I’m still not clear on why conservatives don’t want people voting early, yet they do want people voting absentee

Sunshine in the sunshine state:

Election experts and Democratic voting advocates told U.S. senators Friday that a Republican-backed overhaul of Florida election laws will suppress Democratic turnout in the nation’s biggest battleground state next fall.
Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida and Dick Durbin of Illinois held a field hearing at the Hillsborough County Courthouse that drew a racially diverse crowd that at times resembled an orchestrated Democratic rally. In packed pews in a sixth-floor courtroom, people wore yellow stickers that read “Our voice, our vote” and hissed a witness who defended the law.
Testimony centered on the most controversial changes: reducing early voting from 14 days to eight, from 96 hours to a minimum of 48, and ending it on the Saturday before the election; requiring third-party groups to register and face fines if they turn in voter registration forms after 48 hours; and requiring voters to cast provisional ballots if they moved from another county since they last voted if they did not update their addresses.
Nearly 200 people attended the hearing and about 200 more watched on TV from a nearby room. The crowd erupted into loud applause when Durbin said: “There are people literally fighting and dying for the right to vote in countries like Syria, and we are finding ways to restrict the right to vote?”
As the two-hour forum ended, Nelson said: “The rule of law has been assaulted in this state by this election law under the pretense of cutting down on election fraud.”

I think these field hearings are a great idea. Part of the problem with conservatives changing voting requirements every twenty minutes is that voters don’t know that the rules have changed or what, exactly, the ever-changing rules now require. The more attention voter suppression laws get, the better. Targeted groups have to know they’re targeted before they can act to protect their right to vote.

Nelson called this witness:

University of Florida political science professor Daniel A. Smith will testify Friday before several U.S. senators about Florida’s new voting law.
Smith was invited to the hearing by U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights.
The hearing, to be held in Tampa, will examine a Florida law that limits the time available for early voting, makes it more difficult for volunteer organizations to register voters and changes the cause for voters to cast provisional ballots.
Smith was selected by U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson’s office to “speak from an academic viewpoint, not an activist’s,” Smith said. Smith was chosen as a witness because of his work on Florida election law and voting behavior.
Smith’s testimony will look at three features of the new law and how they potentially limit voting rights of Floridians.
“The first is early voting. The new Florida law truncates the early voting period from a 14-day window to an eight-day window, and most importantly, it eliminates the final Sunday before Election Day,” Smith said.

Early voting is popular with voters, yet Republicans are working hard all over the country to limit early voting. The crazed conservative assault on early voting makes even less sense than their other nonsensical, wholly imaginary claims re: voting, because there’s absolutely no difference between an early vote and an election day vote in terms of security or potential fraud. They don’t even have a remotely plausible storyline on Fox News on why we must limit early voting. They have nothing. People like early voting because it’s convenient. Conservatives oppose early voting because… well, we don’t know why conservatives oppose early voting.

Smith and Michael Herron, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, matched the voter file from the 2008 general election with the early voting file from that election, identifying trends such as which ethnic, racial, gender, or age groups were more likely to vote early in 2008, and how the new law likely will affect them.
Smith said they found African-American, Hispanic, youth, and first-time voters were much more likely to vote on the Sunday before the election.

Oh. That explains it.

Maybe at the next hearing we can discuss this:

Not mentioned at the hearing was that Florida has made it easier for voters to cast absentee ballots by mail as an alternative to early voting or visiting the polls on Election Day. But UF’s Smith said the highest likelihood of fraud involves absentee ballots.

If there’s a conservative lawyer out there who can defend the fact that conservatives push absentee balloting, the least secure voting method, while aggressively acting to limit early voting, I’d sure like to hear what they have to say. That doesn’t make any sense, unless they’re targeting voters who disfavor conservatives.

▲

Belt and suspenders

More like this, please:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Attorney General Eric Holder plans to deliver a speech on voting rights on Monday at a Martin Luther King holiday rally in South Carolina, a state where just weeks ago his Justice Department blocked a new voter identification law.

Holder plans to attend a rally sponsored by the civil rights group National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at the state capitol building in Columbia, S.C., according to a statement from the NAACP.

That was where lawmakers approved the tough new law that required voters to present identification to cast a ballot, which conservatives argue is needed to help prevent voter fraud.

