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President Joe Biden addressed socially-distanced, mask-wearing members of Congress for more than an hour Wednesday night, touching on themes of jobs for the middle and lower class, and keeping any post-pandemic recovery going.

It was an effective speech, said G. Terry Madonna, senior fellow for political affairs, Millersville University, even if you dont agree with what he said.

The point to be made about the speech, Madonna contended, is that he went to his strengths when he started out, and then he talked about how to expand the economy, how to make it work. and it has to be from the middle out.

That was a big theme of the speech, Madonna noted, and was how he defended these changes that he wants to make in the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan and in the $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan that has passed the House and probably isnt going anywhere in the Senate.

He would need 10 Republican votes.

Nick Clark, associate professor of political science, Susquehanna University agreed with Madonna.

Biden clearly focused on economic, bread-and-butter issues far more than cultural issues, Clark said. He has really laid in to achievements, policies and proposals designed to improve the financial and physical health of Americans.

There have been some bipartisan nods, Clark noted, with the president acknowledging a kind act from Senator Mitch McConnell a couple years ago and the efforts of the group of Republican senators to introduce a Republican version of the infrastructure bill.

Biden also signaled more of a willingness to compromise around this than he did with the earlier stimulus bill.

Time will tell if that happens, Clark said.

Biden mostly avoided discussing any of the controversial culture wars issues, other than his calls for more gun regulations and immigration reform toward the end of his speech, observed Robert Speel, Penn State University Associate Professor of Political Science, The Behrend College.

His emphasis on creating American jobs, expanding access to preschool and college education, expanding access to health care, increasing the minimum wage, and increasing taxes on millionaires will all probably be relatively popular among Republican voters, if not Republican members of Congress, Speel said.

But, cautioned Speel, continued antagonism among many Republican voters toward Biden overall, promoted by former President Trump and some in the conservative media, will only strengthen resolve among those Republican members of Congress to resist support for Bidens proposals.

Speel thought Bidens delivery was about as good as any speech he has given before.

His interest in lowering the amount of hatred in Washington and in advocating for ideas that can gain support from voters for both major parties will probably continue to help his overall approval ratings in polls, Speel said.

Clark didnt think the speech would provoke as much hate on the other side of the aisle as either President Trump or President Barack Obama used to.

Biden is just so more low-key, Clark said. Republicans will oppose most of his proposals, and there are some truly progressive and costly ideas amongst those, but I think it will not inspire the same passions on either side. His supporters will argue it is because he is calmer and more moderate; his opponents will say it is because he lacks energy or youth, but either way, it appears that the bitterness of politics has deescalated under his leadership thus far.

Meanwhile, Speel noted the importance that for the first time in U.S. history, two women (Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) sat behind the president as he gave a speech to Congress.

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Expert: Biden's speech started with strengths, shifted to plans - Sunbury Daily Item

Joe Bidens election prompted spasms of joy in education circles. Before he was sworn in, a story in Inside Higher Education gushed over his transformative victory, cheered that he believes in research, and judged that community colleges are likely ecstatic. The Washington Posts Valerie Strauss promised that Biden would fix the inequity that has long existed in the education system. Ken Wong, Brookings scholar and Brown Universitys Annenberg chair in education policy, proclaimed that Bidens education agenda represented a return to responsible governance.

Now, 100 days into Bidens term, his education agenda is taking shapeand its anything but a model of responsible governance. His administration has exacerbated educational culture wars despite his promises to be a uniter. Hes done little to persuade recalcitrant teacher unions to lead on school reopening (other than perhaps threaten to smother them with bales of cash). And hes pushed for stupefying levels of new school spending with no obvious interest in whether the funds are spent wisely or well.

When it comes to education, President Bidens first 100 days have been nothing to write home about. Lets take a closer look at the four subjects that have absorbed the lions share of the administrations energy and that constitute his 100-day report card.

School reopening:A majority of school districts remain at least partly closed over a year into the pandemic, despite the widespread availability of vaccines, the vast majority of educators having been fully vaccinated for well over a month, data making clear that schools are not a significant source of COVID spread, and the copious evidence demonstrating that children learn better and have better mental and emotional health when theyre in school.

