#my most recent reads that i loved were fourth wing and the death of Mrs Westaway so

[forsorrow]

friends. I need book recommendations please. I'm taking my Kindle away with me and I don't want to purchase books I already own as physical copies 💀

[housewiththereddoor]

Joshua Warner Ate A Frog In Bio-Chem

Word Count: 2,041

~~~

When something even slightly out of the ordinary happens in a small town, it becomes the topic of conversation for a very long time. It is therefore no great surprise that when Anthony Warner suspected his wife of being unfaithful and beat her to death on the living room rug, every man and woman in Caledon, Ontario knew his name.

However, high school is quite a different dynamic, and the fresh young minds of William C. Riley Catholic Secondary School were far more interested in Anthony’s son, Joshua, who had built up his own reputation.

In freshman year, he was known as the kid who stole bras out of the ladies’ change room while his female classmates were in gym class. When the vice principal and Phys Ed department head broke into his locker, they were met with an avalanche of bras and panties in various different shades of pink. The perverted episode was hot gossip up until Joshua entered his sophomore year, which was when he, as most of his peers would say, “really out-creeped himself”.

The popular assumption among staff and students was that Joshua was quite a dull, vacant boy judging by his poor grades and his non-existent participation in the classroom (or in any other interactive setting for that matter). However, if little else sparked his interest, Joshua had quite the passion for the field of scientific development; it was the only subject in which he had a passing grade. He had always been very curious in his youth, if not a little naively so, and he loved putting that curiosity to the test whenever he got the chance.

His enthusiasm for science derived also in part from his admiration of Mr. Jacobi, who was the head of the school science department, and by whom Joshua had had the good fortune of being taught for the past two years. There was something about Mr. Jacobi that demanded respect He was a no-nonsense man who demonstrated a seemingly unlimited knowledge for the subject he taught; two qualities that even Joshua, with his generally apathetic nature, could appreciate.

It was frog dissection day in fourth period bio-chemistry, as was evident by the putrid stench of formaldehyde assaulted the entire science wing, as well as all surrounding corridors. Most of Josh’s peers walked into class that day feeling either dreadful repulsion or juvenile excitement, but Joshua was perhaps the most excited of them all. He had gotten little sleep the night before, and had awoken earlier that morning with an idea for an experiment in his head. Twenty dead frog corpses were slapped onto twenty different trays, and all the necessary excavating tools were administered to each student. He waited patiently until his partner, a pretty and studious girl named Amy who was far too popular to be standing next to him, was preoccupied with recording observations in her lab report, and then he seized his chance.

Taking in hand the thin metal scalpel they had used to open the frog’s abdomen, Joshua began to saw at the mummified ankle of his lifeless little friend until it was severed. For a moment, he held the detached extremity and examined it with the eyes of a skilled biologist while he considered his next move.

His lab partner looked up just in time to see him pop the slimy webbed foot in his mouth, which provoked a verbal response somewhere along the lines of “what the fuck are you doing?”

Mr. Jacobi, who had previously been doing a rather poor job supervising from his desk, now looked up and scanned the room for what could have caused one of his model students to use the dreaded F word. When he pieced together what had taken place, Joshua was sent to the principal’s office, where he was given a three day suspension. Mr. Jacobi also demanded that he return to the class after school for an additional punishment. Joshua didn’t mind though; his experiment had been a roaring success.

When he re-entered the odorous classroom after the final bell, he found that his teacher’s face was quite difficult to read; his true emotions were covered a mask of indifference that was quite reminiscent of Josh’s own resting expression. Joshua passed by him and walked instinctively to his own desk at the centre of the room. Mr. Jacobi shut the door behind him.

It took the middle-aged man about ten seconds to stride across the room towards Joshua, and within the same motion, he struck the boy across the face with such force that he was sent backwards into a row of desks. Papers went flying and a rack of test tubes shattered on the floor.  Joshua propped himself up on the desktops as he fought to find his footing in a startled daze. Mr. Jacobi advanced on him once more, but this time he let his words do the abusing:

“When are you gonna shape up, Warner?”