But critics of laws like the one passed in the state argue that citizens should not have to present identification to exercise their basic right to vote, which they say is unlike requiring identification for privileges like driving.

I think this is great timing, because of the DOJ action in South Carolina, sure, but also because of the national media covering the GOP primary.

The best protection against voter suppression is voter awareness and education. Lawyers and activists are all well and good, but at the end of the day what we need is lots and lots of media attention and lots and lots of energized, informed voters. We’re not going to be able to stay or overturn all of these laws, and there are no do-overs.

One of the things that makes election law different from other regulatory schemes that people encounter in their daily lives is the one-off nature of each election. A voter who is wrongfully disenfranchised cannot remedy that injustice as to that election. There’s only one 2012 election. It won’t be repeated. If a legally registered voter is denied a ballot the best lawyer in the world can’t fix that after the fact.

So, belt and suspenders: DOJ orders and ACLU lawsuits and voter protection people running around with their hair on fire, sure, great, but also big media-heavy events and voter awareness and preparation. Tell voters the rules have changed. Tell voters how the rules have changed. Tell voters barriers have been deliberately set up that they’re going to have to get over. Tell voters to expect the worst and plan accordingly.

We may not be able to get media to stop slobbering over internet luminary James O’Keefe, but we can go around the celebrities and pundits and Tea Party governors and increase awareness among the groups of ordinary voters conservatives disfavor. We can give voters the tools and information they need to protect their own vote, if (when) the lawyers and judges fail.

One more thing, a hopeful thing: this coordinated voter suppression effort really took off in 2006. Six years later, as more and more states adopt increasingly restrictive schemes, we’re finally, finally to the point where it’s national news, and it’s taken seriously. That, all by itself, is huge. Conservatives and their paid mouthpieces have dominated the fake-debate over “voter impersonation fraud” for years. We’ve heard plenty from the voter suppression side. It’s well past time we heard from the voter access side. They think one fraudulent vote is one too many? Well, guess what. We on the access side think one wrongfully disenfranchised voter is one too many. Sounds like a stand-off to me. Let’s have a real debate, where both sides get a microphone.

▲

If You Have To Legislatively Force Your Theory To Be Taught As Science, You’ve Lost

PZ Myers flags this legislation under consideration in the Missouri House.  It seems HB1227 would not only redefine “intelligent design creationism” as actual science, it would then require that textbooks and classes in Missouri schools be forced to teach it as acceptable science along with “scientific theory” evolution.

It’s bad enough that the bill attempts to redefine not just intelligent design but the process of science itself through legislation, but then the bill happily forces teachers to treat intelligent design and evolution as equals by radically re-categorizing what science actually means, which is a bit like saying every time you order your favorite meal at a restaurant, you must also be punched in the crotch, because both of them are equally satisfying according to the definition of “satisfying” placed in legislation by Republicans.  The practical upshot:  under this bill Missouri’s kids will eat their intelligent design and they will like it.  (Also, the bill specifically says teachers can’t call out either “theory” as crap, but must teach them as actual accepted science.)

And before you say “Well that’s going to make it hard to get into college when you graduate with a background in basic science that has built-in air quotes”, the law applies to universities and colleges in Missouri too, defined as “any introductory science course taught at any public institution of higher education in this state” having to meet criteria like this:

“If scientific theory concerning biological origin is taught in a course of study, biological evolution and biological intelligent design shall be taught. Other scientific theory or theories of origin may be taught. If biological intelligent design is taught, any proposed identity of the intelligence responsible for earth’s biology shall be verifiable by present-day observation or experimentation and teachers shall not question, survey, or otherwise influence student belief in a nonverifiable identity within a science course.”

In other words, college professors and instructors in biology have to teach intelligent design as serious science, and they have to like it. Full stop.  I’m thinking this bill will most likely die a slow and ignominious death in committee, but then again, anything involving Republicans and science always seems to end very badly for the country as a whole.  We’ll do your critical thinking for you, thanks.  You went to college to play football and drink anyway.

This makes me want to become a legislator, slap the definition of “douchebag” in a bill, then require that all Republicans be referred to as such in any official state capacity.  The bill may or may not involve crotch-punching.  I haven’t decided yet.

▲

I believe he’s gonna work me into the ground

Gnoot has a post up about his proposal to prepare kids from poor families for the low paying, menial jobs they will often be forced to take after leaving school by giving them low paying, menial jobs while they are at school.

