New Definition of Sustainability: To Save Life on Earth

From Common Dreams:

A landmark United Nations climate report published Wednesday details the observed and anticipated future impacts of planet-heating emissions from human activity on the world's oceans and frozen zones—and warns of the emerging consequences for humanity, marine ecosystems, and the global environment.

The Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) is a product of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. body that assesses the latest science related to the human-caused climate crisis. It follows recent IPCC reports on the consequences of 1.5°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels and the necessity of reforming land use practices worldwide.

Although a draft of the SROCC leaked to the press last month, the final version was released Wednesday after the world governments approved its Summary for Policymakers (pdf) at a meeting in Monaco Tuesday. For the new report, more than 100 experts from 36 countries examined research on the ocean and cryosphere, which includes Greenland and Antarctica's ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, and areas of snow and permafrost as well as frozen lakes, rivers, and parts of the ocean.

The report presents projections for the future based on both low- and high-emissions scenarios, underscoring the urgent need for curbing greenhouse gas emissions by overhauling human practices, particularly the use of fossil fuels, on a global scale.

"We will only be able to keep global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels if we effect unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society, including energy, land and ecosystems, urban and infrastructure as well as industry," Debra Roberts, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, said Wednesday. "The ambitious climate policies and emissions reductions required to deliver the Paris agreement will also protect the ocean and cryosphere—and ultimately sustain all life on Earth."

The SROCC features chapters on high mountain areas; polar regions; sea level rise and implications for low lying islands, coasts, and communities; changing ocean, marine ecosystems, and dependent communities; and extremes, abrupt changes, and managing risks.

"The open sea, the Arctic, the Antarctic, and the high mountains may seem far away to many people. But we depend on them and are influenced by them directly and indirectly in many ways—for weather and climate, for food and water, for energy, trade, transport, recreation and tourism, for health and well-being, for culture and identity," noted IPCC chair Hoesung Lee. "If we reduce emissions sharply, consequences for people and their livelihoods will still be challenging, but potentially more manageable for those who are most vulnerable." . . .

Read on.

Greta Thunberg Has a Promise for Traitors to Life on Earth

Greta's message is quite clear:  If "leaders" of the world are to impose a mass extinction with their grotesque inaction and half-measures, the young citizens of the Earth know where that extinction shall begin.

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you are doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight.

You say you “hear” us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I don’t want to believe that. Because if you fully understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And I refuse to believe that.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5C degrees, and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control.

Maybe 50% is acceptable to you. But those numbers don’t include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of justice and equity. They also rely on my and my children’s generation sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist. So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us – we who have to live with the consequences. 

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5C global temperature rise – the best odds given by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the world had 420 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide left to emit back on 1 January 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatonnes. How dare you pretend that this can be solved with business-as-usual and some technical solutions. With today’s emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone in less than eight and a half years.

There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures today. Because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us I say we will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

• This is the speech Greta Thunberg delivered to the UN Climate Action summit in New York on Monday.

PA Senator and Charter Booster Busted on Child Porn Charges

Based on charges outlined in a criminal complaint alleging possession of child pornography depicting an adult male and a "very young female child," State Senator Michael Folmer has resigned. 

Biloxi, MS School Decides to Censor "To Kill a Mockingbird"

"To Kill a Mockingbird" has been removed from a school curriculum in a Mississippi school district because it "makes people uncomfortable."  

Let's make the censorious, racist asses who run the Biloxi schools uncomfortable until they decide differently.

Dr. Larry Drawdy Interim Superintendent P.O. Box 168, Biloxi, MS 39533 160 St. Peter Ave. Biloxi, MS 39530 Secretary: Mrs. Lee Ann Dubaz Telephone: (228) 374-1810, X-1118 FAX: (228) 436-5171   Ms. Pamela Manners Interim Assistant Superintendent   Secondary Programs and TestingP.O. Box 168, Biloxi, MS 39533160 St. Peter Ave. Biloxi, MS 39530 Secretary: Mrs. Michelle Johnson Telephone: (228) 374-1810, X-1134 FAX: (228) 435-6289

The Sun Herald reports that Biloxi administrators pulled the novel from the 8th-grade curriculum this week. School board vice president Kenny Holloway says the district received complaints that some of the book's language "makes people uncomfortable." Published in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee deals with racial inequality in a small Alabama town. A message on the school's website says "To Kill A Mockingbird" teaches students that compassion and empathy don't depend upon race or education. Holloway says other books can teach the same lessons. The book remains in Biloxi school libraries.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) Spawns Learning Rebellion (LR)

XR Educators: Learning Rebellion sign up page.

 

This will sign you up to the XR Educators newsletter, including further information about getting involved in actions inside and outside of educational institutions. Read more at http://learningrebellion.earth

Follow at: http://twitter.com/XRLearningrebel https://www.facebook.com/XRLearningRebellion/

"No Excuses" Realities Remain As KIPP Makes Rhetorical Retreat

This may be remembered as the summer that "No Excuses" became too toxic for charters to admit that they are still clinging to the abusive reality.  

