SCROTUS

This Supreme Court Term Is All About White Grievance

The justices are poised to rule that the real victims of racism are white people.


PEMA LEVY

Reporter

MOTHER JONES


Mother Jones illustration; Getty
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From Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, to the deadly white nationalist riot in Charlottesville, to Fox News’ fear mongering over critical race theory, white grievance has become an animating force on the right. Now, it has officially arrived at the nation’s highest court.

During this term, the Supreme Court will decide at least five cases that ask whether laws and policies enacted to protect racial minorities in fact victimize white people. In each of these cases, conservative activists and GOP-controlled states are making versions of the same argument: That the 14th Amendment, enacted after the Civil War to protect the rights of Black people, actually forbids laws that make society more equal. Through the cases runs the narrative that racism is over and woke liberals are discriminating against white people. The court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, is poised to agree.

In the first of these cases, which the Supreme Court heard on October 4, Alabama argued that the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship and “equal protection of the law” to people freed from slavery, is in conflict with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which requires drawing political maps that give racial minorities a voice by ensuring lawmakers can’t draw districts to dilute their votes. By requiring states to take race into account when drawing voting districts, Alabama argues, the VRA violates the equal rights of white people by “favor[ing] one [race] over another.” (Notably, Alabama has historically drawn maps that empower white communities while splitting the state’s largest Black community across multiple districts—but denies that race is a factor.)

If the Supreme Court sides with Alabama, the result would be dramatic disempowerment of racial minorities, particularly in the South, on a scale not seen since the end of Reconstruction.

“Substantial minority populations in multiple States would likely lose their ability to elect representatives to Congress,” Harvard Law election expert Nicholas Stephanopoulos, who has studied how Alabama’s proposal for race-blind map drawing would impact people of color, explained in previewing the case. “And a similar pattern could play out in state legislatures, unwinding decades of racial progress.” And yet that is the outcome Alabama is asking for: Use the VRA and the 14th Amendment, both enacted to give Black people equal citizenship, to consign them again to the political shadows.

Alabama’s latest brief veers from the strictly legal to the sneering language more reminiscent of Fox News’ manufactured outrage over critical race theory to argue that racism is over and white people should not have to think about or feel guilt over the past.

“Plaintiffs assert that white Alabamians ‘have discriminated against [black Alabamians] for centuries,’ the brief says. “Of course, individual people cannot do anything ‘for centuries’; Plaintiffs’ narrative reduces individual Alabamians to members of competing racial monoliths and presumes that broad-brush claims about past discrimination can justify current laws that ‘favor[] one [race] over another.’” White Alabamians, the state argues, should be allowed to draw maps however they like, unburdened by the lingering effects of their ancestor’s oppression.

Through the cases runs the narrative that racism is over and woke liberals are discriminating against white people.

At the end of October, the court will hear two cases over race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Both cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), founded by the conservative legal activist Edward Blum. (Blum has targeted both voting rights and affirmative action for more than a decade, making similar appeals to end policies that benefit minorities’ political and educational potential.)

In both affirmative action cases, Blum’s group makes the case that universities that use race as a factor in their admissions decisions to remedy past discrimination and build campus diversity are the real racists: “Americans sometimes treat each other differently based on race,” the group’s latest brief in the Harvard case states. “But Harvard should not be perpetuating that ‘unfortunat[e]’ reality.”

Students for Fair Admissions and the universities dispute the meaning of the 14th Amendment. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood that race may be considered,” Harvard states in a brief, citing state and federal programs during Reconstruction to help freed people live as equal citizens after the Civil War. But SFFA dismisses this history. These programs “were likely remedial toward former slaves,” SFFA responded. “But the 1870s are over.”As in the Alabama voting rights case, a key argument is that white people are no longer under any obligation to rectify the disadvantages ingrained through slavery and segregation.

While the universities see race-conscious admissions as a way to further equality, SFFA argues that using race in admissions is an illegal form of discrimination. SFFA claims that the 14th Amendment mandates “colorblindness,” calling the universities that use race when considering whom to admit the new segregationists. By insisting that the 14th Amendment and Brown v. Board of Education—the 1954 decision that required the integration of public schools—both mandate ignoring race, SFFA inverts history. The group claims these civil rights landmarks for themselves, then uses them to advance the interests of white people over people of color.

The Supreme Court sanctioned race-conscious admissions in a 2003 case that Students for Fair Admissions wants the justices to overturn. The group blames affirmative action for the trend of schools and businesses choosing to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion as well as for anti-racist curriculums—placing their mission to eliminate affirmative action squarely in the GOP’s culture wars.This group’s goal is a society that ignores past oppression and forbids remedying its effects. This will lead to more white people in America’s universities and white-collar workforce, while outcomes worsen for people of color.

“Deviations from racial neutrality have spawned more,” the group argues. “No wonder, then, that universities have spent millions erecting bureaucracies that specialize in ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’” SFFA then takes an out-of-context quote from Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be an Anti-Racist, a frequent target of the right, to boost their position: “Antiracism teaches that ‘[t]he only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.’ This open embrace of racial classifications has trickled down to K-12 schools—with disturbing results.” Those “disturbing results” SFFA warns about include critical race theory being “forced” on children.

The effects of affirmative action, the brief continues, don’t stop in education. SFFA decries diversity programs in corporations and points to one instance in which medical experts supported using race as a factor in allocating COVID-19 vaccines due to the higher hospitalization and mortality rates among racial minority groups at the height of the pandemic.

In invoking the many ways schools, corporations, and even the medical establishment consider race to improve outcomes for minorities, Students for Fair Admissions demonstrates what the right’s culture war is really about. This group’s goal is a society that ignores past oppression and forbids remedying its effects. This will lead to more white people in America’s universities and white-collar workforce, while outcomes worsen for people of color. That is the fairer society we should aim for, Students for Fair Admissions argues. The one the Constitution requires.

A week after the Supreme Court hears the two affirmative action cases, it will hear a dispute over the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a 1978 law that gives preference to Native adoptive parents over non-Native adoptive parents when Native children are placed for adoption. The goal of the law is to stop state child welfare agencies from taking Native children away from their families and communities and assimilating them by placing them with mostly white families, which was happening with alarming frequency when the law passed. At the time, an estimated 25-35 percent of Native children were being placed for adoption. Today, according to the National Indian Child Welfare Association, Native children are removed from their homes at a rate 2 to 3 times that of white children, and, despite the ICWA’s protections, “often are not placed with relatives or other Indian families, even when such placements are available and appropriate.”

