In Today's News...

Charter schools were created for two reasons: to provide a market-driven alternative to public schools that might push all schools to improve and to weaken (or bust) teachers unions.  The former justifies reducing support for already impoverished public schools with an alternative designed (sometimes) to educate better.  The latter justifies public impoverishment to enrich conservative insiders like Akron businessman David Brennan. 

For years, the tension between these two justifications combined to hurt public schools and prop up dubious charter experiments that could not demonstrate success or even innovation.  In the most recent budget, the charter experiments justified as political weapons are now stealing resources from both public schools and from their more effective charter school counterparts.

According to today’s Beacon, ‘[t]he 5,300-page state budget, approved with no Democratic support and little opposition from House or Senate Republicans, gives the highest dollar increases to some of the state’s lowest-performing charter schools, while state aid for many of the highest-performing charter schools could be cut.’

The schools run by non-educators like Brennan will receive significantly more funding (and a larger increase in funding) than charter schools that have actually been innovative and successful.  Further, these failing charters run by political hacks will continue to be exempted from any form of accountability.  Since these schools continue to fail (receiving ‘Fs’ in most recent state report cards) this year’s budget will ensure that they are excluded from any reporting in next year’s report card.  Do we need any additional evidence that the constant call for accountability in education from conservative leaders is a red herring?

Bob Dyer (for the second time in the last 17 years) wrote a column worth reading.

Michael Douglas provides valuable context for understanding the SCOTUS Voting Rights Act decision, even as Charles Krauthammer provides his usual fear-mongering drivel to distract and confuse readers about what he imagines to be the hidden threat of the DOMA decision.  The Douglas commentary is worth reading and pasted below in its entirety. 

I provide the link to Krauthammer, so anyone can see for themselves just how paranoid the far right can be.  Yes, we are likely on a road where gay marriage is legal everywhere, but not because the court ‘neither nationalized nor delegitimized gay marriage,’ as CK put it in his tired effort to pound the anti-Roe drum yet again. 

The court is applying national standards in the Constitution, so by definition SCOTUS decisions nationalize our framing of a conflict, from the right to choose to right to marry as applications of the individual rights protected in the Constitution.  What he means to say is he does not like the decision because of its immediate impact and because it establishes a principle for the nation, rooted in our shared value called ‘equal protection of the laws,’ as applied to marriage equality.

Michael Douglas on Voting Rights Act decision…well worth reading…

They gathered at the White House in late July seven years ago, President Bush, Cabinet members, representatives and senators, Republicans and Democrats, along with many civil rights leaders. The president signed the reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the law, as he put it, that “broke the segregationist lock on the ballot box.”

“Today, we renew a bill that helped bring a community on the margins into the life of American democracy,” Bush told the audience. He added: “My administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law, and we will defend it in court.”

The occasion reflected a broad consensus. The reauthorization cleared the Senate by a 98-0 vote, and the House, 390-33. The legislation stemmed from the 15th Amendment — that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged … on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude” and that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

It is important to emphasize here that strictly by the numbers we have a case of overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses of Congress for legislation then signed by a very conservative Republican President.  While Douglas and Ginsburg provide even more important reasons below, this alone should raise serious questions about the court’s decision to intervene in this case. 

Thus, the question before the U.S. Supreme Court this past session: Did Congress act appropriately?

On Tuesday, a 5-4 majority answered no. The court held that lawmakers failed to update the criteria for a key component of the law, the formula for determining which states must get federal approval in advance, or “preclearance,” of changes in voting procedures and election laws.

As we will see this claim by the court is empirically inaccurate; Congress did take current conditions into account, and anyone who has paid attention to our most recent election cycles knows that current conditions remain filled with efforts to legally block access to the vote. 

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that the formula must be driven by “current conditions,” taking into account dramatic advances in voter turnout among blacks and the election of scores of black candidates. He invited Congress to start from scratch. Until it does (an unlikely prospect), the court ruling amounts to “striking at the heart of the nation’s signal piece of civil rights legislation.”

Those are the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissenting opinion, a comprehensive effort, rich in detail, even in tone, yet pressing forward, exposing the hubris and the harm of the majority.

Ginsburg applauds the progress that has been made, reminding that the Voting Rights Act has succeeded where other laws long failed. Why? Because of the preclearance requirement in the covered areas. It works to avoid lengthy litigation, lawsuits following new instances of discrimination, remedies arriving years later. More, the Justice Department works with states, counties and cities, showing how proposed laws and procedures must be improved, resulting in swift action to prevent injustices.

Most striking about Ginsburg’s dissent is the record she reveals, how Congress did act in a responsible and informed way, and why the nine states, most in the South, still require federal oversight, discriminatory schemes still at work.

Read the majority opinion, and you would think Congress lacked care and seriousness. Not so. Ginsburg recalls James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of House Judiciary Committee, describing the effort as “one of the most extensive considerations of any piece of legislation” that he had seen in his more than 27 years in Congress.

The record covered 21 hearings, many witnesses and 15,000 pages. What did lawmakers find since the previous reauthorization in 1982?

Congress learned there were more Justice Department objections between 1982 and 2006 than during the first 17 years of the act. The department won the withdrawal or alteration of more than 800 changes.

Ginsburg uses bullet points, conveying “a sense of the extent” to which the law “continues to protect minority voting rights.” Among other instances, she cites Mississippi seeking a dual registration system, a Georgia town proposing a redistricting plan designed to diminish black voting strength, a South Carolina county pursuing an at-large system for the school board after black candidates won a majority of the seats.

Congress conducted a study to test the coverage formula. Ginsburg points to this finding: Although the covered areas amount to less than 25 percent of the country’s population, they accounted for 56 percent of the successful litigation under the act since 1982. The study also found that the covered areas had a greater degree of racial polarization.

Ginsburg notes that since 2006, an Alabama town has sought approval of a plan that would have eliminated its sole majority black district. In 2010, the FBI caught on tape Alabama state senators referring to blacks as “Aborigines” and expressing concern about a referendum that would boost black turnout. The trial judge viewed the recordings as “compelling evidence that political exclusion through racism remains a real and enduring problem” in Alabama.

Here we see a summary of the record demonstrating that the majorities reasoning is without basis in fact. 

The record makes plain that Congress wasn’t stuck in 1965, as Chief Justice Roberts contended, applying old data to new circumstances. The thinking of those gathered at the White House that summer day involved concerns about backsliding and subtler forms of discrimination, “second generation barriers,” current evidence shaping their judgment.

They acted appropriately, at the intersection of what Justice Ginsburg describes as “the most constitutionally invidious form of discrimination and the most fundamental right in our democratic system,” or where “Congress’ power to act is at its height.”