Backstepping
No, not the Control Theory version of Backstepping developed around 1990 by Petar V. Kokotovic. In the Marine Corp there was a Back Stepping cadence. The entire squad or platoon would move in 15 inch steps backwards after coming to a complete halt.
It appears DOE Secretary has started to backstep on her comments on allowing states, Charter schools, and parents decide what is acceptable discrimination. The Senate Committee on Education was not too happy with her comments about letting states and schools decide. One problem still remaining is cutting the funding for the Department of Education and it’s Office of Civil Rights. This will curtail the oversight the DOE has today on local schools.
“Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Tuesday said she will pursue allegations of discrimination “in any form,” pushing back against criticism that the Trump administration might allow private and religious schools to accept federal funding while at the same time rejecting or discriminating against LGBT students.”
Who would have thought the Michigan billionaire-iron-lady of the DOE could be moved by so called “hurtful” remarks about her very apparent indifference to discrimination? In a follow-up comment, Betsy lamented;
“’Anyone who knows me knows that they (the Senate Committee) couldn’t be further from the truth,’ she said. ‘Discrimination in any form is wrong. And I’ve said before and I’ll say again: the department is committed to ensuring that every child has a safe and nurturing environment, and we are and will be continuing to pursue allegations of discrimination in any form as well. So that has been a really hurtful thing for me personally, because it’s not who I am.’”
I guess I do not know her either and my Vulcan Mind-Meld is not working on her to find out what she is really like. Sorry Betsy, we have to take you at your word or what you do not say too! A case in point as to the impact of Betsy Devos’s efforts with school choice and the results of it can be found in Holland, Michigan very close to the DeVos homestead. “Betsy DeVos and the Segregation of School Choice.” Ms. DeVos knew what was happening in Holland and the rest of the state all along. Michigan is the laughing stock of the nation when it comes to Charter Schools.
So the students remaining in Holland have seen per-pupil spending increase 8% (inflation-adjusted) in the last 12 years.
https://www.mackinac.org/depts/epi/fiscal.aspx
Why is it so important that there be a certain percentage of White kids?
well, i thought the last post on this subject had been about taking federal money without honoring federal law re discrimination. the comments strayed far from that question and left me wondering what value gross statistics had in evaluating school quality or basic humanity.
question for me is… if they are Republicans why do they want your steenking federal money?
Well, Coberly, no U.S. government should go to education. It is not in its charter.
Warren
i wonder if you are as fundamentalist in religion as you are in law and punctuation.
The Constitution was a place to start. It is highly unlikely that all the people who signed on to it agreed about what it meant. But over the past two hundred and thirty years they have had ample time to register their disagreements with the way it has been interpreted. For some reason they have not done so… in the majority… in the way you and God think they should have. Try to understand that it is as much up to them, you, people who disagree with the current state of the law, to amend the Constitution (to clarify it’s eternal god-given meaning), as it is — as you think it is — up to the people who have passed and accepted laws under the current understanding of the Constitution to pass an amendment to change (clarify) the original god given as understood by all parties meaning.
As for me, I don’t like a lot of what the government in any of its branches or levels does. I’d settle for basic morality — which we do not have — but as far as the Constitutional basis for Federal money (and power) in education, i’ll rely on the “general welfare” clause (not the one in the preamble, though that ought to be important to those who wish to honor the intent of the Founders, but more narrowly in the phrasing that precedes (or follows?) the enumerated powers.
If I remember the Northwest Ordinance established some basis for the Federal interest in education, and more recently the separate and unequal treatment of some children by the holy States forced the Federal government to act under the Fourteenth amendment.
But I am not a Constitutional scholar and don’t pretend to be one… unlike some. Just trying to get along somewhat sensibly with the law as we have it, the government as we have it, and –god help us — the people as we have them.
We tried that unlimited states rights crap and it brought slavery and civil war and jim crow, and it is still out there doing what it can of the devil’s work. I think you are probably a decent person, but you have swallowed a catechism of evil disguised as “freedoom” especially freedom not to have to pay taxes. you’d rather give your money to your kind local predatory capitalist and look the other way while your neighbors are cheated out of their homes and their bread and lynched when they complain about it.
Coberly:
The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 also comes into play. Education is very much an important role the Federal Government has had to play a role in historically. It has moved to support it by giving land grants to states in the support of schools. The over riding crap as you stated is “states rights, separate but equal, and other policies which limited people of difference due to their difference from the majority.
DeVos indirectly takes these steps to do the same in a very distinct manner knowing it will occur the same as it has in some places in Michigan experiencing Charter Schools. Republican – led Michigan is the laughing stock of the nation because of its policy on Charter Schools.
Actually, Coberly, they avoid these questions by saying that taxpayers have no standing, so taxpayers cannot challenge unconstitutional spending.
The old fall-back position of “The General Welfare Clause” to support whatever spending you want is starting to look like Atlas forced by Zeus to hold up the sky. Let’s look at it in full: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;”
Are the States incapable of running their school systems? Are U.S. bureaucrats more capable of allocating resources than the State bureaucrats are?
In short, can you come up with any argument whatsoever that the U.S. government’s providing resources to particular schools (so the States change their allocations to account for the U.S. taxpayers’ money) does anything for the general welfare of the States? All it does is get more bureaucrats of the U.S. government payroll.
(The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 is, of course, completely irrelevant since it was passed under the authority of the Articles of Confederation, not the Constitution of the United States.)
