#Tennessee Department of Education

[svalleynow]

Bledsoe County Schools Receive Grant

The Tennessee Department of Education announced over $2.6 million in Perkins Reserve Grant (PRG) grant funds have been awarded to 55 school districts for the 2024-25 school year to support Career and Technical Education (CTE) across the state. The PRG grant awards support the implementation of programs of study aligned with emerging technology in regionally identified high-skill, high-wage,…

[realjdobypr]

Tennessee HBCU Partnership Empowers Incarcerated Students' Historical Graduation Inside Prison

Six men, incarcerated at the Northwest Correctional Complex (NWCX), made history in November 2023, as they proudly marched across the stage, receiving their Bachelor of Science in Business degree from Lane College an HBCU. This monumental achievement is a testament to the Tennessee Higher Education Initiative (THEI), which continues to blaze a trail, offering education to those behind the prison…

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #27

July 12-19 2024

President Biden announced the cancellation of $1.2 billion dollars worth of student loan debt. This will cancel the debt of 35,000 public service workers, such as teachers, nurses, and firefighters. This brings the total number of people who've had their student debt relived under the Biden Administration to 4.8 million or one out of every ten people with student loan debt, for a total of $168.5 billion in debt forgiven. This came after the Supreme Court threw out an earlier more wide ranging student debt relief plan forcing the administration to undertake a slower more piecemeal process for forgiving debt. President Biden announced a new plan in the spring that will hopefully be finalized by fall that will forgive an additional 30 million people's student loan debt.

President Biden announced actions to lower housing coasts, make more housing available and called on Congress to prevent rent hikes. President Biden's plan calls for landlords who raise the rent by more than 5% a year to face losing major important tax befits, the average rent has gone up by 21% since 2021. The President has also instructed the federal government, the largest land owner in the country, to examine how unused property can be used for housing. The Bureau of Land Management plans on building 15,000 affordable housing units on public land in southern Nevada, the USPS is examining 8,500 unused properties across America to be repurposed for housing, HHS is finalizing a new rule to make it easier to use federal property to house the homeless, and the Administration is calling on state, local, and tribal governments to use their own unused property for housing, which could create approximately 1.9 million units nationwide.

The Department of Transportation announced $5 billion to replace or restore major bridges across the country. The money will go to 13 significant bridges in 16 states. Some bridges are suffering from years of neglect others are nearly 100 years old and no longer fit for modern demands. Some of the projects include the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River which connects Portland Oregon to Vancouver Washington, replacing the Sagamore Bridge which connects Cape Cod to the mainland built in 1933, replacing the I- 83 South Bridge in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and Cape Fear Memorial Bridge Replacement Project in Wilmington, North Carolina, among others.

President Biden signed an Executive Order aimed at boosting Latino college attendance. The order established the White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity through Hispanic-Serving Institutions. Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) are defined as colleges with 25% or above Hispanic/Latino enrollment, currently 55% of Hispanic college students are enrolled in an HSI. The initiative seeks to stream line the relationship between the federal government and HSIs to allow them to more easily take advantage of federal programs and expand their reach to better serve students and boost Hispanic enrollment nationwide.

HUD announced $325 million in grants for housing and community development in 7 cities. the cities in Tennessee, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Nevada, New York and New Jersey, have collectively pledged to develop over 6,500 new mixed-income units, including the one-for-one replacement of 2,677 severely distressed public housing units. The 7 collectively will invest $2.65 billion in additional resources within the Choice Neighborhood area – so that every $1 in HUD funds will generate $8.65 in additional resources.

President Biden took extensive new actions on immigration. On June 18th The President announced a new policy that would allow the foreign born spouses and step children of American citizens who don't have legal status to apply for it without having to leave the country, this would effect about half a million spouses and 50,000 children. This week Biden announced that people can start applying on August 19, 2024. Also in June President Biden announced an easing of Visa rules that will allow Dreamers, Americans brought to the country as children without legal status, to finally get work visas to give them legal status and a path way to citizenship. This week the Biden Administration announced a new rule to expand the federal TRIO program to cover Dreamers. TRIO is a program that aims to support low income students and those who would be the first in their families to go to college transition from high school to college, the change would support 50,000 more students each year. The Administration also plans to double the number of free immigration lawyers available to those going through immigration court.

The EPA announced $160 million in grants to support Clean U.S. Manufacturing of Steel and Other Construction Materials. The EPA estimates that the manufacturing of construction materials, such as concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass, accounts for 15% of the  annual global greenhouse gas emissions. The EPA is supporting 38 projects aimed at measuring and combatting the environmental impact of construction materials.

