What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

xpost to will - another reason i love AOC, her positivity. that GND video she made that was like an upbeat kids' cartoon from the future, about how back in the 2020s we totally rallied as a country and accomplished this amazing thing and put all these people to work and saved the planet! gloom and doom is the stick, but the opportunity to raise your standard of living (AND heroically save us from complete disaster) is the carrot.

both sides bash unions. right wing bashes teachers union. left wing bashes police union.

*all while

both sides bash unions. right wing bashes teachers union. left wing bashes police union.

― Thus Sang Freud, Thursday, November 12, 2020 2:35 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is so disingenuous as to be demonstrably false. Teachers' unions fight for the salaries and working conditions of their members; police unions fight for the right to be unaccountable in the commission of human rights abuses.

Yeah I don't get behind that "both sides." However it's more like GOP bashes teachers' unions, Democrats know they still need teachers' unions but quietly erode them through things like charter schools.

exactly

and yes in orbit v v much otm re police unions

In my direct personal experience the main teachers' union in NYC fights AGAINST charter schools but loses to bought politicians! Idk about other cities though I guess.

I mean Robert Cornegy Jr is set to run for NYC mayor next year and he is, and always has been, a charter-backed candidate!! I worked on a city council primary race in the district right next to his, when he first ran in 2013, and a bunch of charter school teachers & staff members came DURING WORK HOURS and GOT PAID by their employers to canvas for him! There was a lot of winking at us involved iirc.

i will always bash police "unions"

Sorry, Cornegy is running for Brooklyn Borough Pres, not for NYC Mayor. Just a step on the way though.

i will always bash police "unions"

what in the living fuck at that moronic Thus Sang Freud post, everybody has jumped on it already but that's gotta be the stupidest fucking thing I've read itt so far which is really saying something

police unions are not "unions" and should be mercilessly destroyed

In my direct personal experience the main teachers' union in NYC fights AGAINST charter schools but loses to bought politicians! Idk about other cities though I guess.

― Ima Gardener (in orbit), Thursday, November 12, 2020 9:46 AM (eighteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I might have worded my post awkwardly - this is what I meant. Unions are against charters, democrats are ostensibly pro teachers union but also pro charter, which is actually a low-key anti-union position.

police unions are not "unions" and should be mercilessly destroyed

otm, and even putting that aside, there are more than two unions last time I checked, so this was a particularly feeble attempt at both-sidesing

democrats are ostensibly pro teachers union but also pro charter, which is actually a low-key anti-union position

^if I were trying to describe the Democratic Party ca 2020 to someone unfamiliar w American politics

Yeah I've watched the machine Dem candidates in my district & surrounding ones take the softshoe "charter schools are public schools" route many times. They're all going to end up getting primaried from the left though, which I absolutely welcome and will happily put in hours for those candidates.

Actually speaking of which I'm looking up 2021 City Council races right now and thinking about who to volunteer for!

I'm here for the Teena Marie clips.

Both sides-ism: they all support charter schools :(

Democrats have moved away from the Obama era courting of charter schools over the last few years - remains to be seen how that goes from here.

I just looked up every candidate for the neighboring district to mine and the person who's probably going to win the primary has already clearly stated support for charters. I just signed up to volunteer for a queer progressive candidate nearby.

lol at the both sides upthread.

might as well say

"both the left and right are anti-government! conservatives hate big government and liberals hate fascist, authoritarian governments!"

Democrats have moved away from the Obama era courting of charter schools over the last few years - remains to be seen how that goes from here.

― onlyfans.com/hunterb (milo z), Thursday, November 12, 2020 12:47 PM (forty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

*Some* democrats have. Most notably the ones people like Pelosi are trying to distance themselves from.

fuck charter schools

-Ben and Jerry's

xxp - I mean as a general party mood. Biden came out in the primaries for a ban on for-profit charters and against any federal money going to charters at all.

It's not a full rejection of charters, but it's better than the Obama era - if it holds. (big if of course)

"For-profit charters" is a weasel term that means nothing. They're nearly all for profit, it's just that some of them place a non-profit structure in between the govt and the profit takers.

To be honest, I am extremely conflicted about charter schools.

I was educated in the public school system and feel very strongly that investment there can have a huge potential payoff given that's where most of our students are.

However, I was also educated in a school district that was over 90% white in a state that pumped a gigantic amount of tax revenue into public education; the fact that I had the capability to excel in this environment and the support of most of the teachers I encountered is more luck and happenstance than planned or even normal.

