiana, according to the Center for Popular Democracy, “charter schools have experienced millions in known losses from fraud and financial mismanagement so far, which is likely just the tip of the iceberg.”

    According to PR Watch, Florida “has one of the worst records in the nation when it comes to fraud and lack of charter school oversight.” Texas has an unknown number of charters housed in churches. Nine charters in Washington remain open despite being declared unconstitutional by the state’s Supreme Court.

    Ohio might be worst of all. Since the 2006-07 school year, 37 percent of the state’s charter schools receiving federal grants have either closed or never opened. An Ohio newspaper reported, “No sector – not local governments, school districts, court systems, public universities or hospitals – misspends tax dollars like charter schools in Ohio.”

    The Big Picture

    Despite student selection advantages, charter schools generally perform no better than public schools, according to the most recent CREDO study and as summarized by the nonpartisan Spencer Foundation and Public Agenda: “There is very little evidence that charter and traditional public schools differ meaningfully in their average impact on students’ standardized test performance.” As for technology-based schools, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools admits that “The well-documented, disturbingly low performance by too many full-time virtual charter public schools should serve as a call to action to state leaders and authorizers across the country.”

    Charter schools have turned our children into the products of business people. Americans need to know how important it is to get the profit motive out of education, and to provide all our children the same educational opportunities.

    Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, an active member of US Uncut Chicago, founder and developer of social justice and educational websites (UsAgainstGreed.org, PayUpNow.org, RappingHistory.org), and the editor and main author of “American Wars: Illusions and Realities” (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

  • US Cyber-War Is Against Wikileaks, Not Russia

    by SREĆKO HORVAT

    Originally published at CounterPunch Oct 3, 2016

    When the ruling class is in panic, their first reaction is to hide the panic.

    They react out of cynicism: when their masks are revealed, instead of running around naked, they usually point the finger at the mask they wear. These days the whole world could witness a postmodern version of the infamous quote “Let them eat cake”, attributed to Marie-Antoinette, queen of France during the French Revolution.

    As a reaction to WikiLeaks publishing his emails, John Podesta, the man behind Hillary Clinton’s campaign, posted a photo of a dinner preparation, saying “I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy”.

    A similar version of vulgar cynicism emerged earlier this month when Hillary Clinton reacted to the claim that she reportedly wanted to “drone” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (“Can’t we just drone this guy?”) when she was the US Secretary of State. Instead of denying her comments, Clinton said that she doesn’t recall any such joke, “It would have been a joke if it had been said, but I don’t recall that”.

    One doesn’t have to read between the lines to understand that if Hillary Clinton had said that, she would have considered it a joke. But when emperors joke, it usually has dire consequences for those who are the objects of their “humor.”

    Cyber-war Not with Russia…but WikiLeaks

    During the last few months I have visited Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London several times and each time I came out of the Embassy, where he is spending his fifth year in political asylum under legitimate fear he might be extradited to the US, my thought was the following one: although he lives, without his family, in a postmodern version of solitary confinement (even prisoners are allowed to walk for up to one hour a day), although he has no access to fresh air or sunlight for more than 2000 days, although the UK government recently denied him safe passage to a hospital for an MRI scan, if his access to the internet would be cut off this would be the most severe attack on his physical and mental freedom.

    The last time I saw him, which was only two weeks ago, he expressed the fear that, because he had already published leaks concerning US elections and with more to come, the US might find various ways to silence him, including pressuring Ecuador or even shutting down the internet.

    What seemed a distant possibility only two weeks ago, soon became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    When the Obama administration recently announced that it is, as Biden said, planing an “unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia”, the first victim was not Putin, but precisely Julian Assangewhose internet was cut off just a day after Biden’s self-contradictory proclamation.

    No wonder Edward Snowden reacted immediately by saying that “nobody told Joe Biden what ‘covert operation’ means.

    According to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, a covert operation is “an operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor.”

    It is no secret anymore that the Ecuadorian government has come under extreme pressure since Assange leaked the Democratic National Committee email database. We don’t know yet whether the US pressured Ecuador to shut down the internet, but it is clear that the present US government and the government to come is fighting a war with WikiLeaks which is all but “covert”. Is it really a coincidence that Julian Assange’s internet access was cut off shortly after publication of Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches?

    If at the beginning we still had a “soft” version of postmodern McCarthyism, with Hillary calling everyone opposed to her campaign a Russian spy (not only Assange, but also Donald Trump and Jill Stein), then with Obama’s recent intervention it became more serious.

    With Obama’s threat of a cyber-war, the “soft” McCarthyism didn’t only acquire geopolitical significance, but at the same time a new mask was revealed: Obama is obviously trying to cement the public debate and make the Russian threat “real”, or at least to use it as a weapon in order to help Clinton to get elected. Moreover, this new twist in something that has already become much more than only US elections (US elections are never only US elections!), shows not only how Obama is ready to strengthen Hillary’s campaign, but it also reveals that a cyber war is already in the making.

    It is not a cyber war with Russia, but with WikiLeaks.

    And it is not the first time.

    What would Clausewitz say?

    In 2010, when the Collateral Murder video was published, the Afghan and Iraq war logs were released, and we witnessed one of the most sinister attacks on freedom of speech in recent history. VISA, Mastercard, Diners, American Express and Paypal imposed a banking blockade on WikiLeaks, although WikiLeaks had not been charged with any crime at either state, federal or international level. So if the US government successfully convinced payment companies representing more than 97% of the global market to shut down an independent publisher, why wouldn’t they pressure Ecuador or any other state or company to cut off the internet?