The US announced $203 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of Sudan. Sudan's out of control civil war has caused the largest refugee crisis in the world with 11 million Sudanese having fled their homes in the face of violence. The war is also causing the gravest food crisis in the world, with a record setting 25 million people facing acute food insecurity, and fears that nearly a million will face famine in the next months. This aid brings the total aid the US has given Sudan since September 2023 to $1.6 billion, making America the single largest donor to Sudan.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau put forward a new rule that would better regulate popular paycheck advance products. 2/3rds of workers are payed every two weeks or once a month and since 2020 the number of short term loans that allow employees to receive their paycheck days before it’s scheduled to hit their account has grown by 90%. the CFPB says that many of these programs are decided with employers not employees and millions of Americans are paying fees they didn't know about before signing up. The new rule would require lenders to tell costumers up front about any and all fees and charges, as well as cracking down on deceptive "tipping" options.

[mimi-0007]

Eva Beatrice Dykes (13 August 1893 – 29 October 1986) was a prominent educator and the third black American woman to be awarded a PhD.

Dykes was born in Washington, D.C., on August 13, 1893, the daughter of Martha Ann (née Howard) and James Stanley Dykes. She attended M Street High School (later renamed Dunbar High School). She graduated summa cum laude from Howard University with a B.A. in 1914. While attending Howard University, where several family members had studied, Eva was initiated into the Alpha chapter of Delta Sigma Theta. At the end of her last semester she was awarded Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Incorporated's first official scholarship. After a short stint of teaching at Walden University in Nashville, Tennessee, Dykes attended Radcliffe College graduating magna cum laude with a second B.A. in 1917 and a M.A in 1918. While at Radcliffe she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1920 Dykes began teaching at Dunbar High School, and in 1921 she received a PhD from Radcliffe (now a part of Harvard University). Her dissertation was titled “Pope and His influence in America from 1715 to 1815”, and explored the attitudes of Alexander Pope towards slavery and his influence on American writers. Dykes was the first black American woman to complete the requirements for a doctoral degree, however, because Radcliffe College held its graduation ceremonies later in the spring, she was the third to graduate, behind Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1921, University of Pennsylvania) and Georgiana R. Simpson (1921, University of Chicago).

After her graduation from Radcliffe in 1921, Dykes continued to teach at Dunbar High School until 1929 when she returned to Howard University as a member of the English Faculty. An excellent teacher, Dykes won a number of teaching awards during her 15 years of service at Howard University. Her publications include Readings from Negro Authors for Schools and Colleges co-authored with Lorenzo Dow Turner and Otelia Cromwell (1931) and The Negro in English Romantic Thought: Or a Study in Sympathy for the Oppressed (1942). In 1934 Dykes began writing a column in the Seventh-day Adventist periodical Message Magazine, this continued until 1984.

In 1920 Dykes joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church, and in 1944 she joined the faculty of the then small and unaccredited Seventh-day Adventist Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama, as the Chair of the English Department. She was the first staff member at Oakwood to hold a doctoral qualification and was instrumental in assisting the college to gain accreditation. Dykes retired in 1968 but returned to Oakwood to teach in 1970 and continued until 1975. In 1973 the Oakwood College library was named in her honor and in 1980 she was made a Professor Emerita. In 1975 the General Conference of the Seventh-day Adventist Church presented Dykes with a Citation of Excellence honouring her for an outstanding contribution to Seventh-day Adventist education. Dykes died in Huntsville on October 29, 1986, at the age of 93.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Nathalie Baptiste at HuffPost:

Donald Trump promised over the course of his campaign to abolish the Department of Education. It’s been a pet policy goal of the right ever since the agency was created in 1980 under former President Jimmy Carter and is spelled out in Project 2025, the conservative playbook that Trump will probably use once he is back in the White House.

But Trump doesn’t need to shut down the department in order to launch an all-out war on public schools. He outlined his plan for education in a video last year, saying that not only will he close down the agency, he will bring back prayer in schools, end the supposed indoctrination of students and take politics out of schools. “We will ensure our classrooms are focused not on political indoctrination but on teaching the knowledge and skills needed to succeed,” Trump said, adding, “We will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught right now.” It’s the same agenda that right-wing culture warriors have been pushing in red states for the last four years — and Trump wants to spread it across the country. “This renewed push to go after the Department of Education isn’t so much a sincere push for smaller government or even reducing the federal role,” Jon Valant, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, told HuffPost. “It’s more about this continued attack on public education as a concept and eroding support for public schools in general.”

