SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
american federation of teachers
'Dangerous': Judge Blocks Student Debt Relief Rule That Doesn't Exist Yet
"Opponents of democracy are terrified that they will lose again at the ballot box in November and are rushing to right-wing judges to hamstring democratic governance," said one observer.
Sep 05, 2024
A Republican-appointed U.S. federal judge in Georgia raised eyebrows and objections Thursday after taking what observers called the "unprecedented" step of blocking a rule that hasn't even been finalized in order to stop the Biden administration from implementing a plan to deliver promised debt relief to millions of student borrowers.
U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Georgia James Randal Hall issued an order blocking the Biden administration's proposed federal student debt relief rule. Hall—an appointee of former President George W. Bush—granted a motion by a coalition of right-wing state attorneys general to preempt the rule's eventual implementation.
"The court is substituting its judgment for those elected to serve the public," American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten said in response to the ruling. "It subverts the democratic process and denies relief to student loan borrowers, many of whom rely on debt relief programs already advanced by the Biden-Harris administration."
"This court's unprecedented decision to block a rule that does not yet exist is not only bad for the 30 million borrowers who were relying on the administration to deliver much-needed relief," she continued. "It's a harbinger of the chaos and corruption right-wing judges seek to force on the American people."
Mike Pierce, executive director of the Student Borrower Protection Center—which called the ruling "dangerous and unprecedented"—denounced Hall for preventing the Biden administration from delivering student debt relief "even though no plan has been finalized."
"This is an extraordinary break with precedent and a brazen move by the conservative movement to shift even more power to unelected, unaccountable red-state judges," he said. "Opponents of democracy are terrified that they will lose again at the ballot box in November and are rushing to right-wing judges to hamstring democratic governance."
"This is the clearest sign yet that Project 2025 is already terrorizing student loan borrowers through a slow-moving judicial coup," Pierce added, referring to a conservative coalition's agenda for a far-right takeover of the federal government—which critics warn would worsen the U.S. student debt crisis.
Biden's proposal would forgive some or all student debt for around 30 million borrowers who have been repaying undergraduate loans for at least 20 years, or graduate loans for 25 years.
Hall's order is based on what he said was the plaintiffs' "substantial likelihood of success on the merits given the rule's lack of statutory authority" and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona's "attempt to implement a rule contrary to normal procedures."
"This is especially true in light of the recent rulings across the country striking down similar federal student loan forgiveness plans," he added.
The U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority last year struck down Biden's initial plan to relieve up to $20,000 in federal scholastic debt for around 40 million borrowers, and last month the justices kept in place a sweeping suspension of the administration's Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) program, which aims to lower monthly repayments and hasten loan forgiveness.
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Right-Wing Group Backing a New Anti-Union Strategy in Florida
A Miami-Dade school teachers’ vote is a test case for a novel experiment: whether a group dedicated to dismantling public sector unions can successfully seed a competing union.
Aug 15, 2024
Starting Tuesday, public school teachers in one of the country’s largest school districts began voting on whether to keep their current union—a longstanding local affiliate of a national teachers union—or join a newly formed employee organization that has the financial backing of a notorious anti-union advocacy group.
The vote is a test case for a novel experiment: whether a group dedicated to dismantling public sector unions can successfully seed a competing union. If it works, some worry that existing unions may be forced to ward off expensive and time-consuming copycat efforts elsewhere.
The Freedom Foundation, a right-wing group based in Washington state, is financing and promoting the new employee organization in Florida. Called the Miami-Dade Education Coalition (MDEC), it was founded to compete with the longstanding teachers’ labor union, United Teachers of Dade (UTD), an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
The Freedom Foundation’s latest effort in Florida is tied to the right’s goal of busting unions throughout the country as a way of defunding progressive political campaigns, starting with those representing public sector employees.
The story began in spring 2023 with SB 256, a bill passed by the Florida legislature that raised the membership threshold for certain public sector unions to 60%. Under the new law, if less than 60% of eligible members have signed up for the union, it is vulnerable to automatic decertification.
Notably, the unions that were exempted from this new, higher membership threshold—representing corrections officers, police, and firefighters—all support Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who fought for the anti-union legislation.
“Tallahassee didn’t have a problem with unions playing politics as long as the politics were in favor of the governor and Republicans,” said Jim DeFede of CBS News Miami in an interview with an MDEC representative. “The unions that endorsed DeSantis got exempted from this bill.”