The state of Texas and several adoptive parents are challenging the law on the grounds that its classifications of Native and non-Native violate the equal protection guarantee of the 5th Amendment, which mirrors the 14th Amendment. They argue that applying a unique standard to Native kids is a racial classification that causes them to be treated differently from children of other races in adoption proceedings. The division of the prospective adoptive parents into Native and non-Native classifications, they claim, is also problematic. “ICWA treats non-Indians as a politically disfavored class: they are placed last on preference lists for either adoptive or foster-care placements,” the latest brief from Texas states.

The federal government and several tribes dispute that the law classifies based on race. Instead, they argue that native and tribal status are political classifications. Indian law experts warn that reading race into the Indian Child Welfare Act is a backdoor attempt to strip away tribal sovereignty by reclassifying Native tribes as racial rather than political entities—an effort that would threaten tribal sovereignty and the laws and treaties that give them land and economic resources. For tribes, this is an existential threat. With that context, it becomes clear that in this case, too, the plaintiffs are using laws meant to undo racism against minorities to instead secure the wants of white elites: be those business opportunities on tribal lands or an equal claim to Native children.

The first law protecting the rights of Black people to access theaters, restaurants, transportation, and other businesses passed in 1875, securing the protections of the 14th Amendment. In December, the Supreme Court will hear a case that threatens these safeguards. The case concerns a graphic designer in Colorado who wants to create wedding websites for heterosexual couples while denying her services to gay and lesbian couples. This would violate a Colorado civil rights law that prohibits businesses from discriminating against LGBTQ people and other protected minorities, so the graphic designer sued.

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the graphic designer, as expected, it could also enable discrimination by businesses based on race, sex, religion, and national origin. That door has been shut for decades, ever since Congress banned businesses from denying services to Black people through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld that law. More than five decades later, this case gives the court the opportunity to once again allow businesses to turn away customers whose identity they dislike.

These five cases reflect the arrival of the GOP’s culture wars at the high court. But the conservative justices have for years laid the groundwork for these cases; the briefs in support of striking down race-conscious remedies rely heavily on the decisions of the Roberts Court, as if they are simply asking the conservatives to finish the job they already started. Now, with a 6-3 majority, the path to redefining equality and victimhood is unobstructed.

Pro-life Dobbs decision is an attack on women’s liberty, another new member of Pontifical Academy for Life says

October 24, 2022

On October 15, Pope Francis named Roberto Dell’Oro, Director of the Bioethics Institute and a Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University (California), as one of 14 new ordinary members of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

Three days earlier, Dell’Oro strongly criticized Dobbs v. Bolton, the June Supreme Court decision that restored to states the ability to offer legal protection to unborn human beings.

“In the potential conflict between a woman’s claim to autonomy and a state’s right to determine the future of her pregnancy, the Dobbs decision sides with the latter over the former, rejecting any space of ‘personal liberty’ for women, even in cases of rape or incest,” said Dell’Oro, according to a report from the Catholic News Agency.

“To impose a choice on women over matters that belong to their most intimate sphere threatens to compromise their integrity, bodily and otherwise, as persons,” he added. “It also undermines basic requirements of tolerance toward the pluralism of moral perspectives within society. In matters of personal life, a democracy differs from a totalitarian regime because it maximizes, rather than restricts, a space of personal freedom for all citizens, including women.”

Loyola Marymount University, where Dell’Oro teaches, is an apostolate of the Jesuits’ USA West Province.

On October 15, Pope Francis also named Mariana Mazzucato, another supporter of abortion “rights,” to the Pontifical Academy for Life. The Pontifical Academy circulated a statement to journalists defending the appointment. Later, Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2016, personally defended the appointment. (See Phil Lawler’s commentary.)

According to the Pontifical Academy for Life’s statutes, promulgated by Pope Francis in 2016, ordinary members are appointed on the basis of their “promotion of the right to life of every human person,” among other qualifications. In this, the Pontifical Academy for Life differs some of the other pontifical academies, such as the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences, whose statutes call for academicians to be appointed simply “on the basis of their competencies in the social sciences and of their moral integrity.”

FROM A RIGHT TO LIFE (SIC) WEBSITE

The Making of an AMERICAN Leftist

My trajectory from teenage progressive to democratic socialist.

By Luke Savage

FCIC; Library of Congress; Getty; Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic
OCTOBER 24, 2022

Few people of my generation are ever likely to forget the euphoric evening of November 4, 2008. As networks projected the election of Barack Obama, those around me erupted in a spontaneous outburst of joy and emotion. The setting was the common room at the University of Toronto’s Hutton House, but being outside of America did nothing to dampen the excitement. Borders be damned, the event felt historic in its significance and universal in its implications. To those who assembled for tearful hugs and celebratory drinks in the quad, and to countless others around the world, Obama’s election felt like an epochal affirmation of political possibility—as if some invisible barrier had been shattered or some unconquerable breach in the human experience had finally been traversed.

I will admit to feeling a twinge of embarrassment in describing the innocent and uncomplicated emotions of that night some 14 years later. But I have nonetheless found myself returning to them again and again while reflecting on my own trajectory from teenage progressive to democratic socialist.

The journey to any mature political identity is invariably a complicated one, tracing a winding and sometimes circuitous path with many forks and detours along the way. Which is to say: I did not ultimately turn against the liberal mainstream or become a critic of its most prominent politicians simply because they fell short of my 19-year-old self’s exalted expectations. But watching the liberal political classes of North America and Europe navigate the turbulent events of the early 21st century has been a very real catalyst in pushing me—alongside many others of my generation—to the left.

In my early 20s, I tended to view the categories of liberal and conservative as neatly transposable onto a simple left/right binary. Although I never really called myself a liberal, I saw my own commitments as belonging on the same continuum. To be on the left was more or less to be a liberal in a hurry and, insofar as there was any distinction to be made, it was not one of substance but rather of degree.

That view became untenable during Obama’s early years in office. Elected in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the administration rejected any serious overhaul of the financial system, moving instead to keep Wall Street leviathans afloat with injections of federal cash while millions of working- and middle-class people were left to sink. If the president’s 2008 campaign had been a populist cri de coeur for democratic transformation from below, his governing ethos would quickly become technocratic and managerial. No reckoning, it seemed, was to be had with the powerful interests complicit in causing the financial crisis or the many other maladies running through the American body politic. Elite brokerage would take the place of democratic confrontation, and the president would ultimately carry out the rousing slogan “Yes we can” by neutering the very grassroots army that had gotten him elected.