The Department of Education’s primary functions are providing funding for programs that serve low-income public schools and children with disabilities and protecting students from discrimination. If Trump were able to abolish it, it would spell disaster for the entire country. But public education has increasingly become politicized, and support for public schools, especially among Republicans, is now at an all-time low. The upcoming Trump administration will likely seize on that sentiment to further attack public schools through rolling back Biden-era rules designed to make them safe and equitable for all students, supporting the expansion of programs that take away funding from public schools and promoting laws that restrict books and censor teachers. “One of their first moves would be pulling back Title IX protections for LGBTQ+ students,” Valant said. Title IX is the federal regulation that protects students from sex-based discrimination. The Biden administration expanded it to include protections for students in the LGBTQ+ community. Republicans have fought against the change from the beginning, and several GOP-led states sued to block the rule. An overwhelming majority of transgender students have reported feeling unsafe or unwelcome at school. Then there’s the Office for Civil Rights. This arm of the Department of Education allows students, parents and families to sue their school districts over civil rights violations. Often, the department works with both sides to seek a resolution because it’s a low-risk way of settling civil rights violations. But Project 2025 proposes gutting the office and only allowing lawsuits to go through the courts, thus eliminating an avenue for addressing discrimination in our nation’s schools.

[...] Multiple states have already passed their own versions of parental rights bills, like in Iowa and Tennessee. These laws often ban books that conservatives believe are sexually explicit but usually target books with LGBTQ+ themes. Teachers are typically restricted in what they can say about gender identity and sexual orientation and are required to inform parents if their child wants to go by another name or pronouns at school — even against the student’s wishes.

The Orange Fascist’s war on public schools could have very costly consequences for the quality of education across America, and especially for LGBTQ+ students, staff, and faculty.

[ritchiepage2001newaccount]

MAGA congressman says top priority is shutting down FEMA like the Department of Education

A Tennessee Republican congressman on Friday told a conservative podcaster that the first thing he wants to do when he returns to Washington D.C. is advocate to reorganize FEMA – and “shut it down.”…

[ifelllikeastar]

Bessie Smith experienced a "wretched childhood". Her parents and a brother died while she was young. Her older sister Viola took charge of caring for her siblings and as a consequence, Bessie was unable to gain an education. To earn money for her impoverished household, Bessie and her brother Andrew busked on the streets of Chattanooga. She sang and danced as he played the guitar. They often performed on street corners for pennies, and their habitual location was in front of the White Elephant Saloon at Thirteenth and Elm streets, in the heart of the city's African-American community.

Bessie began forming her own act around 1913. Working a heavy theater schedule during the winter and performing in tent shows the rest of the year, Smith became the highest-paid black entertainer of her day and began traveling in her own 72-foot-long railroad car. Columbia Records publicity department nicknamed her "Queen of the Blues", but the national press soon upgraded her title to "Empress of the Blues". Smith's music stressed independence, fearlessness, and sexual freedom, implicitly arguing that working-class women did not have to alter their behavior to be worthy of respect.

Bessie Smith was born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, Tennessee and died on September 26, 1937 in Clarksdale, Mississippi from critical injuries she suffered in a car crash at the age of 43

[thebiscuiteternal]

Gov. Bill Lee said Wednesday that he’d welcome closing the U.S. Department of Education under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration, adding that states can do a better job of deciding how to spend federal dollars on students. “I believe that Tennessee would be more capable than the federal government of designing a strategy for spending federal dollars in Tennessee,” Lee told reporters when asked about the prospect. “We know Tennessee. We know our children. We know the needs here much better than a bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. does,” Lee said.

Reminder that this dickweed is the one currently trying to force a program that would spend state money on vouchers for out-of-state religion-based schools run by Hillsdale College, the only school that could match Liberty University for the amount of right-wing evangelicalism it's inserted into issues of education.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

If you want to see what the GOP has in store for the rest of America, visit the Old South

Thom Hartmann

June 27, 2024 5:42AM ET

Photo by Miltiadis Fragkidis on Unsplash

Today is the first Biden-Trump debate and many Americans are wondering how each will articulate their ideas for the future of America.

Republicans have a very specific economic vision for the future of our country, although they rarely talk about it in plain language: they want to make the rest of America look and function just like Mississippi. Including the racism: that’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s called the “Southern Economic Development Model” (SEDM) and has been at the core of GOP economic strategy ever since the days of Ronald Reagan. While they don’t use those words to describe their plan, and neither did the authors of Project 2025, this model is foundational to conservative economic theory and has been since the days of slavery.

The SEDM explicitly works to:

— Maintain a permanent economic underclass of people living on the edge of poverty, — Rigidify racial and gender barriers to class mobility to lock in women and people of color, — Provide a low-cost labor force to employers,

— Prevent unions or any other advocates for workers’ rights to function, — Shift the tax burden to the working poor and what’s left of the middle class while keeping taxes on the morbidly rich extremely low, — Protect the privileges, power, and wealth of the (mostly white and male) economic overclass, — Ghettoize public education and raise the cost of college to make social and economic mobility difficult, — Empower and subsidize churches to take over public welfare functions like food, housing, and care for indigent people, — Allow corporations to increase profits by dumping their waste products into the air and water, — Subsidize those industries that financially support the political power structure, and, — Heavily use actual slave labor.

For hardcore policy wonks, the Economic Policy Institute(EPI) did a deep dive into the SEDM last month: here’s how it works in summary.