“I - I’m sorry sir.”

His tone was as flat and lifeless as ever, but his feelings were that of shock from being hit by his teacher, and the shame one feels when they’ve let down their hero.

“Oh, save it. You think you’re some big hot shot pulling these disgusting little stunts, but I’ve taught here a long time, kiddo. I’ve seen about a hundred creeps like you slouch in and out of these doors in that time. I know what you’re all about; no real interests, no ambition. The world just bores the shit out of you, doesn’t it, Warner? Until one day you start committing petty thefts and lighting old ladies on fire just to feel a buzz. I know what your father was all about too, and you can tell him I said hello when you wind up in the nuthouse with the rest of the whackjobs; I’m sure they’ll let you eat plenty of frogs in there”.

“I do have ambition, sir,” was the only thing Joshua could think to respond.  “I’m not gonna be like my father. I’m gonna be a biology teacher, just like you.”

Mr. Jacobi barked with cold, cruel laughter.

“Don’t fuck with me.”

Joshua winced like he had been slapped again. He’d never heard a teacher use the F-word before. Mr. Jacobi continued:

“Let me tell you where you’ll be. You see, I don’t even think you’ll make it as far as your father did. He was an angry bastard, wasn’t he? But you’re not angry. Oh no, not you; you’re just an empty vessel. The lights are on but ain’t nobody home. I think that in five years they’ll find you dead in a ditch somewhere with a needle sticking out of your arm, and you know what? I don’t think I’d mind very much at all. No Siree, because that’s what happens to all the little low-life shits that I teach, and every time I sit down with my morning paper and see one of your names in the obituaries, my coffee always tastes a little bit sweeter.”

Joshua fought the swell of hot tears that threatened to stream down his face, and he hated himself for having to do so. In fact, he hated a lot of things in that moment; his hands had clenched into tight fists, and he was having trouble fighting off a wave of full body tremors. Suddenly he didn’t love Mr. Jacobi anymore. Suddenly his brain was boiling over with white hot mercury rage, and if he didn’t do something soon the results would be explosive.

Mr. Jacobi seemed satisfied with his verbal tirade, and with a few final words, the man Joshua had looked up to like a father turned his back on him.

“Now, you’re going to clean up this broken glass, and then you’re going to get the fuck out of my classroom.”

Joshua followed silently behind as his teacher strode back to his desk, for in that moment he saw an opportunity. As his teacher bent down to grab a brush and dustpan out of the bottom drawer, he tore a Bunsen burner from its fuse on the nearest desk, and before he could second guess himself, he brought the rusted metal instrument down hard against the side of Mr. Jacobi’s skull.

His teacher’s body hit the floor hard enough that Joshua was almost pulled from his blind rage. He gave his head a shake and smashed the burner against Mr. Jacobi’s head a second time, and a third, and then three more times. The connection of hard blunt object to temple, and the sickening ‘thwack’ that accompanied it, was deliciously cathartic. It felt like a release. His mind was buzzing, but one thought stood out above a hundred others:

This is how Papa felt.

With every blow his anger subsided, until eventually he dropped the dented Bunsen burner and admired his work. Kneeling in front of the battered man, he could see that Mr. Jacobi was still breathing, but he imagined he wouldn’t be for very much longer. Steady streams of blood ran down his face and skull from various different wounds. Joshua was calculating the likelihood that he would be placed in the same prison block as his father when he was struck with a profound inspiration. As he stared at his biology teacher’s limp form, he realized that he was no longer regarding him as an authority figure who he had once admired, but rather as another potential scientific experiment. He examined the man’s aging but muscular build; strong limbs wrapped in thick skin that was tanned golden-brown from a recent spring break in the Bahamas. Oh yes, he’d do just nicely. Joshua made a few more mental preparations before pulling a switchblade from his back pocket. It had belonged to his father, and Josh had kept it on him at all times since he went away. If he had learned anything from Anthony Warner, it was that sometimes, people deserve to get what’s coming to them, and you had to be ready in case you were the one who had to give it.

