I suppose I ought to front load this: In the Democratic Party Primary in New York State, I voted for Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. My reasons for the doing so were various, but they focused heavily upon how well Senator Sanders articulated what I consider to be a genuine crisis in our time: the out of control growth in income inequality and the consequent damage to opportunity and justice that comes with it. Senator Sanders' ability to make a genuinely competitive campaign outside of the system of large donor politics was also inspiring, and it pointed to another vital issue - how our campaign finance system grants large donors more access and more voice to the point of commanding far more attention than the voters.
In contrast, former Secretary of State and Senator Hillary Clinton, while acknowledging such issues, has spent the last quarter century at or near the very highest offices of political power in the country. While I did not doubt that she recognizes these as problems, I did question her ability to give full critique to them while running a campaign that is fully enmeshed in big donor politics, especially when given the choice of Senator Sanders' avoidance of typical large donors. Further, as an advocate for public education and full-throated critic of the current reform environment, Secretary Clinton's long standing connections to education reform was, and remains, a real difficulty for me. Secretary Clinton has been supported by Eli Broad, whose education "philanthropy" has been consistently aimed at aggressively favoring charter schools over fully public schools. Secretary Clinton's PAC received a massive donation from Alice Walton, and the Clinton Foundation has been a financial beneficiary of the Walton Family Foundation whose education efforts are geared towards privatization and hostility to teachers' unions. "Democrats" for Education Reform, an organization founded largely by Whitney Tilson in a effort to convince Democrats to support anti-union and pro-privatization policies that are more typical of Republicans, greeted Secretary Clinton's campaign with enthusiasm. Secretary Clinton's 2016 campaign chair is John Podesta who is President Bill Clinton's former chief of staff and the founder of the Center for American Progress (CAP). CAP, while often progressive and innovative on a range of issue, is reliably on the wrong side of education reform. If there is a bad idea being proposed for our public schools, there is a good chance that CAP has written a position paper in support of it.
Suffice it to say that this has been at least a bit of a difficult journey. In reality, finding American politicians who truly support - and understand - public education and its purposes is not actually easy. Senator Sanders' education record - beyond college financing - is not actually stellar considering missed opportunities to trim back today's test and punish environment. California Congressman Mark Takano is a former school teacher who has explained that most of his colleagues, however well-intentioned, have limited time to learn an issue as complex as teaching and learning and are readily swayed by ideas that fit their known areas of expertise such as law and finance.
So how have I come to support Secretary Clinton's bid for the Presidency?
One thing to remember is that, despite my initial support for her opponent, I find a huge portion of the criticism hurled at Secretary Clinton either false or overblown. The Clintons really have been the target of a now generation long effort to both defame them and to blow up every misstep into major scandal. Despite her currently dismal poll numbers on trustworthiness, Secretary Clinton has been admirably honest in her campaign statements - this really isn't even close in comparison to the Republican nominee. Secretary Clinton has been endlessly accused of corruption, and while I agree that our big donor political system is rife with the corrupting influence of money, it is hardly fair to claim that Secretary Clinton is some extraordinary example. This is a system of campaign finance that touches most elected officials at most levels of government. 60 Minutes did a story in April about how the need to raise campaign money is so important to remaining in Congress that Congressional Republicans had personal targets of raising $18,000 a day over a six month period. While I desperately want this system to change, it is not fair to single out Secretary Clinton as some kind of avatar of political corruption merely for having been around for as long as she has.
