Will Progressive Education Policy Put Bernie In The White House Next Time?

A week or so ago we looked at an interesting video of Bernie's wife Jane interviewing economist Stephanie Kelton about a paper she and her colleagues had just published on student debt cancellation, likely to be an important part of Bernie's 2020 campaign platform. A couple of years ago Gaius posted about Bernie's likely 2020 opponent, Joe Biden and how he has backed bills to make it harder to reduce student debt, let alone cancel it. I can't imagine a Democrat who would be a worse representative of a perspective from the 20th Century... or even the 19th.

Before Biden was rebranded as the kindly, well-liked Vice President, he was a long-serving senator from Delaware, the "senator from MBNA" as he was often called for a number of very good reasons. Delaware is the state that attracted a great many credit card company headquarters by offering little in the way of usury laws-- limits to interest rates that banks could charge their customers. As a result, one of Delaware's most important industries is those who profit from debt-creation.

Being in the consumer debt business, especially student debt and credit card debt, is a license to print money, and protecting that lucrative source of money is the job of Delaware senators like Biden, just as protecting Boeing's access to government money via the Export-Import Bank is the job of senators like Washington's Patty Murray, the so-called "senators from Boeing."

Joe Biden is, and has been for years, a friend and enabler of his state's debt industry.

Biden's political fortunes rose in tandem with the financial industry's. At 29, he won the first of seven elections to the U.S. Senate, rising to chairman of the powerful Judiciary Committee, which vets bankruptcy legislation. On that committee, Biden helped lenders make it more difficult for Americans to reduce debt through bankruptcy-- a trend that experts say encouraged banks to loan more freely with less fear that courts could erase their customers’ repayment obligations. At the same time, with more debtors barred from bankruptcy protections, the average American’s debt load went up by two-thirds over the last 40 years. Today, there is more than $10,000 of personal debt for every person in the country, as compared to roughly $6,000 in the early 1970s.

That increase-- and its attendant interest payments-- have generated huge profits for a financial industry that delivered more than $1.9 million of campaign contributions to Biden over his career, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Biden's a tangent. Public education advocates were cheered-- pleasantly surprised-- when the new governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, a conservative Democrat, dealt a nice strong rebuke to charter school fanatic and Trumpist Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos by appointing Atif Qarni his secretary of education. A Pakistani-American ex-Marine, Qarni was a Prince William County Public Schools educator and, when Northam appointed him to the state's top education slot he was teaching civics and economics, U.S History, and mathematics at Beville Middle School in Dale City.

Qarni: "If we want to build an economy that works better for every family, no matter who you are, no matter where you live, we must begin with the foundation of a world-class education. We can accomplish it if we support our educators and school support professionals, uphold accountability, invest in and expand STEAM curriculum, and make early childhood education a priority."

In the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election, an old friend of mine from Athens, Georgia, Bertis Downs, wrote a column for Slate about how Democratic candidates should deal with education policy. He was happy that both Hillary and Bernie had finally started "questioning the efficacy and priority of charter schools in the national dialogue on educating our children" and seemed especially happy that Bernie had proposed a new, "equity-focused approach to funding education." But not happy enough. He wrote that "the candidates’ words don’t seem to resonate with many of the largely untapped public education parents and teachers who are in search of a candidate. Neither candidate really has a grasp on the varied and complex issues that have to be addressed when considering the changes and reforms our schools and children truly need. Let's help their campaigns by outlining the speech that at least one of them ought to give-- and soon:

We know several things about public education. We know it is the road out of poverty for many children. We know many or most of our public schools are doing a fine job of educating our children. But we also know our nation still suffers from generations of neglect, discrimination and underfunding that drive unconscionable disparities in how we educate our privileged and our less affluent children. Clearly, education does not exist in a vacuum. We cannot expect schools or teachers alone to solve the immense problems many of our youngest children face in their home lives. Schools are expected to do more and more in an age when we are making it harder for them to do the basic job of educating their students. It seems that teachers have less control over what and how they teach, yet teachers are blamed more than ever for how their students perform on standardized tests. Is it any wonder we have an impending shortage of teachers? Even those who have long dreamed of being teachers may be hesitant to enter the profession as it is currently defined. Is that really what we want? Is that really what our children deserve?

John Dewey once said, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that we must want for all of the children of the community." Well, under my administration, we will actually govern that way and foster the kinds of schools where we would all be proud to send our children. We all know the factors that make a school great: excellent teachers who are respected, compensated, and supported so they can better teach our children; a rich and varied curriculum that includes the basic academic subjects as well as the arts and physical education; safe and healthy learning environments; the school as a center of community; strong leadership that focuses on enabling educators to collaborate, develop, and improve as they teach; reasonable class sizes; and an active and engaged parent and community presence. These describe some of our best schools-- both public and private. And these are the attributes our policies need to be building and sustaining, not undermining and discouraging. For too long, our policies have created a de facto parallel system-- schools for the Haves and other schools for the Have-nots. We need to shift our thinking and try a different approach-- one that strives to improve opportunities for all of our nation’s children, not just a select few. Put simply, we must redouble our efforts to expand on our schools’ existing strengths, while freeing teachers to teach and addressing the lingering inequality that presents challenges to teachers and administrators.

Thus far, there’s been very little campaign time devoted to public education policy. I guess that’s not surprising given the amount of money and power at stake. Someone recently joked that on the Democratic campaign trail it’s as if children go straight from pre-K to debt-free college, and there’s no such thing as K-12 education in between. Well, I want to change that mistaken perception. I want to address the hard questions, face the obvious challenges, and examine current practices to discern what works and what needs to be expanded. We also have to determine how to equitably allocate our resources strategically to solve problems. And then our nation has to set about the real work to make all our schools work for each of our children.

How do we do that? Well, in recent months, I have been quietly talking with teachers, principals, parents and students. These are the true stakeholders in this debate, after all. Many of these true stakeholders are affiliated with groups like the Network for Public Education, the Badass Teachers Association, Parents Across America, Class Size Matters, Education Opportunity Network, National Education Policy Center, Journey for Justice, FAIRTEST, Save Our Schools, United Opt-Out and the growing movement of student activist groups in many of our major cities. These are grassroots groups with smart, dedicated and hardworking people who believe in the value of public education and work hard every day to strengthen and improve the system.  Groups like these will have a seat at the table in my administration. Together, we will carefully consider the various approaches of Community Schools-- public schools that incorporate social service agencies, local businesses, and health and adult learning resources, to ensure that children and their families have the support they need. These programs have had promising results where implemented, but they have not been fully embraced or built out to their potential. That needs to change. Communities all over America are doing this work-- building communities around and within schools, positively affecting the culture by addressing out-of-school factors that we all know have a major impact on school performance.