He flicked open the blade and began cutting away at Mr. Jacobi’s arm.

The spurt of blood on his fingers felt warm and inviting. He could feel it sinking into his pores and revitalizing him like a powerful elixir. The knife glided effortlessly through his skin, and the more he cut, the more blood spilled between the lifelines on his palms and down to his wrists. His heart was hammering inside his chest and his thoughts were dancing behind his dilated pupils. The crotch of his uniform grey slacks strained with the force of his growing erection. This was nothing like the incisions he had made on frogs and pig fetuses, what with their tiny dead bodies all cold and stiff with formaldehyde. This was something brand new and exhilarating, and he knew exactly what came next. When he had cut away a satisfactory section of his teacher’s forearm, he dropped the knife and brought the bloody chunk of flesh to his lips. As he placed it on his tongue, he felt a tremor move down his neck to the base of his spine. The texture and warmth as he chewed was so incredibly sustaining that he knew he’d never taste anything the same way again.

Oh, how very wrong the man had been; he was a scientist, for in this divine moment of experimentation, he had never felt more alive. But perhaps, just maybe, it was something else as well; something a bit more primal than the desire to observe and hypothesize. Perhaps he could revel in an entirely new passion, one that allowed him to appreciate how pure and gratifying it felt to hunt, and feed.

By the time the custodian on-duty made his after school rounds and saw what was taking place, Andrew Jacobi was very much deceased. Not long after, police arrived at the scene. Before two burly police officials could tear the boy away from his kill, the biology teacher’s left forearm and a third of his face had been entirely stripped of its flesh, and Joshua Warner had arrived at the firm decision never to go back to frogs.

[tessatechaitea]

Batman #17

Is Finch afraid that if he looks too closely at a male mouth for reference purposes, he might become gay?

You know that feeling when you've just finished writing a novel and printing it up so you delete the file on the computer so it can't be stolen and then go to your printer and get the pages and accidentally throw them in the wastebasket nearby that's still on fire? I hate that feeling. I find myself checking in on Twitter far more than I ever have before since the election. Mostly because the few people I follow are liberal which means they know how to create funny jokes. It must suck to be a conservative if you like to laugh because mostly when you laugh at jokes conservatives like Huckabee tweet, you're only laughing because in that way that screams, "This isn't an actual physical reaction to something funny but an acknowledgment that I completely and utterly agree with the words you strung together in just the right kind of way that I could tell it was supposed to be a funny joke. Err, ha ha!" That's not to say all heathen liberal atheist monsters are funny! Here's a good example of the big fat colored-in part of the pie chart of Twitter (as opposed to the little splinter that represents people being creative and unique and hilarious):

"Hey! Look at this headline that makes a point! Now read my tweet where I restate the point, just in case you were too stupid to understand it. Although my restating of the point is almost exactly the same as the point in the headline so if you didn't understand that, I suppose you won't understand this tweet. So you're probably thinking, 'Why was this tweet needed?', right? Fuck you. I'm hilarious at hot takes that were already made!"