While her long time associations and past positions have worried me, it is also true that Secretary Clinton has proven herself persuadable on key education issues. Last Fall, she created a near panic among education reform advocates for saying something that is objectively true: many charter schools "don't take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don't keep them." This is objectively true by any normal analysis, especially of the high flying "no excuses" schools who claim they "prove" that urban public schools are full of lazy teachers -- even while they do everything they can to suspend students they do not want until they leave. It is also fair to say that Secretary Clinton seems to be trying to have it at least one and a half ways on charter schools, making statements about high quality "public" charter schools and trying to thread a needle on the difference between "for profit" and "not for profit" charters. These are attempts to dichotomize situations that are often much murkier. For example, a charter school can be run by a "not for profit" management organization that then contracts services to companies that entirely for profit - and which have ties to the people running the not for profit. Fraudulent use of public funds is a very real problem across the charter sector and unlikely to improve without strict public scrutiny that charter operators and their investors have mightily resisted. Further, current school financing situations generally mean that charter schools, as a whole, operate at the expense of their host districts who find that their fully public schools have higher concentrations of the highest need students without accompanying increases in spending to help them succeed.
Secretary Clinton and the Democratic Party, however, appear to be making some progress on the issue as evidence by subtle but meaningful changes in the platform. The original platform language on charter schools was basically more of the same - equating them with fully public schools and insisting that parents have options while offering a relatively meaningless opposition to for profit charters and a weak call for transparency. The new language inserted:
"We believe that high quality public charter schools should provide options for parents, but should not replace or destabilize traditional public schools. Charter schools must reflect their communities, and thus must accept and retain proportionate numbers of students of color, students with disabilities and English Language Learners in relation to their neighborhood public schools."
This should not be controversial - unless you believe that it is a great thing for schools accepting public money to operate to the detriment of existing schools and to fail to retain their students. The platform also addressed accountability and testing, adding language that called for testing to meet reliability and validity standards, opposing testing that unfairly labels vulnerable students as failing, using test data to redirect funds, close schools, and in teacher and principal evaluation, and it directly supported parents' right to opt out of standardized tests "without penalty for the either the student or their school."
Shavar Jeffries, head of "Democrats" for Education Reform, was not at all pleased. His statement said the platform had been "hijacked" at the last minute and declared that the platform would harm the nation's most valuable children.
You have to wonder about someone who thinks calling on charter schools to stop kicking out so many poor and minority children and not financially destabilize their host district and calling for testing to be used in ways that do not actually harm schools and teachers and children is a massive affront to progress. The good news is that Secretary Clinton and the Democratic Party as a whole may have begun a slow and ponderous turn from failed policies of test and punish and letting charter schools do whatever they want.
Another issue for teachers to consider is the composition of the Supreme Court. This term, the court heard Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, and the court's five conservative justices were poised to issue a death blow to public sector unions and to rule that people who enjoy the protection of a union contract did not have to contribute money to the union if they do not join. Such agency fees are a vital way for unions to still have enough revenue to represent all members even though they cannot mandate membership. A decision against the CTA would have overturned decades of precedent and only the unexpected death of Associate Justice Scalia prevented the anti-union ruling. The composition of the Supreme Court should be on teachers' minds not simply because of the Friedrichs case, but also because of Vergara v. State of California case which is working through appeals and which is inspiring copycat lawsuits financed by dark money.
Where they cannot win with elections and legislation, education "reformers" are trying to break the back of teacher unions and are trying to sue away teachers' workplace rights in court. The four justices appointed by President Bill Clinton and by President Obama voted against the most recent case to reach the court. The four justices appointed by President Reagan and by both Presidents Bush voted in favor. There is no reason to believe Secretary Clinton would appoint justices markedly different than those appointed by her Democratic predecessors.
Secretary Clinton should also get some recognition for her choice of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate. Many progressives that I know are not happy with the pick, citing that Senator Kaine has, at best, a mixed record on many issues of sincere importance. On education, however, he was one of the most promising of Secretary Clinton's potential running mates. Simply put, among prominent Democrats, Senator Kaine is not a favorite of education "reformers". As Virginia's governor, he was not a proponent of standardization, high stakes testing, and privatization - the grand trifecta of what passes for education reform today. Further, Senator Kaine's wife, Anne Holton, is Virginia's current Secretary of Education and in that position, she has worked to reform standardized testing in the Commonwealth, blaming it for making the achievement gap worse, and she has opposed charter school expansion.