Republicans claim that by offering low-cost non-union labor and little to no regulatory oversight to massive corporations, they’re able to “attract business to the region.” This, they promise, will cause (paraphrasing President Kennedy out of context) “a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Somehow, though, the only people who own boats that rise are those of the business owners and senior executives. The permanent economic underclass is key to maintaining this system with its roots in the old plantation system; that’s why Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina have no minimum wage, Georgia’s is $5.15/hour, and most other GOP states use the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and $2.13/hour for tipped workers.

It’s thus no coincidence that ten out of the 20 Republican-run states that only use the federal minimum wage are in the Old South.

Anti-union or “right to work for less” efforts and laws are another key to the SEDM; the failed unionization effort last month at the Alabama Mercedes factory was a key victory for the GOP. Unions, after all, balance the power relationship between management and workers; promote higher wages and benefits; support workplace and product safety regulations; advance racial and gender equality; boost social mobility; and have historically been the most effective force for creating a healthy middle class.

Unionization, however, is antithetical to creating and maintaining a permanent economic underclass, which is why, as EPI notes, “while union coverage rates stand at 11.2% nationally, rates in 2023 were as low as 3.0% in South Carolina, 3.3% in North Carolina, 5.2% in Louisiana, and 5.4% in Texas and Georgia.”

Unions also make wage theft more difficult, essentially forcing government to defend workers who’ve been ripped off by their employers. That’s why Florida doesn’t even have a Department of Labor (it was dismantled by Republican Governor Jeb Bush in 2002), and the DOLs in Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina no longer bother to enforce wage theft laws or recover stolen money for workers.

Another key to the SEDM is to end regulation of corporate “externalities,” a fancy word for the pollution that most governments in the developed world require corporations to pay to prevent or clean up. “Cancer Alley” is probably the most famous example of this at work: that stretch from west Texas to New Orleans has more than 200 refineries and chemical plants pouring poison into the air resulting in downwind communities having a 7 to 21 times greater exposure to these substances. And high rates of cancer: Southern corporate profits are boosted by sick people.

Between 2008 and 2018, EPI documents, funding for state environmental agencies was “cut [in Texas and Louisiana] by 35.2% and 34.8% respectively.… Funding was down by 33.7% in North Carolina, 32.8% in Delaware, 20.8% in Georgia, 20.3% in Tennessee, and 10% in Alabama.”

To keep income taxes low on the very wealthy, the SEDM calls for shifting as much of the taxpaying responsibility away from high-income individuals and dumping it instead on the working poor and middle class. This is done by either ending or gutting the income tax (Texas, Florida, and Tennessee have no income tax) and shifting to sales tax, property taxes, fees, and fines.

Nationally, for example, sales taxes provide 34.4% of state and local revenue, but in the SEDM states that burden is radically shifted to consumers: Tennessee, for example, gets 56.6% of their revenue from sales tax, Louisiana 53.3%, Florida 50.9%, Arkansas 49.6%, Alabama 48%, and Mississippi 45.5%. Fees for registering cars, obtaining drivers’ and professional licenses, tolls, traffic and other fines, and permits for home improvements all add to the load carried by average working people.

Republicans argue that keeping taxes low on “job creators” encourages them to “create more jobs,” but that old canard hasn’t really been taken seriously by anybody since Reagan first rolled it out in 1981. It does work to fill their money bins, though, and helps cover the cost of their (tax deductible) private jets, clubs, and yachts.

Another way the SEDM maintains a low-wage workforce is by preventing young people from getting the kind of good education that would enable them to move up and out of their economic and social class. Voucher systems to gut public education, villainization of unionized teachers and librarians, and increasing college tuition all work together to maintain high levels of functional illiteracy. Fifty-four percent of Americans have a literacy rate that doesn’t exceed sixth grade, with the nation’s worst illiteracy mostly in the Old South.

Imposing this limitation against economic mobility on women is also vital to the SEDM. Southern states are famous for their lack of female representation in state legislatures (West Virginia 13%, Tennessee 14%, Mississippi and South Carolina 15%, Alabama and Louisiana 18%), and the states that have most aggressively limited access to abortion and reproductive healthcare (designed to keep women out of the workplace and dependent on men) are entirely Republican-controlled.

Perhaps the most important part of the SEDM pushed by Republicans and Project 2025 is gutting the social safety net. Wealthy rightwingers have complained since FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s that transferring wealth from them to poor and middle-class people is socialism, the first step toward a complete communist tyranny in the United States. It’s an article of faith for today’s GOP.