Anyway, that's most of Twitter. People tagging jokes by making the same joke yet less subtly. I'm not sure why people ever expand a tweet to read the replies because conversation on twitter is like going out to the dog park and comparing the taste of the various dog dirt you find lying in the grass. You might be wondering, "Is this a review of Batman or Twitter?" If you are, you shouldn't limit your life experiences. Sometimes when you plan to do something and the plan falls apart because the person lied about the plans (like, say, you wanted to read a Batman #17 review and instead got a review of Twitter), you should not think, "Well, this is crap!" You should instead embrace this life detour and think, "The person who lied to me and wasted my time is probably a super cool person who has had so much sex, how can I be mad?" Now that we've established my credentials of being super cool and having had so much sex I can hardly feel my crotch due to nerve damage, let's get to Batman! When we last left Batman, he and Alfred had just walked into the Batcave where Dick, Damian, and the Dumb One were hanging by their necks with a three word message painted on their chests, one word on each dead kid: Am I Bane? So they're probably dead. This issue will probably start with a funeral but then it will turn out not to be the funeral of these dead Robins but the other one. Nope. It doesn't begin that way at all. I guess I'm not as good at writing comic books as I am at playing Tracer on Overwatch. Lately when I play, I begin as McCree because come on! Gunfighter! Even if his ultimate almost always fails, the times it doesn't make me call my mother to tell her how much I probably love her (in theory). But if I'm doing poorly as McCree, I'll switch to Tracer and then the other team is all, "What the fuck just happened? What has changed? Why are we dying all the time?! Who let this lesbian punk rock maniac out of her cage?! And why won't she stop calling me a wanker when I die?!" Then they call their mother to tell her she's a fucking whore. Oh! Sorry! This was supposed to be about Batman! So, um, this issue begins in a hotel with Bronze Tiger ordering a shotgun blast to the stomach from Room Service. I wonder how much that set him back? That's just some kind of prologue to get everybody's genital juices flowing. Maybe that was inappropriate to the people reading this blog who don't find violence sexually alluring. The real beginning (Oh! I just watched the fourth episode of Season Two's Little House on the Prairie and it was called "In the Big Inning". Get it?! So clever!) begins in the Fortress of Solitude (located either in the Arctic or the Antarctic, depending on which dumb writer is currently writing). Apparently Dick, Damian, and the Dumb One didn't die (just as I predicted! Who else would have predicted that? Not you dum-dum comic book readers!). They just lost consciousness which allowed Batman to fly them all up to the Fortress of Solitude where Superman has some cryogenic chambers lying around. He threw them all in and has now asked Batman to babysit them while he goes after Bane. Why would he call Superman? Wasn't Supergirl given the Fortress? Preboot Superman has his own Fortress in the Himalayas. Having three kids stuck in freezers will seriously hamper Supergirl's social life. How creepy will it be fucking that Ben kid in the Fortress with their dead faces staring at Supergirl's naked bum going up and down and up and down and maybe sideways? Do butts go sideways when people do it? Alfred Pennyworth busies himself with Gotham Girl's therapy. Disguised as Jeremiah Arkham (who was recently shot in the face), he sneaks Gotham Girl into the most isolated wing of Arkham where Psycho Pirate is being kept. He has to keep her safe for the next four days while Batman hunts down Bane. Bane is Batman's most dangerous foe! At least for this story since Bane is the antagonist of this story. Next story arc, the most dangerous foe might be Penguin or Mad Hatter or Kite-man. If not for his terrible ability to draw the lips of men, I would have forgotten David Finch was doing the art for this issue. But I would have quickly been reminded when I turned the page and discovered a double splash page of Batman on a rooftop saying, "I have mine." Mr. King and Mr. Finch, I would like to not commend you on your use of comic book pages. What was so dynamic about that shot of Batman that it needed to waste two full pages of story? He's simply brooding on a roof with a clock tower in the background. We've seen this shot millions of times in Batman comic books over the years. Making it larger doesn't make it more compelling. Later, Room Service decides to head out of the hotel to shoot Catwoman.

What does Room Service have against characters with feline names? Jerko.