The rhetorical retreat from "No Excuses" began with a New York Times piece in July, "Why Some of the Country’s Best Urban Schools Are Facing a Reckoning."
In it, I found so little to substantiate the claim that New York's "no excuses" charter schools are actually implementing any policies that would negate their brutal discipline systems that I read the piece a second time, looking for something that might justify a delay in these punitive charters' well-deserved day of reckoning. At the risk of dating myself, I could only ask, "Where's the beef!?" 

The discipline changes noted at the Ascend charter schools was covered in a bit more detail in a Times piece from 2017, even though that piece, too, doesn't say much. The other big change at Ascend appears to be a new school that lumps disabled students into one school, a practice that lost pedagogical credibility decades ago and one that cripples efforts to create inclusive learning environments. It's hard to say why Success Academy is even mentioned in this piece, since its management is staying the course on its total compliance penal variety of schools. 

As for KIPP, there seems to a kinder, gentler change in rhetoric from the top, but in terms of policy change, I can't find it. There seems to a belief that more black and brown teachers will be enough to humanize the zero tolerance "no excuses" approach. Sadly, KIPP seems to have put most of its black and brown New York teachers in a single school. In the end, KIPP teachers follow school policy, or else, and there is nothing in the NYTimes article to indicate a change of practices that demean and humiliate both students and teachers.

What is clear is that KIPP Model hell school operators would like to mold the media in order to convince politicians that the brutality of "no excuses" charter school has changed.  With growing numbers of citizens now realizing that these racist penal-style KIPP Model schools are emptying public school coffers while making policymakers complicit in crimes against children, PR campaigns now abound to present these cultural sterilization charter schools in the best possible light.  

Enter Jay Mathews, who has remains a tireless mouthpiece for corporate charter hell schools for the past 25 years. Jay's August 2 column, ‘No-excuses schools’ make no excuse for updating their approach, is devoted to downplaying the punishing practices and policies that have earned KIPP the reputation of "Kids in Prison Program." 

A formidable propagandist, Mathews cherry-picks individual policies from the Big Five "no excuses" chains (Achievement First, Success Academy, KIPP, YES Prep, and Uncommon Schools) to make it sound as if universal changes are happening to make these educational sweatshops less inhumane.  

Jay mixes in some plain old lying, too.  A couple of examples:

Sitting straight in class with hands folded on the table and eyes continuously on the teacher: Those were the rules when I started visiting KIPP schools in 2001, but no longer. . . .Walking silently through the halls in single-file lines: That is no longer the rule in these networks.

I did a cursory search on the web and found many examples of KIPP networks with these student contract elements still in place.  Here is just one: 

I will SLANT during instruction· 
I will track whomever is speaking· 
I will greet and respond to greetings from others in the hallway· 
I will raise my hand to speak and share· 
I will enter and exit rooms silently and close doors carefully· 
I will say please, thank you, and excuse me· 
I will walk quietly on the right side of the hallway· 
I will hold doors for people behind me· 
I will be team and family and include others· 
I will speak like a scholar and friend to all· 
I will keep hands, feet, and objects to myself· 
I will communicate with my parents by providing them with flyers from school

Jay says that "No-excuses is so 20th century. Let’s talk about something new."  That will only be possible, Jay, when realities in these lock-down schools actually change to match the misleading rhetoric that you continue to propagate.

"Undercover" — Valerie Plame for Congress

Real Estate Empires and "Non-Profit" Charter Schools

From Common Dreams:

Charter schools, once the darling of politicians on the right and left, have become a hot potato in the Democratic Party 2020 presidential primary with nearly every candidate voicing some level of disapproval of the industry. A common refrain among the candidates is to express opposition to “for-profit charter schools.” Charter school proponents counter these pronouncements by pointing to industry data indicating only 12 percent of charter schools are run by overtly profit-minded entities, and that most charter schools are overseen by outfits that have a nonprofit, tax-exempt status.

But the singling out of for-profit charter schools is somewhat beside the point as residents of a St. Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood learned this summer when a treasured local landmark was threatened by an expanding charter school. The charter was decidedly nonprofit, but as families and preservation advocates would learn from their tenacious, but ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save a beloved, historic church, charter schools, regardless of their tax status, have become powerful players in a lucrative real estate market in urban areas where land values are high and empty lots or school-ready buildings are hard to find. . . .

Read on here.

Walmart Shoppers Help Fund Public School Privatization

From the Arkansas Education Association:

Inside the web of Arkansas’s School Privatization Empire 

A free quality public education for every child is a foundational principle of American society and a right guaranteed by Arkansas’s Constitution. Everyone in this state, regardless of religion, race, income, disability or any other characteristic deserves an equal opportunity to learn and succeed.  

Unfortunately, a vast network of corporate interests and wealthy individuals are chipping away at this bedrock of our democracy in an effort to turn public education into a marketplace where private interests can profit off of our students.  

Across the nation, states have implemented and expanded charter schools that are unaccountable to the public and voucher programs that have siphoned off public taxpayer money to pay for private school tuition. 

This powerful and well-funded effort is nationwide, but one of the biggest contributors is based right here in our state, and each year the network of privatizers working in Arkansas is growing. 