I am listening to educators and parents-- the true stakeholders-- and I will put some educators with actual real-world, real-school experience in positions of power in my administration. For a long time now, we have pursued so many of the corporatized policies: test and punish, drill and kill, stack, rank and close. These practices are not helping our children learn. And from my lifelong travels around the country and the globe, I know that no other country uses standardized testing the same way we do. There is a better way-- our teachers and parents know there’s a better way.

This approach will support children and begin to address the socioeconomic factors that pose challenges for our students at home. Let’s try an approach that values educators and supports their efforts to innovate and try new things. And let’s figure out ways to reward schools that look like America, with the rich and sustainable diversity that has long been one of our nation’s essential strengths. Integrated schools are healthier schools. In the wise words of Thurgood Marshall, "...unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together."

We say we want good schools for each child. But the policies we have pursued at the federal and most state levels have not produced that result-- not even close. Mine will be the first administration in a long time that not only makes speeches about strengthening and improving our public schools, but actually adopts policies that will strengthen and improve our public schools. To those of you who have said my campaign hasn’t emphasized public education enough: you are right. Admittedly, I am looking at this with new eyes as I consider the education of my own grandchildren. How we educate them, and the millions of peers coming up alongside them, is one of the nation’s greatest responsibilities. I, for one, am ready to do my part.

Alas, neither Hillary nor Bernie ever made that speech. Bernie will have another shot at it in 2 years. I know he plans to emphasize education a lot more strongly in 2020.

Are Schools Afraid To Teach Critical Thinking? Or Is It Just Too Damn Hard?

Yesterday charter school shill Sarah Hernandez jumped into the open seat race for CA-34, one of the bluest districts in the country. The last thing that kind of district needs is some pawn on the charter school billionaires jumping into Congress disguised as a progressive Democrat just because EMILY's List demands a woman fill the seat. Betsy DeVos is a woman too. Stephen Henderson, who writes for the Detroit Free Press knows her well and shared his insights about why she could well be Trump's most dangerous cabinet pick so far with USA Today readers this week.

In Detroit, parents of school-age children have plenty of choices, thanks to the nation's largest urban network of charter schools.

What remains in short supply is quality.

In Brightmoor, the only high school left is Detroit Community Schools, a charter boasting more than a decade of abysmal test scores and, until recently, a superintendent who earned $130,000 a year despite a dearth of educational experience or credentials.

On the west side, another charter school, Hope Academy, has been serving the community around Grand River and Livernois for 20 years. Its test scores have been among the lowest in the state throughout those two decades; in 2013 the school ranked in the first percentile, the absolute bottom for academic performance.

Or if you live downtown, you could try Woodward Academy, a charter that has limped along near the bottom of school achievement since 1998, while its operator has been allowed to expand into other communities.

This deeply dysfunctional educational landscape is no accident. It was created by an ideological lobby that has zealously championed free-market education reform for decades, with little regard for the outcome. And at the center of that lobby is Betsy DeVos, the west Michigan advocate whose family has contributed millions of dollars to the cause of school choice and unregulated charter expansion throughout Michigan.

President-elect Donald Trump has made a number of controversial cabinet nominations already. But none seems more inappropriate, or more contrary to reason, than his choice of DeVos to lead the Department of Education.

DeVos isn’t an educator, or an education leader. She’s not an expert in pedagogy or curriculum or school governance. In fact, she has no relevant credentials or experience for a job setting standards and guiding dollars for the nation’s public schools.

She is, in essence, a lobbyist-- someone who has used her extraordinary wealth to influence the conversation about education reform, and to bend that conversation to her ideological convictions despite the dearth of evidence supporting them.

For 20 years, the lobby her family bankrolls has propped up the billion-dollar charter school industry and insulated it from commonsense oversight, even as charter schools repeatedly failed to deliver on their promises to parents and children.

DeVos is a believer, and a powerful influence wielder for the special interest she has championed. But that doesn't make her the right pick to helm an entire arm of the federal government. Wealth should not buy a seat at the head of any policy-making table.

That is true especially in public education-- a trust between government and the people that seeks to provide opportunity for those who wouldn’t otherwise have it.

Supporters call Betsy DeVos an "advocate" who cares for children. And she may be that.

But the policy expression of that concern has been one-sided, and as much about establishing an industry as it is about kids.

The DeVos family has helped private interests commandeer public money that was intended to fulfill the state's mandate to provide compulsory education. The family started the Great Lakes Education Project, whose political action committee does the most prolific and aggressive lobbying for charter schools.

Betsy DeVos and other family members have given more than $2 million to the PAC since 2001. GLEP has spent that money essentially buying policy outcomes that have helped Michigan's charter industry grow while shielding it from accountability.

This summer, the DeVos family contributed $1.45 million over two months-- an astounding average of $25,000 a day-- to Michigan GOP lawmakers and the state party after the Republican-led Legislature derailed a bipartisan provision that would have provided more charter school oversight in Detroit.

GLEP also pushed hard and successfully to lift the cap on charter schools a few years ago, even though Michigan already had one of the highest numbers of charters in the nation, despite statistics suggesting charters weren't substantively outperforming traditional public schools.

And in 2000, the DeVos extended family spent $5.6 million on an unsuccessful campaign to amend Michigan's constitution to allow school vouchers-- the only choice tool not currently in play in Michigan.

Even if Betsy DeVos ceased her substantial contributions to pro-school choice lawmakers, or to GLEP’s PAC, what credibility would she have in a policy job that requires her to be an advocate for all schools? How could she credibly distance herself from her history as a lobbyist?

Beyond the conflicts, there are also deep questions about her substantive understanding of education policy.

As a private citizen, DeVos is free to hold any belief she wants, and to promote her beliefs however she likes, regardless of how they comport with fact or outcome. But as secretary of Education, DeVos would be expected to help set standards, guide accountability and oversee research in a way that benefits children, through outcomes, not one particular interest or industry. And more important, the U.S. Secretary of Education must understand the value of both high-performing charters and traditional public schools.

She has no track record of working along those lines, and no experience that suggests she’s even interested in it.

Largely as a result of the DeVos lobbying, Michigan tolerates more low-performing charter schools than just about any other state. And it lacks any effective mechanism for shutting down, or even improving, failing charters.

We're a laughingstock in national education circles, and a pariah among reputable charter school operators, who have not opened schools in Detroit because of the wild West nature of the educational landscape here.