Room Service goes after Jim Gordon next. I don't get it. How is the name "Commissioner James Gordon" in any way catlike? Because he doesn't have a cat name, James Gordon doesn't wind up getting shot. He shoots Room Service and Room Service's friends, Housekeeping and Night Clerk. With the help of Duke, Batman's unnamed sidekick (although people keep telling me his name is Lark because of a dumb vision in Batman #35. I refuse to call him Lark until he's actually called Lark because it's a dumb name that evokes a sense of flippancy that Batman would never allow), Gordon survives the onslaught. But then Bane crashes through the wall like the Kool-Aid man on bath salts and the scene ends. The episode ends with Batman still hunched on the roof where he had his double splash appearance. Across the way, Bane is on another rooftop with all of his captives: gutshot Bronze Tiger, backshot Catwoman, severely beaten Commissioner Gordon, and was supposed to stay out of this Duke Thomas. I guess it's time for Batman to beat the shit out of Bane. Although, I suppose what this story has been hinting at, is that Bane is more dangerous suffering through the withdrawals of Venom (which, I guess, never end unless you have a Psycho Pirate to comfort you?) than he is on the drug. I don't know. I get that Bane broke Batman's back so he's supposed to be Batman's Doomsday. But to me, Bane is just as boring as Doomsday. He's a big, beefy beatdown machine and that's about it. I will admit, if you're going to argue because you're so in love with Bane that you probably pretend to suck his dick before falling asleep every night, that he has a little bit more character. He wears a luchador mask and is some kind of ethnic and, I suppose, he's also intelligent or something. Plus he has so many mental health issues because he was born inside a prison to somebody serving a life sentence which, apparently, means you have to live out the life sentence too. That's...well, I was going to say clever but that's the entirely wrong word, isn't it? It's not clever at all! It's the epitome of comic book nonsense! Like Dick Grayson driving a motorcycles straight up a wall! Doomsday's background of having been killed and reborn over and over again to make him immune to death is a more believable origin story! The Ranking! No change!

[96thdayofrage]

How Democrats Paved The Way For Trump-Era School Privatization

Before Trump nominated Betsy DeVos as Sec'y of Education, Democrats savaged public schools with Obama's Race To The Top program.

JAISAL NOOR:​Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore.

Public refusals on Wednesday by two U.S. Senate Republicans to support Betsy DeVos, the billionaire school choice crusader and Republican donor that President Donald Trump picked to be Education Secretary, raised the possibility of a rare Congressional rejection of a Cabinet nominee. In an ominous sign for Trump, Republican Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski said they would not vote for DeVos, an heiress who has poured millions into promoting so-called school choice and vouchers but has no practical experience working with or managing public schools.

SUSAN COLLINS:​In keeping with my past practice, I will vote today to proceed to debate on Mrs. DeVos's nomination. But Madam President, I will not, I cannot, vote to confirm her as our nation's next Secretary of Education.

LISA MURKOWSKI:​I do not intend to vote on final passage to support Mrs. DeVos to be Secretary of Education.

JAISAL NOOR:​They would be the first Republicans to break party ranks and vote against one of Trump's Cabinet selections.

Well, now joining us to discuss this is Diane Ravitch. She's the former Undersecretary of Education to George H.W. Bush. More recently, she's turned into an influential whistle-blower against the school privatization movement. Her recent best sellers, including "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" and most recently, "Reign of Error" are considered necessary reading for those wanting to understand the grave threats facing our public education system today and what we can do about it. Thank you so much for joining us.

DIANE RAVITCH:​Glad to be with you.

JAISAL NOOR:​So, there's pretty big news coming out of the education world from Capitol Hill because Betsy DeVos is one vote shy of becoming blocked from becoming Education Secretary. You have come out strongly against her. You've called her an education extremist, Said she would gut public education. What is your message to those remaining Republican Senators that might be on the fence right now? Why is she such a bad pick to be Education Secretary?

DIANE RAVITCH:​Well, she does not understand anything about education except for escaping from public schools. She's never taught. She's never supervised. She's never attended public schools. Her children did not attend public schools. She thinks that public schools everywhere are just awful and she has spent millions... She's a billionaire and she has spent many millions of dollars advocating for vouchers and choice and charters and home schooling and cyber charters for every other alternative but not for public education. She's spent millions on political campaigns to advocate for choice and also to fund the campaigns of very extremist right-wing Republicans who are opposed to public education.

