Following The Money

It was never about improving education.

I’ve posted several times about the World’s Worst Legislature’s continuing assault on public education–an assault defended on grounds that research has soundly debunked. An article from yesterday’s Indiana Capital Chronicle pulled back the (already pretty sheer) curtain on those legislative justifications.

Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston maintained Thursday that virtual charter schools deserve equal funding as their brick-and-mortar counterparts and denied that a virtual education company he consults for would unfairly benefit from an increase in taxpayer dollars proposed in the state budget

The for-profit Stride, Inc. operates seven Indiana-based virtual public, charter and private schools, according to its website and as reported by the School Matters blog. 

Indiana virtual schools like Stride currently receive 85% of the per-pupil state funding that goes to “traditional” public schools. Funding would increase to 100% under the House Republican budget proposal that’s now under consideration in the Senate. 

That means virtual schools stand to get a significant funding boost. For instance, Union School Corporation’s enrollment is almost all virtual, and it will see a 30% increase in total base funding in the first year of the budget. By comparison the statewide average increase in base funding for all school would be 6%.

Based on its current student enrollment, Stride stands to win big, as well — to the tune of some $9 million.

Can we spell “conflict of interest”?

According to the report, Huston is one of at least 15 state lawmakers who provide “professional advice and guidance” to private businesses.

Huston started TMH Strategies Inc. last year, a little more than a month after his high-profile departure from a six-figure role at the College Board, according to his latest statement of economic interest.

He listed his consultancy’s current clients as Fishers-based tech company Spokenote, as well as Stride, Inc. — a for-profit education management organization that provides online curriculum to homeschooled kids and other schools. 

Lest we be tempted to give these lawmakers the benefit of the doubt–lest we be inclined to believe them when they claim to ignore the financial interests of their paying clients when legislating, we need only look at the involvement of a familiar name .

The President of Schools at Stride, Inc. is Tony Bennett — former Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction before he was defeated in 2012 by Democrat Glenda Ritz.

Huston left Cisco Systems, Inc. in 2009 to serve as Bennett’s chief of staff at the state education department. But he returned to the company in 2010.

The Associated Press detailed Huston’s involvement in the 2012 sale of a $1.7 million Cisco videoconferencing system to the IDOE that officials later determined was a waste of taxpayer money.

Bennett also contributed $15,000 to Huston’s campaign account since 2020.

Many of you will remember Bennett. During his single term as Indiana’s Secretary of Education, he was touted as a “national leader in the Republican effort to overhaul public education.” After his defeat by Glenda Ritz, he was hired as Florida’s Education Commissioner by then-Governor Rick Scott, a post he was forced to resign when the AP reported that while serving in Indiana, he’d changed the state’s evaluation of a charter school founded by a prominent GOP donor.

As a former teacher–I started my professional life as a high school English teacher and later spent 21 years as a college professor–I have multiple reservations about virtual instruction, not to mention the state’s ability to confirm attendance figures reported by such schools. But even if those concerns can be addressed,  virtual schools don’t incur overhead for brick and mortar school buildings–they don’t pay for utilities, janitors and maintenance. They don’t provide school lunches or transportation. Why should they receive the same per-pupil dollars as schools that do incur those expenses? 

I guess the answer is: because they were savvy enough to hire the right “consultant.”

The assault on Indiana’s public schools has been unremitting and enormously damaging, but in Indiana, education isn’t the only policy area where deep pockets are more persuasive than logic, evidence or the public good. 

Again, the Capital Chronicle has the story.

Environmental activists decried the legislative process for two bills Thursday, saying they clearly benefited some of the state’s most powerful while harming the average Hoosier… 

On Wednesday, a House environmental committee opted to add controversial wetlands language to a Senate bill on sewage systems. Because the topic was unrelated and no notice was given, opponents had limited opportunity to give public testimony — a critical part of the legislative process. 

Meanwhile, the state’s biggest utility – and frequent campaign donor – Duke Energy already called upon a court to review a crucial ruling less than 24 hours after the House passed and Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a bill to recover “unexpected” additional costs from customers.

Gee–I wonder why Indiana ranks 43d among the states in education–and why we’re the most polluted…

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It’s The Culture, Stupid!

During Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, the “ragin’ Cajun” hung a huge sign in campaign headquarters proclaiming: It’s the Economy, Stupid!

That approach, focusing upon economic issues, was evidently a winner at the time. Right now, despite considerable economic turmoil and growing economic unfairness (Gilded Age #2, anyone?), that sign should probably read “It’s the Culture, Stupid!”

In fact, when I read reports about the suicidal stupidity of lawmakers at both the federal and state levels, I remind myself that they are fighting a rearguard battle–that changes in the culture have been “baked in” and will sooner or later make them irrelevant.