In Michigan, just about anyone can open a charter school if they can raise the money. That's not so in most other states, where proven track records are required. In other states, poor performers are subject to improvement efforts, or sometimes closed. By contrast, once a school opens in Michigan, it's free to operate for as long as it wants.

And in Michigan, you can operate a charter for profit, so even schools that fail academically are worth keeping open because they can make money. Michigan leads the nation in the number of schools operated for profit, while other states have moved to curb the expansion of for-profit charters, or banned them outright.

The results of this free-for-all have been tragic for Michigan children, and especially for those in Detroit, where 79% of the state's charters are located.

A yearlong Free Press investigation found that 20 years after Michigan's charter school experiment began, Detroit's charter schools have shown themselves to be only incrementally stronger, on average, than traditional public schools. They have admirable graduation rates, but test scores that look nearly identical to those of public schools.

The most accurate assessment is that charter schools are simply a second, privately managed failing system. Yes, there are high-performing outliers--  slightly more than 10% of the charter schools perform in the top tier. But in Detroit, the best schools are as likely to be traditional public schools.

DeVos and her family have not been daunted by these outcomes. It's as if the reams of data showing just incremental progress or abysmal failure don't matter. Their belief in charter schools is unshakable, their resistance to systematic reforms that would improve both public and charter schools unyielding.

They have also pushed hard on schools of choice, where districts open their borders to kids from other jurisdictions.

In concept, it could be a great equalizer: Children from poor districts could attend schools that have many more resources. But in practice, white and more affluent parents have fled as poorer, minority kids have come into their schools, exacerbating de facto segregation, according to a report by Bridge Magazine.

This newspaper has been, and will continue to be, an advocate for successful charter schools, and for educational choice as one way-- but certainly not the only way--  to improve this state’s school landscape.

But it's impossible to imagine such improvement will be aided by an education secretary so willfully impervious to the relevant data. Instead, Betsy DeVos' lodestar has been her conviction that any nontraditional public school is better than a traditional one, simply because it's not operated by government.

Charter school advocates like DeVos reject any criticism of charters as a defense of the status quo. But that's a gross and partisan distortion, especially for people like me.

I've made the most personal endorsement possible by sending my two children to charter schools in Baltimore and here in Detroit. In both cases, we've chosen high-quality charters; in Detroit, the best choices were far scarcer than in Baltimore. And to get into the high-performing school we chose in Detroit required an extraordinary effort. I have the income, the transportation and access to be sure my kids get the best opportunity available.

Most Detroit parents don't enjoy those same advantages, and they are stuck choosing from among a sea of mediocrity or worse.

DeVos' lobbying hasn't been good for Detroit, or Michigan.

It won't be good for the nation.

And if you noticed that virtually every member of the Trump Administration-- from top to bottom-- is weighted down by unbelievable conflicts of interest, you would be guessing right if you assumed DeVos is one of the worst. Even the Wall Street Journal couldn't help noticing yesterday. Her family invests heavily in Social Finance Inc., "a startup whose fortunes hinge in part on policies crafted by the department Ms. DeVos would run... Much of SoFi’s business stems from refinancing student loans; the Department of Education is by far the country’s biggest student lender, with $1.3 trillion in outstanding loans."

So what happens when we educate children poorly. I'm sure you know. Trump's election stands as a testament to ill-advised political interference in the education system by right-wing ideologues like DeVos for decades. This week an occasional DWT contributor, author and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, penned a special report for the New York Daily News on the "fake news" pizzagate insanity of recent days. This could only happen in a country filled with self-righteous, ill-educated morons, the people who, in large part, elected Trump. Dan started his piece by acknowledging he was about to drive some of those morons into a frothy frenzy "by saying two things that will surely make some people very mad. First, the language we use has begun to obscure the relationship between facts and fantasy. Second, this is a dangerous byproduct of a lack of education in our country that has now affected an entire generation of citizens."

Regarding language: we are all being more than a bit too careful in how we refer to falsehoods. Perhaps in an effort not to create interpersonal confrontations, an effort to "just get along" we have started to use euphemisms to refer to things that are just plain whack-a-doo crazy. The lie that Washington, D.C. pizza shop Comet Ping Pong was running a sex slave operation spearheaded by Hillary Clinton led to a shooting on Sunday. This newspaper called the lie a "fringe theory."

Other euphemisms for lies are counterknowledge, half-truths, extreme views, conspiracy theories, and, the more recent appellation, "fake news."

The phrase "fake news" sounds too playful, too much like a schoolchild faking illness to get out of a test. The euphemisms obscure the fact that the sex-slave story is an out-and-out lie. The people who wrote it knew that it wasn't true. There are not two sides to a story when one side is a lie. Journalists-- and the rest of us-- must stop giving equal time to things that don't have an opposing side. Two sides to a story exist when evidence exists on both sides of a position. Then, reasonable people may disagree about how to weigh that evidence, and what conclusion to form from it. Everyone, of course, is entitled to their own opinion. But they are not entitled to their own facts. Lies are an absence of facts and, in many cases, a direct contradiction of them.

Regarding education: We have failed to teach our children what constitutes evidence, and how to evaluate it. Edgar Welch, the Comet Ping Pong shooter, told authorities that he was "investigating" the conspiracy theory. I believe he thought that is what he was doing, but there is no evidence that any investigating was performed. I suspect that this ignorant citizen does not know what it is to compile and evaluate evidence. In this case, one might look for a link between Hillary Clinton and the restaurant, behaviors of Clinton that would suggest an interest in running a prostitution ring, or even a motive for why she might benefit from such a thing (certainly the motive could not have been financial, given her speaking fees). Or, lacking the mentality and education to conduct one's own investigation, one could rely on professionals by reading what trained investigative journalists have to say about the theory. The fact that no credible journalist gives this any credence should tell you all you need to know.

We have failed to teach our children to fight the evolutionary tendency towards gullibility. We are a social species, and we tend to believe what others tell us. And our brains are great storytelling and confabulation machines: given an outlandish premise, we can generate fanciful explanations for how they might be true. But that's the difference between creative thinking and critical thinking, between lies and the truth: the truth has factual, objective evidence to support it.

A Stanford University study of civic online reasoning tested more than 7,800 students from intermediate school through college for 18 months ending June 2016. The researchers cite a "stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people's ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak." They were horrible at distinguishing high quality news from lies. We need to start teaching them to do so now. And while we're at it, the rest of us could use a refresher course. Fortunately, evidence-based thinking is not beyond the grasp of most 12-year olds, if only they are shown the way.

Our kids isn't learning.