Warren:
None of this was in the original post itself. Coberly brought it up in answer to it. Everything which is there including the Land Act establishes precedent for Federal Government support of Education. I do not believe there is an argument anyone could present to you which would be satisfactory to you. Again, I am not about to let you hijack the thread or the post. I believe you should leave and perhaps find a place more suitable to your interests. I am going to trash each comment of yours which is off topic.
Warren
1) i gave you an argument why the Feds step in when the states do not respect the rights of their people.
2) i was aware that the Land Act preceded the Constition… I thought that was an argument on my side.
3) while not as adamant, i tend to agree with Run that you missed the whole point of his post, and started throwing irrelevant and trivial “arguments” out at almost random. While not entirely “off topic” they do represent an established technique of the paid troll: obscure the serious point with every thing you can think of to draw the argument away from it into your side’s “talking points.” I don’t think you do this deliberately, but i wish you’d be more careful.
4) the people whose side you take, despite their emotional hooks about “the constitution” “freedom” “taxes”… are bad people. they are perfectly willing to violate your personal freedom, “original intent”, and even make you pay taxes for their benefit if and when it enhances their power to get away with even uglier things.
Here is a book for you “Superhubs” by Sandra Navidi. I don’t think it is a very good book, but after you read it you may have a hard time believing in “the invisible hand.” The people who control the economy, your life, your money,and your government (in spite of claiming on the one hand to be “against government” and on the other to be “against the rich” are very visible. But they do their actual work behind closed doors.
The whole point of his post seems to be that, in the Holland City Public School System, more Whites than Hispanics took advantage of the opportunity to put their kids in other schools, and that somehow that’s a Bad Thing.
Why this is a Bad Thing, he does not say.
No, that was not the point. Go back and read the post again. Beside what was said in the post itself, here are some points from the article about the impact of what DeVos is shilling. Furthermore, does not care about the impact of her decisions on people and races. The results of her charter schools in Michigan can be seen in how the races are reacting and it encompasses demographics and economics.
“Choice has, consciously or not, left districts like Holland not only scrambling for students, but more racially segregated as its white students leave, often for districts that are less diverse.”
“tens of thousands of parents across Michigan are using the state’s schools of choice program to move students out of their resident districts and into ones that are more segregated,”
“Today, 70 percent of Holland students are eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch, more than double the district’s poverty rate when choice began.”
“Better resources, less racial friction, higher test scores, a safer environment. Advocates say parents are simply choosing schools that are better for the needs of their children, and deny that racial animus drives the majority of school choice decisions.”
DeVos is pushing an old ideology which differs from being an outright racist. I care about race and discrimination. My programs do not promote racism; but, they do just that and she loves it. It just comes across more subtle. This is what you are defending and promoting Warren. I am letting you dig your hole deep.
Atwater: “You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger. By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’— that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger”
Just keep jabbering away Warren.
Warren
I don’t think so. It is a fact of human cognition that what is “the whole point” to you is lighted up in your brain as though written in neon.
I read “the whole point” as DeVos believing that those who take Federal money have a right to ignore what the Federals regard as unacceptable discrimination.
And I added the corollary, “why do these Republicans want to take Federal money in the first place?”
as for the “more whites than Hispanics” I would guess that what’s wrong with that is that “whites” tend to be privileged, so we might guess that why “whites” want to be allowed to take federal money while keeping the un-privileged out of their schools is that they just want to suck on the Federal purse while leaving the underprivileged to an underfunded State school system.
So, Coberly, the States are not respecting the rights of students in any school district in the country? Because I think just about all of them are getting money from the U.S. government. Why? Is the U.S. government doing something in the schools that the States are not capable of doing?
“[As] for the ‘more whites than Hispanics’ I would guess that what’s wrong with that is that ‘whites’ tend to be privileged, so we might guess [that’s] why ‘whites’ want to be allowed to take federal money….”
Whoa, there, big fella. We’re not talking about U.S. government money. We’re talking about the State’s money following the children to whichever school their parents choose for them. So if a student goes to another school district, only the State money follows him, not the local and U.S. government money.
As for underfunded, the Holland City School system is in the top quintile in the State for local spending per pupil, and top third for U.S. spending per pupil. Naturally, the State resources going there are in the bottom quintile, but the district is still in the top quintile for total per pupil spending.
The Hispanics with kids in the Holland City Public Schools have the same choices the non-Hispanic Whites do. They make different choices. So what?
Warren
you need to watch out for markers like “we might guess” and before you correct my grammar you ought to read the whole sentence.
i don’t regard your take on the issue as being sufficiently important to be worth any more of my time.
the question remains.. why do republicans want to take federal money and not follow federal rules?
The question is a red herring. Federal money is not part of the issue with Detroit charter schools. Only the STATE money follows the kids. Why do you have a problem with that?
Pardon me. That should be MICHIGAN charter schools.
Warren
your argument is a dead herring.
Actually, Coberly, I am making a request for information. Why is it a Bad Thing that non-Hispanic Whites are choosing to send their children to other schools in Ottowa County, while Hispanics are choosing to keep their children in the Holland schools?
Is this just blatant racism against Hispanics?
warren
i wouldn’t know. in fact, i don’t know anything about it. i only joined the discussion because you seemed to miss the point of the original post, and Run threatened to throw you off the site for hijacking.
seems you can’t help yourself. you have changed the subject so that you can show off your superior knowledge… which i have neither the time nor interest nor knowledge to debate with you. and i don’t like where you are trying to go with it.