I don’t mean to minimize the harm these self-identified “Christian soldiers” can do in the meantime, nor am I suggesting that those of us who are appalled by mean-spirited attacks on everything from trans children to accurate history should take a vacation from activism. But I do believe that cultural change will win the day, and that most people who despair–young people, especially– fail to recognize just how rapid and profound such change has been.

Those of us who are older–okay, a lot older–have seen immense shifts in our own lifetimes. When I delivered a “Last Lecture” at my university, back in 2015, I pointed out that I’d lived through the Civil Rights movement, the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, the gay rights movement and truly explosive advances in technology, communication and transportation, all of which caused big shifts in public consciousness. Each shift has been accompanied by multiple less-remarked-upon, minor changes in our everyday lives. (Today you can wear jeans pretty much everywhere, and I haven’t seen a girdle in a very long time…)

What really brought the extent of cultural change home to me was research I’ve been doing for a book I’m co-authoring with Morton Marcus, who sometimes posts (usually sardonic) comments here. Morton and I have been friends for some thirty years, and our joint effort–titled “From Property to Partner”– traces women’s progress along that path. ( The book is in the last phase of copy-editing and will be available for purchase soon, at which time I will shamelessly urge you all to buy it.)

When women emerged from “barefoot and pregnant” status, we changed a number of cultural norms, and the extent of that change has been demonstrated in the reaction to the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs. 

Jennifer Rubin was one of the many pundits pleasantly surprised by the unanticipated reaction to that first-ever withdrawal of a Constitutional right.

Who could have guessed that preserving access to abortion would be such a unifying position?

Given how divided our country is, and how loud voices seeking to criminalize the procedure have become, one might not expect abortion bans to be so unpopular. Yet polling shows that support for abortion care is remarkably consistent.

 A recent report from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) finds, “Just under two-thirds of Americans (64%) say that abortion should be legal in most or almost all cases,” including 68 percent of independents. Only one-third say it should be illegal in most or almost all cases. Even among Republicans, 36 percent favor legal abortion. And the percentage of the party that favors banning all or most abortions has declined from 21 to 14 percent in just over a year.

In fact, majority support for abortion access cuts across gender, racial, ethnic, educational attainment and age lines. That support also spans most religious groups. The PRRI finds, “White evangelical Protestants (27%), Jehovah’s Witnesses (27%), Latter-day Saints (32%), and Hispanic Protestants (44%) are the only major religious groups in which less than half of adherents say that abortion should be legal in most or all cases.”

Unlike the many positions that divide Americans, support for reproductive rights is not limited to residents of Blue states. In  2018–before Dobbs— there were only seven states in which fewer than half of residents wanted abortion to be legal in most or all cases: South Dakota (42%), Utah (42%), Arkansas (43%), Oklahoma (45%), Idaho (49%), Mississippi (49%), and Tennessee (49%).

I don’t have access to surveys posing similar questions back in the 1950s, but I imagine the results would have been very different. (Not that women didn’t abort back then–they just didn’t abort safely. In my high school days, I was aware of at least two deaths of girls from botched terminations–as the saying goes, the law can’t prevent abortions, it can only prevent safe abortions.)

I’m sure the magnitude of the response to Dobbs came as a shock to the inhabitants of what I think of as “holdout communities”–the bubbles populated by men (and some women) determined to cling to the verities of a bygone society. Those folks need to brace themselves, because the culture has turned sour on plenty of their other pet issues.

And ultimately, culture prevails.

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We’re in Sci-Fi Territory…

Time on the treadmill goes faster when you listen to a podcast, but the other day, I should have listened to music. Instead, I listened to Ezra Klein and his guest discuss AI (Artificial Intelligence).

In case you’ve missed the mountain of reporting, recriminating, pooh-poohing and dark prophesying, let me share the podcast’s introduction.

OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor GPT-3.5 on a variety of tasks.

GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled, around the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT, up from GPT-3.5’s 40th percentile. And on the advanced sommelier theory test, GPT-4 performed better than 77 percent of test takers. (GPT-3.5 hovered around 46 percent.) These are stunning results — not just what the model can do but also the rapid pace of progress. And Open AI’s ChatGPT and other chat bots are just one example of what recent A.I. systems can achieve.

Every once in a while, a commenter to this blog will say “I’m glad I’m old.” Given the enormity of change we are likely to see over the next decade, I understand the appeal of the sentiment. You really need to listen to the entire podcast to understand both the potential benefits and the huge dangers, but an observation that really took me aback was the fact that right now AI can do any job that humans can do remotely.

Think about that.

In 2018, researchers reported that nine out of ten manufacturing jobs had been lost to automation since 2000. That same year, Pew asked 1900  experts to predict the impact of emerging technologies on employment; half predicted large-scale replacement of both white- and blue-collar workers by robots and “digital agents,” and scholars at Oxford warned that half of all American jobs were at risk.