Despite all of this, Bidens push to reopen schools has been half-hearted and lacking in urgency. In principle, Biden has extolled the benefits of in-person schooling and urged schools to bring students back. Indeed, back in December, before taking office, Biden pledgedthat my team will work to see that the majority of our schools can be open by the end of my first 100 days.

In practice, Biden balked at setting clear expectations for reopening or using his relationship with teacher unions to accelerate things. On his first day in office, Bidenwalked backhis reopening goal by announcing that it no longer included high schools. That same day, first lady Jill Biden hosted the presidents of the two major teachers unions, praising their heroic commitment to students.

In February, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky announced at an official White House press briefing, Vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools. Hours later, press secretary Jen Psaki walked that back, claiming that Walensky was speaking only in her personal capacity. A few days later, Psaki sparked ridicule when she stipulated that, in scoring Bidens 100-day reopening goal, schools should be considered open if they offered a single day of in-person instruction each week.

Biden eventually clarified that he expected schools open five days a weekbut rejected proposals to reserve federal aid for schools that actually did so. Ultimately, of course, the Democrats party-line American Recovery Plan included more than $120 billion for schools, with no expectation that schools actually be open (even part-time) to collect these funds. Its nice that Biden has said that hed like schools to open, but his stutter steps and deference to the unions have made him an embodiment of all talk, no action. Grade: D+

The proposed student debt jubilee: Before Biden even took office, progressive activists were pressing him to use executive action to forgive $50,000 per borrower in student debt. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, despite all evidence, termed student debt the time bomb that could throw millions of families over a financial cliff. To his credit, Biden has usefully pushed back (a bit).

In December, Biden observed that the president probably lacks the legal authority to forgive student debt. At a CNN town hall in February, Biden reiterated his opposition to forgiving $50,000, arguing the government shouldnt forgive loans for those who attended "Harvard and Yale and Penn.

Biden has, however, heartily endorsed less ambitious debt forgiveness. In January, he called on Congress to forgive $10,000 for all borrowers (even those who went to Harvard and Yale and Penn). In recent weeks, hes hinted that hes willing to forgive even more, even though blanket debt forgivenessof whatever amountwould disproportionately benefit the affluent, give colleges an excuse to hike prices, and tempt students to borrow even more.

The troubling thing is that this is one place where theres substantial bipartisan agreement on how to protect those who havent completed college or are wrestling with economic hardship, without embracing the kind of regressive, ridiculous giveaways that Warren craves. But Biden has shown no appetite for offering an alternative vision. Grade: C-

The culture war: For all his high-flown campaign talk about bringing America together and uniting our people, Bidens education moves have shown a president seemingly content to stoke the culture wars. On his first day in his office, he issued an executive order suggesting that schools must allow biological males to compete on female sports teams. He abolished the Trump-established 1776 Commission, whichin response to the New York Times 1619 Project and its kinwas charged with enabl[ing] a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States. He issued a Title IX executive order intended to undermine due process in college sexual assault investigations, while promising to restore Obama-era regulations under which the accused sometimes werent even informed of the charges against them (and which prompted hundreds of lawsuits from accused students).

Ol Centrist Joe Biden couldve approached these issues differently. He might have suggested that a presidential order should be preceded by a presidential panel that would help weigh the rights of biological girls, transgender individuals who identify as female, and issues of fairness and safety. (Recall that this is how George W. Bush effectively handled the contentious stem cell question.) Biden mightve nodded to the value of a reconfigured 1776 Commission and moved to retool it, or else quietly retired the effort in a less ostentatious manner. He mightve acknowledged that the current Title IX framework was adopted via a formal rulemaking process and that, whatever his concerns about it, hes sensitive to the importance of due process and believes theres value in moving deliberately.

Instead, throughout the past 100 days, Bidens administration has seemed eager to spark hot-button culture clashes in education. Now, the administration is revising the rules regarding the broadly popular American History and Civics Education program so as to prioritize grantees who embrace the woke agendaname-checking materials like the New York Timess historically challenged 1619 Project and the precepts of anti-racist darling Ibram X. Kendi.