Many are saying that Pizzagate is a direct result of fake news (but let's call it like it is: lies). But what weaponizes the lies is not the belief in them-- belief in lies can be harmless, such as belief in Santa Claus or that these new jeans make me look thin. The danger is in the intensity of that belief-- the unquestioning overconfidence that it is true.

Critical thinking trains us to take a step back, to evaluate facts and form evidence-based conclusions. What got Welch into a situation of discharging a firearm in a DC pizza parlor was a complete inability to understand that a view he held might be wrong. The most important quality in critical thinking is in short supply these days: humility. If we realize we don't know everything, we can learn. If we think we know everything, learning is impossible. Somehow, our educational system and our reliance on the internet has led to a generation of kids who do not know what they don't know. If we can accept that truth, we can educate to stamp out the lies.

Yesterday, the NY Times looked at those PISA results (from the video up top) and although there is some controversy over the premises, everyone agrees that the U.S. is doing pretty badly at educating young people-- treading water in the middle of the pool. "Generally speaking, the smartest countries tend to be those that have acted to make teaching more prestigious and selective; directed more resources to their neediest children; enrolled most children in high-quality preschools; helped schools establish cultures of constant improvement; and applied rigorous, consistent standards across all classrooms."

For now, the PISA reveals brutal truths about America’s education system: Math, a subject that reliably predicts children’s future earnings, continues to be the United States’ weakest area at every income level. Nearly a third of American 15-year-olds are not meeting a baseline level of ability-- the lowest level the O.E.C.D. believes children must reach in order to thrive as adults in the modern world.

And affluence is no guarantee of better results, particularly in science and math: The latest PISA data (which includes private-school students) shows that America’s most advantaged teenagers scored below their well-off peers in science in 20 other countries, including Canada and Britain.

The good news is that a handful of places, including Estonia, Canada, Denmark and Hong Kong, are proving that it is possible to do much better. These places now educate virtually all their children to higher levels of critical thinking in math, reading and science-- and do so more equitably than Americans do. (Vietnam and various provinces in China are omitted here because many 15-year-olds are still not enrolled in school systems there, limiting the comparability of PISA results.)

As we drift toward a world in which more good jobs will require Americans to think critically-- and to repeatedly prove their abilities before and after they are hired-- it is hard to imagine a more pressing national problem. “Your president-elect has promised to make America great again,” Mr. Schleicher said. But he warned, “He won’t be able to do that without fixing education.”

Change for the sale of change is never the answer. In fact, its as likely that change will make thing worse instead of better. And, judging by who Trump picked to head his education efforts, worse is exactly the direction the U.S. will soon be headed.

Betsy DeVos-- The End Of American Public Education

It's all over, suckers

I've been in a state of denial since November 9 but Trump's appointment of Betsy DeVos yesterday snapped me right out of it. Sure, Trump hired an actual neo-Nazi as virtual co-Chief of Staff. And no matter how many times the clueless shills on Morning Joe try to assure everyone that Trump won't be governing the way he ran his vile campaign and that everything is back to normal and he'll have a fine cabinet, it just ain't so. The only thing I've heard positive about yesterday's announcement about Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is that her appointment will clarify the battle lines. DeVos is another extremist billionaire whose life's work has been to destroy public education. Originally a huge Common Core advocate, her real goal is always to destroy teachers unions and voucherize and profitize education. (Incidentally, her brother is Erik Prince, founder of the worst of the American-based mercenary firms, Blackwater, privatizing war.) Annette Taddeo, former Democratic Party chair of Miami-Dade County, and currently a candidate for Florida Democratic Party chair now, was dismayed by Trump's appointment yesterday. "In Florida with Governor Scott's massive cuts to public education," she told us, "I thought we had reached rock bottom, but it seems there is a new bottom with Trumps nomination of DeVos."

The first person I called was my old friend Bertis Downs, probably best known as REM's manager, but also as a dedicated public school education activist in Georgia and a board member of the Network for Public Education. "So," he morosely quipped on the phone just after the news broke, "I guess now our American public schools will all be more like AmWay, I mean what could possibly go wrong!?" He sobered up fast:

But seriously, people don’t want the false cures pushed by corporate reformers and they prove that time and again, in statewide votes like the recent ones in Massachusetts, Washington state and Georgia. This is one of the rare issues that crosses party lines: parents and communities, regardless of their politics or parties, support their local schools and want to see them succeed. Republicans who support public schools-- and there are lots of them-- that is who needs to speak up and out about this appointment. If not, we really could be seeing the abandonment of our nation’s historic commitment to educating everybody-- public education as the great equalizer and perpetual engine of opportunity. People are wise enough to know that "choice" doesn’t educate kids-- teachers do and parents do-- schools do. And to the extent that the federal government has a role, it is to supplement and encourage our public schools, and the equality of opportunity within them-- not to destroy them by putting them into the hands of politicians and their cronies.

Bertis asked me to reach out to Carol Burris, head of the Network for Public Education and New York's 2013 New York State High School Principal of the Year. She told me that the DeVos pick makes one thing clear-- it shows Trump's commitment to the privatization of public schools as I wrote about here. DeVos wants all children to have vouchers, and she opposes regulations and oversight. Betsy DeVos spent over 1 million dollar to successfully block the effort of the Michigan legislature to clean up the mess of for-profit, unregulated charters in the state. The majority of Americans do not want what DeVos is selling. They do not want the Chilean education system of right wing dictator, Augusto Pinochet. They want community schools where they, not moneymakers, have voice. I have no doubt that the pushback on charters, vouchers and privatization will be enormous. The veil over so-called ed reform is now off."

"Trump," she had written for the Washington Post just last Sunday, "had little to say about education during the campaign, but that does not mean that he and those who surround him do not have a plan. There are clear indications that President Obama’s Race to the Top will be replaced with something that could be called 'Race to the Bank,' as the movement to privatize education seems certain to accelerate under an administration run by Trump and his vice president, Mike Pence." And the first concrete conformation was the appointment of DeVos.

Trump’s disdain for public schools is apparent. The Trump/Pence website uses the adjective “government” instead of  “public” when referring to community schools. It claims that school choice is “the civil rights issue of our time.”

Donald Trump Jr. used the convention as an opportunity to denigrate public schools by comparing them to “Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers.” Trump Jr.’s rhetoric belongs to a long-standing, right-wing belief that public education is a socialist institution and that schools should be run by the private sector.

Let’s stop for a moment and think about the “government” that runs public schools. It is not, as the slogan implies, a Washington cabal. Except in those cases where mayors have grabbed control, public schools are governed by locally elected school boards. The origin of the school board dates to 1647, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony required every town to establish a public school. Committees of school governance sprang up, becoming autonomous, local governing boards as early as the 1820s.