Weekly unemployment benefits, for example, are lowest in “Mississippi ($235), Alabama ($275), Florida ($275), Louisiana ($275), Tennessee ($275), South Carolina ($326), and North Carolina ($350)” with Southern states setting the maximum number of weeks you can draw benefits at 12 in Florida, North Carolina, and Kentucky, 14 in Alabama and Georgia, and a mere 16 weeks in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

While only 3.3% of children in the Northeast lack health insurance, for the Southern states that number more than doubles to 7.7%. Ten states using the SEDM still refuse to expand Medicaid to cover all state residents living and working in poverty, including Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas.

The main benefit to employers of this weak social safety net is that workers are increasingly desperate for wages — any sort of wages — and even the paltriest of benefits to keep their heads above water economically. As a result, they’re far more likely to tolerate exploitative workplace conditions, underpaid work, and wage theft.

Finally, the SEDM makes aggressive use of the 13th Amendment’s legalization of slavery. That’s not a metaphor: the Amendment says, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” [emphasis added]

That “except as punishment for crime” is the key. While Iceland’s and Japan’s incarceration rates are 36 for every 100,000 people, Finland and Norway come in at 51, Ireland and Canada at 88, there are 664 people in prison in America for every 100,000 people. No other developed country even comes close, because no other developed country also allows legalized slavery under color of law.

Fully 800,000 (out of a total 1.2 million prisoners) Americans are currently held in conditions of slave labor in American jails and prisons, most working for private prison corporations that profitably insource work and unfairly compete against normal American companies. Particularly in the South, this workforce is largely Black and Hispanic.

As the ACLU documented for the EPI, “The vast majority of work done by prisoners in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas is unpaid.” Literal slave labor, in other words. It’s a international scandal, but it’s also an important part of this development model that was, after all, first grounded in chattel slavery.

The Christian white supremacist roots of the SEDM worldview are best summed up by the lobbyist and head of the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution, Vance Muse — the inventor of the modern “right to work for less” model and advocate for the Southern Economic Development Model — who famously proclaimed in 1944, just days after Arkansas and Florida became the first states to adopt his anti-union legislation, that it was all about keeping Blacks and Jews in their places to protect the power and privileges of wealthy white people.

So, if you want to see what Republicans have in mind for the rest of America if Trump or another Republican becomes president and they can hold onto Congress, just visit the Old South. Or, as today’s MAGA GOP would call it, “the New Model.”

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

In Memory of Miss Patricia Dickson 🇺🇸

November 12, 1965 — September 18, 2024

Dear Miss Patricia,

My heart is broken and my eyes are filled with tears hearing the sad news that you passed away. I've been thinking of you almost every day since the election and now to learn that you went home to heaven back in September of this year (2024) just breaks my heart. I'm thankful you are Home Free but sad for those of us who were touched by your beautiful smile and your common sense commentary. I have fond memories of stories about your life experiences. For example, you shared how your wayward nephew came to live with you and he came home with news that his teachers/school administrators were "afraid of you." 😂

Thank you for sharing your beautiful spirit, for your service to our country, and for your fearless truth teller videos. We learned from you and you made us feel like we knew you. May God comfort your loved ones and may your memory always be a blessing. Looking forward to meeting you in heaven. Well done good & faithful servant. 🇺🇸👑

Condolences

"Patricia Dickson was born to the late John Reddick and Anna Studivant in Paris Tn. Patricia’s parents transitioned early in her life, therefore she was blessed to have been adopted by the late Frank and Daisy Dickson. Patricia transitioned from this life on September 18, 2024, at Maine General Health in Augusta, Maine. Patricia loved school as a child and was very active with all school functions. She moved and finished growing up in Covington, Tn. Where she attended and was a faithful member of Collins Chapel CME Church. As a young girl Patricia wanted to become a minister and throughout her life she studied and took courses towards her goal. Paticia graduated in 1984 at Covington High School. Then she went on to further her education at the University of Tennessee at Martin for a year. Before restructuring her career path by enlisting into the Army for 10 years. Then I decided to change branches and enlist in the Air Force for an additional 11 years. For a grand total of 21 served and dedicated years. Patrica retired from the Air Force military base in 2009. She was so passionate about her work. She continued to work with the military as a civilian in Logistics Manager for the next 11 years before finally retiring in July 2023. Patrica always had dreams and the drive to complete as many goals as she could before departing from here. During her life work, she studied at World Harvest Bible College, received a Associates Degree in Business at Riverside Community College, a Bachelor Degree of Arts in Psychology from Chapman University, and a Master's Degree in Business Administration and Management, with a Minor in Organizational Leadership from Brandman University Patricia leaves to honor her memory is her beloved sister Dweellia Henslee of Paris, Tn, devoted brothers Bobby Jones of Louisville, Ky, George Studivant of Nashville, Tn, Randall Dickson and Thomas (Diane) Edwards of Covington, Tn and her aunt Ruthie Porter of Paris TN. Her legacy extends to her nieces, nephews, and wide circle of family and friends. She preceded in death her birth parents and adopted partners, brothers Isaiah Studivant, and Lorenzo Studivant, sister Jackie Strickland."

