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      Critics condemn Trump's rewrite of America's legacy of racism in DC speech

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      Donald Trump on Thursday launched an extraordinary attack on American education at a history conference in Washington DC, downplaying America’s historic legacy of slavery and claiming children have been subjected to “decades of leftwing indoctrination”.Speaking at what was dubbed the White House Conference on American History, the president intensified efforts to appeal to his core base of white voters with a historically revisionist speech, while blasting efforts to address systemic racism as divisive.The president specifically attacked the New York Times’ 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning endeavor that was published last year to cast a spotlight on the 400th anniversary of the first slave ship arriving in America.The 1619 Project “warped” the American story, Trump said. The president said the project claimed the US was “founded on the principle of oppression, not freedom”. Trump said children should know “they are citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world”.He also used the appearance to announce plans to establish a commission to promote patriotic education, dubbed the 1776 Commission, that would be tasked with encouraging educators to teach students “about the miracle of American history”.Critics were swift to condemn Trump’s new “patriotic education” plan and his attacks on the 1619 Project, something he said the teaching of which was akin to “child abuse”, with journalists quickly asserting his claims as blatantly false.Pres Trump said this of history to loud applause: “A radical movement is attempting to demolish this treasured and precious inheritance. We can’t let that happen.”Context: A movement is happening to look at America’s flaws and it’s original sins of slavery and stealing land.— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) September 17, 2020
      The president, who called curriculum on race “toxic propaganda, an ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds”, continued his administration’s efforts to restrict the telling of American history in schools to erase a legacy of racism, genocide and imperialism. The president recently threatened to cut funding to California schools that teach the 1619 Project. Trump has already cracked down on anti-racism training sessions in federal agencies.He also argued that America’s founding “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery, secured civil rights, defeated communism and fascism and built the most fair, equal and prosperous nation in human history”. But he did not mention the 246 years of slavery in America, including the 89 years it was allowed to continue after the colonies declared independence from England. Nor did the president acknowledge the ongoing fight against racial injustice and police brutality, which has prompted months of protests this year.Responding to the president’s remarks, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the writer behind the 1619 Project, made an observation on who isn’t included in Trump’s retelling of American history:The White House Conference on American History has not a single Black historian on it. Strange.— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) September 17, 2020
      Hannah-Jones also told the Associated Press that the first amendment to the Constitution abhors government attempts to censor speech and guarantees a free press.“The efforts by the president of the United States to use his powers to censor a work of American journalism by dictating what schools can and cannot teach and what American children should and should not learn should be deeply alarming to all Americans who value free speech,” she said.Meanwhile members of the Trump administration, including education secretary Betsy DeVos, remain silent on the backlash.I tried to ask @BetsyDeVosED why Trump was establishing his commission on patriotic education now just weeks from the election. After all, he’s had four years. Her press team shooed me away.— Philip Melanchthon Wegmann (@PhilipWegmann) September 17, 2020 More

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      Dear Joe Biden: the student loan crisis is exploding. We need real action | Various