Candidate Biden promised to lower the temperature of our culture wars and bridge some of our bitter divides. In education, early signs are that his administration has something very different in store. Grade: D-

Spending: Before Biden took office, Congress had already earmarked nearly $70 billion in emergency COVID aid to K-12 schools. As of February 2021, most of that money still hadnt been spent. (As the Wall Street Journal editorial board drily noted, Its hard to spend money when schools arent open for classroom instruction since unions have resisted returning to work in much of the country.)

But Biden doubled down in his American Rescue Plan, providing $130 billion more in additional K-12 aid. For reference, thats double what the federal government typically spends a year on K-12 schooling. Meanwhile, states are already so swamped with relief money that it may be years before Bidens bailout is fully spent. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance, estimates that nearly half of Bidens emergency COVID K-12 aid will be spent between 2024 and 2028. On top of that, Bidens proposed budget calls for a massive 41 percent increase in federal K-12 aid.

Theres a case to be made that schools needed some additional dollars (though its easier to make the case that families should receive these education fundsespecially in all those locales where schools are open only part time). But its tough to justify this decision to helicopter tens of billions into even the most inert of public school systems. Grade: D

All in all, surveying Bidens first 100 days, hes earned a gentlemans D. The best one can probably say is, remembering when it looked during parts of 2019 and 2020 like Warren and then Bernie Sanders might claim the Democratic nomination: Things could always be worse.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Grading Biden's First 100 Days on Education - The Dispatch

Highland Park residents recently opened their mailboxes to find flyers slamming a school board candidate because he put a Black Lives Matter sign in his yard.

Ahead of the May 1 municipal elections, some North Texas school board races have taken on a tenor infused with huge amounts of cash, political divisiveness and dog whistles evoking national wedge issues.

For more than a year, trustees have been at the center of some of the countrys most heated debates: People have packed into meetings to decry mask mandates or to demand they remain in place. Theyve come to say schools should be reopened to 100% capacity or that they must be closed completely to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Theyve testified that teachers should never talk about Black Lives Matter or that districts must be more active in dismantling systemic racism.

These high-profile debates made board members better known to their communities and considered with a more political slant, experts say.

While technically nonpartisan bodies, school boards have long dealt with questions that come with big political implications, including desegregation, said Donald Kettl, a professor at the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.

The difference now is that society has become so polarized and almost every question has become political, Kettl said.

How trustees feel about mask mandates and public health guidance becomes a reflection of their political attitudes. And local elections held so soon after the latest presidential contest give candidates the opportunity to play to those already active in both parties and mobilize voters in what are often low-turnout races.

A candidate in Keller ISD, for example, took to Facebook to fend off a claim that he was affiliated with QAnon, a group associated with unfounded conspiracy theories. In McKinney ISD, one of the candidates helped form a group devoted to unmasking children. She took legal action against the district over the matter.

Theres a base out there to be tapped into for both the left and the right and a set of dog whistles and sort of key phrases or terms that might be useful in trying to galvanize that base, Kettl said. An example is Black Lives Matter.

Perhaps because of that shift, some residents say this years trustee elections brought out the uglier sides of their communities as huge amounts of money flowed, political action committees formed and political consultants joined in campaigns.

Its yet another arena of our public life that will be relentlessly politicized and drawn into the vortex of the culture wars, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University.

Polarizing debate

School board seats typically are not the most glamorous of elected positions.

But in their unpaid jobs, trustees are responsible for hiring the superintendent, approving the budget and setting countless other decisions involving personnel, facilities and district policy.

Many trustees interpret their roles differently and attempt to exercise greater control, former Houston ISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said.

Others, and Ive experienced this over the years, really want to get involved and basically micromanage in the district, Saavedra said.

Its not a new phenomena for trustees to be minutely involved in district affairs, but it becomes more complex when they incorporate their political agendas, experts say. And recent months have created an ample opportunity for polarized debates in school boardrooms.

In both Carroll and Highland Park two wealthy, mostly white areas much of the discussion during the school board elections has been on diversity issues.