In the year since the law passed, more than 50,000 public employees have already lost union representation. Just this summer, all eight adjunct faculty unions at Florida’s public universities have been decertified.
The Miami-Dade teachers’ union avoided outright decertification by demonstrating a threshold of at least 30% interest from eligible members. However, their failure to reach the 60% threshold triggered the current election asking members to vote on which organization they want to represent them.
That’s where the Freedom Foundation comes in. After lobbying for the bill, the organization has been working for the past year and a half to get teachers in Miami-Dade County to choose its own pet organization, MDEC, over the UTD.
Ballots started to be mailed out Tuesday, according to the Public Employees Relations Commission (PERC). Teachers have until September 24 to cast their votes.
“Unlike UTD, MDEC’s founding principles protect our independence from outside affiliations,” the organization contends. “MDEC is its own legal entity, and no outside organization has control over our local union.”
According to an FAQ on its website, MDEC insists that it is accepting “outside resources” from the Freedom Foundation “solely for the duration of the campaign.”
Last month, the Freedom Foundation brought together public school teachers from across the country to teach them how to decertify their unions and keep “the socialist dogma of their leadership [out of] our children’s classrooms.”
MDEC filed for registration with the state labor board last October, and received approval in February; one of the signatories on behalf of MDEC was Allison Beattie, the Freedom Foundation’s director of labor relations.
Another signatory was Matthew Hargraves, who previously served as an attorney for an unaffiliated teachers union in Florida—Santa Rosa Professional Educators, which broke away from the Florida Education Association.
In January, MDEC held a press conference to reiterate that it’s a legitimate union.
The president and co-founder is Brent Urbanik. In an interview with CBS News Miami, he agreed that the Freedom Foundation is “bankrolling” MDEC but did not disclose how much money the foundation has spent on the effort. Instead, he confirmed that it is paying for all of the mailings, canvassers, and legal expenses involved in getting the alternative “local union” off the ground.
Urbanik insisted that “Freedom Foundation is not necessarily anti-union.”
The other co-founder is Shawn Beightol, who ran for UTD president twice. Media reports have claimed that the Freedom Foundation proposed the idea of an alternative union, which has been corroborated by CBS News Miami.
“The think tank proposed replacing these entrenched, agenda-driven unions with local-only ones that focused on local issues [and] Miami-Dade educators were ‘elated’ with the idea,” according to The Lion.
The Freedom Foundation’s latest effort in Florida is tied to the right’s goal of busting unions throughout the country as a way of defunding progressive political campaigns, starting with those representing public sector employees. These coordinated attacks—bankrolled by billionaires—largely culminated in the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision, which ruled that public employees are not required to pay for the costs of union representation.
Since the Janus decision, the Freedom Foundation has pushed state-level legislation that makes it harder for teachers to pay union dues, used what some union leaders have called “federal mail fraud” to trick members into leaving their unions, and aggressively pursued access to personal information in order to contact union members directly with anti-union campaign materials.
Keep ReadingShow Less
State Takeovers of Schools Are Not the Answer to Educational Inequality
Too often, they are an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Aug 10, 2024
The state takeover of Houston Independent School District, the eighth-largest public school system in the United States, is entering its second year.
State-appointed superintendent Mike Miles is celebrating the occasion by touting state test score results that show preliminary improvement in student achievement. Other leaders in education across the country are paying close attention to Miles’ tactics to see if they’re effective enough to implement in their own schools.
Since 1989, over 100 school districts across the U.S. have been subjected to state takeovers, in which the state seizes control of low-performing or financially struggling school districts, replacing their locally elected school boards. This is done with the goal of dramatically improving the district’s academic or financial performance. State takeovers are difficult to neatly describe because they vary from place to place depending on the policies that the state-appointed board and superintendent decide to implement. But they are overwhelmingly ineffective.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students.
A 2021 study done by researchers from Brown University and the University of Virginia analyzed over 100 state takeovers between 1989 and 2016. It found “no evidence that takeover generates academic benefits.” In fact, it can take years for schools to return to their previous levels of academic achievement after a takeover.
Beyond that, takeovers are emblematic of a worrying trend in education that extends beyond Houston and hurts low-income learners and students of color most.
The study also showed that state takeovers disproportionately target districts with higher concentrations of low-income and nonwhite students, regardless of academic achievement. But another study revealed that majority-Black districts rarely see financial improvement in the years following a takeover.