Nearly all school board members serve without pay. Most are dedicated, locally elected community servants who must abide by strict laws regarding conflict of interest-- laws from which many corporate charter boards are exempt. Yet school boards are viewed as an impediment by billionaires, like Reed Hastings of Netflix, who argued that school boards should be replaced with corporate boards through charter expansion.

The elimination of democratically governed schools is the true agenda of those who embrace choice. The talk of “civil rights” is smoke and mirrors to distract.

The plan on the Trump-Pence website promotes redirecting $20 billion in federal funds from local school districts and instead having those dollars follow the child to the school of their choice-- private, charter or public. States that have laws promoting vouchers and charters would be “favored” in the distribution of grants. Like Obama’s Race the Top, the competition for federal funds that states could enter by promising to follow Obama-preferred reforms, a Trump plan could use financial incentives to impose a federal vision on states.

The idea is not novel. Market-based reformers have referred to this for years as “Pell Grants for kids,” or portability of funding.

Portability, vouchers and charter schools have been hallmarks of Pence’s education policy as governor of Indiana. Unlike the Trump-Pence website, which frames choice as a “civil rights” initiative, Governor Pence did not limit vouchers to low-income families. He expanded it to middle-income families and removed the cap on the number of students who can apply.

It was promised that vouchers would result in savings, which then would be redistributed to public schools. What resulted, however, was an unfunded mandate. The voucher program produced huge school spending deficits for the state-- a $53 million funding hole during the 2015-16 school year alone. That deficit continues to grow.

The “money follows the student” policy has not only hurt Indiana’s public urban schools, it has also devastated community public schools in rural areas-- 63 districts in the Small and Rural Schools Association of Indiana have seen funding reduced, resulting in the possible shutdown of some, even after services to kids are cut to the bone.

In contrast, charters have thrived in Indiana with Pence’s initiatives of taxpayer-funded, low-interest loan, and per-pupil funding for nonacademic expenses. For-profit, not-for-profit and virtual schools are allowed. Scams, cheating scandals and political payback have thrived, as well. Former Indiana education commissioner Tony Bennett was forced to resign as the commissioner of Florida after it was discovered that he had manipulated school rating standards to save an Indiana charter school operated by a big Republican donor who gave generously to Bennett’s campaign.

Two nations, Chile and Sweden, fully implemented school choice. Both countries were influenced by the school privatization and choice theory of Milton and Rose Friedman, which is embraced by the incoming administration.

Chile’s choice system, imposed by dictator Augusto Pinochet, created a subsidized private school system in which schools could be run for profit. Chileans choose among elite private schools; public schools; and voucher schools, which are government-subsidized privates; and corporate schools, which are similar to American charters. Nearly all upper- and middle-class children attend private, corporate or voucher schools, leaving only the poor behind in the public schools. By 2011, Chile ranked 64 out of 65 in segregation across social classes in its schools and colleges.

The post-Pinochet government is banning for-profit schools, tuition and test-in criteria to try to fix the deep inequality caused by privatization, but progress is slow. Putting a public school system back together when it has been systematically disassembled is no easy task.

In the late 1990s, Sweden also embarked on a course of privatization as the driver of school reform. By 2011, the country went into “PISA shock” because Sweden was the only OECD nation to see its scores decline every time PISA was given since the international test began in 2000. Sam Abrams’s book Education and the Commercial Mindset describes Swedish scandals and bankruptcies, grade inflation due to school marketing, higher costs, and increased segregation by social class caused by privatization. As in the case of Chile, only the neediest children were left in some of Sweden’s municipal schools.

Both nations show us the outcome of choice. Americans need to consider some tough questions, before embracing its allure.

Do we want our schools to be governed by our neighbors whom we elect to school boards, or do we want our children’s education governed by corporations that have no real accountability to the families they serve?

Do we to want to build our communities, or fracture them, as neighborhood kids get on different buses to attend voucher schools, or are forced to go to charters because their community public school is now the place that only those without options go?

Do we believe in a community of learners in which kids learn from and with others of different backgrounds, or do we want American schools to become further segregated by race, income and religion?

The most shocking instances of charter school scandal and fraud consistently appear in states that have embraced the choice “market” philosophy. Are we willing to watch our tax dollars wasted, as scam artists and profiteers cash in?

When it comes to improving education, we have been engaged in work avoidance for too long. Rather than putting our efforts into creating better, safer and more diverse neighborhoods with excellent schools, we have pretended that the marketplace offers the only solution. We gave up the dream. And the privatizers and billionaires who dismiss democracy as an annoyance cynically jumped in.

True community public schools cannot survive school choice. There are only two paths. Will we choose the path chosen by a Chilean dictator, or will we rebuild and nurture a system with deep roots in American tradition and idealism?

OK, let's boil this down to a short version: redirecting federal funds toward school vouchers and privatization will lead to wealthy investors turning schools into profit centers for themselves, sort of like the catastrophe of private prisons, but a million times more destructive to what's left of America. Overly dramatic? We'll see. As for the DeVos family... it doesn't get any worse than these crackpot religious fanatics.

The DeVos family has thrown millions of dollars behind the causes and politicians they support. That means financing Senate races across the country involving vulnerable Republicans who support their issues; funding crisis pregnancy centers that lie to patients about abortion and other health concerns; fighting against marriage equality; and lining up support for so-called religious liberties measures.

...“Over the course of 2015, no family in conservative politics donated more hard dollars to political campaigns than the DeVoses,” reported Swan and Neidig [of The Hill]. Richard DeVos, the family’s billionaire patriarch, built his fortune as a co-founder of direct-selling franchise Amway; he is also the owner of the NBA’s Orlando Magic team. “An analysis by The Hill shows that members of the DeVos family donated $964,000 in hard dollars to Senate and House campaigns and to Republican Party committees at both the state and national level. This spending easily surpasses the $97,000 in hard dollars from the Koch family and $72,000 from the Coorses-- two other major conservative donor families.”

The DeVoses’ commitment to the Republican Party runs deep. Among their numerous political ties, Richard DeVos acted as the finance chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) in the 1980s; Betsy DeVos, who is married to Richard’s son Dick DeVos, was the chair of the Michigan Republican Party and finance chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee; and her husband Dick took on a self-funded failed gubernatorial bid in Michigan in 2006 that cost the family more than $35 million.