The administration would secure its biggest legislative achievement through the Affordable Care Act, which many insisted was an incremental step toward the eventual goal of real universal health care. Only a few years later, as she faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from the Senate’s solitary democratic socialist, Obama’s would-be successor dismissed the idea as a dangerous fantasy that “would never, ever come to pass.” If I had any lingering belief in the reformist impetus of the liberal project, the intransigent centrism of Hillary Clinton’s campaign—and the relentless determination of powerful Democrats to squash and discredit the Sanders movement and its agenda—safely put it to rest.

Years of electoral setbacks and legislative frustrations finally culminated in the defeat of Clintonite triangulation at the hands of Donald Trump. On the night of the 2016 election, an experience as depressing as 2008 was elating, I wondered if the calamity might finally inspire elite liberals to reexamine some of their basic assumptions. For as long as I could remember, the basic contention of liberal leaders had been that, whatever their faults might be, a more moderate approach was the best way of assembling a coalition broad enough to win and keep the right at bay. Faced with the catastrophic rebuttal of that idea, however, they doubled down on old reflexes instead—holding up the idealized image of a pre-Trumpian America in which Democrats and Republicans cooperated, institutions functioned harmoniously, and the long arc of history bent ever so gently toward progress.

Whereas I had once seen the malaise of contemporary liberalism in terms of diffidence and capitulation, these developments (and countless others like them) cast it in a new light. Perhaps the problem was not so much a dearth of courage or a paucity of ambition, but rather a deeper pessimism about the possibility, and desirability, of a politics that looks significantly beyond the horizons of our stagnant present. As the de facto standard-bearers of American progressivism, institutional liberals continue to draw from a lexicon of social justice and moral urgency. Yet even as they adopt the language of exception and crisis, their leaders reject democratic populism and appeal to moderation and consensus instead.

In the Biden era, this contradictory posture has expressed itself through a White House that formally acknowledges existential threats such as right-wing authoritarianism and climate change while maintaining a largely conventional political style concerned with upholding norms. Running for president at the height of a pandemic, Joe Biden could be heard promising to veto universal health care even if a proposal managed to make its way through the House and Senate. Inheriting the most protracted global crisis since the Second World War, his administration has (despite some limited successes) proved unable to implement much of its initially promised agenda of domestic reform. Confronting what they tell us is a new and uniquely malevolent strain of conservatism, liberal operatives spent tens of millions ahead of this year’s midterms to elevate far-right Republican primary candidates who refuse to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election—part of a questionable strategy to boost the chances of centrist Democrats. Faced with a right-wing Supreme Court’s decision to stampede over abortion rights, the first instinct of many top Democrats was to call for calm, send fundraising emails, and remind people to vote blue in November.

Peter Beinart: Biden stops playing it safe

Though frustration with individual politicians may have been a powerful accelerant, I ultimately ended up on the left because I came to see liberalism’s incessant deference to markets as irreconcilable with its stated commitments to freedom and equality. People are not meaningfully free if they are compelled to spend their waking hours struggling to afford the necessities of life, or if they have to choose between going hungry and seeing a doctor. In a liberal society, the state does protect important political and civil rights. But outside of those things, many must fend for themselves in a chaotic marketplace where they are compelled to compete and trample over others to obtain what’s needed for a dignified life. We therefore need a thicker vision of the common good than liberalism is able, or willing, to offer.

At its best, liberalism represents a rich vein of democratic thought from which conservatives and radically minded reformers alike have long been able to mine. It’s therefore a truism, as the left-wing essayist and literary critic Irving Howe put it nearly 70 years ago, that any genuine “revival of American radicalism will [necessarily] acknowledge not only its break from, but also its roots in the liberal tradition.” At the level of political practice, however, what is generally called “liberalism” today is often small-c conservative in spirit: In language and rhetoric, the soaring cadences of struggle, progress, and reform persist but any profound attachment to them has gradually withered away.

The causes of this development are complex and varied, but the outcome is a form of politics whose managerial impulses have overwhelmed its more progressive ones. Beginning in the 1990s, America’s liberal mainstream conceded many of the core premises of Reaganism and has since largely committed itself to working from within its stifling confines. While some view this turn as a pragmatic one born of political necessity, I have come to think it represents a more lasting ideological conversion. Which is to say: Whatever role bleak memories of George McGovern’s thrashing by Richard Nixon may have had in inspiring electoral caution, I mostly believe liberals of the Clinton era took up the Reaganite religion of unbound markets less because they had to than because they wanted to. Regardless of how we account for this convergence, the upshot has been an ever-narrowing field of political contestation in which fundamental questions are off the table and much of what remains is the orderly management of discontent in an unequal and unstable world.

The obstacles to change and progress today are both daunting and real. But being aware of constraints and limitations in a battle is not the same as refusing to engage in one. When I watched the inauguration of Barack Obama 14 years ago, my younger self could find in his paeans to overcoming political difference and transcending the partisan divide a higher calling to equality, universalism, and cooperation toward the common good. Today, when his successors issue similar refrains, I now hear something else: the exhausted liturgy of a project that reflexively spurns real democratic ambition and prefers to conduct politics as the Tory philosopher Michael Oakeshott once recommended, namely by steadying the ship and refusing to chart a definitive course toward any particular harbor.

The problem is that, while smiling officers cheerfully maintain appearances from the comfort of the upper decks, the ship is sinking, and many of the passengers below have begun to drown.

This essay was adapted from Luke Savage’s book, The Dead Center.

The Dead Center - Reflections On Liberalism And Democracy After The End Of History

LUKE SAVAGE

Luke Savage is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine and the author The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History.

Exposing the Financial Costs of Climate Change—and Denial of the Climate Crisis

As a warming planet brings economic tensions to a boil, following the money can reveal some critical stories.

MARK SCHAPIRO

MOTHER JONES

 

Grass growing in the shape of planet Earth, inside a transparent piggy bank.

Pogonici / Getty Images

This piece was published originally by Capital & Main.

Biting the Hand

It hasn’t been the best season for the invisible hand, the 18th century principle that the market be left to its own devices free of government intervention.In August, President Biden took his right hand and applied his signature to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — signaling that the government would be tipping scales in the economy toward renewable energy. While unanimous opposition from Republicans signaled their continuing lip service to that free market ideology, in truth they — along with some Democrats — have long manipulated the economics of energy by steering billions of dollars in public funds toward the fossil fuel industry.