The Brown study also found that takeovers tend to happen in states with both a Republican governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. This should be really alarming given the fact that those same states are also passing legislation like requiring the 10 Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms and restricting the discussion of race, sex, and gender in schools.
HISD is no different.
As of 2022, almost 80% of HISD students were considered economically disadvantaged, and the overwhelming majority were students of color. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer, but state takeovers exacerbate education inequality for low-income and minority students. Too often in conservative states, they disrupt existing communities and feed students subpar and radicalizing material.
In 2019, out of HISD’s almost 300 campuses, just one school’s repeated failure to meet state standards allowed the Texas Education Agency to take over the entire district. HISD had managed to fight off takeover for four years.
During that time, their academic accountability scores improved. In 2022, the district received a high B, performing better than several other districts in the state, and Phillis Wheatley High School, the 97-year old historically Black campus that had triggered the state takeover law, improved its score to a passing 78.
Last year, the Texas Education Agency took over anyway, appointing a nine-person board of managers and Mike Miles, formerly the very controversial superintendent of Dallas ISD, to transform the Houston public school system.
As a result of the takeover, the Texas Education Agency implemented a scripted curriculum in HISD schools. This past year, Miles had to reassign a group of teachers to review the provided curriculum, which was found to be riddled with errors and inappropriate content, including ChatGPT-sourced material. He also faced backlash after it was revealed that students were being shown videos questioning human-caused climate change from the conservative Prager University Foundation.
Now, the Texas Education Agency is offering all school districts in the state $60 per student to teach a new curriculum that contains extensive biblical references. For students in Texas schools, culture war politics are increasingly invading education, and districts taken over by the state have no choice but to teach its curriculum.
There are several other problems with the HISD takeover: 28 schools faced the most radical reforms this year, and an additional 57 were brought into the new system but didn’t experience some of the larger structural changes.
State requirements for certified teachers, deans, and assistant principals were waived to ease the hiring process, while veteran teachers had to reapply for their positions, with many not offered the chance to return.
A militaristic learning environment was enforced, with teachers forced to rush through timed and scripted lessons and students made to participate approximately once every four minutes. When students had to use the restroom, they had to carry a large traffic cone as a hall pass, which many felt was humiliating and dehumanizing.
Libraries were converted into “team centers” that housed both students who finished their lessons early and students with discipline problems made to watch their lessons virtually, while librarians were let go and, in several cases, shelves emptied.
All of these reforms have led to a budget deficit of almost $200 million for this year and a projected shortfall of over $500 million for next year that Miles is attempting to make up partially through the cutting of special education and wraparound specialists, who help students dealing with homelessness and hunger. Many have questioned the long-term financial feasibility of the takeover.
On August 8, the district’s state-appointed board of managers will decide whether or not to put its proposed $4.4 billion bond, which it says will be put toward renovating facilities and improving school safety, among other promised improvements. Opponents to the takeover, including the American Federation of Teachers, have spoken out against the bond, citing their lack of faith in Miles and embracing the rallying cry “No trust, no bond.”
Meanwhile, Miles seeks to implement a pay-for-performance model, where teacher pay—and continuing employment—will be tied to standardized test scores and evaluations. For now, he’s settled for raising teacher pay, but only for the 28 schools required to follow the new model, and only for those teachers whose grades and subjects are tested on state exams. Furthermore, teachers can only benefit for as long as they manage to stay employed at those schools.
This past year, teacher turnover was almost double its usual rate, as teachers and administrators both opted to resign in protest to the reforms and were not asked back throughout the year.
It is possible that some of Miles’ practices are worth considering, but a year of teacher, parent, and student responses only support the growing body of evidence that show that takeover is not the way to go about it. Protests and student walkouts against the takeover continued until the end of the school year, with community members complaining that their concerns have been repeatedly ignored or dismissed.
We can all acknowledge that educational inequality is a major issue, and change is necessary. But a takeover is not the answer. Too often, it is an instrument of conservative politicians wielded against local communities who find their voices shut out, and the most vulnerable students pay the price.
Instead of allowing the state to take over our schools, we need to turn to proven solutions like increasing per-pupil spending, which has been shown to address achievement gaps faced by low-income students. According to a 2018 Rutgers study, Texas needs to spend $12,000 more per student to bring its poorest students up to national average outcomes.
We owe it to all of our students to find effective and sustainable reforms that center their needs. Education should not be a power struggle. Instead, it should be a way to uplift and empower communities and to help give students the start that they need to succeed in life.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular