Bernie Calls For Banning For-Profit Charter Schools-- Strengthening Public Schools

Lara Trump isn't supposed to be the brightest of the Trump menagerie and she's certainly always welcome at Fox. Yesterday she was babbling some incoherent nonsense about how sad it is that Democrats want to beat her father-in-law, almost universally recognized as the worst"president"-- if history will even remember him as a president-- on history. "Shouldn’t you want someone that you think can run the country well, that’s gonna do the best job at being president, not just beat Donald Trump? But I think it actually speaks to the fact that there are still a lot of people who out there that are very upset that Hillary Clinton did not win in 2016." There may be, but the only people I know who pine for Hillary are people who recognize how much better she would have been than Trump. Anyone-- even Status Quo Joe, the worst of the Democratic alternatives, would be better than Trump.

Author and Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer reported how Trump is trying to be king. He singled out 4 precedents:

• Delegitimating oversight
• Using the bully pulpit for disinformation
• Legitimating conflict of interest
• Using national emergency power to replace legislating

The Worst. Ever. So... according to Newton's third law of physics, "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." That suggests that following Trump-- the worst-- the U.S. is ready for-- not some mediocrity like Status Quo Joe Biden-- for someone as good as Trump is bad-- a Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or-- better yet-- the two of them on a unity ticket.

Today, Bernie, basically ignoring the ugly and demeaning Trumpism that almost defines everything in our world, delivered an important education policy speech in Orangeburg, South Carolina-- as if Trump didn't exist. He called for a ban on all for-profit charter schools-- pretty much the opposite of what both corporate Democrats and the Republican Party have been working for-- and a moratorium on the funding of all public charter school expansion until after a national audit, a policy suggestion that comes from the NAACP.

California already has a new ban on for-profit charter schools. This will immediately put Bernie at odds with more corporate Democrats-- particularly Beto, Cory Booker, Tim Ryan and McKinsey Pete all of whom have admitted to being for charter schools, No other Democratic candidate has called for a ban on for-profit charter schools yet, but probably will now that Bernie has. These are the positions he laid out today:

• Mandating that charter schools comply with the same oversight requirements as public schools
• Mandating that at least half of all charter school boards are teachers and parents
• Disclosing student attrition rates, non-public funding sources, financial interests and other relevant data
• Matching employment practices at charters with neighboring district schools, including standards set by collective bargaining agreements and restrictions on exorbitant CEO pay
• Supporting the efforts of charter school teachers to unionize and bringing charter schools to the negotiating table

Watch who lauds Bernie's position and who unmasks themselves as the corporate whores being paid off to go on the warpath against him. I wonder how long Biden can keep quiet on the subject and not take a stand one way or the other. See if you can identify the corporate whore below (hint: she's completely in sync with both Betsy DeVos and that wretched Trumpanzee daughter-in-law).

Sanders will concede that the initial goal of charter schools-- to help kids with unique learning needs-- was admirable. But he will argue the system has been corrupted by wealthy activists who spent millions to privatize these schools, leaving them unaccountable and draining funds from the public school system.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, lauded the Sanders plan. In a statement to CNN, she called the proposal "vitally important" and said that it would provide real checks and balances for the charter school system.

"For the last several decades, the unregulated growth of private charter schools has siphoned off money from public schools, with little protection against fraud, and little attention paid to equity or quality when it comes to educating kids," Weingarten said. "The senator's plan takes tangible steps toward making the charter school industry accountable to parents and the public."

Those who operate these schools feel differently. Amy Wilkins, senior vice president of advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, points out that three California branches of the NAACP broke with the national organization's call for a moratorium on funding. She noted that there was evidence that charter schools have helped thousands of children in at-risk situations.

"Sanders' call is out of touch-- as usual-- with what African Americans want," Wilkins said in a statement to CNN. "More disturbing, the senator-- for personal political gain-- would literally lock African American students into schools that have failed them for generations."

Really? Out of touch? Here's Bernie's plan; please read it and decide if he's out of touch, the way the charter school shills-- like Jonathan Chait-- are saying he is. "Our nation," he wrote, "used to lead the world in the percentage of young Americans with college degrees. We were number one. Today, we are number 11, behind countries like South Korea, Japan, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Australia-- and that is not acceptable. And here is the simple truth: 40 or 50 years ago, in California and Vermont, virtually any place in America, if you received a high school degree, the odds were pretty good that you would be able to get a decent paying job, raise a family, buy a house, buy a car, all on one income. That was the world 40 or 50 years ago. But that is not the world we live in today. The world has changed, the global economy has changed, technology has changed, and education has changed. Over the past decade, states all over America have made savage cuts to education, while, at the same time, providing massive tax breaks to the wealthiest people and largest corporations in America. Our kids and our students are too important to cut back on education, especially when those cuts reduce educational opportunities for underserved students, students of color, low income students, LGBTQ students and students with disabilities."

In the twenty-first century, a free public education system that goes from kindergarten through high school is no longer good enough. If we are to succeed as a nation, public colleges and universities must be tuition free. Higher education should be a right for all, not a privilege for the few. That means we have got to make public colleges and universities tuition free and we must substantially reduce student debt. Each and every year, hundreds of thousands of bright and qualified young people do not get a higher education for one reason and one reason alone: their family lacks the income. That is unfair to those families; and it is it is unfair to the future of this country.

Instead of pursuing their dreams of being an environmentalist, a teacher, a social worker, or an artist, too many Americans end up taking higher-paying jobs on Wall Street or as accountants or as corporate managers simply to pay back their student loans. We need environmentalists. We need people to take care of the poor. We need health care providers to choose to work in community health centers. We need good teachers. Each and every American must be able to get the education they need to match their skills and fulfill their dreams.

In fulfilling those dreams, we must make teaching a highly attractive profession again. Teachers have one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in America. Teachers have been the leaders in the fight to improve public schools, reduce class sizes, and provide every student with books, computers and safe, high quality schools. What encourages me and gives me so much hope about the future is that teachers across the country are standing up and saying enough is enough! The wealthiest people in America cannot have it all, while public schools all over America are falling apart.

Over the past year, tens of thousands of teachers across the country have gone on strike to demand greater investment in public education. The wave of teacher strikes throughout the country provides an historic opportunity to make the investments we desperately need to make our public education system the best in the industrialized world, not one of the poorest.

Bernie’s education plan addresses the serious crisis in our education system by reducing racial and economic segregation in our public school system, attracting the best and the brightest educational professionals to teach in our classrooms, and reestablishing a positive learning environment for students in our K-12 schools. This plan calls for a transformative investment in our children, our teachers and our schools and a fundamental re-thinking of the unjust and inequitable funding of our public education system.

Universal school lunches and a $60,000 floor on teachers salaries, which Bernie proposed in his South Carolina speech today-- seem like a pretty good straight-forward idea too. Right? Where do you think the opposition to those two proposals will come from? Come on, take a guess. It's not a trick question. On a macro-level, it hasn't changed since the debate in the colonies on whether or not we should declare our independence. A third of the population opposed that. Many fought on the side of the colonial occupiers. Don't remember? Starts with con...