    The US is not only rhetorically trying to “get” Assange (it is worth to check out the Assassinate Assange video for evidence of the verbal masturbation of US officials), he poses a serious threat to the major elite factions in the US to remain in power. No wonder panic is rising in the US, which is now going even so far that a 16-year-old boy in Britain has been arrested on criminal charges related to the alleged hacking of email accounts used by CIA director John Brennan, which WikiLeaks published in October 2016.

    What WikiLeaks obviously successfully challenged–and maybe one day (“history is written by the victors”, remember?) it will be learned in military strategy– is what the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz would call the “centre of gravity” (Schwerpunkt), which is the “central feature of the enemy’s power”.

    Instead of speaking about the Russians, we should start speaking about the Schwerpunkt of the actual leaks, their real essence. Just take the following quotes by Hillary Clinton exposed by WikiLeaks, which reveal her true nature and the politics behind her campaign: “We are going to ring China with missile defence”, “I want to defend fracking” and climate change environmentalists “should get a life”, “you need both a public and a private position”, “my dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders”.

    What WikiLeaks has shown is not only that Hillary is a hawkish war-monger, first it was Libya (over 1,700 of the 33,000 Clinton emails published by WikiLeaks reference Libya), then it was Syria (at a Goldman Sachs conference she explicitly stated she would like to intervene in Syria), tomorrow it will be another war.

    It is now clear – and this is the real “centre of gravity” where we should focus our attention – that the future Clinton cabinet may already been filled with Wall Street people like Obama’s was. No wonder WikiLeaks revelations create utter panic not only in the Democratic Party itself but also the Obama administration.

    One question remains, isn’t WikiLeaks, by leaking all these dirty secrets, influencing the US elections? Yes, it certainly is, but the current criticism misses its point: isn’t the very point of organisations such as WikiLeaks to publish the material they have and to influence public opinion?

    The question should finally be turned around: isn’t the US mainstream media the one influencing the US elections? And isn’t Obama, by announcing a cyber-war with Russia, influencing the elections?

    WikiLeaks is not only influencing the US elections, but transforming the US elections – as they should have been from the very beginning – into a global debate with serious geopolitical consequences at stake. What WikiLeaks is doing is revealing this brutal fight for power, but, as the old saying goes, “when a wise man points at the Moon, the idiot looks at the finger”. Instead of looking at the finger pointing to Russia, we should take a look at the leaks themselves.

    If democracy and transparency means anything today, we should say: let them leak!

    Join the debate at CounterPunch’s page on Facebook

    Srećko Horvat is a philosopher and activist. He is co-author, with Slavoj Žižek, of What Does Europe Want? (Columbia University Press, 2014) and author of The Radicality of Love (Polity Press, 2015). Together with Yanis Varoufakis he co-created the movement DiEM 25. https://diem25.org/

  • Georgia’s Governor Wants To Turn His Public Schools Into Post Katrina New Orleans

    by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    An utterly cynical and deceptively marketed constitutional amendment is on the ballot in Georgia. It’s called the “Opportunity School District” because it’s about creating business opportunities for the charter school sugar daddies who contribute to the governor. Elite Republicans and Democrats too from the First Black President down to local mayors all want school privatization, so they’ve disguised their privatization amendment as something else entirely.

    Originally published at Black Agenda Report on September 21, 2016

    Georgia’s Governor Wants To Turn His Public Schools Into Post Katrina New Orleans

    A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    There’s a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Georgia this November. The word voters will see on their machines election day read thusly:

    “Amendment #1: Provides greater flexibility and state accountability to fix failing schools through increasing community involvement.

    “Shall the Constitution of Georgia be amended to allow the state to intervene in chronically failing public schools in order to improve student performance?”

    It’s Georgia Governor Nathan Deal’s cynically misnamed “Opportunity School District” or OSD, the latest atrocity in the bipartisan right wing drive to privatize public education in the United States.

    The so-called “Opportunity School District,” as its corporate funded multimillion dollar advertising campaign calls it, empowers the governor, through an agency he appoints, to decide what schools are “failing”, usually by low scores on standardized tests. It authorizes the closing of a hundred Georgia public schools, almost entirely in black Georgia.

    The governor then gets to fire up a virtual school district stretching across the entire state, a district in which he alone appoints all the officials on whatever basis at what ever salary suits him. OSD lets the governor create up to a hundred new charter schools in his virtual district to eat the funds which used to go to those public schools. The new OSD charter schools will make fortunes for their investors and contractors, who have already and will continue to donate generously to the governor and his friends. OSD’s charter schools will only be responsible to their own boards and investors, and of course the governor.

    There is no “flexibility” or “community involvement” whatsoever. It’s simple school privatization. OSD will strip locally elected school boards, along with parents, teachers and communities of any and all rights to control their schools and the educational destiny of their children.

    The only opportunity in Governor Deal’s opportunity school district is a business opportunity for his friends, not an educational opportunity for our children.

    The leading candidate to head this contraption is said to be Illinois Democrat Paul Vallas, who shredded the public schools of Chicago and Philly before being named the first head of the post-Katrina New Orleans Recovery School District, an all charter operation created when one-percenters closed all 127 New Orleans public schools. So it’s not metaphor when we say Governor Deal wants to turn Georgia’s schools into those of post-Katrina New Orleans.

    Some Democrats DO oppose, though they only criticize Republican privatizers, not Democrats. Some Republicans oppose it too, because OSD will strip locally elected school boards of any semblance of control over the educational futures of children. But the most powerful politicians of both parties do want school privatization. They just don’t like to use p-word, it has “high negatives.” So their privatization amendment is on the ballot, nicely wrapped up to look like something else entirely.

    Unlike Democrats and Republicans, many of whom are deep in the pockets of charter school sugar daddies, the Green Party is the only political party which unequivocally opposes school privatization in general and the OSD in particular. If the amendment passes, it will be the biggest set of school closures since Katrina, and Chicago a few years back when Rahm Emanuel shut down 50 schools at once. The eyes of the nation, for a little while will be on Georgia.