It would be easy to dismiss those findings and predictions–after all, where are those self-driving cars we were promised? But those cited warnings were issued before the accelerated development of AI, and before there was AI able to develop further AI generations without human programmers.

Many others who’ve been following the trajectory  of AI progress describe the technology’s uses–and potential misuses–in dramatic terms.

In his op-eds, Tom Friedman usually conveys an “I’m on top of it” attitude (one I find somewhat off-putting), but that sense was absent from his recent essay on AI. 

I had a most remarkable but unsettling experience last week. Craig Mundie, the former chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, was giving me a demonstration of GPT-4, the most advanced version of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in November. Craig was preparing to brief the board of my wife’s museum, Planet Word, of which he is a member, about the effect ChatGPT will have on words, language and innovation.

“You need to understand,” Craig warned me before he started his demo, “this is going to change everything about how we do everything. I think that it represents mankind’s greatest invention to date. It is qualitatively different — and it will be transformational.”

Large language modules like ChatGPT will steadily increase in their capabilities, Craig added, and take us “toward a form of artificial general intelligence,” delivering efficiencies in operations, ideas, discoveries and insights “that have never been attainable before across every domain.”

The rest of the column described the “demo.” It was gobsmacking.

What happens if and when very few humans are required to run the world– when most jobs (not just those requiring manual labor, but jobs we haven’t previously thought of as threatened) disappear?

The economic implications are staggering enough, but a world where paid labor is rare would require a significant paradigm shift for the millions of humans who find purpose and meaning in their work. Somehow, I doubt that they will all turn to art, music or other creative pursuits to fill the void…

I lack the capacity to envision the changes that are barreling down on (unsuspecting, unprepared) us–changes that will require my grandchildren to occupy (and hopefully thrive) in a world I can’t even imagine.

If we’re entering a world previously relegated to science fiction, maybe we need to consider applying and adapting Asimov’s three laws of robotics:  1) A robot (or any AI) may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2) A robot (or any AI) must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3) A robot (or other AI) must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Or maybe it’s already too late…..

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The Tyranny Of The Minority

Among the newsletters I receive is one from historian Heather Cox Richardson, who regularly provides historical context for contemporary issues.

These two paragraphs from a recent newsletter have prompted me to dust off and recycle one of my old classroom lectures.

The right-wing rejection of democracy was on display at a meeting of the Federalist Society in early March. Politico’s Ian Ward covered the meeting. The Federalist Society organized in the 1980s to argue that the civil rights decisions of the past several decades corrupted democracy because liberal judges were “legislating from the bench” against the wishes of actual voters. The society’s members claimed to stand for judicial restraint.

But now that their judges are on the bench, they have changed their philosophy. Last summer, after a Supreme Court stacked with Federalist Society members overturned the right to abortion, voters have tried to protect that right in the states. Now, according to Ward, the Federalist Society appears to be shifting away from the idea of judicial restraint in the face of popular votes and toward the idea that judges should “interpret the Constitution” in ways right-wing Americans support. They are quick to claim that democracy is not the answer: it would result, they say, in the tyranny of the majority.

When I taught Law and Public Policy, we talked a lot about the U.S. Constitution, and the Founders’  approach to that “tyranny of the majority.”

The phrase points to a legitimate concern: if the law is anything a majority of voters say it is at any given time, individual rights are at risk. A majority can vote to disenfranchise a minority, require everyone to attend a particular church, criminalize anti-government sentiments… the list goes on.

It is easy, after 200 plus years, to find fault with our Constitution, and in this blog I have pointed to areas that I think need to be amended or re-construed. But the philosophy with which the Founders approached these very real worries about what they called the “passions of the majority” was (in my view) as close to perfect as possible.

Drawing on Enlightenment scholarship, the Founders distinguished between matters that were properly within the decision-making authority of “the people”–the majority– and matters that were to be protected from the majoritarian passions of those people.

That division was the entire purpose of the Bill of Rights.

In our system, a majority of voters get to select their lawmakers (theoretically, at least, voting for those whose positions they endorse). Those representatives then decide, via legislative majorities, issues ranging from waging war, to taxes, to electoral processes, to the establishment of government agencies…on and on. (And yes, as I periodically point out, this process is currently not working very well…)

The Bill of Rights constrains the ability of the majority to determine the law. It protects the right of individuals to self-govern, marking out legal territory that the majority cannot enter. Your neighbors cannot vote to make you attend a particular church or  prevent you from reading a particular book; they may not authorize a government functionary to “search and seize” you without probable cause. Etc.

For years, judges and lawyers have debated the range of personal liberties protected against majority disapproval. Was the Bill of Rights to be read as an organic whole, encompassing the “unenumerated” rights retained by the people, or was it to be limited to rights expressly identified? I think the expansive reading is more consistent with the text and the Founders’ original expressed philosophies, but it’s a legitimate debate.