[whencyclopedia]

Henry Knox

Henry Knox (1750-1806) was a Boston-born bookseller who became a general of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and served as the army's Chief Artillery Officer. After the conflict, he was appointed the first Secretary of War of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1794 in the Washington administration.

Knox first distinguished himself in January 1776, when he guided his 'Noble Artillery Train' of 58 artillery pieces on a harrowing 300-mile trek across the snowy and mountainous terrain of New York State and Massachusetts; this effort helped the Continental Army win one of its first major victories at the Siege of Boston. Henry Knox commanded the Continental artillery for most of the American Revolution and was one of George Washington's most trusted subordinates. When Washington became President of the United States in 1789, Henry Knox was put in charge of the War Department. In this capacity, he sought to strengthen the military and helped create the Legion of the United States, a standing army of professional soldiers, while simultaneously overseeing the Northwest Indian War. In 1795, he retired to his estate in Thomaston, Maine, where he died in October 1806, at the age of 56. Today, many American towns, cities, counties, and military bases are named in his honor, including Knoxville, Tennessee, and Fort Knox in Kentucky.

Early Life

Henry Knox was born on 25 July 1750 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the seventh of ten children born to William Knox and Mary Campbell, both of whom were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who had emigrated to Boston in 1729. William Knox was a shipbuilder who, in 1759, was spurred on by financial troubles to abandon his family and move to Sint Eustatius in the West Indies to start a new life; his new life would not last long, however, as he died three years later of unknown causes. Henry, who was only nine years old when he was abandoned by his father, was now responsible for caring for his mother and younger siblings, and he eventually found a steady job as a clerk in a Boston bookstore.

The shopkeeper, Nicholas Bowes, became something of a father figure to Knox, encouraging the young clerk to take home books from the shop's extensive library to furnish his self-education. Knox soon became a voracious reader; with the help of the books in Bowes' shop, he educated himself in the topics of philosophy, mathematics, and even French, and spent his free time reading the works of classical literature. Yet Knox also took a special interest in military theory, reading everything he could get his hands on about tactics and military engineering. When he came of age in 1771, Knox opened a bookstore of his own called the London Book Store, which boasted a "large and very elegant assortment" of the newest books and magazines from London (McCullough, 58). Since Henry Knox's store offered a large selection of fashionable English products, it soon became a popular "morning lounge" for the Boston elite; the store, and Knox himself, soon became well-known throughout the city.

Continue reading...

[svalleynow]

TDOE Releases 2023-24 3rd Grade and 4th Grade ELA TCAP State-Level Results

The Tennessee Department of Education has released statewide average 3rd grade and 4th grade results for the ELA portion of the spring 2024 Tennessee Comprehensive Academic Program (TCAP) assessment. Third grade student scores remained steady as 4th grade student scores showed significant improvement, thanks to the nation-leading, comprehensive statewide literacy strategy for Tennessee public…

[shewhoworshipscarlin]

Thomas Fountain Blue

Thomas Fountain Blue, the first African American to head a public library in the United States, was also a civic, educational, and religious leader. Blue was born in Farmville, Virginia, on March 6, 1866, to Noah Blue, a carpenter, and Henry Ann Crawley Blue. They were parents of two other children, Alice Blue and Charles Blue.

Blue enrolled in Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia, in 1885 and graduated in 1888. In 1894, he enrolled in Richmond Theological Seminary (now Virginia Union University) in Richmond, Virginia, finishing in 1898 with a Bachelor of Divinity degree. One week later, when the United States declared war on Spain after the sinking of the USS Maine off the coast of Cuba, touching off the Spanish-American War, Blue joined the Sixth Virginia Volunteers battalion comprising African American soldiers and was stationed first in Camp Poland in Tennessee and later at Camp Haskell in Georgia.

In 1905, Blue was selected to lead the Western Branch Library of the Louisville Free Public Library on South 10th and Chestnut Street, the first Carnegie Library in the nation to serve African American patrons with an exclusively African American staff. The facility cost $31,024.31 to build and when completed had over 4,000 books and 53 periodicals.

In 1914, Blue opened Louisville’s second Carnegie Library for African Americans, the Eastern Branch Library. During World War I, Blue was drafted, left the branch, and was appointed the Education Secretary at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville, one of sixteen national Army training camps created across the nation. Blue worked with Black troops who mostly had supporting and laboring roles in the United States.

After the war ended in 1918, Blue returned to Louisville, and a year later, in 1919, he was named head of the “Colored Department” for the city’s public library system and supervised eight African American assistants. The Colored Department was the first in the United States to have a staff which served multiple Black library branches.

In 1922, Blue was a presenter at the American Library Association Conference in Detroit, Michigan, where he gave a paper titled, “Training Class at the Western Colored Branch,” and led the subsequent discussion with the Negro Roundtable composed of other African American Library staffers from across the nation.