    For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com, where you can subscribe to our free weekly email newsletter.

    Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and the co-chair of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via email at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.

  • Hillary’s Family Ties to School Privatizers, and Diane Ravitch’s Review of Hoosier School Heist

    By Doug Martin at Hoosier School Heist Blog, and Diane Ravitch

    Originally published at dianeravitch.net in July 2015

    Last week the American Federation of Teachers endorsed Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy, without consulting more than a token slice of the union’s membership. It’s hard not to know that AFT leaders have turned their backs on teachers and thrown in with the privatizing politicians and consultants. Hillary too has her own family ties to school privatizers.

    Hillary’s Family Ties to School Privatizers, and Diane Ravitch’s Review of Hoosier School Heist

    By Doug Martin at Hoosier School Heist Blog, and Diane Ravitch

    1. Hillary and the Privatizers

    A while back, Hillary Clinton, speaking the talk of the working class as all Wall Street DC Democrats do, lashed out at top hedge fund managers for “making more than all of America’s kindergarten teachers combined.”  Hillary’s statement was mere deception. Not because it wasn’t the truth; but because Hillary happens to love hedge fund managers and banksters.

    Hedge fund managers seek to privatize education and steal pensions from teachers, as I detail in my bookHoosier School Heist, and wipe out what is left of the middle class.  And Hillary is all about that.

    In fact, Hillary’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, is a hedge fund manager.  His fund, Eaglevale Partners, recently lost a little money in Greece, a country which cannot pay back loans to billionaires, banksters, and hedge fund managers who have set in place legalized stealing in the form of disaster capitalism.

    One of the chief structures behind disaster capitalism across the planet is the World Bank, which Hillary once wanted to lead.

    As a New York Times piece noted, Eaglevale Partners is a “fund that makes trades based on global economic and political events.” Several investors in Hillary’s son-in-law’s hedge fund, as the New York Times alsopointed out, have ties to the Clintons and have even funded Hillary’s campaign chest. Goldman Sachs is one of these.  As of November 2010, Goldman Sachs, through its Charter School Loan Facility, was funding 130 charter schools across the US.  Hillary’s son-in-law was once a Goldman Sachs employee.

    As for Bill?  Bill Clinton has been behind the for-profit charter school movement since its inception, as many now know. Last year, he even spoke at a Nashville charter school operated by one of Chelsea’s old college sweethearts.

    Recently an outfit spreading charter schools in India was honored at the Clinton Global Initiative, and MarcMezvinsky, Clinton’s hedge fund son-in-law, was there for the photo-op.

    Disaster capitalism is the leading force behind the assault on public schools.  And be sure that Hillary, hedge fund managers, Goldman Sachs, and Randi Weingarten will help further its agenda.

    DC is a lost cause.  And so are the teachers unions. Sleep good at night. Focus your energy on the state level and make plans for a real revolution, before global warming kills us all off.

    Doug Martin is the author of Hoosier School Heist : How Corporations and Theocrats Stole Democracy From Public Education, a book being read in over 130 cities and towns and 78 Indiana counties, 23 states, and the District of Columbia.  A regular guest on national and Indiana radio talk shows such as Justin Oakley’s Just Let Me Teach and Amos Brown’s Afternoons with Amos, Dr. Martin’s research has been or will soon be featured in the Washington Post Answer Sheet , ABC’sNightline, and the Associated Press. 

    2. Diane Ravitch, review of Hoosier School Heist

    Every so often, I run into someone who says that he or she cannot take seriously the claim that there is such a thing as a “privatization” movement. They think that charter schools are public schools (I do not) and they scoff at any concern about for-profit schools. They say things like, “There have always been for-profit businesses in education, selling tests, textbooks, supplies, etc., why does it matter if some corporations run schools for profit?” In their eyes, corporate reform is innovative and risky, and no one—not even the for-profit corporations—is trying to privatize public education.

    To anyone who questions the existence of the privatization movement, I recommend Doug Martin’s “Hoosier School Heist.” Martin is a blogger who holds a Ph.D. in nineteenth century American literature. He is a native of Indiana who is deeply versed in that state’s school politics and its major (and minor) players. His book is eye-opening; actually, his book is eye-popping. It is a no-holds-barred critique of Indiana’s politically and financially powerful privatization movement.

    Martin’s critique shows the linkages among the free-marketeers, the Religious Right, and the greedy.

    A few examples of his snappy style:

    “Academic progress is irrelevant to voucher supporters, for the goal is not to improve schools through competition, as they claim, but to completely dismantle traditional public schools altogether. In fact, those calling for school privatization don’t want to hold anyone with profit motives accountable, as Florida has proven.”

    He recognizes that vouchers and charters drain funding from public schools, leaving the latter with fewer teachers, fewer aides, fewer programs—“so for-profit education management companies can take them over with temporary teachers or justify starting charter schools by deeming the neighborhood schools as ‘failing.’”

    He sees why Wall Street is involved in the charter industry. “Making money from disasters is a Wall Street specialty, and investors have jumped on the opportunity for school privatization. Besides generating tax-exempt bonds, stocks, and other shady financial gimmicks, school privatization allows big bank CEOs, private equity firm honchos, and hedge fund managers to collect interest on loans to non-unionized charter schools which employ a temporary teacher workforce….Unlike traditional public school boards, charter school boards are unelected, undemocratic, and cloaked in mystery. Their conflicts of interest enable schemes like high rent to waste public education money.”

    Martin challenges the corporate-sponsored claims that the public schools are failing to produce a good workforce. He says that Indiana’s newspapers and TV stations “advertise corporate school talking points, portray front group spokespeople as ‘experts,’ and seldom, if ever, question that profit motives and rigged research behind the corporate-sponsored statements that our schools are failing.”