...Much of the DeVos family’s donations have gone toward helping to fund the politicians and the conservative organizations behind anti-choice and other conservative measures in their home state of Michigan. “With donations to state legislators and Gov. Rick Snyder, the DeVos family-- via the Michigan Family Forum and Michigan Right to Life, which they help to fund-- were able to pass Michigan’s ‘rape insurance’ law, requiring women to buy a separate insurance rider for abortion to be covered, even in cases of rape and incest,” explained NARAL Pro-Choice America in a 2015 memo, referring to the 2013 Abortion Insurance Opt-Out Act.

Michigan's preeminent progressive blog, ElectaBlog, has plenty of experience covering all things DeVos. Yesterday, right after the announcement, Mitchell Robinsion, an associate professor and chair of music education at Michigan State University, made it clear that while if "Trump's plan to turn the US into a giant flea market, selling off the bits and pieces of a once great nation for parts to the highest bidders" is going to be successful, he's found in DeVos a real pro in the game. Betsy DeVos was the absolute worst possible choice for Secretary of Education, so it’s no surprise that Trump chose her for this cabinet post... DeVos," wrote Robinson, "has been busy dreaming up new ways to capitalize on the billions of taxpayer dollars currently being wasted on children, teachers, and schools, and helping her puppet in the Michigan governor’s residence with his plan to destroy the state’s schools."

Remember, Michigan is the state where the Governor poisoned the water in one of the city’s largest cities, and more than 400 days later has still refused to replace a single water pipe. And the state whose lawyers recently claimed-- and I swear I’m not making this up-- that the state’s children had no “fundamental right to literacy.”

This is Betsy DeVos’ and Rick Snyder’s dream for how a state should govern-- that a state and its elected officials have no responsibility to provide clean drinking water or a quality education for its children. It’s a dystopian vision of the future that absolves a state’s leaders and institutions from providing, maintaining, repairing, and supporting its schools, roads, water systems, and infrastructure, or protecting its most vulnerable citizens from the permanent damage caused by a poisoned water supply.

So, if you want to know what our new federal education policy is going to look like under Secretary DeVos, what has happened in Michigan under Gov. Snyder-- and bankrolled and supported by the DeVos family-- provides perhaps the best example of what to expect…

Snyder’s “skunk works” plan was a furtive, secretive, and unconstitutional effort to turn Michigan’s schools into a virtual bonanza for profiteers. As originally reported by Chad Livengood, here’s what Snyder–and DeVos–were doing:

The education reform advisory team has dubbed itself a “skunk works” project working outside of the government bureaucracy and education establishment with a goal of creating a “value school” that costs $5,000 per child annually to operate, according to meeting minutes and reports obtained by the Detroit News.…Records show the group has strived to remain secretive, even adopting the “skunk works” alias, which dates to defense contractor Lockheed Martin’s secret development of fighter planes during World War II….In January, participants were instructed in a memo to use “alternative” email accounts.

The idea behind the “skunk works” plan was to radically increase the use of technology (i.e., virtual charters, online classes) to dramatically reduce the number of teachers needed, and to decouple tax dollars from schools by providing every student in the state with an “education debit card” that could be used for a wide range of educational experiences (i.e., music lessons, art classes, sports teams).

The ultimate goal here was to create a new “value school” model in the state, delivering schooling at a per-student cost of roughly $5000, over $2000 less than the average reimbursement provided by the state for each child enrolled in a district’s schools-- with “edupreneurs” pocketing the balance. For Snyder and DeVos, the purpose of education is not to help develop a more informed and educated citizenry, or to help children to become more fully human by providing a comprehensive, high quality curriculum, including music, art, and physical education in addition to the rest of the disciplines. The purpose of education under Snyder and DeVos is to turn the state’s once excellent system of public schools into an educational WalMart, boasting “low, low prices” in place of quality instruction.

...Betsy DeVos’ mission is no less than the total destruction of public education. Her apparent support for charters is merely a head fake to the right to distract us from for her ultimate goal of “decoupling” state and federal dollars from supporting schools of any type.

Under Secretary of Education DeVos we will see the emergence of a two-tiered educational system:

One, a system of elite private and religious schools for well-to-do, mostly White parents with the means to afford expensive tuition payments, staffed by qualified, certified teachers, with a rich curriculum based on face-to-face instruction in clean, safe, well-maintained schools…

The other, a parallel system of “fly by night” virtual and online “schools” that open and close seemingly at random, and for-profit charters operated by scam artists like Northern Michigan’s Dr. Steve Ingersoll, with little to no state or federal regulation or oversight, and a bare bones, “back to the basics” curriculum delivered by unqualified and uncertified “teachers.”

I’m guessing that the leadership at Teach for America is practically salivating today.

For the rest of us, welcome to the Hunger Games of public education.

Is there a public response to this kind of catastrophic decision? The Senate will have to confirm or reject the nomination. I'm sure they're trying to work it out among themselves,although Republicans seem quite enthusiastic. We contacted Madison congressman Mark Pocan, a strong advocate for a healthy and vibrant public education system as a means to give children of all backgrounds an opportunity to achieve their potential. He looked at Trump's announcement yesterday with what appeared to me to be a combination of alarm and revision. "Maybe the only thing worse than taking money away from public schools," he told us, "is being a rich GOP donor who wants to take money away from your public schools. Betsy DeVos has funded efforts across the country and in my state of Wisconsin to elect politicians who will take funds from public schools and give them to private ones. Her record on education is about as wrong as you can get."

The L.A. Times, The Greed-Obsessed Billionaires And The Evisceration Of Public Education

-by Ellen Lubic

Why does the L.A. Times hate and deride real teachers and public schools, but love and support Eli Broad and his billionaire partners in their privatizing takeover?

In the last few days, the L.A. Times has published misleading information on the California Appeals Court decision this week denying the lower court ruling in the Vergara lawsuit, wherein a few carefully chosen students were urged to press a lawsuit to terminate teachers without due process and to change the law pertaining to what they call tenure. Also this lawsuit would serve to weaken teachers unions.

This lawsuit was contrived by billionaires David Welch, under the aegis if the non profit called Students Matter, and with the input of Eli Broad and of the Walton Family and others of the billionaire anti-public school contingent. These uber wealthy non-educators tried to prove that bad and uncaring teachers were assigned to inner city schools so as to diminish the civil rights of inner city students to a fair and equal education in public schools, and that laws should be changed to be able to fire them with no due process.

However, these same billionaires have been working toward privatizing most of Americas' public schools and turning them into "Wall Street investment opportunities" as openly expressed by Rupert Murdoch in his NY Times oped a few years ago, and also by hedge fund managers such as Whitney Tilson, who sell their clients products of investments in charter schools and other allied corporations, and hold classes for these clients on how to invest in "public" education for large profits.