Wouldn’t it be great if New York City schools served their students as well as they serve some of their custodians?

Students—especially those from very poor families—would be better served if they had the opportunity to earn money part-time at school by doing some of the tasks custodians are now performing so expensively.

Dozens of poor students could have part-time, paying jobs for the $100,000 a year New York schools pay some custodians. For that amount, more than 30 children could work just two hours each school day and each take home $3,000 a year by the time they are 12 or 13 years old.

Some of this work could be clerical; other tasks could be janitorial, such as cleaning the cafeteria, or emptying the trash, or vacuuming the classrooms. These are similar to the chores many parents require their kids to do at home, and it would allow 12- and 13- year olds to make money they desperately need. Giving children the opportunity to earn money would help teach work habits, and letting them do so in their schools would build a stronger commitment to that community.

Here’s the thing, Gnoot, you crap-filled, sociopathic blowhard.

I may be a fictional, sweary old lady who knows two fifths of fuck-all about poverty and the challenges facing inner city kids, or about how we could improve their financial position while increasing their self esteem and encouraging them to learn.

However, I’d be willing to bet quite a lot of money that the answer is not making them stay back after school to clean up other students’ shit for six bucks an hour.

Arsehole.

▲

Working As Intended, Citizen Pierce!

Charlie Pierce, Esquire, is alarmed by a new “pediatric health” study:

Of all the numbers in this new study, the following remains an astonishing statistic: By the time they’re 23, 41 percent of American kids have been busted for something more serious than a traffic stop… To me, it’s an indication of that something is seriously out of whack in the way we’re asking our law enforcement community to interact with our children.

Children today grow up surrounded by the police power of the state, both the soft and hard versions of it. At almost every level of their lives, they are policed, in one way or another, either by the police themselves, or by administrators and bureaucrats to whom the police and the courts have subcontracted the job. They have no Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights as soon as they walk through the schoolhouse door. They are searched. They are tested for drugs. Their rights of free expression are tightly circumscribed. Rights unexercised atrophy. We have raised, and are now raising, generations of children who are completely ignorant of the rights they have as citizens, and we are doing it through the application of the most coercive powers the state possesses…

Another triumph for the Banana Republicans! Let’s face it, the fortunate sons of the One Percenters—ask the C-Plus Augustus—have always been able to treat the police as nothing more than well-armed security guards. Cops were for keeping those people in line and away from the better neighborhoods, unless they were toting cleaning equipment or yard tools. And the bottom Twenty Percenters, give or take, knew “the arrangement” and warned their kids about the dangers. But over the last few decades, as the unindicted Watergate co-conspirators cemented their criminal takeover under St. Ronnie and the two Bush regencies, those Americans who were once fortunate enough to consider themselves “middle class” have been ever-so-slowly relegated to the ranks of barbarians-outside-the-gated-community. And the increasing militarization of School Security (because drugs! Gangs! Forced busing! Drugs! Hippies! Also Columbine! Foreigner gangs! And did we mention, drugs!) has been one weapon for reminding the rank and file that they—we—have no rights our masters can’t find an excuse to erode.

▲

On the Local Front

The WV BOE changed the bullying rules:

For the first time in state history, gay and lesbian students will be expressly protected from school bullying after the West Virginia Board of Education unanimously adopted a new anti-bullying policy Wednesday.

Under the new policy, bullying based on 13 categories including race, religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and “gender identity or expression” qualifies as a Level 3 disciplinary offense.

Punishments for harassment can range from detention to suspension from school for 10 days. Students can also be punished for “vulgar or offensive speech” online if it disrupts school learning.

“Students and teachers alike are entitled to a safe educational environment,” said state Superintendent of Schools Jorea Marple. “This policy addresses behavior and school safety comprehensively by addressing inappropriate behaviors proactively to promote safe and supportive learning conditions.”

I like most of this, but my gut instinct is to be troubled by the “vulgar or offensive speech” aspects.

▲

“If I Were a Poor Black Kid…”

Dude naw.

Look, if you’re a middle-aged white guy writing for Forbes Magazine, and you find yourself writing an article entitled “If I Were a Poor Black Kid,” just stop.

Seriously. Stop:

President Obama gave an excellent speech last week in Kansas about inequality in America.

“This is the defining issue of our time.” He said. “This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. Because what’s at stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, secure their retirement.”