    The Republican-dominated legislature has taken steps to cripple the funding of public schools. “To sneak more politically connected for-profit charter schools into Indiana, in 2010 legislators cut $300 million annually from the public school budget and mandated tax caps to purposely ensure the destruction of public schools….Since the state controls the purse strings, Republican lawmakers have purposely bolted in place everything needed to start closing down Indiana schools and expanding for-profit charter schools.”

    Martin shows how the overuse of standardized testing has benefited corporate politicians like Mitch Daniels. Not only do they stifle the critical thinking skills needed in a democratic society, not only do they send millions to testing corporations, but they demoralize and drive out good teachers. This too sets public schools up for failure.

    One of the valuable aspects of Doug Martin’s book is his careful dissection of the sponsors of corporate reform in Indiana. A key player is called the Mind Trust, which Martin cites as an exemplar of “crony capitalism.” Martin writes:

    “The Mind Trust typifies America’s counterfeit political Left. Mouthing the rhetoric of class warfare, civil rights, and female empowerment, the mock liberals at Education Sector, the Center for American Progress, and the New America Foundation, all supportive of the Mind Trust specifically or school privatization in general (and most bringing home six-figure salaries), attack teachers unions and public schools and connive to mount in place a school system based on corporate profit, one which disenfranchises the female teachers and minority and poor students they claim to be helping.”

    Martin calls out the enablers of the school privatization movement, such as Eli Lilly and the Lilly Endowment, reliable funders of privatization activities, and of Teach for America and the New Teacher Project, which will recruit the temporary teachers needed for the charters. He cites the power of ALEC in the Indiana legislature, whose members pushed to evaluate teachers by their students’ test scores and to judge colleges of education by the test scores of students taught by their graduates. He provides overviews of the anti-teacher, anti-union, privatization agenda of Stand for Children, DFER (Democrats for Education Reform), the Christian right, the Bradley Foundation, the DeVos family of Michigan, and the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), which promotes charters and vouchers.

    Martin doesn’t offer any suggestions about how to combat the well-funded, interconnected organizations that are advancing the privatization agenda. His book contains valuable information about the privatization movement, its goals, its major players, and its strategies. He leaves it to voters to figure out how to save public education in Indiana.

    Whether or not you live in Indiana, you should read this book. The major players like DFER and BAEO operate nationally. The activities in Indiana follow a script that is being enacted in many states, probably including yours.

    Hoosier School Heist is listed on amazon.com, or you can obtain a copy by going to the website http://www.hoosierschoolheist.com.

    Diane Ravitch is a former education advisor to the Clinton administration, who eventually realized the folly of corporate-inspired school reform. Find her work online at http://dianeravitch.net

  • Why Was Atlanta’s Beverly Hall Indicted For Racketeering While Michelle Rhee Won’t Be?

    By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    Atlanta’s black former school superintendent and 34 other black teachers and administrators have been indicted for “racketeering” in a cheating scandal. Why aren’t others like former DC Schools chancellor Michelle Rhee and her team indicted? Should we be rallying the racial wagons around Dr. Hall and the other 34? No way.

    Originally published at Black Agenda Report on April 3, 2013

    Why Was Atlanta’s Beverly Hall Indicted For Racketeering While Michelle Rhee Won’t Be?

    By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    Last night former Atlanta superintendent of schools Beverly Hall, along with 35 teachers, principals and others, were indicted for racketeering. The core “criminal” activity alleged is that teachers, principals and test administrators, either under Hall’s explicit direction or thanks to a “climate” that endorsed such behavior altered the results of hundreds, or thouands of standardized tests given to Atlanta’s public school children.

    In the political climate of Georgia, where black and white elites have been campaigning to demonize teachers, discredit the very notion of public education, and ultimately privatize it to get their hands on its multibillion dollar assets and stream of tax revenue, Fulton County’s black district attorney has been able to convene a grand jury and morph cheating on tests into criminal racketeering indictments. Why is this happening?

    Since the advent of No Child Left Behind in the early 1990s, schools districts have been forced by federal law to take up large portions of the instructional year giving standardized tests, and publishing ranked lists of the schools by test scores, with the lowest ranked schools branded as “failing.” The remediation for so-called “failing schools” is chiefly teacher firings, more tests, tying teacher pay and jobs to test scores, more tests, firing principals and administrators, budget cuts and still more tests, and finally, closing the school. Closed schools are generally replaced with privately owned charter schools, often with free or nearly free leases in the same buildings as the former public school which are largely exempt from many of the requirements of public schools like hiring qualified teachers, paying them a living wage, and accepting all the local students who apply.

    Since scores on standardized tests, of course, track to income levels, and in the US, where residential segregation along racial and economic lines is the rule, majority black and Latino schools consistently get the lowest scores, are most often labeled as “failing” and the most frequently closed and replaced by favored charter operations. In this climate of fear cheating has become a national epidemic, with reports of industrial scale test manipulation in Los Angeles, Houston, Washington DC and elsewhere.

    Dr. Hall pretty much implemented every misguided, corporate-inspired “reform” that the business and privatization-oriented consultants brought to her — closing public schools in favor of charters, excessive testing, even purchasing the tests from firms with connections to the consultants who recommended them. Hall even helped Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin divert over a hundred million dollars a year in tax revenues which should have gone to Atlanta’s public schools into a real estate and gentrification boondoggle called the BeltLine. Hall was in every respect a loyal asset to the forces who have been demonizing teachers and dismantling public education.