On June 18, 1925, Blue married Cornelia Phillips Johnson from Columbia, Tennessee, and they parented two children, Thomas Fountain Blue, Jr., and Charles Blue (named after his younger brother). Two years later, in 1927, Blue founded the Negro Library Conference and conducted its first meeting at Hampton Institute.

Later becoming a minister, Reverend Thomas Fountain Blue—who held membership in the American Library Association, the Special Committee of Colored Ministers of Louisville on Matters Interracial, and was a charter member of the Louisville Chapter of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History—died on November 10, 1935, in Louisville, Kentucky. He was 69.

At the 2003 joint conference of the American Library Association with the Canadian Library Association Annual Conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Ontario, Blue was posthumously honored when the organization passed a resolution recognizing his leadership in promoting professionalism among the staff of African American libraries across the United States. In 2022, a headstone honoring Blue and his wife, Cornelia Phillips Johnson, was placed at Eastern Cemetery in Louisville by the Frazier History Museum.

https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/people-african-american-history/thomas-fountain-blue-1866-1935/

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #29

July 26-August 2 2024

President Biden announced his plan to reform the Supreme Court and make sure no President is above the law. The conservative majority on the court ruled that Trump has "absolute immunity" from any prosecution for "official acts" while he was President. In response President Biden is calling for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that Presidents aren't above the law and don't have immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. In response to a wide ranging corruption scandal involving Justice Clarence Thomas, President Biden called on Congress to pass a legally binding code of ethics for the Supreme Court. The code would force Justices to disclose gifts, refrain from public political actions, and force them to recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have conflicts of interest. President Biden also endorsed the idea of term limits for the Justices.

The Biden Administration sent out an email to everyone who has a federal student loan informing them of upcoming debt relief. The debt relief plan will bring the total number of a borrowers who've gotten relief from the Biden-Harris Administration to 30 million. The plan is due to be finalized this fall, and the Department of Education wanted to alert people early to allow them to be ready to quickly take advantage of it when it was in place and get relief as soon as possible.

President Biden announced that the federal government would step in and protect the pension of 600,000 Teamsters. Under the American Rescue Plan, passed by President Biden and the Democrats with no Republican votes, the government was empowered to bail out Union retirement funds which in recent years have faced devastating cut of up to 75% in some cases, leaving retired union workers in desperate situations. The Teamster union is just the latest in a number of such pension protections the President has done in office.

President Biden and Vice-President Harris oversaw the dramatic release of American hostages from Russia. Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, former Marine Paul Whelan held since 2018, Russian-American reporter for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Alsu Kurmasheva convicted of criticizing the Russian Military, were all released from captivity and returned to the US at around midnight August 2nd. They were greeted on the tarmac by the President and Vice-President and their waiting families. The deal also secured the release of German medical worker Rico Krieger sentenced to death in Belarus, Russian-British opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza, and 11 Russians convicted of opposing the war against Ukraine or being involved in Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption organization. Early drafts of the hostage deal were meant to include Navalny before his death in Russian custody early this year.

A new Biden Administration rule banning discrimination against LGBT students takes effect, but faces major Republican resistance. The new rule declares that Title IX protects Queer students from discrimination in public schools and any college that takes federal funds. The new rule also expands protections for victims of sexual misconduct and pregnant or parenting students. However Republican resistance means the rule can't take effect nation wide. Lawsuits from Republican controlled states, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming, means the new protections won't come into effect those states till the case is ruled on likely in a Supreme Court ruling. The Biden administration crafted these Title IX rules to reflect the Supreme Court's 2020 Bostock case.

The Biden administration awarded $2 billion to black and minority farmers who were the victims of historic discrimination. Historically black farmers have been denied important loans from the USDA, or given smaller amounts than white farmers. This massive investment will grant 23,000 minority farmers between $10,000 and $500,000 each and a further 20,000 people who wanted to start farms by were improperly denied the loans they needed between $3,500-$6,000 to get started. Most payments went to farmers in Mississippi and Alabama.

The Biden Administration took an important step to stop the criminalization of poverty by changing child safety guidelines so that poverty alone isn't grounds for taking a child into foster care. Studies show that children able to stay with parents or other family have much better outcomes then those separated. Many states have already removed poverty from their guidelines when it comes to removing children from the home, and the HHS guidelines push the remaining states to do the same.

Vice-President Harris announced the Biden Administration's agreement to a plan by North Carolina to forgive the state's medical debt. The plan by Democratic Governor Roy Cooper would forgive the medical debt of 2 million people in the state. North Carolina has the 3rd highest rate of medical debt in the nation. Vice-President Harris applauded the plan, pointing out that the Biden Administration has forgiven $650 million dollars worth of medical debt so far with plans to forgive up to $7 billion by 2026. The Vice-President unveiled plans to exclude medical debt from credit scores and issued a call for states and local governments to forgive debt, like North Carolina is, last month.