He’s right. The spread between rich and poor has gotten wider over the decades. And the opportunities for the 99% have become harder to realize.

The President’s speech got me thinking. My kids are no smarter than similar kids their age from the inner city. My kids have it much easier than their counterparts from West Philadelphia. The world is not fair to those kids mainly because they had the misfortune of being born two miles away into a more difficult part of the world and with a skin color that makes realizing the opportunities that the President spoke about that much harder. This is a fact. In 2011.

I am not a poor black kid. I am a middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background. So life was easier for me. But that doesn’t mean that the prospects are impossible for those kids from the inner city. It doesn’t mean that there are no opportunities for them. Or that the 1% control the world and the rest of us have to fight over the scraps left behind. I don’t believe that. I believe that everyone in this country has a chance to succeed. Still. In 2011. Even a poor black kid in West Philadelphia. More »

▲

Test drive

I know the Obama 2012 campaign has started because I found myself writing the phrase “white working class voters” here yesterday. Oh, for God’s sake, not that again. In any event. However. There will be all of that chatter, and then there will be a campaign that is actually going on in states and cities.

Here’s the first Ohio HQ opening:

Chillicothe on Tuesday was the epicenter of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in Ohio. Campaign staffers and volunteers gathered at 149 W. Water St. to celebrate the opening of the campaign’s first field office in Ohio.”We came to Chillicothe because we know the importance of this area in this state, a swing state. ... We’re not ceding any votes,” said Greg Schultz, state director for the Obama campaign.

And here is what politically obsessed rank and file Democrats in Ohio are talking about:

Obama’s grass-roots operation in Ohio already has been kicked into gear for the 2012 campaign, backers said. Over the past eight months, Organizing for America, an Obama campaign arm, held 3,500 events across the state in successful efforts to gather signatures for referendums challenging Senate Bill 5 and House Bill 194, GOP-passed laws to limit collective bargaining and voter access to polls, respectively.“They really got an opportunity to test drive their operation,” said Timothy M. Burke, chairman of the Hamilton County Democratic Party.

I hear “test drive” over and over, because the Issue 2 campaigns and the HB 194 effort were huge, and people are wondering if that will be an advantage in 2012.

Issue Two was labor-led and then gained crazy-good momentum out in the wider world of voters, but the petition drive to put a repeal of the voter suppression law on the ballot was different, to me.

There, OFA succeeded in organizing on an issue that not enough people care about: voting rights. We’ve been harping on voting rights in Ohio since the first suppression law went in (2006) but voter protection has always, honestly, been left to the lawyers. Volunteer lawyers, paid lawyers who bring election-related litigation, interest groups that specialize in voter access, great that we have all these lawyers, but voting should be a core issue for everyone who votes or wants to vote. It can’t be shunted off to the pros. People have to engage on it and think it through, because media coverage of actual nuts and bolts voting process is horribly misleading and confusing, and there’s a whole Right wing pundit sector muddying the water by accusing random people of unlawfully voting.

We don’t need more lawyers on the access side of the fraud v access battle. We have hundreds. We need more voters on the access side of the fraud v access battle. The petition effort on SB 194 took it out to voters, and made us all talk and think about voting process and access, and that’s where it belongs.

▲

I thought we were winning but we may be losing

I started reading more about for-profit K-12 schools last spring because I was talking with people about teachers and unions during the Issue Two campaign.

In the course of those conversations, I found that people here were very surprised to learn that nearly half of “public” charter schools in Ohio are run by for-profit entities. They weren’t happy about it either, which isn’t surprising, because privatization isn’t what they were sold when they were sold public education reform. When a politician or expert tells people “we’re reforming your public schools!” people just naturally assume those politicians and experts actually mean “reforming public schools” not “creating publicly funded for-profit schools”. Those are two different things to an ordinary non-expert person.

I’ve been following the progress of one lawsuit against a for-profit in Ohio (here for the prior posts). The company in question has a lousy record on educating kids, but that isn’t really my focus. When tracking the burgeoning for-profit education sector I’m just following the money.

This company, White Hat, operates schools in five states. White Hat schools are called public schools but they should really be called for-profit schools, because for most people, “public” means “not for profit”. I don’t believe the use of the word “public” and the omission of the word “profit” in the education business is an accident. It’s marketing.