    At some point, the Chamber of Commerce, Invest Atlanta and other local elite representatives realized that while Dr. Hall was perfectly willing to give away the store in return for her six figure salary and perks, something as radical as the utter privatization of public education needs a crisis — and crises need villains, with mug shots and orange jump suits, preferably with waist and ankle chains. So after getting as much as they could from Dr. Hall, they cheerfully doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. The grand jury’s lurid accusations, dribbled out to the eager corporate-owned media over the last two years have created a pervasive atmosphere of crisis, in which the Chamber and its allies can get far more than any superintendent could have given them.

    Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of DC’s public schools enjoyed a reign of terror over a couple years in which she fired hundreds of teachers, and a number of principals, and handed over public school properties to her favorite charter schools, and ceaselessly berated parents and educators. There are widespread allegations that she too fostered a “climate of fear” under which teachers and administrators knew that if scores on expensive, irrelevant tests did not rise, their schools would be closed. But DC is not Georgia, and Michelle Rhee remains the darling of the White House, corporate media and even cruise missile liberals like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. Rhee has made herself into the permanent propagandist of the privatizers, from her stint at Teach For America (her former boss at TFA succeeded her as DC schools chancellor) to her one-person organization, Students First.

    Georgia’s elite has long been uncomfortable with the inclusion of blacks in its own ranks. The current Republican governor had to personally intercede with formal and informal bodies to get Atlanta’s black mayor a seat at the table, for instance, in discussions over regional transit, even though nobody could be a more loyal servant of the one percent than Kasim Reed. Atlanta’s black elite may be invited to some of the meetings, and share some of the spoils, but they don’t own local corporate media outlets, where the constant association of black faces in high places with embezzlement, scandal and fraud is a daily news staple.

    Would Beverly Hall be under indictment if she was white? Maybe not, but this is NOT an occasion to rally the racial wagons around her and the 34 indicted teachers and administrators, not a white face among them. Dr. Hall was no friend of public education and no champion of Atlanta’s public school children or teachers. If Hall had real integrity she would have spoken out years ago, and resisted the imposition of unfair “standards” and the reliance upon standardized testing as the only method to evaluate school and teacher performance. Dr. Hall could have spoken up when Shirley Franklin diverted hundreds of millions in school revenues to repay a bond issue aimed at gentrifying Atlanta. Dr. Hall had plenty of chances to stand up for Atlanta’s school children in her decade in the top office. She put her career and perks first. Hall has been indicted to create lurid headlines for a “crisis” that will get the privatizers even more than she could have given them. The same goes for the teachers and administrators under her.

    Just because her enablers have turned on her doesn’t mean we should turn toward her. As Roland Martin found out when he made noises suggesting that black people should protest to get him his CNN commentator’s job back, it doesn’t work that way.

    Teacher heroes are teachers who resist the turn to excessive testing, like the teachers in Seattle. Teacher heroes are the thousands of Chicago teachers who struck last fall in the face of Mayor Rahm Emanuel carrying out Barack Obama’s Race To The Top program, and who are resisting the closing of more than 50 Chicago public schools this year, the largest wave of public school closings in US history. We need more heroic teachers, like some of those who are occupying the Department of Education later this month. Dr. Hall is no hero.

    Michelle Rhee for her part, is a bigger villain on a bigger stage than Dr. Hall’s, and with better friends. If her fortunes since being dismissed from DC are any indication, she has a long and lucrative career ahead of her.

    Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and a state committee member of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

  • Vampire Capitalism Comes to Detroit, Michigan and Dekalb County, Georgia

    by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    Disaster capitalism is the manufacture of phony “crises” to divert government revenue directly to banksters and sell government assets off to privatizing looters. City government in Detroit, and the school system in suburban Atlanta’s Dekalb County, population 700,000 each have been nullifiehttp://blackagendareport.com/content/vampire-capitalism-comes-detroit-michigan-and-dekalb-county-georgia-where-black-political-cld, while black political elites in both these majority African American constituencies are impotent or complicit.

    Originally published at Black Agenda Report on April 20, 2013

    Vampire Capitalism Comes to Detroit, Michigan and Dekalb County, Georgia

    by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    What do Detroit MI and Dekalb County GA in suburban Atlanta have in common? Each has about 700,000 people, and both are majority black, Dekalb at 55%, and Detroit over 80%. Both elect local officials to manage local affairs, like city government in Detroit, and the school system in Dekalb County GA. In both cases, phony fiscal and educational crises have been manufactured in accordance with state law to allow state governors to sideline or fire outright local elected officials — City Hall in Detroit, and the elected school board in Dekalb GA, to impose programs of vicious fiscal austerity and privatization.

    The crises exist because corporate media, and our bipartisan political elites, including the black political class, tell us they do. And although the laws in Michigan and Georgia which enable governors to sweep aside elected officials in these “crises” were passed by Republican legislators and and the triggers are being pulled by Republican governors, the virtually all-Democrat black political class has rallied no resistance, its pundits and intellectuals have proposed no alternatives. At most, some like MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry have offered the standard neoliberal justifications for austerity and privatization as if they were explaining some impersonal, automatic phenomenon like gravity — “there’s no money…. budgets have to be balanced” and invite us to fruitlessly wonder whether the whole thing was “racist” or not. Really, who cares?

    In the first place, the “crises” are fabrications of corporate media, and the wealthy banksters, bondholders and privatizers whose “solutions” are inevitably pushed upon us. In Detroit, bondholders and banksters declared they feared the city would miss or default on the interest payments for previous loans, and that was just about all the governor needed to sweep aside Detroit City Hall and appoint what amounted to a dictator over every aspect of local government. In Georgia, the private organization which accredits public school systems is a captive of the US Chamber of Commerce and right wing pro-charter and privatization foundations, so it threatened to revoke the accreditation of a county school system serving 100,000 children based upon spurious, insubstantial, and in some cases anonymous charges against elected school board members, so the governor could fire and replace them with his own appointees. In both locations, the gubernatorial appointees will impose massive job, wage and service cuts, and are expected to privatize everything that’s not nailed down.