The about-face by the Federalist Society is not legitimate. It is an argument for the tyranny of a minority–so long, of course, as that ruling minority agrees with them.

The American constitutional system was based upon the libertarian principle (libertarianism as properly–and originally–understood). I’ve shared it before; let me share it again: The libertarian principle holds that Individuals should be free to pursue their own ends–their own life goals–so long as they do not thereby harm the person or property of another, and so long as they are willing to accord an equal liberty to their fellow citizens.

We can argue about the nature of the harms that justify government intervention, but Jefferson had it right: “It does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are 20 gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

The purpose of the Bill of Rights was to erect a boundary between those matters that harm others, which the majority can properly sanction, and the individual, profoundly personal human rights that are simply none of government’s business.

We can argue about where that boundary belongs, but the Federalist Society,  MAGA warriors and  Christian Nationalists are trying to erase it altogether.

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Who To Believe?

I just encountered an article raising the very troubling possibility that–in the absence of clearly trustworthy and widely trusted sources of information, all of us, Right and Left alike, get played–purposely or not– by people pursuing partisan agendas.

As regular readers of this blog have probably surmised, I subscribe to a wide array of publications: newspapers, magazines, newsletters and the like, representing a pretty wide swath of political opinion/argumentation. Ever since Louis DeJoy was named Postmaster General, I have gotten regular “warnings” from a Democratic organization insisting that DeJoy is busily privatizing the Postal Service, and asserting that–among other nefarious things– he had interfered with delivery of election materials in order to help Trump. More recently,  those emails have been asking me to sign petitions “demanding” that Biden instruct his postal board appointees to fire DeJoy.

Those emails did raise a question: What was the holdup? Why was this Trumper still there?

Then I came across this lengthy  and apparently well-researched article from Time Magazine, titled “Louis DeJoy’s Surprising Second Act.” It included a fairly “deep dive” into several of those accusations.

DeJoy may be best known as the Trump-era GOP megadonor the left accused of meddling with mail-in voting to subvert the 2020 election. But by the time Schumer called him on that frigid winter night, DeJoy was on his way to convincing congressional Republicans—120 in the House and 29 in the Senate—to buy into a lengthy Democratic wish list of postal reforms. When President Joe Biden signed the landmark legislation into law two months later, it guaranteed a union-friendly version of six-day mail service and stabilized health coverage for the 650,000 USPS employees. “There’s no way we could have gotten [the] votes without Louis DeJoy,” says Jim Sauber, the chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers at the time. “That’s for sure.”…

But to the astonishment of many in Washington, the man Democrats once denounced as a threat to American democracy has become one of their most important allies in government. Defying the far right, he delivered more than 500 million COVID-19 test kits to Americans in the winter of 2022. Crossing conservatives last December, he agreed to transition the Postal Service’s entire fleet to electric vehicles by 2026. DeJoy’s capstone collaboration with Democrats was the Postal Service Reform Act, which is arguably the most bipartisan piece of major legislation in the Biden era, drawing 10 more GOP Senate votes than the $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

According to the article, the postal unions and the Biden-appointed Democratic majority on the agency’s Board of Governors have bought into DeJoy’s plans, although members of Congress who don’t want to see rate increases continue to object.

DeJoy had been active in GOP politics for many years, and was certainly no “Never Trumper,” but he insists that Trump wasn’t involved in hiring him.

“I swear on my mother’s life, the President had nothing to do with it,” DeJoy says. “He didn’t know anything about it. I would never even think to tell him before I had a decision, because who knows what he could do with his tweets!”

The article is lengthy, and goes into detailed explanations of the various accusations about politically-motivated chicanery. You should read it yourself, and decide whether you find this far more nuanced reporting more convincing than the generalized accusations made in those periodic emails.

I am not posting this in an effort to convince readers one way or the other; my concerns are–once again–focused on the information environment we inhabit. I will readily admit that, given my own political orientation, I simply accepted the accuracy of the allegations contained in those emails. (In my own defense, until I came across the linked article, I hadn’t seen reason to doubt them.)

Any fair-minded observer of America’s current political scene will conclude that most misrepresentations come from the Right. There’s Fox “News,” the Big Lie, the various conspiracy theories, QAnon insanity, the all-out war on a “wokeness” its enemies can’t define...but those of us who are waging our own war against propaganda need to acknowledge that not everything that emerges from “our side” of the political spectrum is worthy of uncritical acceptance.

Until I have evidence that Time Magazine disseminates misinformation, I am inclined to trust its reporting, and revise my opinion of DeJoy. But the larger and far more troubling conclusion to be drawn from this clash of “alternative facts” is that it is increasingly difficult for Americans to know who and what to believe and who and what to discount.

Social cohesion requires trust. A fundamental problem of our times is that we don’t know who or what we can trust. No wonder conspiracy theories are so rampant.

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