Publicly funded for-profit schools scare the hell out of me, because the stakes are very high. We could lose not-for-profit public education. We may still have publicly-funded education, but that’s not the same thing.

In this particular lawsuit, parents sued the for-profit manager of ten charter schools because they wanted some transparency and accountability on where the public money was going.

White Hat stonewalled on where the money went, then the case then took a dramatic turn outside of court, on the Ohio legislature side:

A Franklin County judge has given charter-school kingpin David L. Brennan and the schools suing his for-profit management company an additional 60 days to work on a new contract. But Gov. John Kasich and GOP leaders in the General Assembly might resolve the year-old lawsuit sooner. The Senate will decide next week whether to keep several charter-school provisions added to the budget by House Republicans at Brennan’s request. Many involve issues at the center of the lawsuit against his White Hat Management Co., including one that would allow the for-profit company to keep secret how it spends tax dollars it receives to operate charter schools. Another would give White Hat possession of school desks, supplies and other items purchased with tax dollars, should a school close.

Those measures were sidelined, but only because they got an enormous amount of negative attention. They would have turned over publicly-owned assets to for-profit education management companies, which was apparently too much reform and exciting innovation for even Ohio to rubberstamp. So, despite last-ditch efforts by Republicans to rescue White Hat, the lawsuit went forward. Then the public and the parents had an interim win, when the judge ordered the for-profit actor to turn over (some) records. So close, we were!

Well, sadly, we’ve now suffered a setback that may prove fatal:

A Franklin County judge who ordered a for-profit management company to turn over records showing how it spent millions in tax dollars to operate public charter schools is now questioning whether he should even be involved in the lawsuit. Common Pleas Judge John F. Bender has suspended “all further discovery” until he determines jurisdiction.
The development is a setback for the charter schools that filed suit nearly 18 months ago challenging the authority of White Hat Management Co. — the private firm of Akron businessman and major GOP donor David L. Brennan. Last month, Bender ruled that White Hat is a public official when acting as an authorized agent of a public charter school. The designation would make White Hat subject to Ohio public-record laws, requiring it to account for the public dollars it receives, information that for years the company has been unwilling to disclose.

For years.

If the parents can’t get relief in a court, and without jurisdiction they’re not getting anything, I guess they go to the legislature. The same legislature that introduced measures last spring that could have been written by for-profit education management companies, measures that were so outrageous a transfer of public assets to for-profit education entities that they didn’t survive the most cursory public evaluation. I wish them a lot of luck with that route. I think they’re going to need it.

▲

Mitt Romney is always welcome here

We in Ohio were lectured for months by Governor Kasich and media that Kasich’s union busting law was not about unions. It was about health insurance. It was about merit pay. It was about budgets. It was about balancing the state budget. Very few in Ohio believed that, because it was obviously not true.

The Republican base in Ohio are now going to push a constitutional amendment that will destroy both public sector and private sector unions. That’s what opponents of Governor Kasich like me told Ohio private sector union members. We said “they’ll go after you next”. What we didn’t know is that they would go after private sector unions members even if they failed in destroying public sector unions, but it really doesn’t matter. What we said they were planning is in fact what they’re now doing.

This wasn’t hard to predict. Governor Walker in Wisconsin told us all about it, way back in February:

Gov. Scott Walker claims that Ohio’s overwhelming rejection of anti-labor legislation modeled on the measures he developed and promoted in Wisconsin has no bearing on the debate about whether he should remain in office.
The governor is in full spin mode.

By any measure, last Tuesday’s election results from Ohio represented a devastating rejection of the agenda Walker and his allies have been peddling since February. Offered an opportunity to endorse a Walker-style attack on collective bargaining rights for state, county and municipal workers and teachers, Ohioans voted “no” by 61-39 percent.
Of Ohio’s 88 counties — with big cities, small towns and rural areas — 82 voted to defend public employees and their unions. More Ohioans took a pro-union position in 2011 than voted for the governor who promoted the anti-labor legislation, John Kasich, in 2010.

Faced with the facts, Walker’s political team claimed that comparisons of Wisconsin and Ohio were “ridiculous.” Funny, that’s not what Wisconsin’s governor was saying back in February, when he refused to negotiate with unions representing state employees, and when he and his aides tried to lock hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites out of the state Capitol.
“I talk to Kasich every day — John’s gotta stand firm in Ohio,” Walker told the caller he thought was David Koch. Walker said that Kasich was one of the new Republican governors who, like the Wisconsinite, “got elected to do something big.” “You’re the first domino,” the Koch caller said of Walker’s anti-labor push in Wisconsin.“Yes,” replied Walker. “This is our moment.”