    This is the hollow soul of vampire capitalism — the conversion of local government from an engine which collects local tax revenue, user fees and dollars from state and federal levels to pay living wages, health care and pensions to its service-providing employees, into an engine that diverts tax revenue straight into the pockets of banksters for debt repayment, and sells off public assets like city and school district real estate for a song to well-connected looters and privatizers. On the economic level bloodsucking fiscal austerity is just about as rational a the brain deciding to strip mine the liver and kidneys for minerals.

    The black political class of politicians, preachers and business people from whom the ranks of establishment black leaders are drawn doesn’t just lack a vision of how to do things better. They lack even the soul that believes a better world, a more just society, with high quality education for everybody’s children, jobs at living wages, decent housing, a clean environment, justice and an end to war are even possible. Our black political class has been entirely captured. They are held hostage by their own perks and job prospects. While local governments in the heavily black constituencies that made their rise to prominence possible are being nullified by “crisis” and “emergency management” laws, they toast and roast and coast on the victories of the sixties, instead of leading campaigns of mass action and defiance that might enable African Americans and all Americans to dream a new world and begin to build it. All that our black misleadership class knows how to do any more is get paid.

    Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the GA Green Party. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be reached via this site’s contact page or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

  • Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven’t Already?

    By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    A key role in the elite drive to privatize public education is being played by privately owned school “accreditation” agencies, which are immune from public scrutiny, and under the absolute thrall of pro-privatization forces like the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation. Are you hearing stories in local corporate media about your school board being “dysfunctional” and your school systems accreditation threatened? It could mean the US Chamber of Commerce and the Broad Foundation just want to replace them.

    Originally published at Black Agenda Report on February 27, 2013

    Why Does the US Chamber of Commerce Want to Train or Replace Your Elected School Board, If They Haven’t Already?

    By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    “…The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems.”

    There’s a not-so-secret campaign underway to privatize public education, an effort that is making unprecedented progress under the administration of Barack Obama. How is such a thing possible? Public education is supposedly a matter of local government, in the hands of thousands of school boards across the country, most of them chosen by local voters?

    The representatives of corporations, billionaires, Wall Street speculators, along with their right wing foundations and political tentacles like the US Chamber of Commerce, all of whom aim to privatize education have been allowed to embed themselves in the supposedly impartial processes which evaluate and accredit schools and school systems. From these completely unaccountable positions, they are able to create convenient “crises” at will by making spurious and anonymous accusations against elected local school board members, and threatening to withdraw the accreditation of individual schools and entire districts. When such threats are made, a mayor or governor can appoint extra school board members or as in Georgia this week, replace school board members the voters have chosen with his own pro-privatization flunkies.

    Here’s how it works. The federal Department of Education is forbidden to tell local school districts precisely what they can and cannot do or teach. But the Department of Education officially recognizes privately owned and operated “accreditation agencies” to decide whether a school, a school board or a school system are up to snuff. There are 6 of these accreditation agencies covering the 50 states, and three of these covering more than 20 states are under the umbrella of something called Advanc-Ed. Being “private” and not-fpr-profit that Advanc-Ed’s processes, educational policies, judgment calls and the rest are completely immune to public scrutiny.

    “…The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. ..”

    Advanc-Ed’s director of public information told Black Agenda Report on the phone that it was entirely funded by the nominal dues paid by school systems for the privilege of accreditation, and that those dues largely paid for its professional development activities, training education leaders, which meant principals, administrators, school board members, interested public officials, and probably members of local business communities who wanted to be more involved in local educational policies. A little digging into the content of some of Advanc-Ed’s professional development work revealed a number of other players. A typical one is the Center For Reform of School Systems, a not for profit largely funded by the deep pockets of a longtime major advocate of school privatization, the Eli Broad Foundation. CRSS also appears to be deeply involved in the US Chamber of Commerce‘s push to “influence” the boards of education in cities across the country.

    The Obama administration has allowed these unaccountable forces unprecedented access to federal levers of power. It was the Broad Foundation’s consultants, along with the Walton Family and Gates and others, who actually wrote Race To The Top’s voluminous guidelines, as well as many of the state level proposals that won the lion’s share of funds under the program.

    If you live in the metro Atlanta media market you’ve been bombarded with corporate media news coverage the last month or two of a looming crisis in the school system of suburban (and majority black) Dekalb County, pop. 700,000. The crisis is that the accrediting agency the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, part of Advanc-Ed, is threatening to withdraw accreditation for the county’s entire school system. You can pay careful attention to daily corporate media stories of the crisis for weeks on end without ever hearing what the specific accusations against the board members are. You hear that the board members just don’t work together, that they fuss and fight, that they doze off in public meetings, that they may have hired relatives or mismanaged funds, but that they should just step down for the good of the children. The reason news stories can’t be any more specific about the accusations that threaten the accreditation of a large county school system is that Advanc-Ed’s own report, based largely on anonymous sources, is just as vague, trivial and non-specific. Check it out here.

    “…Georgia’s notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that…”

    The accusations may be flimsy, but nothing has to be proven in a court of law. Their purpose is to justify provoking the useful crisis that disaster capitalism requires on the educational front to replace the board members and carry out policies that locally elected officials would not dare dream of. In the last couple years, Georgia’s notoriously corrupt legislature has passed laws allowing the state governor, much in the pattern of Michigan, to replace duly elected local school board members with his own appointees, and just yesterday, the governor did just that, suspending 6 of 9 school board members in the state’s third largest school district after appointing a black Democrat flunky with no classroom bona fides whatsoever as county school superintendent.