A flyer, which was circulated by a PAC linked to hotel magnate Monty Bennett, attacked Highland Park ISD candidate Doug Woodward for displaying a Black Lives Matter sign, labelling him a New Jersey liberal, although he left the state after high school. It contrasted a darkened photo of him with a smiling Kelli Macatee, describing her as a Christian Conservative Texan.

Woodward said its unfortunate that allegations about his beliefs keep coming out of left field, including falsely saying he supports unisex bathrooms.

Macatee said she was not aware of the flyer before it was circulated and would never have approved of it.

The mailer touched a raw nerve.

Near the start of the COVID-19 crisis, some Highland Park families formed a vocal group known as Park Cities Parents Unite to argue against mask mandates. It soon began weighing in on other controversial topics and blasting out its opinions in mailers and emails.

The group recently uploaded a video of Woodward, dubbing him Diversity Doug. It also mass-emailed parents last week saying Woke Politics have infiltrated the schools and circulated flyers decrying cancel culture in the classroom.

The groups president, Spencer Siino, said it formed long before the school board election, but that many residents who support its goals also support Macatee. Siino donated $5,000 to her campaign, but the nonprofit itself is not endorsing a candidate.

I imagine the temperature gets raised wherever you challenge the status quo, and thats particularly true in the Park Cities, TX, he wrote in an email.

Overall, Macatee has raised more than $42,000, initial campaign records show, far more than what any candidate raised during the last contested election in that district. She says her donations come from a wide range of people in the community. Part of her funding has gone toward paying two political consulting firms, including one with a record of riling up a school board race.

Among the central issues listed on Macatees website is: DIVERSITY We MUST NOT engage in racism for the sake of diversity.

Issues of diversity and inclusion have similarly engulfed Southlake Carroll ISD. Two sitting trustees were recently indicted on charges of violating open meetings law by discussing a proposed cultural competency plan outside an authorized setting. A judge issued a restraining order in December and temporarily halted the plan from being implemented.

The plan which would mandate the district hire a director of equity and inclusion, establish a grievance system through which students can report discrimination and require cultural competency training was cast by opponents as reverse racism. They accused the district of trying to form diversity police, even as students pleaded that it was necessary to help end the discrimination they faced at school.

As the plan sits in limbo, trustee candidates have positioned it as a debate over the future of Carroll ISD. District 5 candidate Hannah Smith described the plan as a hindrance to free speech while opponent Ed Hernandez said the community knows the plan wont be implemented and should move past the fear-mongering.

In District 4, Cameron Cam Bryan claimed the plan would cause more divisiveness in the district while Linda Warner said theres a need for an alternative to a plan rooted in a lengthy student code of conduct.

Tarrant County pastors are getting involved with the race. Two pastors from Gateway Church stopped short of endorsing candidates but reminded congregants of the members who were running for election including Bryan for school board. They went on to encourage churchgoers to vote.

Another church was forced to distance itself from the Southlake race after a woman called members identifying herself as a congregant and encouraged them to vote for Bryan and Smith, saying they must be elected because they stand against critical race theory and in support of freedom of speech and religion.

Money has also flowed into the Carroll race. Southlake Families PAC which describes itself as unapologetically rooted in Judeo-Christian values and backs Smith and Bryan raised more than $57,000 in the early months of 2021 and reported having nearly $140,000 cash on hand.

Bryan and Smith reported raising more than $50,000 each from January through late March. Meanwhile, Warner raised more than $24,000 and Hernandez reported $3,400 in political contributions over the same period.

It can be hard to tell if the notable financial support in these races is the impetus for or result of political polarization, said Kettl, the UT professor.

Its both cause and effect in a way that the most successful way of raising money is to tap into some of these deep-seated opinions and, on the other hand, the money tends to follow those who advanced those opinions, Kettl said.

Viola Garcia, president of the National School Boards Association, said its important to remember that children are listening to the rhetoric engulfing these races.

Our students are actively participating in the conversations that adults are having across our country, she said.