Fossil fuel companies have received at least $20 billion annually in federal and state government subsidies over the past 10 years alone, and as much as $6 trillion from governments worldwide. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declared in September that the industry was “feasting off subsidies” while our planet burns. So there’s an important frame to the story of the IRA that’s worth remembering: The $141 billion it allocates to support wind and solar industries represents what is likely the first time that subsidies and tax credits for renewable energy in the United States have exceeded subsidies to fossil fuel companies — and is just about two-thirds of what the petrochemical companies have received from the government over the past decade.

The massive government support for oil and gas interests was largely missing from the reporting on the IRA, and is certainly worthy of greater media scrutiny moving forward. In the U.S. those subsidies come in the form of loan guarantees, tax breaks and discounted rates for drilling on public lands, and in some cases direct payments to explore for oil in difficult locales — all provided to the companies that are, collectively, most responsible for the massive and expensive climate disruptions being experienced on Earth. Identifying which fossil fuel companies receive those different forms of direct and indirect government aid would be a significant contribution to the public interest — particularly since the public funds the subsidies, and the public pays for the billions of dollars in damages to the economy from the companies’ greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate economist Richard Heede has identified the primary contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is a very small group. Apportioning responsibility for climate costs to any one company is, of course, difficult given the range of emitters. But when Heede reviewed CO2 emissions data from 1854 to 2010, he discovered that just 90 global companies are responsible for two-thirds of the emissions now wreaking havoc in the atmosphere. Among the top 20 global emitters from 1854 to 2010 are five U.S. companies, including the top two, Chevron and ExxonMobil.

We know their names and those of others, and the media can and should remind us of them with each new financial consequence — from the costs of fighting new diseases linked to increased heat to contending with the developmental impact on children of exposure to greenhouse gasses like nitrogen dioxide to rebuilding from extreme weather disasters, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates to be at least $15 billion thus far this year alone, and could be as much as $128 billion annually by mid-century, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget. And that’s just one fraction of the damages which will, if current emission rates persist, only increase. NOAA recently issued a handy graph on the accelerating pace of “billion dollar” extreme climate disasters. And here are two sources on fossil fuel subsidies and the industries that bear significant responsibility for those costs: Oil Change International and the Environmental Integrity Project.

This great piece in Nature gets as close as I’ve seen to an explanation for why the helping hands given to the petrochemical companies can be difficult to report. Fundamentally, it’s because they’re so deeply woven into obscure tax codes and provisions of the national budget. Challenges notwithstanding, there are many vital stories to be written on taxpayer-supported handouts to oil and gas entities.

The pressures of climate change are revealing how the myth of the so-called invisible hand has long concealed what is in fact a highly manipulated energy market. This became quite visible when, in the runup to the passage of the IRA, 15 states pulled back the curtain on just how much the “free market” deck is stacked. Politico detailed how West Virginia’s Republican state treasurer was about to place at least six major financial firms on a blacklist for state funds due to their attempts to, slowly but steadily, shift their investments away from fossil fuels. By the time Biden signed the IRA, in August, the state treasurers of at least five other states — Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Florida — had also established, or announced their intention to establish, their own often overlapping blacklists of financial firms retreating from fossil fuel investments.

Among the blacklisted companies are Wells Fargo, BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. More Republican-led states are likely to follow. Most of the state funds in question are tied to employees’ pensions, which means the retirement funds of state employees will be even more directly exposed to accelerating climate risks — as the state treasurer of Oregon pointed out — than they already are. (At current emission rates those costs would likely cut global economic output by 10%-14% by 2050 — amounting to as much as $23 trillion — according to the global insurer SwissRe, which has its money on the line with such predictions.) The head of Ceres, an NGO that has been pushing climate disclosure rules for years, captures the “blatant lie” at the heart of the actions of West Virginia and the other states.

Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, declared that the blacklist bill would put an end to what he called “energy discrimination.” Which is another way of saying that the state should go back to discriminating in favor of oil. That mix of tax breaks and subsidies to the fossil fuel industries has amounted to as much as $500 million annually in recent years, according to an Oklahoma Policy Institute newsletter.

The question that would no doubt lead to an overflow of revealing stories in the 16 states where such initiatives are either complete or in motion, not to mention other fossil fuel-producing states, is this: In what ways has government favored oil and gas companies, and does that constitute “discrimination” against renewable energy companies?

Answers to that question might be the final bite to the myth of the invisible hand that’s been grifting us for more than two centuries.

Black Rock and a Hard Place

Meanwhile, tensions are rising for the financiers, caught in a climate pincer: Those very same blacklisted companies, and many more, will soon be contending with a new set of reporting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission, set to take effect in January. The SEC’s proposed new guidelines will require that publicly traded companies report to shareholders the “material” risks they face from climate change.

For financial firms like Goldman Sachs, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America and others that are on the evolving Republican blacklist, that will include the risks faced by the companies they loan money to or invest in. Climate change is hitting the bottom line, and the SEC wants those financial exposures no longer hidden.

The SEC’s initiative came shortly after West Virginia’s treasurer withdrew $8 billion in state funds from an investment fund at BlackRock, the publicly traded financial giant, in response to the company’s CEO recommending that investors embrace a “net zero” strategy favoring low carbon emitters.

I have no great sympathy for the financial community. But consider this: These corporations now face two converging and contradictory forces that foreshadow trouble ahead. On the one hand, they are under pressure from states controlling access to potentially multibillion dollar accounts not to pay attention to the mounting economic consequences of climate change. On the other hand, the SEC is telling them to pay attention to precisely those pressures in order to produce an accurate portrait of their financial prospects.

These colliding imperatives will compel some of the nation’s largest financial firms to decide between defying the SEC — which would subject them to potential sanctions for nondisclosure of financial risks — or defying the rules of nearly a quarter of the states, and losing potentially billions of dollars’ worth of public fund accounts.

There will be great opportunities for high-impact media coverage as companies maneuver through those converging pressures and the vice tightens. What, if anything, does JP Morgan Chase do to regain its hold on millions of dollars it handled for West Virginia government pension funds, and the funds of other states withdrawing their assets on climate grounds?

More such questions — and storylines — are coming down the pike as even the bland rating agencies discover the climate backlash. For example, how do businesses in Utah and Idaho respond to the declaration by those states’ financial officers that they will not be bound by the creditworthiness ratings of S&P Global due to the willingness of that company, one of the stalwarts of the U.S. credit business, to incorporate environmental and social factors in its ratings of companies’ financial health?
Follow the Money

All of which raises another question as climate disruptions to the economic order accelerate: If shareholders will now be informed about the very real risks from climate disruptions to the U.S. and global economy, what about the rest of us? What, for example, are the consequences of the rising cost of peaches and cherries and other immovable tree crops as temperatures rise, chill hours (key to ripening) fall, and fruit quality and quantity decline? …the diminishing value of a condo on the coast of Florida after the devastation of a hurricane and the likelihood of more to come as sea levels rise? …the increased cost of crop insurance for farmers and the impact on food prices? …the costs to school districts forced to install air conditioning units in their classrooms?