The Department of Transportation put forward a new rule to bank junk fees for family air travel. The new rule forces airlines to seat parents next to their children, with no extra cost. Currently parents are forced to pay extra to assure they are seated next to their children, no matter what age, if they don't they run the risk of being separated on a long flight. Airlines would be required to seat children age 13 and under with their parent or accompanying adult at no extra charge.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is giving $3.5 billion to combat homelessness. This represents the single largest one year investment in fighting homelessness in HUD's history. The money will be distributed by grants to local organizations and programs. HUD has a special focus on survivors of domestic violence, youth homeless, and people experiencing the unique challenges of homelessness in rural areas.

The Treasury Department announced that Pennsylvania and New Mexico would be joining the IRS' direct file program for 2025. The program was tested as a pilot in a number of states in 2024, saving 140,000 tax payers $5.6 million in filing charges and getting tax returns of $90 million. The program, paid for by President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, will be available to all 50 states, but Republicans strong object. Pennsylvania and New Mexico join Oregon and New Jersey in being new states to join.

Bonus: President Biden with the families of the released hostages calling their loved ones on the plane out of Russia

[jbfly46]

My younger brother claims to do OSINT for the Navy and have the highest military clearance possible. When I suspected he was lying to me about my father’s estate lawsuit, I decided to first test his capabilities. I mentioned a bunch of classified information I knew about that has been getting released recently, and his reaction was that of one in a state of shock or disbelief. He went completely mute on that subject. Next I tested his OSINT capabilities. As I know that the Navy has him using software for OSINT, I performed a full OSINT investigation on my old shady landlord, finding his family that lives in Switzerland and Europe, finding his ties to a land trust that has changed hands 3 times between different people with his last name, and different people with what looked like a name an Ashkenazi Jew would make up. Then I tied him as having a personal relationship with a lawyer who changed his name after getting out of prison in Washington State for a violent rape conviction. A lawyer that Multnomah County Court uses to perform court duties, even though he is a private lawyer with his own private office. I accomplished all of this in less than 2 hours without any OSINT software. My brother responding with a state of childish anger, and proceeded to encourage my mother to report me to DHS for posting a threat to mail anthrax to Oak Ridge National Laboratory or something of that nature. Only there was no such post on Reddit, and the DHS she reported this to was actually the Tennessee Department of Safety pretending to be DHS by leaving out the part where they were only affiliated with the state of Tennessee when introducing themselves. All this resulted in was two really dumb sloppy looking behavioral health PPB officers knocking on my door and listening to me give them a 30 minute lecture on psychology that they clearly could not follow even after claiming to have an education in psychology. My brother makes enough money from the military to have already have bought his own house, all while clearly not being able to perform his actual job, while I live in a 400 sq. ft. apartment with my partner; barely able to afford food and bills. Safe to say, that despite already owning his own home, he was also lying about my father’s estate lawsuit, I can only assume in an attempt to somehow gain hold of my portion of our father’s estate, I guess because he thinks me posting something about anthrax on Reddit (a post that didn’t exist), would be relevant to a county level estate case, and sufficient for me to be deemed not eligible to receive my allotted half of the estate. I feel like the entirety of these actions reaches beyond stupidity, and into the territory of malevolent insanity. Obviously, the government does not want competent and sane people working for them, for whatever reason. It has now been almost 3 years since the estate case was opened up and I have yet to hear anything more about it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Biden Administration's issuance of protections for LGBTQ+ students struck down by far-right judicial activist Reed O'Connor

Daniel Wiessner at Reuters:

June 11 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Texas on Tuesday said the Biden administration improperly attempted to rewrite a federal law barring sex discrimination in schools by applying it to LGBTQ students. U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, ruled in a lawsuit brought by the state's Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton that legal guidance issued by the U.S. Department of Education three years ago was invalid because the agency lacked the power to adopt it and that it could not be enforced in Texas.

The guidance, which is not legally binding, said schools could be denied federal funding for discriminating against students based on their gender identity or sexual orientation, such as by requiring students to use bathrooms and other facilities that correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth. A federal judge in Tennessee in 2022 had already blocked the Education Department from enforcing the guidance in 20 Republican-led states that had separately sued to strike it down. The Biden administration is appealing that decision. The guidance was a response to a landmark 2020 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said the federal law banning workplace sex bias extended protections to LGBTQ workers. The Education Department said the same logic applied under Title IX because the two laws use similar language. But O'Connor in a 112-page ruling said the Education Department did not have the authority to extend that ruling to the education law, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

Radical right-wing judicial activist Reed O’Connor strikes down the Biden Administration’s issuance of Title IX definition change to include LGBTQ+ students.

See Also:

The Hill: Federal judge blocks Biden’s Title IX transgender protections