Consider the other possibilities. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was reported to be a top contender, and as a rising star in the party, he certainly would have added quite a lot to Secretary Clinton's ticket, especially with his prodigious political talent. But he is also a horrible choice on education policy, supporting vouchers, privatization, merit pay, and high stakes accountability testing. Frankly, I was holding my breath wondering if I could ever be pleased voting for Secretary Clinton in the general election, and while Senator Kaine may not be a fully progressive pick, his selection gives me confidence that on education issues, Secretary Clinton is listening to a much broader and more informed set of advisers than President Obama has.
The issue of listening is actually another reason to be hopeful of a Clinton Presidency on education. Ezra Klein wrote a fascinating portrait of Secretary Clinton, one that discussed some of her flaws as well, that got to a central strength of her leadership style - listening. Klein stated that this seemed almost too cliche for him at first, but person after person repeated the same observation: Secretary Clinton not only listens to others, she does so with a sincere interest in understanding their point of view, and she saves notes and records from those conversations to use when it comes time to craft policy:
It turned out that Clinton, in her travels, stuffed notes from her conversations and her reading into suitcases, and every few months she dumped the stray paper on the floor of her Senate office and picked through it with her staff. The card tables were for categorization: scraps of paper related to the environment went here, crumpled clippings related to military families there. These notes, Rubiner recalls, really did lead to legislation. Clinton took seriously the things she was told, the things she read, the things she saw. She made her team follow up.
This is substantial, and it makes me consider the very strong possibility that Secretary Clinton and the Democratic Party's "evolution" on issues like charter schools and high stakes testing may be more than cosmetic and that they might signal the beginning of a shift away from the era of testing and punishment and privatization. President of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten has long been a supporter of Secretary Clinton. While some rank and file members of the AFT were critical of the union's early endorsement and while I do know members who have questioned the union's efforts to cooperate with education reformers in the past, two things are indisputable: 1) as evidence has come in, AFT has been more forceful on opposing policies such as value added measures in teacher evaluation; 2) President Weingarten had a substantial and sincere role in assisting a ground breaking study by the Badass Teachers Association on workplace issues for teachers. This study gained major, unprecedented, response from AFT membership, and issues that it highlighted even made their way into the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed last year. Given Secretary Clinton's leadership style and given President Weingarten's role in supporting her this year, it is entirely reasonable to hope that genuine shifts are beginning.
Of course, it is possible that I am entirely wrong. I accept that. President Obama certainly said many of the right things about testing and accountability in 2008, only to hurl our schools into even worse policies than those imposed by the Bush administration. The reality is that we are 30 years into a policy cycle premised on accountability rather than equity and 15 years into a policy cycle using high stakes testing as a bludgeon on schools. The reform side of education today is backed by enormously powerful and enormously wealthy interests such as Rupert Murdoch who claimed in 2010 that education was a "500 billion dollar sector" waiting to be "transformed" by technology. That's a pile of potential profits that none of them will simply walk away from readily. At their best, education reformers tend to be blind to the consequences of creatively disrupting a core democratic institution the way they disrupt wireless communication. At their worst, they are outright fraudsters enriching themselves at the expense of equity and justice.
The consequence if I am wrong about Secretary Clinton on education is that we continue to argue with the Federal DOE and that we continue to lobby state by state for needed changes from punitive accountability and towards support and growth. These are arguments that are gaining traction community by community, so if Secretary Clinton turns out to produce no substantive change in education policy, there is at least familiar, if exhausting, work ahead. Certainly, education reformers have no intention of going anywhere regardless of federal education policy, so we'll be in this for the long haul.
But what is the alternative in this election?
I have seen friends insist that others make a positive case to vote for Secretary Clinton without mentioning her opponent. That is an entirely reasonable request, and I hope that I have made a positive, if heavily qualified, case on those grounds. However, it is also impossible to ignore her opponent in this election. Whatever flaws Secretary Clinton may or may not have, they are within the normal parameters of American politics. Donald Trump is far beyond the bounds of acceptability, not merely because of his utter and total lack of qualifications for the job, not merely because of his horrendous temperament, not even because of his documented lies, racism, and sexism -- but because he represents a genuine threat to our system of governance. President Trump guarantees a rolling series of Constitutional crises from the moment he is sworn into office.