For example, a coalition of Southlake students dedicated to making their district more inclusive has spent months encouraging older students to register to vote and is endorsing Hernandez and Warner.

Take a moment to think about what kind of progress you would like to see in Southlake for future generations, the students wrote on their Instagram page.

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The DMN Education Lab deepens the coverage and conversation about urgent education issues critical to the future of North Texas.

The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from The Beck Group, Bobby and Lottye Lyle, The Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, The Meadows Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University and Todd A. Williams Family Foundation. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Labs journalism.

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Mailers, money and a churchs politics: How some North Texas school board races are drawn into the vortex - The Dallas Morning News

It looks as if the right are giving themselves heartburn to own the libs. Over the weekend, some prominent US conservatives shared pictures of themselves eating enormous slabs of meat in response to fabricated claims that president Joe Biden is planning to limit red meat consumption. Despite the fact that Bidens imaginary meat quotas exist only in these peoples heads, rightwingers have spent the last few days frothing at the mouth over them. Several Fox News hosts have repeated this baseless claim and a number of Republican politicians, including the governor of Texas, have tweeted their opposition to this fictional policy. Larry Kudlow, the former economic adviser to Donald Trump, even complained that Biden wants Americans to drink plant-based beer. You know, as opposed to the flesh-based beer that real Americans enjoy.

What on earth sparked this carnivorous conservative fever-dream? MailOnline. On Thursday it published a highly misleading article claiming: Bidens climate plan could limit you to eat just one burger a MONTH. The word could is doing a lot of heavy lifting there: Biden has said nothing of the sort. The assertion stems from a 2020 academic paper that has no connections to Biden; this study noted that if Americans made a 90% cut to their beef consumption, there would be a 51% reduction in diet-related US greenhouse gas emissions between 2016 and 2030.

Factchecking all this is largely futile, of course: the people who get het up about an imaginary war on burgers tend to not let reality get in the way of their feelings. I suspect many of the high-profile people pushing the Biden-bans-beef narrative knew very well it was baloney; they just wanted to stoke the culture wars. Fox News, for example, rammed the story down peoples throats for days then acknowledged on Monday that its reporting about Bidens meat quotas had been somewhat inaccurate. The rightwing grievance cycle goes like this: invent something to get upset about; have jowly men with names like Tucker and Chad amplify this imaginary grievance on conservative media outlets; find ludicrous and often self-defeating way to protest against this imaginary grievance; get Tucker and Chad to quietly admit they may have somewhat exaggerated things; conjure up something new to get outraged about.

This isnt the first time the right has had a meat-based meltdown. Meat has become a cornerstone of the culture wars, a recurring theme in the endless rightwing grievance cycle. They want to take away your hamburgers, the former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka yelled at the 2019 Conservative Political Action conference. This is what Stalin dreamed about but never achieved. Ah, yes, Stalins Five-Year Hamburger Eradication Plan I remember learning about that in history class. In todays polarised world, meat is no longer just a foodstuff: performative meat-eating has become a way to signal that youre a Real Man (or a Traditional Woman who appreciates Real Men) who loves guns and freedom and is sceptical about the climate crisis. Fox News host Jesse Watters once ate a steak on air to trigger a vegan. Very edgy stuff! Jordan Peterson, the rights favourite philosopher, has memorably endorsed a meat-only diet. (Tangentially, according to one study by researchers from the University of Hawaii, men incorporate more red meat into their diet when they feel like their manliness is threatened.)

Ultimately, however, it is not just the right that has an unhealthy obsession with meat. Global meat consumption keeps rising: the amount of meat consumed per person nearly doubled in the past 50 years. Plant-based eating may have become fashionable, yet the world is on track to consume more meat in 2021 than ever before. That is a problem because the meat industry has a huge carbon footprint. While banning people from eating animal products obviously isnt feasible, we desperately need to find ways to reduce global meat consumption. Food for thought while you enjoy a plant-based beer, anyway.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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No, Biden has not declared war on meat. But maybe thats what the world needs - The Guardian

Anderson edited "Leveraging: A Political, Economic and Societal Framework" (Springer, 2014), has taught at five universities and ran for the Democratic nomination for a Maryland congressional seat in 2016.