This is the greatest scam in the universe and outshines Teapot Dome as a robber baron scheme. They call the schools "public" but the only thing public about them is that they are paid for by the American taxpayer public. Other than that, these charter schools have no oversight by real educators and education administrators, nor a Board of Education, but they are run on business models devised by Eli Broad and his Broad Academy, to make vast sums of money for their leaders and investors, none of whom are generally educators.

These vulture business managers fire real trained teachers with degrees in education, and replace them with low paid Teach for America recent college graduates who only get 5 weeks of minimalist training before they are dumped into classrooms in inner cities for only a short period of time, with often 50 children in a room that was built to hold 30. Many disasters occur, and students suffer.

This week one of these ersatz public charter schools was awarded $7.2 million dollars by an LA court for not having LAUSD provide them with a free site for their marginal school.  We also see Fetullah Gulen, the Turkish Imam who lives in guarded seclusion in the Poconos, running over 146 of these questionable charters all over the US, with 11 in L.A. These Magnolia Schools in L.A. are headed by the infamous charter school queen, Caprice Young, who has made a fortune in her career off these schools that use taxpayer funds with no taxpayer oversight.

As to the L.A. Times... this information is always soft pedaled by the Times reporters, and we have been told they are under the thumbs of their bosses, the editorial board, who carefully monitor and edit their reports. Focusing on Saturday, April,16, 2016, we find the reporters front page story starting off with their own Broad-directed take on this week's decision by the Appeals Court to throw out this highly flawed case. The Times, and LASR, all week kept calling this a "landmark case," which it is not.  It is a failed case of bad law based on unproven allegations and bias against teachers and their unions, but the Broadies will again file similar lawsuits for they have endless deep pockets.

Howard Blume and his writer pals follow the Broad line imposed by their Times bosses, even though they do not have the usual disclaimer on today’s front page manipulated article. Ryan Smith and Ben Austin are quoted by the L.A. Times today. They chose once again to interview and quote Ryan Smith, past hatchet man for United Way and now the darling of Marion Edelman fame and fortune, and Parent Revolution/parent trigger shady lawyer, Ben Austin, former and still hatchet man for Eli Broad and now of Broad/Welch fame and fortune, to be their voices on education issues. These two men are in the lead in the deception to steal public education in the name of their manufactured view of civil rights. These are the two who led the infamous street charade of Oct. 29, 2013 to get the equally infamous John Deasy’s (who now works for Broad fulltime) contract renewed… and wherein the pathetic LAUSD BoE danced to Eli Broad’s tune by allowing the spectacle takeover of Beaudry Street and Board Room... and then signing and extending the disasterous contract, after the multiple fiascos caused by Broad's Supt. Deasy which cost the District around $780 million in losses and payoffs for lawsuits. Deasy almost forced the District into bankruptcy.

The supportive 'reformer' language these reporters use in the their introductory paragraphs, "the nation's most generous teacher employment protections...and, the (reformers) centerpiece effort to remake schools... and, teachers' unions have flexed their muscle locally and nationally"  is egregious. These biases set the scene for the rest of the manipulation of the story.

The 'reformer players' and the Times use the important claim of civil rights to elevate the privatizing of public schools, and the firing (and teacher jailing) of teachers without due process, and with the goal to kill off unions, but they want the exclusive use of public funds in running their charter schools, all paid for on the backs of the taxpayers. Deasy testified against teachers at the Vergara trail, and at the Treu decision for the plaintiffs, he stated that he was delighted and would rush home to fire more teachers...and he did.

Today's article mentions the recent Friedrichs case which SCOTUS dropped in a 4 to 4 tie after Justice Scalia's death as a case "which could have prevented unions from collecting dues from employees who didn't agree to become members." This is not actually what the case shows...as with Harris v. Quinn (" Holding: The First Amendment prohibits the collection of an agency fee from the plaintiffs in this case, home health care providers who do not wish to join or support a union.Judgment: Reversed in part, affirmed in part, and remanded, 5-4, in an opinion by Justice Alito on June 30, 2014. Justice Kagan filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer, and Justice Sotomayor joined."), teachers who do not join the union are generally required to pay a small fee since they benefit from union negotiations in their behalf as well as paid members.

But how easy it is to blame it all of public educations problems on the teachers.

However, do these reporters interview some of the skid row (see San Pedro St. in L.A.) crack mothers of the thousands of LAUSD students who sleep on the hard streets every night? Rarely do these ace reporters do any in-depth investigation of how these inner city kids live lives of desperate poverty, with little food or rest, and virtually no parental supervision. There are also many poverty level parents working three jobs to try to exist, but there are thousands of others who have NO business parenting children. These students are sent to school and teachers are supposed to fill all the spaces of their wretched lives and make them math and language successes, and college-ready, too. These same expectations extend to the lives of all those of LAUSD students living at or below the poverty level which is close to 80% of LAUSD. Could Eli make this work? Could the Kochs, or the Waltons with their endless billions as the two richest families in the world? Why don't they focus on curing poverty?  Can it be because there are no fortunes to be made by curing poverty?

As to their education articles, the Times reporters seem never to interview highly respected academics like Professor Rogers at UCLA or Emeritus Professor Kashen from USC, but rather, they feature on the mendacious warriors for privatization from Eli Broad’s selected non-profits, United Way, Parent Revolution, and California Endowment. So what the public reads is deeply slanted.

This story is filled with dichotomies…it is a continuum of despair of inner city life vs. the grandest displays of wealth in L.A. The 40,000 foot mansions which could house a hundred people, but are vacation homes for the billionaires who seek to run the world are what the tour buses show off…not the tents from 1st and San Pedro stretching for miles and miles, showing the degradation and filth of the poverty stricken, a twenty minute drive from Rodeo.

When we lose a free press, unbiased media, we lose democracy. Judging by Campbell’s new gig at LASR, and by the venomous L.A. Times (plus the biased NY Times), all is lost.

Ellen Lubic
Public Policy Educator
Director, Joining Forces for Education

Tomorrow's Endorsements-- In The Races On My Own Ballot In Los Angeles

I live in Los Feliz, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. I vote down the street in a neighbor's garage. We don't have any high-profile races to vote on here-- nothing that will swing Congress one way or the other. Our gubernatorial race-- pitting incumbent Jerry Brown against a random Republican from the Greed and Selfishness wing of his party-- is not being seriously contested. The last publicly available poll showed Brown ahead 56-37%. Almost all the Democrats running statewide are way ahead in the polls-- including good candidates like Betty Yee (Controller), Dave Jones (Insurance Commissioner) and John Chiang (Treasurer) and really bad ones like Gavin Newsom (Lt. Gov.). The race for Secretary of State looks closer, although mediocre state Senator Alex Padilla has a narrow lead over horrific GOP one-percent fanatic Pete Peterson.