I also don't know how to parse the data around the performance of minorities in charter schools compared to public schools. It seems like there are splits between schools that benefit their students and schools that don't; half the studies and analyses seem to talk past each other and I am not immersed enough in education policy to confidently call bullshit. My friends in education are all over the place on the issue; teachers tend to hate charters while administrators tend to like them, but in MA the level of regulation on them is such that more teachers here I encounter have positive things to say about charters than education people I know elsewhere. There's also a part of me that feels like the Black/Latino student who ARE achieving success via charters are sometimes ignored or treated like race traitors by angry White liberals who would rather see things slowly get worse for all BIPOC rather than see some of them make a choice that improves their own situations; to be clear, the aforementioned lack of experience and not knowing where to start with the competing studies makes me extremely wary of this impulse but I'd be lying if I said the thoughts weren't there, bolstered mostly by looking at American history.

"For-profit charters" is a weasel term that means nothing. They're nearly all for profit, it's just that some of them place a non-profit structure in between the govt and the profit takers.

How does it work?

I can understand all those thoughts, and I have a lot of thoughts about them myself, and it's definitely an interesting and complex subject. But aside from those thoughts, there's no question that their growth erodes teachers' unions.

How does it work?

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, November 12, 2020 1:49 PM (forty-seven seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

TBH I can't guarantee that "nearly all" is true, but many of them simply hire for-profit "management companies" and all kinds of for-profit vendors, to the point that the school is largely de facto run by for profit companies and the non-profit is not much more than a conduit.

My usual line on charters is that I don't fault any parent for choosing one based on their circumstances, and that there are certainly individual charters that are great, but that the phenomenon overall is net negative for public education and most of the successes cannot be scaled.

My nieces attend a charter school whose owners broke promises about Black enrollment a decade ago; these schools tend to open in minority-heavy communities because real estate is cheaper. Educationally it's solid, but several of the county's best public schools surround my sister's house.

xp Close to my feelings. The whole industry stinks of "public-private partnerships" (aka robbing public funds so corporations can profit) and the Republican mantra of "fuck you, i got mine" to abandoning public schools, but palatable enough to the Democratic donor class that wants to fence off their own kids.

I mean if it was my kid and the only good option was a charter I would damn well put them in the charter for sure.

The more I read about it, the less it makes sense to me.

I read TSF's post as mordantly saying the same thing that everyone is counterarguing to it, but maybe I was being naive

Totally agree with your conflicting feelings, DJP. I like the idea of trying new things to improve education with charter schools, but there is a ton of grift going on in that sector, and there are some straight-up sleazy charter schools that should be shut down.

Dumb question: isn’t trying new things with education not possible with the already established public school system?

when DJI and DJP post in the same thread it does weird things to my brain

In the minds of many people, including liberals, public schools = dirty poor brown people

I was going to say upthread, and then edited my post down: The extent to which charter schools have poured into communities of color, esp in historically Black NYC, which is the only landscape I'm personally familiar with, it is in part the city's and the DOE's own fault for under-serving Black communities for EVER. I don't blame parents (NB I do blame white parents who move into the area and then don't send their kids to public schools though!). I definitely blame elected officials who take money from charter networks. Even if you want parents to have adequate options, you don't have to profit from shadowy corporate interest actors.

If you're interested in this subject, the podcast Nice White Parents is very good.

in orbit otm.

Public schools are one of America’s two good ideas, along with birthright citizenship, and I hate to see them undermined in any way.

Public schools are one of America’s two good ideas, along with birthright citizenship, and I hate to see them undermined in any way.

You forgot <insert a typical Ken Burns subject matter>.

I’m not giving TR the credit tbh

Dumb question: isn’t trying new things with education not possible with the already established public school system?

― Van Horn Street, Thursday, November 12, 2020 7:14 PM (four minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

The problem, in loose terms, with many of the things the charters schools want to "try" is that they're things like, "Only hire un-unionized teachers so they can't demand any labor standards and over-work them until they burn out!" and "Force insufficiently obedient children out through punitive discipline because you aren't obliged to accommodate all the students who enroll in you!" and "Make demands on parents that many families in crisis can't meet, and then force them out when they 'fail.'"

xxp Nice White Parents was BRILLIANT. In the first two episodes I was like HAVE YOU BEEN SPYING ON MY SCHOOL??!

The idea of free, non-public schools for innovation and as a possible testing ground for successful tactics you hope to scale up later, is not inherently bad! But it opened the door to anti-public education actors who have just jammed that wedge in with a vengeance.

The prose is High Academic, but Margaret Hagerman’s White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America is an excellent recent study.