So, when she went before the Senate to be interviewed before the Senate Committee, she showed absolute ignorance of federal law and federal policy and federal programs. She was asked about the law that protects the rights of children with disabilities and she said, "Well that would be up to the States." And one of the Democratic Senators pointed out that it's not up to States to decide whether to obey a Federal law. She had no idea that IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is a Federal law. It's not something that States can choose to abide by. So, she knows nothing, other than to be a lobbyist for choice. And, being a billionaire, she's lived in a bubble all her life and knows nothing about public education. Does not understand the history of it, the importance of public education in a democracy, and she plays fast and loose with the truth and the facts.

JAISAL NOOR:​And she's been accused of lying and misleading the Senate panel where she testified on for several different issues.

But I wanted to raise another point, you know, some would argue that it was the often failed bipartisan policies under previous administrations, including Democrats, that created the conditions for the likes of DeVos to be put forth. I mean, the public faith in public education seems to be low and there are a lot children in struggling schools around the country, and DeVos is, I guess, to her supporters, is seen as someone that, you know, will provide an alternative and will give people that choice, give parents that choice. How do you respond to that? Do Democrats also share some of the responsibility here?

DIANE RAVITCH:​Well, definitely Democrats do share some of that responsibility for misleading the public and also for stabbing public education in the back, if public education in fact has a back. They have followed along with the narrative that public education is failing and that narrative itself is a lie.

Public education is not failing. Our society is failing. Our society is failing to fairly fund its public schools. Our society is failing to address the root cause of school failure, which is poverty and racial segregation. And because our society is failing, it's very easy and cheap to blame it on the schools.

But the schools are often the most stable institution in the lives of very hard-pressed communities. And this effort to deflect blame onto the schools, and onto teachers, is really shameful. And DeVos is part of it but so was Arne Duncan, so was President Obama. He also bought the myth that charter schools were the answer. Charter schools are not the answer and the best way to respond to this claim of choice advocates is simply say, let's look at the evidence.

We've now had 25 years of charter schools. We've now had 25 years of vouchers, and there's not a single district that you can turn to and say there is a district where all children are getting a great education and there's a district where charter schools are truly out-performing public schools. The ones that have high test scores -- which may or may not be good indicators of performance -- but the ones that have had test scores are those that push out the kids with disabilities; those who exclude the kids who are English language learners.

If we look at the cities that have vouchers, and Milwaukee has had vouchers and charters now for 25 years. Detroit has charters. The only reason it doesn't have vouchers is because it says in the Michigan State Constitution that public funds can't go to religious schools. And Betsy DeVos and her husband in the year 2000 launched a State referendum to remove that from the Constitution of Michigan and it was turned down by 69 to 31.

So, the public, wherever vouchers have been put to a vote, the public has said overwhelmingly, "No." But let's look at the results.

In Detroit, in the State of Michigan, it's overrun with charters and there are more bad charters than there are bad public schools. Charters haven't lifted Detroit at all. Detroit continues to be the lowest performing school district in the nation. And Michigan, under DeVos's choice policies, has been sliding steadily among the States. It went from the middle of the pack to the very bottom. It's now, in fourth-grade reading and math, listed in the low 40s among the 50 that take the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

So, we don't have a single story about vouchers where researchers or anyone else can say, "Here's the miracle they perform." They perform no miracles. They failed everywhere.

JAISAL NOOR:​And so, I wanted to ask you about Eli Broad from the Broad Foundation -- he's another school privatization advocate, a wealthy philanthropist, and even he has come out against Betsy DeVos. What do you make of that?

DIANE RAVITCH:​Well, I make of it that he is trying to separate his brand and his claims from that of Trump. Trump is terribly unpopular in California. The State voted overwhelmingly against Trump and Eli Broad is trying to spread charters across Los Angeles. So, it's very important for him to separate his brand of charter from Betsy DeVos and Trump.