The most important statewide race that's up in the air is for state Superintendent of Public Education, which pits a really good incumbent, Tom Torlakson, against a Wall Street whore, Marshall Tuck. The L.A. Times poll shows Torlakson narrowly ahead, 32-29% with most voters completely clueless and undecided-- and no party designation on the ballot to help them make up their minds. The Courage Campaign doesn't endorse candidates but yesterday they warned their members in California about the dangers Tuck poses to education in the state. They highlighted four reasons to oppose Tuck:

• Backed by Wall Street executives and business interests who want to create an education market place and profit off of our kids.

• Proposes to increase standardized testing and then use student test scores to judge teachers and schools -- even though education experts, economists and the American Statistical Association all say that this is a bad use of the data.

• Has alarming ties to for-profit education companies. Anyone who's paid attention to Los Angeles' iPad fiasco can tell you that when education leaders are too closely tied to for-profit companies, it doesn't end well for taxpayers or students.

• Heavily financed by the same people who tried to take down Prop 30-- the measure that gave much needed funds to our schools. They funneled $11 million through a Koch brothers group in 2012 to starve our schools, but they lost, so now they're putting their money behind Marshall Tuck.

The congressional race is between Blue Dog warmonger Adam Schiff and progressive Independent Steve Stokes. I know Schiff will win but I'm eager to cast my ballot for Stokes, a much better candidate, and to help slow down Schiff's push for Boxer's Senate seat. My Assemblyman, Mike Gatto, seems to do a good enough job to merit reelection. And I'm eager to vote for Jeffrey Prang as County Assessor and for Sheila Kuehl as County Supervisor. The 3rd Supervisorial District is much bigger than just one or two congressional districts. We're very enthusiastic about Sheila Kuehl, as are our friends on the West Side. Dorothy Reik, president of the Progressive Democrats of the Santa Monica Mountains is as big a Sheila Kuehl supporter as we are here in Los Feliz. Last April she saw an email touting Sheila's corporatist/developer-friendly opponent, Bobby Shriver, being supported by some astroturf group calling itself "Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains." She told me that "a Google search turned up nothing at all that Shriver had done for the mountains and there was no reason to expect that as Supervisor he would change his ways-- especially since he is being supported by developers who have been eyeing our precious Santa Monicas for decades.  So yesterday when I met former Congressman Anthony Beilenson who wrote the legislation that created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area I mentioned this to him. He was similarly outraged and issued the following statement:" 

When I heard she was running, I jumped at the opportunity to endorse Sheila Kuehl to be the next County Supervisor. As Henry Waxman recently said, she is a "powerful and effective advocate for the things I care about."

Today, I feel a sense of urgency to talk about what it means to be a friend of the Santa Monica Mountains.

In 1978, as a congressman, I authored the legislation that created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, (SMMNRA),155,000 acres, visited by millions of Angelenos and people from around the country, and the world.

The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the largest urban public park in the world, had no greater friend and advocate in Sacramento than Sheila Kuehl.

For fourteen years Sheila Kuehl passed legislation, identified resources, protected the park's environment, partnered at the federal, state and local county level, and joined the effort to fill in the mosaic of what has become one of the richest contiguous national park systems in the world that sits inside of and is surrounded by a vast metropolis.

Sheila Kuehl was instrumental in the public private partnership, the team effort required to successfully save critical land and bring it into the public domain as permanent open space.

During her tenure, Sheila identified over $80 million dollars for key acquisitions in the SMMNRA, including Liberty Canyon, a significant wildlife linkage; the former Ahmanson Ranch purchased with state bond monies to protect watersheds and improve water quality; Lower Topanga State Park, 1,800 acres, now part of the Callfornia's largest State Park; Soka campus, now King Gillette Ranch, and permanent public open space; significant wildlife corridors and connectors along the Backbone Trail.

Sheila's genius as a partner in protecting the SMMNRA, to preserve and protect the rare, biologically rich and diverse areas so critical to the survival of the entire ecology of the Santa Monica Mountains, is the kind of experience only  someone who has done what she has done can bring to the Third District as their Supervisor. She knows the ropes.

Her broad support, her intuition, her intelligence her integrity and her strength was unparalleled in Sacramento. Her legacy is apparent today, as those who have followed her, like Senator Fran Pavley, have continued to embrace the importance of federal, state, and local county partnerships  to protect the Santa Monica Mountains.

Now, Los Angeles County again has the opportunity to be the beneficiary of Sheila's extraordinary talent. Millions of Angelenos and visitors from all parts of Southern California and the world, enjoy the natural beauty of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Thanks to the efforts of Sheila Kuehl the Santa Monica Mountains still remain the "people's mountains."

Sheila Kuehl is our friend, and a proven friend of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Former Congressman Tony Beilenson

Let's go through the 6 statewide propositions:

• Prop 1 authorizes $7.12 billion in general obligation bonds for state water supply infrastructure projects, improving access to and quality of drinking water statewide by funding water quality projects in several categories: safe drinking water, recycled water, regional water security, groundwater sustainability and coastal/river protection. I'll probably vote for it but I'm torn because of the nature of the giveaways to special interests and because it is both expensive and wasteful.

• Prop 2 requires the state to siphon off money for a rainy day fund-- while it's still raining and the money is needed to repair the damages already done during the Recession. This is an easy NO vote for me.

• Prop 45 is a big one that the special interests hate and have spent millions to defeat with misleading ads. It puts the brakes on skyrocketing health insurance rates and requires health insurance companies to justify rate increases to the public and receive approval for any increases by the California Insurance Commissioner. This is an easy YES vote for me.

• Prop 46 increases the malpractice damages cap to $1 million for the first time since 1975 to account for nearly four decades of inflation. It also requires mandatory drug testing for doctors with hospital privileges, raising concerns from privacy advocates and the drug policy community. Sounds like a good idea to me-- despite the barrage of special interest TV propaganda against it.

• Prop 47 rolls back the idiotic "war on drugs," while alleviating the state's prison overcrowding. It reduces penalties from felony to misdemeanor for most nonviolent crimes, and redirects savings to rehabilitative programs and schools. Easy YES vote for me.

• Prop 48 is another Indian gaming casino referendum that I can't quite figure out how to vote on-- so I won't. A yes, vote, from what I can tell allows tribes to buy land in areas of California near big population centers explicitly to open casinos.