Climate change is causing the creation of divergent economies — those that recognize how profoundly it alters calculations of risk and economic fortune, and those that refuse to acknowledge those risks even as the costs rise. Blindness to financial risk would be a sure sign that a CEO has lost his or her business savvy. Abundant reporting opportunities lie in the split reality emerging between those who acknowledge the risks ahead and those who fail to see them.

JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR; REIFICATION

Why Does Every Tech Company Want to “Democratize” Something?

A concept rooted in politics and the public sphere has been squeezed into a new container: that of the individual consumer.

István Szugyiczky

LORA KELLEY NOVEMBER + DECEMBER 2022 ISSUE MOTHER JONES


If you were cooking up a pitch for a tech company, you could do worse than “Our mission is to democratize X.” Many have used it in the past.

Glossier, a cosmetics company, explains it is “giving voice through beauty” in order to “democratize an industry that has forever been top-down.” Robinhood, an app that gamified trading, says its “mission is to democratize finance for all.” CoachHub, a corporate coaching company, asserts: “Our Mission: Democratize coaching.” It goes on like this on About pages. Airtable wants to “democratize software creation”; Bolt is going to “democratize commerce”; PayPal is working to “democratize financial services.” Elizabeth Holmes, infamously, set out to “democratize healthcare,” according to media fanfare.

Democratize has two usual definitions: One is to bring democracy or democratic principles to a place. The other, and the usage that has infiltrated Silicon Valley, is to “make (something) accessible to a wide range of people.” For the past couple decades, tech companies and startups have used the latter version liberally, generally to mean they are hoping to make a product or service available at a low cost.

The word’s usage reflects optimism for a new approach to business dealings. In the 1990s, companies began centering their customers, often at the expense of other values. Over the next decade, Jeff Bezos’ signature “customer obsession” became mainstream. Companies sought to give users a voice, to make them feel like they were doing something with their purchasing power. With tech’s version of “democratization,” a concept rooted in politics and the public sphere was squeezed into a new container: that of the individual consumer.

This conscious capitalism became popular as customers were empowered to vote with their wallets, participating in a globalism that promised to end history. In books, usage of “democratize” spiked in 1918 (World War I ended and countries were becoming democracies), and again in 1947 (soon after World War II was over). But the highest peak for the word’s usage came in 2006, around the time Twitter was born, Google bought YouTube, Facebook was in its infancy, and the United States was claiming it was spreading democracy in the Middle East.

By the early 2010s, tech giants including Google were stirring together the language of business and civic engagement. According to Astra Taylor’s The People’s Platform, “In the 2012 ‘open issue’ of Google’s online magazine Think Quarterly, phrases like ‘open access to information’ and ‘open for business’ appear side by side purposely blurring participation and profit seeking.”

But, as Taylor warned, “Despite enthusiastic commentators and their hosannas to democratization, inequality is not exclusive to closed systems. Networks reflect and exacerbate imbalances of power as much as they improve them.” Putting something online, or making it cheaper, does not make it just.

Democracy has a positive social valence. An affiliation with the idea, no matter how oblique, is flattering. It suggests that a good or service—whether it’s a device that runs tests on a few drops of blood, or a one-click payment processor—is for the people. But despite lofty mission statements, companies have in the end hewed closely to traditional pathways for their purpose: making a profit.

Kendra Albert, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, has studied “legal talismans”—terms like “free speech” that tech companies use to give legitimacy to decisions (say a failure to ban a user) that do not involve only legal processes. Democratization is a bit different, Albert says, since democracy doesn’t have a settled legal definition: “The lack of specific meanings for democratization is a plus not a minus in the sense that it basically allows companies to make it mean whatever they want, while still invoking this theme” of civic participation.

“Democratize” offers a synecdoche for an optimism that tech’s social goals and financial imperatives are aligned. And it helps that it looks great on a Squarespace landing page. (Squarespace wants to “democratize good design,” by the way.)

Private Companies Helped Ruin Jackson’s Water

As Mississippi considers privatizing Jackson’s water, parts of the city system already run by private companies have been left in ruins.

A resident displays contaminated water in her kitchen in Jackson, Miss. 

(AP Photo/Steve Helber)


Oct 24, 2022•Naomi LaChance

THE LEVER

The federal government is investigating why the state of Mississippi has failed to adequately fund the Jackson water system, after the city’s water crisis left 180,000 residents without clean water for much of August and September.

The news comes as Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) has been moving to privatize the city’s water system, meaning a private company would take over the system, allegedly to improve the city’s water quality.

In truth, Jackson has already worked with two private companies on parts of its water system, although these companies do not own the infrastructure. The results have been disastrous — and in some cases, helped lead to the most recent crisis. While these partnerships differ from privatization because the city still owns the utilities, they are a harbinger of what privatization could entail.

Jackson declared a water emergency in August, when rain caused the Pearl River to flood, resulting in water that could not be properly treated. Videos from Jackson circulating on social media showed water the color of coffee flowing from faucets. Residents were told to keep their mouths closed while showering, while some people had no water at all and were unable to flush toilets.

On September 15, Reeves lifted the boil water advisory after seven weeks — but the root causes of the water crisis have not been fixed. On September 16, a group of Jackson residents filed a class-action lawsuit over the water crisis, describing “​​neglect, mismanagement, and maintenance failures.”

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency said it is investigating whether the state of Mississippi ​​discriminated against Jackson, a majority Black city, on the basis of race in how it’s funded the city’s water system. And two Democratic lawmakers, including Rep. Bennie Thomspon (D-Miss.), announced they will investigate how Mississippi plans to spend $429 million in funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law allocated to improve the state’s water infrastructure.

According to Politico, the state received almost $75 million in water funding under the law this year but is spending none of it in Jackson.

The water crisis, which affected 150,000 people, was years in the making. The Lever recently reported that the credit ratings agency Moody’s helped make Jackson’s infrastructure problems worse by inflating the city’s borrowing costs.

