Senator Bernie Sanders has a busy campaign. Today, he’s in Asheville, NC for a rally. He’s the first Dem Candidate to visit Ashville in this cycle. Ahead of the rally, he penned an OP piece in Ashville’s Citizen-Times about the dwindling funding for public education:
Bernie Sanders: 65 years after Brown vs Board of Ed, segregation remains in our classrooms
In North Carolina over the last decade, there has been a 61 percent increase in the number of schools that are segregated by race and income. And Republicans in the legislature just passed a bill that empowers wealthy white school districts to create their own publicly-funded, privately-administered charter schools. That’s a recipe for resegregation.
It’s the same story when it comes to funding. North Carolina has one of the lowest public education funding rates in the country. North Carolina public school teachers make at least 26 percent less than comparable college graduates. And Republicans in the legislature have passed major corporate tax cuts, while trying to block Gov. Roy Cooper’s proposed increases in school funding.
This is Robin Hood in reverse, and it is happening on the national level too. After giving huge tax cuts for the very rich, President Trump is proposing to cut after school programs that serve 34,000 North Carolina students and is proposing to eliminate funding for the major grant program for teacher development.
Trump and billionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos plan to pump $500 million into “expanding access” to charter schools, which have been draining money out of traditional public schools and exacerbating educational segregation. Indeed, a 2017 Associated Press report found that “while 4 percent of traditional public schools are 99 percent minority, the figure is 17 percent for charters.” The report added that “In cities, where most charters are located, 25 percent of charters are over 99 percent nonwhite, compared to 10 percent for traditional schools.”
I will soon announce a comprehensive plan to reform and reinvest in America’s public education system to combat racial and economic segregation. I will stand with groups like the NAACP in calling for a ban on for-profit charter schools and a moratorium on federal funding of new charters until we can ensure they’re operating with transparency and accountability.
You can click the title of the article to read more.
OK, perhaps you are wondering: what does this have to do with the Daily Kos?
As we saw in the past 3 days, some diaries on the FP brought the circular firing squad upon Sanders, in which “what will Sanders do if he loses the youth vote” to Sanders (as well as Buttigieg, Gillibrand, and Klobuchar — somehow Castro got omitted as he too accepted an invitation) was desperate to go on Fox Channel to garner attention, and wondered out loud, if he would also attend Klan Rallies to garner more attention.
I’m certain the Sanders campaign was well aware of what was happening here. Twitterverse reported the new low of standards (not to mention violation of the Rules of the Road, which is to make an argument, not attack such as calling Sanders’ appearance on Fox an “an asshole” move).
Taking that insight for a moment: why would a Jewish man, a gay man, or a woman appear at a Klan Rally? We know the Nazis annihilated Sanders’ paternal relatives who weren’t able to escape the Holocaust, not to mention Sanders grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in which many Holocaust survivors still had identification numbers on their arms.
If you didn’t know that, now you do. One cannot erase Senator Sanders’ family or friends’ memories of what happened to Jews in World War II.
Anyone knows that the GOP can pick up this kind of commentary and use it against the nominee in the GE. Trump relishes it, as we know from the 2016 election.
But Sanders is classy and stays above the fray. Instead, his campaign retweeted a DK sponsored tweet yesterday:
Sanders has strong feelings about a woman’s right to choose, as well as being against the death penalty. The campaign could have tweeted out something he said in the recent past or from his last campaign; instead, it chose Laura Clawson’s diary, a good one about the hypocrisy of denying women the healthcare they need under the guise of being “pro-life” when Alabama continues to implement executions of those on its death row.
My grievance is the hyperbole (as someone in the comments called it) used as a cudgel against the a Jewish candidate, not to mention other negative ways to raise attention to the blog by bashing Sanders.
Sanders plans to fight for everyone, even when they call his actions “an asshole move”. His main raison d’etre is justice.
UPDATE: Laura Clawson scribed a diary about Bernie Sanders calling for a Ban on For-Profit Charter Schools.