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      Dear Joe Biden,We write to you as the first generation made worse-off because of higher education. Student debt is a national crisis that destroys lives, drags down the economy and fuels the racial wealth gap.No one should be forced to mortgage their future for an education, yet 45 million of us have been forced to do just that. Today the total amount of student debt stands at $1.7tn, and it keeps growing. This is a direct result of decades of divestment in public funding and the privatization of higher education into a for-profit industry. This broken system has shifted the burden of financing higher education on to individual students and households, disproportionately harming Black, Brown, immigrant and low-income communities. Bold solutions are required to address the harms this policy failure has caused. These solutions can start with the personnel staffing the US Department of Education.As bad as Betsy DeVos is, most of the problems with our higher education system predate her. When President Obama was in office, debtors and advocates sounded the alarm about soaring tuition, mounting student debt, predatory loan servicers, criminal for-profit colleges and more, but their warnings went unheeded.Under the leadership of Arne Duncan, John King and Ted Mitchell, the Department of Education fundamentally failed to listen to and protect their constituents. Under their watch, the total amount of student debt doubled, surpassing the total amount of credit card debt for the first time in history. They sat by and allowed impoverished and elderly borrowers’ social security to be garnished. Several Obama administration officials became investors in the predatory for-profit Apollo Education, including Tony Miller, Obama’s former deputy secretary of the education department. And despite public outcry over abuses, Ted Mitchell fought to keep predatory for-profit schools alive, approved the sale of these schools to ECMC (an abusive debt collection company), and now serves as president of the American Council on Education lobbying against mass student debt cancellation.Meanwhile, the students who were defrauded by predatory for-profit schools continue to wait for justice. The education secretary, Arne Duncan, promised them: “If you’ve been defrauded by a school, we’ll make sure that you get every penny of the debt relief you are entitled to through … as streamlined a process as possible.” He broke that promise. And there are hundreds of other Obama Department of Education officials with a history of failing students who are just waiting to waltz back in through the revolving door.Student debtors cannot afford another Democratic administration that sells them out and sells them short. A Biden administration must make a clean break from this history. It is time for a new Department of Education staffed with champions who will fight for students. You should appoint strong advocates to fight for students and real solutions to the student debt crisis.Additionally the Department of Education Organization Act allows the president to appoint up to four assistant secretaries of education. As president, you should fill all four of these positions.You should commit to appointing:A secretary of education who will use the authority Congress has already granted the secretary to cancel student debt on their first day in office. During the primary, Elizabeth Warren promised to use the department’s full “compromise and settlement” authority to provide student loan relief, and in March the Trump administration actually did, though the relief they provided was woefully inadequate. Nevertheless, the move was significant because it is a further recognition of the government’s broad power to cancel student debt. A Biden administration will be inheriting an economic depression and a global health crisis, alongside Mitch McConnell promising to be the “grim reaper” killing any policies designed to help people. Canceling student debt via the Department of Education bypasses McConnell, and is a direct way to stimulate the economy (estimated at a $1tn stimulus over 10 years) and create millions of new jobs. With people’s lives – and livelihoods – at stake, it would be cruel and unnecessary for the Department of Education to continue profiting from student debt. We cannot afford the economic damage this debt causes to American households.An assistant secretary of education dedicated to enforcement. As president, you should appoint an assistant secretary dedicated strictly to enforcing the regulations already on the books. By simply enforcing its own regulations, the Department of Education could fundamentally reshape how higher education functions and is financed. For decades now, it has tolerated a wild west approach, allowing scam accreditation agencies, predatory for-profit schools (which amass huge profits by exploiting low-income communities), and law-breaking debt collectors and loan servicers to flourish. We need someone at the Department of Education who can shut down these corrupt agencies, for-profit schools and abusive servicers and debt collectors once and for all.An assistant secretary dedicated to racial justice and racial equity. This goes beyond merely protecting civil rights; our education system is fundamentally racist, from the disparities in K-12 funding, to persistent “legalized” segregation, to discriminatory enrollment practices and the deeply racialized nature of student debt. (Study after study after study after study after study after study have shown that student debt is a driver of the racial wealth gap, and that the more student debt we cancel, the better it is for Black and Brown borrowers.) This position should be given full rein to examine how white supremacy functions at every level of our educational system and how our system must change on deep structural levels to repair and redress these inequities.By making these commitments you can show the 45 million voters struggling with student debt and the millions of would-be college students that you take their pain seriously. During the Obama administration we organized protests to mark what we called “1T Day,” the day student debt surpassed $1tn. Unless real solutions like College for All are enacted, we will be marking 2T Day during a Biden administration.A generation ago, college was basically free. As a result, many elected officials were able to graduate without taking out student loans. Over the last few decades, millions of students have suffered from a policy failure that developed on their watch – a policy failure that we know how to fix. You can show that you are committed to staffing a Department of Education that will fight for students, stand for racial justice, and help build a fair, equitable and debt-free higher education system.Sincerely,The Debt CollectiveSunrise MovementJustice DemocratsDemand ProgressAction Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE)The Project on Predatory Student Lending at Harvard Law SchoolProgressive Democrats of America (DPA)Council of UC Faculty AssociationsRutgers AAUP-AFTStudent ActionNYC DSA Debt & Finance Working GroupThe LeapSocial Security WorksStudent Loan JusticeRoots ActionPeople’s ActionThe Progressive Change Campaign CommitteeMoney on the LeftJolt ActionOur RevolutionScholars for Social Justice More

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      Joe Biden tells Trump to 'get off Twitter' and focus on reopening schools – video

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      Joe Biden has described school closures as a ‘national emergency’ as he sought to put the coronavirus pandemic back at the heart of the US election campaign, after two weeks of Trump seeking to capitalise on sporadic scenes of violence in cities to push a ‘law and order’ theme

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      Tom Cotton calls slavery 'necessary evil' in attack on New York Times' 1619 Project

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      The Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton has called the enslavement of millions of African people “the necessary evil upon which the union was built”.Cotton, widely seen as a possible presidential candidate in 2024, made the comment in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette published on Sunday.He was speaking in support of legislation he introduced on Thursday that aims to prohibit use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project, an initiative from the New York Times that reframes US history around August 1619 and the arrival of slave ships on American shores for the first time.Cotton’s Saving American History Act of 2020 and “would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts”, according to a statement from the senator’s office.“The entire premise of the New York Times’ factually, historically flawed 1619 Project … is that America is at root, a systemically racist country to the core and irredeemable,” Cotton told the Democrat-Gazette.“I reject that root and branch. America is a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal. We have always struggled to live up to that promise, but no country has ever done more to achieve it.”He added: “We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as [Abraham] Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.”Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for commentary for her introductory essay to the 1619 Project, said on Friday that Cotton’s bill “speaks to the power of journalism more than anything I’ve ever done in my career”.On Sunday, she tweeted: “If chattel slavery – heritable, generational, permanent, race-based slavery where it was legal to rape, torture, and sell human beings for profit – were a ‘necessary evil’ as Tom Cotton says, it’s hard to imagine what cannot be justified if it is a means to an end.“Imagine thinking a non-divisive curriculum is one that tells black children the buying and selling of their ancestors, the rape, torture, and forced labor of their ancestors for PROFIT, was just a ‘necessary evil’ for the creation of the ‘noblest’ country the world has ever seen.“So, was slavery foundational to the Union on which it was built, or nah? You heard it from Tom Cotton himself.”Cotton responded: “More lies from the debunked 1619 Project. Describing the views of the Founders and how they put the evil institution on a path to extinction, a point frequently made by Lincoln, is not endorsing or justifying slavery. No surprise that the 1619 Project can’t get facts right.”In June, the Times was forced to issue a mea culpa after publishing an op-ed written by Cotton and entitled “Send in the troops”. The article, which drew widespread criticism, advocated for the deployment of the military to protests against police brutality toward black Americans.Times publisher AG Sulzberger initially defended the decision, saying the paper was committed to representing “views from across the spectrum”.But the Times subsequently issued a statement saying the op-ed fell short of its editorial standards, leading to the resignation of editorial page director James Bennet. More