Six on 2020 Elections: Here Are the 10 Candidates Who Qualified for [tomorrow's] the November Democratic Presidential Debate; Why I Do Not Support Mayor Pete; Which of these 2020 Democrats agrees with you most?; Everything you need to know about the
panaritisp
And please don't forget to check out the pertinent images attached to every post
Thanks John and Gary
|
|
|
John King succeeded Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. King was previously the founder of the no-excuses Roxbury Prep. Then he was Commissioner of Education in New York, where his fierce advocacy for Common Core and testing outraged parents and helped to create the opt-out movement.
James Shelton had a leadership role at the Gates Foundation, worked for Arne Duncan in charge of innovation grants for Race to the Top, then ran the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Mayor Pete may have many things going for him, but his education agenda is not one of them. If he were President, he would continue the failed Bush-Obama agenda.
If he runs against Trump, I will of course support him and vote for him. I will vote for anyone who wins the Democratic nomination.
But not in the primaries.
I am willing to change course if Mayor Pete makes clear that he supports fully public schools that are accountable to an elected school board and that he would eliminate the federal Charter Schools Program, created by the Clinton administration in 1994 and funded with $6 million to help jumpstart new charters; that program has grown into a $440 million slush fund for corporate charter chains, which is far from its original purpose. There is a long time from now until the primaries and I will keep an open mind."
|
|
"But how did these documents surface in the first place? According to the results of an open records request, an opposition research group known as America Rising had requested documents from the Riverdale Board of Education in New Jersey just weeks before the news appeared. It asked for “Warren’s employment records,” as well copies of other records requested from the school board from the previous two years.
In response to the request, a school official provided America Rising with the school board minutes that became the basis for the story that erupted the following month, along with emails from a Wall Street Journal reporter, who had requested similar records in April.
America Rising — which is affiliated with a political action committee, a public relations firm, and a for-profit research company, as well as several news websites — has been backed over the years by Republican donors, including hedge-fund billionaires Paul Singer and Ken Griffin, private equity investor John Childs, and banker Andrew Beal.
America Rising did not respond to a request for comment. The organization did not claim direct responsibility for the Warren story, but touted the documents as soon as they appeared online via an allied conservative website called the Washington Free Beacon. Free Beacon is also funded by Singer.
America Rising is known for attempting to dig up dirt on politicians, journalists, and activists on behalf of donors’ interests. The group went after journalist Jane Mayer, shopping negative information about the New Yorker writer following the publication of her book “Dark Money.” In 2016, America Rising focused on environmentalist Bill McKibben, dispatching its team to obtain thousands of documents from McKibben’s past and to follow the Vermont-based writer, filming him at public events, as well as while grocery shopping and sitting in a church pew. This year, Definers Public Affairs, an affiliate of America Rising that shares the same staff, decided to rebrand following revelations that the company had been retained by Facebook to orchestrate a campaign to smear its critics.
The current America Rising research effort on Warren appears to be part of a broader dive into the Democratic field, which is being coordinated with America First Policies, the nonprofit arm of Trump’s Super PAC. The effort involves research on Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Michael Bloomberg, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, and other Democratic candidates.
Election narratives are often crafted in part by research efforts financed by partisan interest groups. The board documents surfaced by America Rising don’t necessarily undermine Warren’s version of the events, but they did add to speculation that she embellished her history by opening up a line of questioning that doesn’t have a clear answer.
Politifact, after reviewing evidence of the controversy, did not reach a conclusion one way or another regarding Warren’s claims and her critic’s efforts to unravel them. The principal of the elementary school at the center of the story, Edward Pruzinsky, is deceased.
Still, Warren has argued against some of the claims. The minutes from the April 21, 1971, meeting show that the board unanimously approved a motion to extend Warren’s employment contract as a speech pathologist for the next school year. Another set of board minutes, from June 16, 1971, show Warren’s resignation “accepted with regret.” It is unlikely, as many have pointed out, that Warren showed visible signs of her pregnancy in April of that year. She gave birth to her daughter Amelia in September 1971. Further, if Warren was let go for showing signs of her pregnancy by the summer of that year, it also seems unlikely that the board would highlight that justification in its official set of minutes.
Trudy Randall, a retired teacher who worked at Riverdale Elementary School for three decades, backed up Warren’s account in an interview with CBS News. “The rule was at five months, you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer,” said Randall. “But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”