Some public education voters may be swayed by his promise to get rid of the Common Core State Standards. Among all of his empty promises, that is quite a whopper as he will possess literally no leverage to change that. While the CCSS were pushed into place with federal incentives during Race to the Top, the states were the ones that ultimately adopted them in response to those incentives. Does Mr. Trump propose a DOE grant program to convince states to repeal the standards now? Actually, that power is pretty much gone as the Every Student Succeeds Act passed last year places extraordinary limits on the Department of Education's ability to mandate or coerce states into adopting standards and academic content. Whatever fighting is going to continue over the Common Core standards, it is entirely at the state level now.
What passes for education policy from the Trump campaign was in full view when his son, Donald Trump Jr., addressed the Republican National Convention and blasted our public schools, comparing them to "Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers." He touted school choice and the free market, and he further decried the Democrats as more concerned with "tenured teachers" than with children's education.
If you really like Campbell Brown's war on teachers, you will absolutely love the Trump Administration.
Donald Trump's broader proposals will harm the children in our classrooms. One of his most consistent proposals is to deport every single undocumented immigrant in the country, an idea that would require massive investments in extra police, extra police powers, mass detention facilities, and emergency courts. Beyond the stark horror of trying to round up and deport many millions of people, the plan would inflict terrible hardship upon millions of our school children. Approximately, 1.4% of school children in America are themselves undocumented immigrants, and in 2012, roughly 4.5 million children born in America, and therefore American citizens themselves, lived with at least one parent who was an undocumented immigrant. Donald Trump would inflict unimaginable agony upon them.
American Muslims are only about 1% of our population, but they would take it harshly on the chin due to Donald Trump's proposed ban on Muslims entering the country. Nearly two thirds of adult Muslims in America were born in another country, which means Muslim children in our schools are very likely to have relatives who live abroad -- and who would be unable to even visit during a Trump administration. In addition, Donald Trump continuously defames Muslims in America from falsely claiming that 1000s of Muslims cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center to claiming that Muslims in America "know what is going on and they don't tell us," blaming the entire Muslim community for the acts of a very few extremists. Muslim school children face increasing cases of bias and acts of hate against them -- can we imagine what will happen to those students in schools if Donald Trump is President using that bully pulpit to spread his lies and hate?
Donald Trump's acceptance speech painted a picture of America spinning into chaos, terrorism, and violence. While the facts do not support these claims at all, he used them to repeatedly claim that he will be a "law and order" President and that "safety will be restored." If this does not send chills down your spine, you need to investigate history and ask yourself if children of color in our schools will see "safety" or if they will see even more aggressive and even more antagonistic policing in their communities and in their schools. Donald Trump's platform is a manifest threat to millions upon millions of the children in our schools.
All of this is bad enough, but Donald Trump represents a different and even worse threat. It is unfortunate that we have used the word "fascist" as a political epithet in recent decades largely to mean "I don't like how conservative this politician is." The term has actual meaning and a set of core ideas and themes that are emblematic of actual fascism that is extremely hard to map onto typical American politics with any honesty. But not this time. While not "pure" fascism in the traditional sense, both Donald Trump's acceptance speech and the overall agenda of his campaign hit a distressing number of fascist themes - call it American proto-fascism, but the fact remains that Donald Trump is a genuine threat to our system of governance.
In 1995, Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco wrote an essay about what he called "Ur-Fascism" or "Eternal Fascism". Having witnessed the rise of Italian Fascism and being forced to participate in Fascist competitions about the glory of the state and Mussolini, Eco was well equipped to explain central themes of fascism that managed to endure even though they did not manifest as national political forces in Europe of the early 1990s. Consider some of Eco's themes of Eternal Fascism and how well they line up with Donald Trump's speech accepting his nomination:
- Cult of Tradition: Trump's portrait of an America falling into violence and chaos was an inherent effort to call for a return to a traditional, nearly mythic, national order. His signature theme of "Make America Great Again" inherently calls for a period of glory lost to our current generation. Trumpism sees no advancement except in a return to a mythologized past.