Throughout the conversation, Walker portrayed himself as the quarterback of a national push to cut pay and benefits for teachers and other public workers, and to crush unions. And he suggested that Kasich was on his team, carrying out the same mission in Ohio that Walker has undertaken in Wisconsin. “Little did I know how big it would be nationally,” Walker chirped. “This is our time to change the course of history.”

People don’t change the course of history by assessing public workers 15% more in health care costs. People don’t change the course of history by balancing a state budget. Governor Walker isn’t telling the truth about his objectives or his plans, just like Governor Kasich wasn’t telling the truth about his objectives or his plans. That’s now become painfully obvious in Ohio, because conservatives are moving ahead to destroy both public and private sector unions.

The campaign to recall Walker kicked off. It will be harder in Wisconsin than it was in Ohio, because in Ohio John Kasich is so disliked and his campaign staff were so inept and incredibly arrogant that we thought at times they were on our side.

We also got some last minute help from the entire GOP 2012 Presidential field, who parachuted in to tell everyone in Ohio that Kasich had lied to us all for nearly a year, and all the GOP superstars were 110% on board with the union busting campaign Kasich had been vehemently denying he was conducting. That must have been awkward for the former Fox News personality. Wisconsin, invite Mitt Romney to visit with Walker volunteers the week before the vote, and then sit back and watch as the entire GOP Presidential field endorses the anti-worker agenda Walker will have just spent six months denying. It’s magical.

We’ll be watching in Ohio, and we’re pulling for you.

▲

No Creativity Left Behind

I haven’t looked into this in great detail, so if any of you know more about the issue, please expand, but I find this kind of think to be tragic:

I was devastated by Michael Winerip’s article on how the No Child Left Behind Act has affected the creative teaching at a New Hampshire middle school. It used to be that eighth graders at Oyster River Middle School chose semester-long “genre” projects in English class. They’d pick “a subject area like mysteries, read masters like Agatha Christie, study the writer’s craftsmanship (‘Explain how the author foreshadows doom’), then draft their own.” In science class they would spend two weeks building a real underwater vessel; in social studies they reenacted the Boston Massacre.

But No Child Left Behind is changing all that. Based on the law’s annual progress requirements toward 100 percent proficiency by 2014, 69 percent of New Hampshire schools are failing. Oyster River is one of them, largely because of the scores of a dozen of its 110 special education students. The bottom line? The school will cut back on its mainstreaming of special-ed kids (unfortunate in itself) and start aggressively teaching to the test. Its new motto, Mr. Winerip reports, is “Fill the Box.”

In a related vein, I read in the local paper a couple of weeks ago that one of the surrounding states run by a wingnut governor (I can’t remember if it was Kasich’s Ohio or Corbett in PA) was radically cutting back arts, music, and phys ed with sharp budget cuts. I can’t draw a stick man or carry a tune in a bucket, but I consider myself very lucky that I had really good art and music classes both in public school and for the few years I went to a private school. I still remember hating carrying that damned saxophone in the clunky faux-alligator skin case up the ginormous hill, but my art and music classes still stick out in my memory. I even remember what instruments my friends played, and that was 30 years ago. I also hated those stupid damned recorders, fwiw. But back on point- a basic understanding and appreciation of art and music is a vital portion of any education, as those things makes us what we are as humans. Every culture finds its roots in food, music, and art, and to ignore that is to ignore the better aspects of what civilization has produced over the last several thousand years. Everyone likes to talk about the genius of Steve Jobs, but what made Steve Jobs a genius is his devices made it easier to deliver and create art and music in the computer age.

It’s a god damned shame what is happening.

▲

Nibbling Around the Edges

Obama does a little something for low-income student loan holders:

At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Melody Barnes, director of the Domestic Policy Council, said the president would use his executive authority to expand the existing income-based repayment program with a “Pay as You Earn” option that would allow graduates to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income for 20 years and have the rest of their federal student loan debt forgiven. That plan would start next year.

Most of the 450,000 low-income student-loan borrowers currently enrolled in income-based payment must pay 15 percent of their discretionary income for 25 years before having their debt forgiven, although terms are easier for those in public service.