And as the saying goes, it's a day late and a dollar short. If he really was opposed to her, he could have said so two months ago when she was first nominated. He could have weighed in then and... Not that he would have had any influence in terms of California, because both the Senators there are Democrats and will vote against her anyway. But he might have used some of his immense -- being a billionaire, he too makes a lot of campaign contributions -- he could have weighed in and cancelled out a few of her Republican votes.

But, at the moment, every single Republican seems to be set to vote for her, for Murkowski and Collins, both of whom voted to approve her in the Committee. Either one of them could have stopped her in the Senate Committee because she was approved by a vote of 12 to 11. It would have been a disapproval of 12 to 11 if one of them had stood up and said, "She's not qualified."

They know she's not qualified and they voted to approve her in Committee. And now that the vote is going to the Senate floor, where Republicans hold the majority of 52 to 48, the two of them bring it to a tie. And, if not a single other Republican breaks ranks, Mike Pence will cast the deciding vote. And Betsy DeVos will become one of the first Cabinet members in history to be approved by a tie-breaking vote by the Vice President. That's how intense the opposition to her is amongst the teachers and parents and people of this country who love their public schools.

JAISAL NOOR:​So, if DeVos is confirmed or if not -- we've been getting questions from viewers, many of them who are teachers, or professors of education -- they want to know your advice on fighting back against these policies, whether it's DeVos or someone else. Here in Baltimore, one of my close friends is a public school teacher, some of my family members are school teachers, in fact. And, you know, here we're facing... People aren't even worrying about DeVos right now because we're facing $130 million budget school deficit, 1,000 teachers and staff are being laid off this year. Can you talk about that? What is the route forward?

DIANE RAVITCH:​Sure. What Baltimore is experiencing is what Philadelphia, for example, has experienced now for years, what Detroit has experienced for years -- which is the deliberate defunding of urban schools in order to create a demand for school choice. The Republican leadership in Pennsylvania did this and starved the Philadelphia school district to the point where they didn't even have the bare essentials. And charter operators moved in very quickly to scoop up their schools and bring in lots of private funding so that the charters could be more attractive, have smaller class sizes, have the arts, have everything the public schools can't offer. This is... what's happening to Baltimore, what has happened in Philadelphia, what's happened in Detroit and what is happening in more and more urban districts, is part of this effort to privatize public education. And the only way to stop it literally is by protesting, by demonstrating, by going to the people in power.

I mean, I think that Maryland has a particular problem because it elected a Republican governor and he has appointed a Republican State Board of Education. So, the centers of power are perfectly willing to starve the City of Baltimore public schools because it will advance the Republican goal of destroying public education. It's really terrible because public education is an essential foundation of our democracy. And we know from what's happened over the last 25 years, vouchers and charters are highly segregated. They increase segregation in society as well as in the schools, and they don't produce better results.

So, we will be offered substitutes for public education that literally destroy communities and they will claim that they empower parents, but the great secret behind privatization is the schools that choose the students, the students do not choose the schools. You may apply to a voucher school. You may apply to a charter school and the school will decide whether they want your child or not. That's not school choice as it is being sold. It's being sold as propaganda.

It's a deception and the only countries that have tried this route, this kind of free market route that Betsy DeVos espouses and that so many of the Republican Party have fallen for, are Sweden and Chile. And Chile did it under the leadership of the dictator Pinochet, and it has seen disastrous results. And Sweden did it and they're now trying to backtrack because they have seen their test scores on the international tests plummet since the privatization of so many of their schools.

JAISAL NOOR:​All right, Diane Ravitch, thank you so much for joining us. And, again, I strongly recommend reading Diane Ravitch's books. They are really important for anyone trying to understand and grasp the crisis in public education and how we can fight back. Thank you so much for joining us.

DIANE RAVITCH:​Thank you.

JAISAL NOOR:​And thank you for joining us at The Real News Network.