- Rejection of Modernism: Nearly everything about the world we have made since the end of WWII seems a threat to Trump. Modern economics. International agreements. Inclusive immigration policies. He does not propose reforming them. They are all rejected in favor of a retreat to isolation and protection.
- Cult of Action for Action's Sake: Throughout this campaign, Trump has repeatedly emphasized that we must "do something" about all of the problems he claims we have. He does not have a real plan because that is not the point -- we must act and must act now. Trump's own son, himself the product of elite private schools and universities, declared his disdain for the educated elite and proclaimed that he and his siblings learned from those with "PhDs in common sense," indicting expertise in favor of blunt action.
- Fear of Difference: Trump has thrived on seeking to make his supporters afraid: undocumented immigrants are murderers and rapists; Muslim immigrants and visitors are potential terrorists; Black Lives Matter protesters are thugs seeking to murder the police and overthrow order. His support is hugely based upon stoking these fears.
- Appeal to a Frustrated Middle Class: Unlike progressive politics which identifies economic hardships and proposes policy fixes, Trump identifies those same hardships and uses them to whip up more anxiety and resentment and a belief among followers that their rightful place in the economic order has been stolen from them, leading to...
- Obsession With A Plot: Again, Trump thrives on the resentments of his followers and directs their fear and sense of humiliation towards others who have victimized them. Again, this should not be mistaken with progressive politics that seeks to address economic insecurity through policy. In Trump's speech and campaign, the fault is that others, immigrants, Muslims, minorities, foreign governments are existential threats to his followers and must be removed or controlled or beaten.
- Humiliation from Enemies: Consider the typical Trump tack on trade -- everyone cheats the United States and gets rich at our expense. In the world according to Trump most of our supposed allies take advantage of us and laugh at us while our adversaries do not respect us and cheat us.
- Life Is Permanent Warfare: Trump promises swift military action against certain enemies, even to the point of committing overt war crimes, but the themes of war are evident in his constant talk of winning and losing. To Donald Trump, all of our problems are summed up by how we "do not win anymore" because there are only two possibilities - victory or defeat. This gives Trumpism another theme of Eternal Fascism:
- Contempt for Weakness: Whether he is mocking the disabled or proclaiming that "only he" can fix our problems, Donald Trump oozes contempt for anyone he sees as weak and viciously attacks on that front.
- Everyone Educated to Be a Hero: Trump promises us that we will "win" as a nation and all of us will prosper as a result. Eco links the Fascist impulse to herorism to a willingness, even a desire, to die which seems absent from Trumpism as of yet, but his appeal to our desire to heroic victory is present.
- Machismo: Heroic death may be elusive, but macho strutting and bragging is readily available to the Ur-Fascist. Donald Trump's hyper-machismo is on full display with its attendant sexism and disdain for women. This is perhaps one of his most reliable personality traits from his personal life to his business career to his current career in politics.
- Selective Populism: Fascism requires that individuals give up their individuality for a Common Will. This is not entirely present in Trumpism as it is still wedded to more typical American conservative ideals of individualism, but in his acceptance speech, Trump openly declared "I am your Voice" and said of our problems that "I alone can fix them." Trump has openly proclaimed himself the legitimate voice of his aggrieved and furious followers.
- Opposition to Corrupt Parliamentary Governments: Trump does not openly advocate the replacement of our Constitutional system of government (assuming, of course, that he remotely understands it), but his contempt for that government is evident. He repeats endlessly that are leaders are "not very smart" and that his skills are essential to save us.
- Use of Newspeak: Trump does not yet have a unique form of speech replacing common language, but Fascist regimes typically use diminished syntax and poor vocabulary that requires little reasoning. That stands on its own as a description of Trump's speeches to date.