Speaking of forgiveness, I’ll forgive anyone who thinks this is a typo or transcription error, since I, too, can’t remember the last time a benefits program was improved for anyone under 65.

▲

Thanks but no thanks

I saw Dougj’s post on Steve Jobs and teachers’ unions and I had to weigh in. I’ve been reading a lot on unions lately. The attack on teachers’ unions specifically concerns me, because the crazed, reckless race to deregulate public schools in Ohio has led to some completely crazy unregulated for-profit grifting in Ohio and elsewhere.

What’s both interesting and truly scary about the now-rote conventional wisdom that teachers unions are to blame for whatever one hates most about public education is that there doesn’t seem to be any real basis for the claim.

There’s horrible (and true) stories about teachers’ unions, but there’s also horrible (and true) stories about non-profit charter schools, or private schools, or for-profit charter schools. You give me a teachers’ union horror story and I’ll give you a for-profit charter school horror story, in Ohio, or Florida, or Michigan. We can go back and forth for a while.

To show how silly this knee-jerk insane demonization of teachers’ unions has become, I liked this, from Matthew Di Carlo at The Shanker Blog:

For years, some people have been determined to blame teachers’ unions for all that ails public education in America. This issue has been around a long time (see here and here), but, given the tenor of the current debate, it seems to bear rehashing. According to this view, teachers unions negatively affect student achievement primarily through the mechanism of the collective bargaining agreement, or contract. These contracts are thought to include “harmful” provisions, such as seniority-based layoffs and unified salary schedules that give raises based on experience and education rather than performance.

But a fairly large proportion of public school teachers are not covered under legally-binding contracts. In fact, there are ten states in which there are no legally binding K-12 teacher contracts at all (AL, AZ, AR, GA, LA, MS, NC, SC, TX, and VA). Districts in a few of these states have entered into what are called “meet and confer” agreements about salary, benefits, and other working conditions, but administrators have the right to break these agreements at will. For all intents and purposes, these states are free of many of the alleged “negative union effects.”

Here’s a simple proposition: If teacher union contracts are the problem, then we should expect to see higher achievement outcomes in the ten states where there are no binding teacher contracts. So, let’s take a quick look at how states with no contracts compare with the states that have them.

In the table below, using data from the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), I present average scale scores for states that currently have binding teacher contracts and those that don’t. The averages are weighted by grade-level enrollment, and they include only public non-charter schools (since most charters in all states have no contracts).
Out of these ten states, only one (Virginia) has an average rank above the median, while four are in the bottom ten, and seven are in the bottom 15. These data make it very clear that states without binding teacher contracts are not doing better, and the majority are actually among the lowest performers in the nation. In contrast, nine of the ten states with the highest average ranks are high coverage states, including Massachusetts, which has the highest average score on all four tests.

If anything, it seems that the presence of teacher contracts in a state has a rather large, positive effect on achievement. Now, some may object to this conclusion. They might argue that I can’t possibly say that teacher contracts alone caused the higher scores in these states. That there are dozens of other factors besides contracts that influence achievement, such as lack of resources, income, parents’ education, and curriculum, and that these factors are at least partially responsible for the lower scores in the ten non-contract states. My response: Exactly.

In other words, it’s complicated.

I have no earthly idea why and when we all agreed to turn US education policy over to a group of completely unaccountable billionaires, but it seems both extremely unwise and anti-democratic to me. Do I want Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or any random member of the Walton family directing and dominating any debate about my kid’s public school? Am I wrong to examine motives and be a little wary when the massive Wal Mart fortune comes out strong against union workers? Seriously. This doesn’t raise alarm bells?

▲

I’m sure he’s already booked on Morning Joe

Fox News personality and former governor Mike Huckabee parachuted into Ohio yesterday to kick off the campaign to support former Fox News personality and governor John Kasich.

Governor Kasich has a long and profitable relationship with Fox News and Rupert Murdoch, and the news channel promoted his bid for governor, so I’m not surprised they’re again pulling out all the stops in my state.

Watch this if you’d like to see my governor stammering and stuttering as he presents an emotional defense of his former employer. It’s cringe-worthy.

Preacher Huckabee is either lying or uninformed on the state law he’s lecturing on, but, as we discovered in the health care debate, asking a conservative leader to read a law before he opens his mouth to opine on it is asking too much.