Part of the blame also lies with the city’s work with the private companies Veolia and Siemens. Veolia, a French water, waste, and energy management company, has periodically dumped partially treated wastewater in the river, while German multinational conglomerate Siemens developed a frustratingly expensive billing system and put the city on the hook to Wall Street bondholders for more than $200 million. As a result, the city and residents found themselves with unsafe water conditions — and had less money to spend on infrastructure.
Tip Jar

Jackson Mayor Chokwe A. Lumumba (D), who is against privatization, said in 2019: “Siemens and those working with the company failed to deal honestly with the City of Jackson… and burdened the City with one of the most expensive municipal water meter and billing systems in the country.”

Privatization of utilities can have ruinous effects, because the process removes public accountability: Citizens cannot vote a corporation out of office. Citizens can also no longer meet with those in charge of infrastructure. Companies are no longer transparent to the public about their plans and operations. It also means that profits will become a main priority, making privatization expensive for taxpayers.

As the effects of climate change increase, more cities are likely to see infrastructure crises, particularly Black cities.

According to Mary Grant, Public Water for All campaign director at environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch, Jackson’s water problems are “a story foremost about structural and systemic racism.”

The problems began in the 1980s, she said, after school integration led many white, wealthy residents to move to the suburbs. “That’s when the water system first started deteriorating,” said Grant. “And so it’s just been decades of intentional disinvestment in the system… It’s this continual legacy of intentional neglect by the state and intentional disinvestment in the system, as well as federal austerity [as] a contributing factor.”

“I think [privatization] is a horrible idea that will just exacerbate the crisis,” said Grant. “If you can’t afford to improve your water system, how could you possibly afford to have profits extracted from your community just to pad the bottom line of a corporation?”

Reeves’ office did not respond to The Lever’s request for comment.

“We Look Forward To The Chance To Make A Difference”

In 2010 and 2012, Jackson dumped 2.8 billion gallons of partially treated wastewater from the Savanna Street Wastewater Treatment Plant into the Pearl River.

The EPA said at the time: “When wastewater systems overflow, they can release untreated sewage and other pollutants into local waterways, threatening water quality and contributing to beach closures and disease outbreaks.” Jackson was charged by the EPA for these unauthorized bypasses.

In 2017, to try to improve the system’s efficiency, Jackson entered a 10-year deal with Veolia to operate the city’s three wastewater treatment plants. Their contract was to not only manage wastewater treatment but also operate 98 pumping stations and sludge disposal, according to a press release from the company.

John Gibson, president and chief operating officer of Veolia North America’s municipal and commercial business, said in 2017: “We look forward to the chance to make a difference in the lives of area residents through our partnership and provide opportunities for local businesses and quality of life enhancements in Jackson.”

Veolia did make a difference — but not in the way residents would have wanted. The Savanna Street Wastewater Treatment Plant operated by Veolia allegedly dumped 6 billion gallons of partially treated wastewater into the Pearl River in 2020, according to a filing by federal and state environmental regulators about violations of the Clean Water Act.

Plaintiffs working on behalf of the EPA and the state of Mississippi noted that the city had not started to evaluate the wastewater system more than two years after the deadline, and they had not started its rehabilitation either.

In 2019, 2020, and 2021, the state issued advisory warnings not to swim or fish in the Pearl River due to its sewer system and overflows at the city’s wastewater treatment plants. Jackson’s contract with Veolia is still ongoing.

This wasn’t the first time Veolia was accused of making a bad situation worse. In 2015, Flint, Michigan, contracted with Veolia to improve the city’s water quality — but the following year, then-Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette (R) sued the company. He charged them with “professional negligence and fraud, which caused Flint’s lead poisoning problem to continue and worsen, and created an ongoing public nuisance.” The charges were dismissed in 2019.

Veolia was also accused of negligence in another Flint case that was ruled a mistrial this past August, after a jury was unable to make a unanimous decision on the matter. According to plaintiffs, lead in drinking water systems caused neurocognitive injuries in four children. Lead was also found in Jackson’s water as early as 2015.

Although residents were given more than 300 boil water advisories in the past two years, doing so would not reduce lead levels and may actually increase them.
“Unprecedented And Is Contrary To Industry Standards”

In 2012, the city signed a $90 million deal with Siemens to install new water meters across the city. Siemens promised Jackson “guaranteed savings,” according to a 2019 lawsuit by the city.

In the years that followed, residents reported receiving either no bills for months or years, or bills that were inaccurately high. Siemens also worked with several subcontractors, inflating its costs.

The city has since accused Siemens of fraud. According to the lawsuit, “Siemens committed fraud with respect to who was performing the work on the project, what the system would do, and what savings the system would generate, among other things.”

The city also said in the lawsuit that more than half of the 60,000 new water meters were installed incorrectly, which meant they “could not communicate with the billing system.”

Grant said the contract “led to massive erroneous bills and lack of… trust in the bills that people were receiving, because a lot of them [were] erroneous and inflated.”’

According to the lawsuit, “The City relied on Siemens, the supposed expert on these types of projects, yet Siemens failed to disclose material information regarding the project’s components and implementation.”

In 2020, the parties settled the lawsuit when Siemens agreed to pay Jackson $89.8 million for fraudulent behavior and botched work, ending the contract. But the city spent that sum on its water and sewage system — and on lawyers litigating the case.

The situation left the city with little matter to spare on improving its water system — and left residents with little trust that their water woes would improve.
“They’re Trying To Extract A Profit”

Now, in light of Jackson’s water crisis, the state is allegedly in talks with an unnamed private water company to take over the system. While the city was originally involved in the discussion, Lumumba said on September 7 that the city lost that role when the state took over the discussion.

According to Grant, there are better ways to help Jackson than privatizing its water system.

“Jackson needs direct federal grants, aid, and technical assistance,” she said. “Having profiteers come in and extract even more wealth from the community, it’s not viable, and it will make matters worse.”

At a September 13 town hall meeting, Lumumba, Jackson’s mayor, shared his concerns about privatization: “The problem with privatization is that companies aren’t taking over your system in order to be benevolent. They’re not taking over your system just because they want to come help, they’re trying to extract a profit from it.”
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He added: “And so when you have to make the level of investment that Jackson’s system requires, that means that there will be significant increases in the cost. They have looked at the margins and they are trying to understand where they get that money from. And if you privatize it then we have far less control over making sure that your rates stay affordable.”

Lumumba’s office told The Lever that they were not sure what would happen moving forward with the privatization of the water system.

Grant, of Food and Water Watch, said there is usually a bidding process and request for proposals, which can take about a year. Once the system is sold, it is almost impossible to take the infrastructure back to public ownership.

As Lumumba put it at a city council meeting in August: “Privatization is, in fact, the selling of the system. And there are white papers and extensive literature that shows [the communities impacted most] are the poor communities.”