Gallup's fresh quarterly assessment of Americans' political leanings finds 44 percent of Americans regard themselves as independents. This is a remarkable statistic especially because we are living in a time when traditional media and social media continue to hammer away at the claim that we are a nation that is polarized.

Our people are polarized and, the media's conventional wisdom holds, that is why they have sent politicians to Washington to engage in very little but horrific trench warfare the policymaking equivalent of what happened when the Allies and Central Powers squared off in France for the first three years of World War I. Our Congress is simply acting out the polarization of its constituents, the theory goes, which of course makes it impossible for them to agree on plans to tackle almost every major issue.

How can this be, that we are a polarized people even though 44 percent regard ourselves as independents? It is not easy to provide a convincing answer. Although Gallup calculated that the share identifying as independents increased 4 percentage points since the final quarter of last year, it was also astounding that two out of every five citizens did not identify with either major party at the time of the presidential election.

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Polarization theorists will tell you the vast majority of self-identified independents aren't really political free spirits because their voting patterns clearly unmask them as red or blue, in the main. And the fresh numbers from Gallup, which has been taking similar measurements every three months since the 1980s, bears this out somewhat: Only 11 percent insist they have no partisan lean at all. But when pressed, 19 percent of the electorate identifies as independent but with a Democratic tilt and 15 percent reveal themselves as Republican-leaning independents. (The numbers don't perfectly align because of rounding.)

But conceding a leaning toward one party rather than the other as opposed to claiming allegiance to one side still says a lot. It may mean that millions of voters have decided that, in deciding to get behind a candidate who has a chance to win, they have ended up pointed most often toward the Republicans or Democrats.

OK, but where is the polarization in the electorate? Where is the fabled 50-50 split? Where is the straightforward statistic that explains the culture wars? Do we need another dozen surveys, asking the political identity question every possible way, to settle the point that we are not divided right down the middle and maybe not even 55 to 45?

Nine out of every 20 adults do not profess to be either a Democrat or a Republican. This fact cannot be reconciled with the assertion the electorate is polarized, no matter how much you crunch data in an effort to prove otherwise.

What we do know is that the media loves a boxing match between two contestants. Many in the American political press corps if they were sent to cover the governments of Britain or France or Germany, would get recalled for poor performance in a matter of months. That's because European parliamentary systems often rely on coalitions among as many as five parties, and American journalists who have only been trained to perpetuate the us-versus-them narrative would lack the nuance and the vocabulary and the syntax to explain such complex politics.

They would do better in Russia or China, with systems just as binary as ours. While we have two "small-d" democratic parties, they have autocratic regimes and dissenters. There are the voices of the system, and the voices of the powerless. Democratic and autocratic systems are extremely different, but they share an overall similar structure.

It is also true there are segments of both the Republican and Democratic parties that are loud and clear, even violent. These segments, probably two-fifths of the total electorate, are definitely polarized. Their voters have an intense identity conflict even if they do not have an intense policy conflict one that pits those who are threatened by highly educated whites, racial minorities and the LGBTQ community against working-class whites, rural whites, and large segments of the middle class and high-income whites.

Many academics and pundits have discussed the distinction between identity and policy issues, and there is surely some merit to the distinction. It is far from clear, though, that it neatly applies to all 240 million voters even if it can explain a good deal of the tension between the extremists in the electorate, between the right-wing media and the left-wing media, and between many of the lawmakers at the Capitol.

Even recognizing the importance of the identity-versus-policy distinction, this still leaves all the people between the 20-yard-line "red zones" on the national political football field. Though they differ with those on the other side of the 50-yard line, they are not rigid and uncompromising and are not driven by issues of identity.

Many are moderates, and some are new centrists who want an ambitious synthesis of progressive and conservative values. Most hate gridlock and love bipartisanship.

One thing is plain, and underscored anew by the Gallup numbers released this month: It is time to put the polarization thesis about the American people aside. Washington is polarized. The people of the United States are not.

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Nine in 20 of us identify as independents. So how can we be polarized? - The Fulcrum