    Last year, the same breathless accusations about “not working together” bad manners and infighting were enough for the accreditation agency to threaten the city of Atlanta’s public schools with loss of accreditation unless they went along with the wishes of its CEO, former BP executive Erroll Clark. Clark also lacks any classroom experience, and once said in public that he learned all he needed to know about managing a large school district while on the board of BP. Atlanta’s accreditation is still on probation. The year before, accreditation agencies sparked a year-long crisis by threatening the accreditation of another large majority black metro Atlanta county, Clayton.

    It doesn’t just happen in Georgia. The US Chamber of Commerce, the Broad Foundation and other privatizers, in league with the Obama administration are trying the same thing in Seattle, and elsewhere around the country. If you hear chatter on corporate media about your local elected school board being “dysfunctional,” you’re probably looking at a tentacle of the same beast working your own backyard. Beware. It doesn’t mean your current elected school board is a paragon of educational virtue. It does mean that they’re probably in the cross-hairs, maybe because they’ve dragged their feet on implementing this or that pro-charter or pro-privatization measure, maybe just because when the privatization goodies flow to the connected they are on the wrong team.

    “…Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him. But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn’t stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top…”

    Essentially we have allowed privatizers, and not for profit bodies funded directly and indirectly by the privatizers to embed themselves in, to actually become the “authorities” which “certify” our school sysems. Neat trick. Our public Department of Education sanctions them, and they do what DOE is legally prohibited from doing —- take the stick to school systems to force the adoption of high stakes testing, common core, and related “run the school like a business” strategies, and ultimately, privatization.

    It’s time to take the discussion out of shallow waters like whether school closings are “racist” or not, and call the real names and frames of what’s happening and how it’s made to happen. We won’t rescue public education, we have no hope of stemming the wave of high-stakes testing and privatization without killing these corrupt private accreditation agencies, and substituting some transparent, fair and bottom-up system of accrediting schools and school systems.

    Congress did not approve Race To The Top, and its attendant wave of teacher firings, school closings and the like. But it’s federal policy and it’s happening. Lots of Obama apologists excuse his supposed inability to get good things done with the claim that Republicans in the Congress and the media block him. But the lack of a majority in Congress hasn’t stopped him from doing some perfectly horrible things, like Race To The Top. The role of privately owned, pro-privatization entities in school accreditation is an object lesson in how the most powerful office in the world can reach around Congress if it wants to, and enforce its will (and the will of the charter school sugar daddies) upon hundreds of local boards of education and hundreds of poor communities across the country. It’s time to stand up and enforce some will of our own.

    Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report. A longtime Chicagoan, he now lives in exile near Marietta GA, where he is a state committee member of the Georgia Green party and a partner in a tech firm. Contact him via this site’s contact page, or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

  • Demonizing Teachers, Privatizing Schools: The Big Lies and Big Plans Behind the Atlanta School Cheating Scandal

    by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

    Originally published at Black Agenda Report on April 22, 2015

    Should we be wondering if the prosecution of cheating Atlanta teachers for racketeering was racist? Or should black parents and educators be leading a movement against high-stakes standardized testing as the gateway tool to privatizing public education in black and brown communities across the country?

    When drama queen Fulton County judge Jerry Baxter demanded public post-conviction apologies from Atlanta teachers already convicted of racketeering lest he hand them double digit sentences, it struck raw nerves in parts of black America. Black pastors and community leaders called press conferences. They held rallies and issued stern statements. They denounced the judge for making “common criminals” out of black teachers. Inevitably, they wondered whether white teachers would have been prosecuted or subjected to post-conviction humiliation of this kind.

    They’re asking the wrong question. What they ought to ask is why the teacher perp walk is being served up in the first place. They need to ask who profits from the continuing crisis in public education in black and brown communities? The answers are not hard to find.

    The whole thing, from the indictment of Atlanta Public Schools superintendent Beverly Hall,who died before the trial was complete, to the posturing of public officials and corporate media about “cheating the children” is the latest act of a long, long fake crisis. Judge Baxter’s histrionics too, in which he called the cheating scandal “the sickest thing that’s ever happened to Atlanta,” were a great contribution to the story our billionaire-owned media wants to paint about public education.

    The one-percenters need us to believe public education in our communities is some new kind of sewer infested with incompetent teachers who are cheating children and the public every week they draw paychecks. The long, long crisis of public education has been designed, engineered and provoked by powerful bipartisan forces to justify their long game, which is the privatization of public education. That’s the Big Plan.

    Since at least 2001, when George W. Bush’s conservative Republicans teamed up with Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s liberal Democrats to pass and implement the No Child Left Behind Act, it’s been the policy of both capitalist parties implemented by the federal Department of Education to create, to provoke and to exacerbate a phony educational crisis. This program of crisis-creation has been backed by Wall Street, by banksters and hedge fund types, by giant corporations like Wal-Mart and powerful right wing interest groups like the US Chamber of Commerce as well as the so-called philanthropic tentacles of corporate America like the Gates, Broad, Heritage and Walton Family Foundations. The solution to the fake crisis has been the whole industry of testing experts, turnaround consultants, diploma mills for fake principals, lucrative charter school companies and their contractors, and the private but government sanctioned agencies that rate school districts. Even the agencies that rate school districts are staffed by the same “run the school like a business” experts approved by the US Chamber of Commerce who were employed to write President Obama’s Race to the Topprogram, which punishes school districts that don’t privatize or implement “run the school like a business ‘reforms’” fast enough.