U$A
Two Decades of Progress, Nearly Gone: National Math, Reading Scores Hit Historic Lows

By Sarah D. Sparks — October 24, 2022 

Illustration by Gina Tomko/Education Week and iStock/Getty

The pandemic has smacked American students back to the last century in math and reading achievement, according to the tests known as the Nation’s Report Card.

Results for students who took the test in spring 2022—the first main National Assessment of Educational Progress administration for these grades since the pandemic began—show the biggest drop in math performance in 4th and 8th grades since the testing program began in 1990. In reading, 4th and 8th graders likewise are performing on par with students in the 1990s, and about a third of students in both grades can’t read at even the “basic” achievement level—the lowest level on the test.

Academic declines on NAEP were sweeping, spanning low-income and wealthier students, boys and girls, and most racial or ethnic groups in both subjects and grades.

That made for some achievement gaps changing in unusual ways. For example, from 2019 to 2022, reading performance fell significantly for white 8th graders, but not their Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American classmates, leading to smaller racial differences in performance. In 4th grade, Black, Hispanic, white, and Native American students’ average reading scores fell in 2022, while Asian students’ average scores improved, widening the white-Asian performance gap from 7 points in 2019 to 12 points in 2022.

“This is not just nerdy education policy stuff. This is really about the future of young people. The world we’re moving towards is one that requires significantly higher skills to be successful, to live lives of purpose and meaning,” said Jeb Bush, former Florida governor and founder of the education advocacy group Chiefs for Change, in a briefing before the NAEP results were released. “If we allow these learning gaps to grow, and if we allow for the decline in learning to just stand pat ... a lot of dreams are gonna be shattered over the long haul.”

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The results come on the heels of NAEP’s long-term trend data released last month, which also showed historically poor performance for 9-year-olds.

Eighth graders saw the steepest drops in both subjects, and high schools will have to significantly ramp up academic support for the students who entered high school this fall, said Beverly Perdue, a former governor of North Carolina and chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the testing program

“Otherwise,” she said, “students will graduate and enter college and the workforce without the skills and knowledge we need to be globally competitive.”

Graduation rates fell in at least 31 states for the class of 2021, and the latest graduating class of 2022 had historically low scores on college placement tests.

In math, pool of struggling learners grows

The average NAEP math score fell 5 points in 4th grade, to 236 out of 500, and in 8th grade fell 8 points, to 274 out of 500. In prior years, the top-performing 10 percent of math students held their ground, while the lowest-achieving students fell. This time, however, math achievement fell across every percentile, even for the highest performers.

“Normally, for a NAEP assessment at the national level, we’re talking about significant differences of 2 and 3 points. So an 8-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark; it is troubling; it is significant,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP.

In both grades 4 and 8, more students cannot meet even the basic level of math achievement, according to the NAEP report. The pool of advanced performers in math has likewise shrunk at both grades, though top readers have held steady.

Roberto Rodríguez, the Education Department’s assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy, noted that, in a prior NAEP study of districts’ practices during the pandemic, 75 percent of districts reported that they held remedial programs this summer, and more than half of districts in the study reported using intensive tutoring to help catch students up.


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MATHEMATICS Explaining That Steep Drop in Math Scores on NAEP: 5 Takeaways
Sarah D. Sparks, October 24, 2022

“Kids need more time,” said Patricia Levesque the chief executive officer of the Foundation for Excellence in Education (ExcelinEd), in a briefing before the NAEP results were released. “They lost time over the last several years, of getting instruction that they need in math, and we need to figure out ways to give them more time.”

Levesque pointed to states like Tennessee, which is requiring high-dosage tutoring for students performing below grade level. However, with large swaths of students now far behind, paying for intensive tutoring may be hard to sustain after federal pandemic recovery funding runs out.

And it’s not clear teachers feel ready to take on the severity of students’ learning loss.

More than a third of 4th graders and 21 percent of 8th graders who participated in NAEP had a teacher who reported spending nearly every day on remedial material in math. But less than half of students in either grade had teachers who were confident in their ability to address knowledge and skill gaps in math.

“We’ve known for decades that many teachers, especially in high-poverty areas, are not as mathematically confident,” said Zalman Usiskin, a professor emeritus and director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project. “They tend to focus more on memorization and the most basic of basic skills, not on problem-solving. ... and the prediction has to be that it’s going to get worse, because teachers now are trying to catch up students who are behind because of pandemic-related disruptions.”

Reading drops are smaller but hit low-achievers hard

Nationwide, the average reading score on NAEP fell 3 points from 2019 to 2022, to 217 in grade 4 and 260 in grade 8. While not as large a drop as math, it represented a significant decline in reading skills for both grades for all but the top 10 percent of 4th graders.

While experts have urged schools to accelerate students’ learning in order to help them make up lost academic ground, more than half of 8th graders had teachers who reported using remedial measures at least once or twice a week, and 20 percent had teachers who did so nearly every day. Among 4th graders, 70 percent of teachers reported using remedial measures a couple times a week. Moreover, about 1 in 3 students who took NAEP in 2022 had a teacher who reported covering the previous year’s material and using remedial instruction every day or nearly every da

When it comes to acceleration, “it just seems as if we expect teachers to know how to do that,” said Kymyona Burk, the policy director for early literacy at ExcelinEd, and a former literacy director for the state of Mississippi. “We have to invest in people, we have to invest in their knowledge.”

In both grades 4 and 8, larger numbers of students cannot read at even the basic academic level than was the case in 2019, according to the 2022 NAEP report. Top readers have held steady, but gained little ground.

Burk said states need to bolster the use of science-based reading instruction to help students who started school during the pandemic and may struggle more with foundational reading skills.


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READING & LITERACY WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS5 Things to Know About the Slide in Reading Achievement on NAEP
Sarah D. Sparks, October 24, 2022

Looking ahead, there are some signs of recovery in reading at least. One study by the testing group Amplify looked at more than 300,000 K-3 students in 43 states who took the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, assessment, this fall—which would be the most recent, available testing data. That study found that while students in all grades remain below their pre-pandemic reading achievement, the share of students who started school this fall on track to read on grade level by the end of the academic year ticked up in every grade, ranging from 33 percent of kindergarteners to 55 percent of 3rd graders.

“The news may be still a bit grim, although the positive side is that, directionally, we are seeing that students at the beginning of this year are more prepared for school than they were at the beginning of last year,” said Paul Gazzero, the director of data analysis for Amplify.