None of this means that Donald Trump intends to replace the United States' political order with a fascist regime. To begin with, he does not possess the paramilitary force that historic fascist leaders surrounded themselves with before ascending to power. Second, he is seeking the Presidency through our existing political structure even as he derides it constantly. However, it does point to a truly unique danger of a potential Trump Presidency: he holds views of power, authority, and the social and political order that are antithetical to our system of shared power among equal branches of government. Consider a President Trump ordering our INS and border guard to begin building massive detention centers and rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants. Now picture him being ordered to stop by a federal judge. Will he stop? Will he recognize the judiciary's authority over the executive branch? Or will he lash out at the judge and simply proceed? What then? Does the court hold him in contempt? Would Congress impeach him under those circumstances? What happens when he makes good on a promise of ordering the military to violate international and military law? Do the Joint Chiefs resign en masse? Does he go through every general and admiral until he finds someone willing to commit a war crime?
Perhaps our Constitutional system would be strong enough to remove him from office. Perhaps not. As a nation, our political order has not faced a threat like this since General Beauregard ordered the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Trump is a potential sledge hammer to America's Constitutional system, a system for which he displays no knowledge and no regard, and to which his views of both his power and of his governing mandate are entirely antithetical. Donald Trump portrays himself as the avenging voice of an aggrieved and humiliated population on whose behalf he will remove parasitic outsiders and force all of our enemies to "lose" as we "win" under his leadership. This is a candidate who promises to smash all norms for rhetoric, policy, and respects for the roles of our institutional limits on the Presidency. He may not seek to be an actual dictator, but he threatens to stretch our system to the very breaking point.
As teachers, we should be horrified by this. Our system of Common Schools was established in no small part to promote democratic values and to contribute to the health of our civic sector. Public schools are working instantiations of the ideal that a healthy civic order provides for the education of all and through that education promotes the wise and beneficial exercise of the franchise:
If the responsibleness and value of the elective franchise were duly appreciated, the day of our State and National elections would be among the most solemn and religious days in the calendar. Men would approach them, not only with preparation and solicitude, but with the sobriety and solemnity, with which discreet and religious-minded men meet the great crises of life. No man would throw away his vote, through caprice or wantonness, any more than he would throw away his estate, or sell his family into bondage. No man would cast his vote through malice or revenge, any more than a good surgeon would amputate a limb, or a good navigator sail through perilous straits, under the same criminal passions.
- Horace Mann, 1848
Over time, we have seen our schools become the very places were advancement in inclusiveness and expansion of the franchise have played out, but this has required working branches of government: executive offices, legislatures, courts responding to the needs of the day and the petitions of people seeking justice. A Presidency that threatens to damage those institutions and their balance will inevitably damage our schools as the system that supports them is thrown into uncertainty.
Some may read this and accuse me of trying to frighten teachers into a particular vote. I will gladly own that accusation, for the prospect of Donald Trump assuming the Presidency is truly frightening. I do not merely believe he must lose this election; I believe he must lose by a margin that thoroughly repudiates his worldview.
I understand that after the past 15 years, it is very hard for many teachers to support a Democrat for President who has been an ally of many in modern education "reform". I also accept that the observations I have made in favor of Secretary Clinton may be unpersuasive for many teachers and for good reasons. I also hope very sincerely that everyone sees what is truly at stake in this election. If I am correct that Secretary Clinton is beginning a slow pivot on public education, then her administration offers a chance for education policy to, slowly, move towards support and growth instead of test and punish. If I am wrong about that, then we continue our familiar advocacy on familiar ground. It will be painful, and it will lead to more harm of schools and children. But if Donald Trump is President, it is a certainty that millions more of our students will be caught up in his racist and xenophobic policies, and the very political institutions that sustain public education face serious peril. On election day, I will vote for the hope of a wiser set of education policies from a candidate who has a genuine gift for listening, and I will vote to repudiate what her opponent represents.
A version of this post can be found at DanielSKatz.net