Huckabee defended SB 5 as a “reasonable, common sense” approach to Ohio’s budget woes while deflecting criticism that it is anti-union.

Nope.

In many ways Senate Bill 5 goes further than the antibargaining law that Wisconsin’s Republican-led Legislature enacted in March over the protests of tens of thousands of union supporters. Ohio’s law allows only limited bargaining: If management and union do not reach a settlement, then city councils and school boards can impose their side’s final contract offer unilaterally. The Ohio law bans binding arbitration and bargaining on health coverage, pensions or staffing levels.

Huckabee continues:

“In every state and in every municipality in this country, there is a huge crisis going on. In Ohio, an 8 billion dollar one. And that has to be made up somewhere,” he said. “I don’t know how many Ohioans you’re willing to put out of work in order to fund a bigger and bigger and bigger government.”

Ohio does not now and never had an 8 billion dollar deficit. Governor Kasich’s budget director admitted it, months ago.

I know facts and preparation don’t matter when a millionaire media personality is opining on a law he hasn’t read and a budget he doesn’t understand in a state he doesn’t live in, but I am curious about how he earns that huge paycheck he receives.

Maybe Huckabee earns the big bucks at Fox for telling jokes like this:

“Make a list… Call them and ask them, ‘Are you going to vote on Issue 2 and are you going to vote for it?’ If they say no, well, you just make sure that they don’t go vote. Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date. That’s up to you how you creatively get the job done.”

Is one or another police agency investigating the now-weekly allegations of criminality and corruption around Rupert Murdoch, or do I have to listen to his mouthpieces conduct yet another political campaign in my state?

▲

About as credible as his former employers

Two statements, one from former Fox News personality John Kasich:

TOLEDO — About 75 protesters, some of them angry and all of them soaked, stood outside a bar in driving rain last night chanting “our town, union town.” And so began Gov. John Kasich’s ground game to defend Senate Bill 5. Kasich’s first official campaign appearance in support of Issue 2 — the ballot measure for this fall’s referendum on Republican-backed limits to collective bargaining — took place in the Omni, a banquet, bar and concert hall next to the University of Toledo.

About 150 GOP supporters, many of them in ties and jackets, filed into the bar where AC/DC, Journey and Motley Crue cover bands play on weekends, to hear Kasich speak — many of them jeered by the drenched union crowd as they walked into the building. It was the exact contrast that Kasich and the Republicans are trying to avoid in this fall’s fight over Senate Bill 5: the working class pitted against the elite.

“I believe in unions. I believe they have a place,” Kasich said, standing on stage with Toledo Mayor Mike Bell.

And, one from the leader of a county Tea Party organization in Ohio that was sent to me by a Balloon Juice reader. The Tea Party leader asked that his email be forwarded, so she did that.

When we pass, Issue 2, and the Democratic Party and the Unions are defunded, they will not have the money to compete in Ohio next year. Barack Obama and Sherrod Brown will lose Ohio and be thrown out of office in November 2012.

The Governor and the Ohio Legislature will be emboldened and thus willing to introduce more conservative legislation like Workmans Comp reform, Right to Work, School Choice, and much more.

“Right to work” is, of course, the conservative legislation that destroys private sector unions. I’ll leave it to you decide which person is telling the truth on the conservative agenda here, former Lehman Brothers executive and Murdoch mouthpiece Kasich, or the local Tea Party leader. This was not then and is not now about the budget. It was a careful multi-state strategy to annihilate unions, the last remaining organized, effective opposition to moneyed interests in Ohio and other states.

Early voting in Ohio has begun. Democrats, liberals and assorted other allies gathered 317,000 signatures, one at a time, to protect early voting. Republicans and the Tea Party attempted to limit early voting. Which side is afraid of a voter referendum on their agenda? Which side tried to limit the opportunity to Vote No On Issue Two?

Early voting for the Nov. 8 election begins today, and today is also the start of “golden week,” the name given the five-day period when people can register to vote and cast a ballot at the same time. The registration period ends Tuesday, Oct. 11.

The Republican-dominated legislature tried to get rid of “golden week” as part of an election reform bill that limited the number of days voters can cast ballots before election day. But the law was put on hold last week because of a petition drive that seeks a statewide referendum on House Bill 194 for November 2012. With the law on hold, the previous 35-day early voting window was left intact.

▲