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READING & LITERACYPROJECT Why Putting the 'Science of Reading' Into Practice Is So Challenging
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Still, the Amplify study suggests large shares of students—ranging from half of kindergartners to 30 percent of 3rd graders—won’t read on grade level by the end of this school year without significant, intensive interventions.
Political fallout?

Well before NAEP results were made public, some education pundits predicted students in states that reopened their schools earlier in the pandemic would have better scores than students in states with longer pandemic-related spans of virtual schooling. Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, suggested that differences in the performance between states that reopened school buildings for in-person learning earlier in the pandemic could become fodder in midterm elections.

But Carr, the NCES commissioner, strongly disagreed with interpreting the results in that way.

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” Carr said. “And let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different all across the United States. ... We have massive comprehensive decline everywhere, whether some were in remote learning longer or shorter than others.”

By the start of 2020-21, the first full school year of the pandemic, an Education Week analysis found that several states had mandated full-time, in-person learning, (Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North and South Carolinas, Oregon, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia) but nearly three-quarters of the 100 largest school districts (representing 9 million students) opened that fall only with virtual instruction.
In reading, 8th graders lost ground in all but two of those states; Iowa and Texas had flat scores, but so did several late-opening states like California, New York, and New Jersey. Performance was more mixed at 4th grade, with seven early-opening states and at least one late-opening one, California, seeing no change in reading achievement during the pandemic.

The other six early-opening states saw drops in 4th grade reading in 2022. In math, only South Carolina and Iowa among the early-opening states held steady in 4th grade. The rest saw drops in math achievement from 2019 to 2022. And Utah, the only state that saw no decline in 8th grade math, had no mandate on schools reopening at the start of 2020-21.

MULTIMEDIA GRAPHS

Sarah D. Sparks
Assistant Editor, Education Week
Sarah D. Sparks covers education research, data, and the science of learning for Education Week.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M OY VEY
Hasidic School to Pay $8 Million After Admitting to Federal Fraud

The Central United Talmudical Academy, which operates the largest all-boys yeshiva in New York State, acknowledged illegally diverting money from federal food aid and other programs.
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The operators of the Central United Talmudical Academy in Brooklyn admitted in federal court to diverting government money in a wide-ranging fraud.

Credit...Jonah Markowitz for The New York Times

By Brian M. Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro
Oct. 24, 2022,

The largest private Hasidic Jewish school in New York State stole millions of dollars from a variety of government programs in a yearslong fraud, the school admitted in federal court documents filed on Monday.

The operators of the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, which serves more than 2,000 boys in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, acknowledged that they illegally diverted money from government programs for school lunches, technology and child care. They also admitted to setting up no-show jobs for some employees while paying others in cash and coupons so the employees could qualify for welfare, according to a deferred prosecution agreement filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.

In all, the school agreed to pay $5 million in fines in addition to the more than $3 million it had already paid in restitution as part of the deal to avoid prosecution.

“Today’s admission makes clear there was a pervasive culture of fraud and greed in place at C.U.T.A.,” said Michael J. Driscoll, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York office, referring to the school by its initials in a statement on Monday. “We expect schools to be places where students are taught how to do things properly. The leaders of C.U.T.A. went out of their way to do the opposite, creating multiple systems of fraud in order to cheat the government.”

As part of the fraud, school officials took money intended to feed children and instead used it to subsidize parties for adults, the federal authorities said Monday.

Timeline: New York’s Oversight of Hasidic Schools

State law requires all private schools to provide an education comparable to what is in public schools. In 2015, New York City’s education department said it would investigate complaints about the quality of secular education in schools in the Hasidic Jewish community. Here’s a timeline of the investigation:

July 2015: Graduates of Hasidic religious schools, known as yeshivas, wrote a complaint about the poor secular education they received. Then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration opened an investigation into the schools, but it soon stalled, plagued by delays and a lack of cooperation from the yeshivas.

November 2018: The state released updated rules outlining what nonpublic schools like yeshivas must teach and for how long – with consequences for schools that did not comply. Hasidic leaders sued, and the rules were thrown out in court in 2019.

December 2019: The city Department of Investigation found the de Blasio administration delayed a report on the schools. A few days later, the city finally released findings: only two of 28 yeshivas that officials visited were offering a basic secular education. The investigation has not concluded, and the city has done little to follow up.

Sept. 11, 2022: A New York Times investigation found scores of schools are systematically denying children a basic education, a violation of state law that has trapped generations of students in a cycle of joblessness and destitution. Even so, The Times found, these institutions have collected more than $1 billion from city, state and federal sources in the past four years alone.

Sept. 13, 2022: The State Board of Regents voted unanimously to approve rules that would force Hasidic yeshivas and other private schools to prove they are offering basic secular instruction. The vote came after four years of tumultuous debate about how the government should regulate the schools.

October 2022: The New York education commissioner ruled that a large boys' yeshiva in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is violating state law by failing to provide a basic secular education. This is the first time the state has taken action against a Hasidic boys' school. New York City had earlier recommended the school be found in compliance with the law

A lawyer representing the school, Marc Mukasey, declined to comment. Other representatives of the school did not immediately respond to phone and email messages seeking comment.

The federal investigation into the school’s use of government funding stemmed from a more narrow criminal case in which two former school leaders, Elozer Porges and Joel Lowy, pleaded guilty in March 2018 for their roles in the conspiracy to defraud the government.
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Since that case, the school has replaced its executive management team and developed a new set of controls, among other changes, the federal authorities said. As part of the deal, the school will also be subject to the supervision of an independent monitor for the next three years.

The Central United Talmudical Academy, an all-boys private religious school, factored prominently in a New York Times investigation last month that found that Hasidic boys’ schools across the state had received hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while denying their students a basic secular education.

The Williamsburg school received about $10 million in government funding in the year before the pandemic, according to a Times analysis. Its leaders, who are affiliated with the Satmar group of Hasidic Judaism, also operate several other schools in the state.

There are more than 100 Hasidic boys’ schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley, and they have received a total of more than $1 billion in taxpayer money over the past four years, The Times found. They focus on providing religious instruction, with most offering little instruction in English reading and math and almost no classes in history, science or civics.

In general, many Hasidic boys’ schools score lower on state standardized tests than any other schools in the state, public or private.

In 2019, The Times reported, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every one of them failed.

Rebecca Davis O’Brien contributed reporting.

Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk of The Times and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. @brianmrosenthal • Facebook

Eliza Shapiro is a reporter covering New York City education. She joined The Times in 2018 and grew up in New York, attending public and private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn. @elizashapiro