    High stakes standardized testing, like the tests educators cheated on in Atlanta, is an essential tool in provoking the crisis, but it’s a big lie. These kinds of tests don’t reflect student progress or teacher competency. They track to family income, and family income in the US correlates largely to race. So as Glen Ford put it back in 2012

    “The standardized tests were bombs, designed to explode the public schools and the teaching profession. Everyone involved knew that inner city kids would fail the tests in huge numbers, setting the infernal machine in motion for the closing of schools and the wholesale firing of teachers…”

    The bombs were planted not just in Atlanta, but in thousands of school districts across the nation, with predictable results. A 2012 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the same suspicious patterns of radical test score improvement seen in Atlanta could be found in more than 200 school districts across the country, from Philly to Portland, and from Alaska to Alabama. Clearly, cheating teachers and principals in Georgia were and likely still are doing the same things the same way as their colleagues across the country.

    It’s also very true that Atlanta’s teachers were singled out. Other teachers in other states were merely stripped of their jobs and professional licenses. Teach For America alums Michelle Rhee and Kayla Henderson both headed Washington DC’s public schools when massive cheating scandals occurred, but unlike Atlanta’s Beverly Hall, neither they nor their subordinates are in any danger of prosecution. Atlanta on the other hand, is closely associated with the notion of African Americans running big cities, so making the example of black educators in Atlanta makes perfect political sense for those orchestrating the crisis. Still we shouldn’t feel too sorry for the Atlanta teachers. Beverly Hall turned big chunks of Atlanta’s public schools over to privatizers, and even helped divert $140 million a year for more than 20 years away from Atlanta’s public school children to line the pockets of developers and gentrifiers in a lucrative boondoggle Atlantans know as “the Beltline.”

    If the black political class and black educators really stood for the interests of their students and communities they would be educating black parents and students across the country about their right to opt out of tests that serve no legitimate educational purpose, as teachers in Chicago and Seattle are already doing.

    But that’s problematic too. Opposing standardized testing would place the black political class in conflict not with the slippery nebulous demons of institutional racism, but biting some of the very real and easy-to-find hands in corporate America that feed it. Taking issue with standardized testing, Common Core and the drive to privatize education would put black educators in opposition to corporate America, to the Gates, Walton Family (Wal-Mart), Eli Broad and other foundations, and to Republicans and Democrats including President Obama and Arne Duncan, his Secretary of Education. This is not an easy thing to do when national black “civil rights” organizations from the National Action Network and the National Urban League have eagerly accepted corporate-engineered school reform with corporate dollars, and President Obama is deeply beholden to the charter school sugar daddies.

    So it looks like we can count on our black political class to stick to the script on the Atlanta teachers cheating scandal. They’ll talk about whether the prosecution was racist, and they’ll wring self-righteous hands over teachers “cheating the children.” But they won’t question those who set up the rigged game of high stakes testing or why.

    Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and serves on the state committee of the GA Green Party. Contact him at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

  • Lester Holt Asks Zero Questions About Poverty, Abortion, Climate Change

    Presidential debates do as much to illustrate corporate media priorities as they do to showcase the candidates. They provide a snapshot into what the media, in this case represented by NBC’s Lester Holt, prioritizes as issues worthy of discussion.

    A week before the debate,Comcast-owned NBC announced the topics, and one could already tell we weren’t going to be in for a substantive evening: “Achieving prosperity,” “America’s direction” and “securing America.” This generic approach lead to a generic debate that focused mostly on horserace disputes and vague, open-ended questions about taxes and jobs.

    Holt didn’t ask any questions about the following topics: poverty, abortion, climate change,  immigration, healthcare, student debt, privacy, LGBTQ rights or drug policy. (NBC reported before the debate that abortion and immigration were two of the policy issues that voters were most interested in, as indicated byGoogle searches, along with the economy and police shootings.)

    What was discussed: jobs, Trump’s tax returns, who did or didn’t support the Iraq War, raising taxes on the rich, race (framed mostly in a way that pandered to Trump’s theme of a country in disarray), Russian cyberattacks, ISIS, Obama’s birth certificate, Clinton’s physical appearance and whether the candidates would accept the election results.

    Obviously, a moderator can’t cover every topic in a 90-minute debate, but one can hardly imagine a scenario where the candidates weren’t asked to discuss taxes on the wealthy, ISIS and the specter of Russian cyberattacks—topics, not coincidentally, the average person is rarely if ever affected by, but receive nonstop discussion on cable news and opinion sections. Holt even framed raising taxes on the wealthy—whose share of national income has multiplied six-fold over the last 40 years—as something Clinton had to “defend.”

    Total mentions from the moderator and the two candidates combined for ISIS were 24; Russia/Putin had 16 and Iran 19. Total mentions of abortion, poverty, health insurance, LGBTQ rights and voter suppression were zero. Climate change was only mentioned—once—because Clinton brought it up.

    As FAIR (5/6/16) noted previously, in nine Democratic Party debates, there were no questions asked about poverty. As Think Progress (4/14/16) pointed out, there were also zero questions about abortion.

    Issues specifically affecting the poor, LGBTQ people and women (aside from a question about Trump denying that Clinton had “a presidential look”) continue to be overlooked. To the extent race was discussed, it was framed with the false parity of “race relations.” Holt didn’t ask Clinton, for example, how she would fight racism—a word Holt never mentioned—but instead asked her how she would “heal the divide.” (In Holt’s defense, he did press Trump on his racist “birther” campaign.)

    The next debate will be on October 9, hosted by ABC’s Martha Raddatz, a reporter noted for her closeness to military sources (FAIR Blog, 11/14/11).

    Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can follow him onTwitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.

    You can send messages to NBC News (or via Twitter: @NBCNews). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

    Debate moderator Lester Holt, asking a question that did not involve immigration, healthcare or student debt. (image: NBC News)
    Debate moderator Lester Holt, asking a question that did not involve immigration, healthcare or student debt. (image: NBC News)