This network uses pass through organizations to fund a swarm of lobbyists and spend dark money on political candidates in our state and across the country. They initiated the recent attack on the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, and have even co-opted our state’s flagship University to provide cover for the work of partisan think tank alumni who misuse statistics in support of a privatization agenda. They have close ties to members of the Arkansas State Board of Education, and their influence is part of the reason Arkansas’s latest legislative sessions have focused more on privatization schemes like vouchers and charter school expansion rather than the investments we know will actually improve outcomes for Arkansas’s 486,000 public school students.  

This article is a look at just some of the connections in our state. It is important to note that this report is not exhaustive. The web of dark money and organizations working in Arkansas and across the country to plunder public school resources is vast and difficult to track.   

HOME REGION 

The Walton Family Foundation (WFF) and many of its grantees are the major school privatization players in Arkansas and even one of the biggest in the nation. WFF is led by the billionaire heirs to the Walmart fortune. The Bentonville, AR based foundation gave away nearly $600 million in grants in 2018. According to its website, the foundation has invested more than $400 million dollars to expand charter schools since 1997. They, along with other privatization supporters have also dumped vast fortunes into think tanks, opinion outlets posing as media organizations and political races, including more than $50 million dollars in a failed attempt to install a charter supporter as the new California Superintendent of Public Instruction.  

WFF has an application process like many foundations and gives to a large number of causes including so called “education reform.” In fact, K-12 Education is one of their top priorities, along with the “Home Region” of Northwest Arkansas and the Arkansas Delta. 

The foundation’s Arkansas investments also include some donations to public school districts, however those grants are dwarfed by the amount being given to pro-privatization organizations and schools across the state. Many of these organizations then in turn fund other organizations, which an outsider could assume to be grassroots or community nonprofits springing up to support the same types of school privatization. These organizations, which lobby and change policy, do receive marginal support from other donors that may benefit from the privatization of our schools, however the organizations likely would not exist without the support of the Walton Family Foundation.  

For example, Arkansans for Education Reform Foundation received $435,000 in contributions in 2017, $350,000 of this revenue came directly from the Walton Family Foundation. Their board includes the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, which regularly prints pro-privatization editorials, a former CEO of Murphy Oil, and a member of the Dillard family. The board’s only paid member, Executive Director Gary Newton, is paid more than $189,000 plus benefits.  

The organization also gave $115,000 to Arkansas Learns where Newton serves as President and CEO. Arkansas Learns’ board has the same members, plus Arkansas Chamber of Commerce President Randy Zook. Zook is married to the new Chair of the Arkansas Department of Education, Dianne Zook, who is also Newton’s aunt.  

Another notable consulting firm the non-profit Arkansas for Education Reform has hired is Trace Strategies. Trace Strategies, owned and operated by lobbyist Laurie Lee, received $205,756 dollars from Arkansans for Education Reform in 2016, according to the organization’s tax documents.  

Lee is also the registered principal officer and Chairman of the Board of The Reform Alliance. The Reform Alliance is a registered non-profit which manages Arkansas’s voucher program, the “Succeed Scholarship.”  

In 2017, WFF gave the Reform Alliance a nearly $1.5 million grant. The Reform Alliance then paid Lee’s company Trace Strategies $180,000 for “Campaign Advisory” services. It should be noted that Lee’s daughter also works at The Reform Alliance, and the nonprofit’s principal address is listed as Lee’s home on the Arkansas Secretary of State’s website.  

The organization also receives a percentage of the taxpayer dollars it manages for administration. The Reform Alliance also lobbies for pro privatization legislation, and the “Succeed Scholarship.” This voucher program has been expanded every year since it was first created. In the 2019 Legislative Session, the funding was doubled to $3 million dollars, despite lawmakers acknowledging there is no way to determine if the students participating in the program are receiving a quality education. Lawmakers also passed a bill to study the program, but elected to increase in the amount of public tax dollars that can be spent on the program by $1.5 million before the study could begin. The Governor has since approved $1.8 million in funding for the program, and is expected to fully fund the $3 million appropriation. To be clear, this means the state is handing millions of your tax dollars to a nonprofit with no transparency and which hired its own chairperson as a contractor. 

This linkage is important for two reasons, firstly because it highlights some of the strategies used to control the discourse surrounding the needs of our children and because it shows how key players in this space receive funding from the Waltons through multiple sources. So, what first seems like the spontaneous creation of a grassroots working group of concerned citizens, is more like astroturf paid in full by the pro-privatization empire. 

IN OUR SCHOOLS 

While it is no surprise the Walton’s can afford teams of lobbyists at the state Capitol, some educators may not realize they may also be contributing to the problem.  

The Arkansas State Teachers Association (ASTA) bills itself as the “non-union” professional association for educators. ASTA is the local affiliate of the Association of American Educators (AAE). AAE was created by insurance billionaire Gary Beckner, who saw an opportunity to sell insurance to educators. While claiming to represent teachers’ best interests, these organizations operate as a vehicle to disrupt school systems by breaking up collective teacher voice. Sourcewatch states that the AAE is funded in part by the Bradley Foundation as part of an effort to “defund teachers unions and achieve real education reform.”  

Trace Strategies also lists AAE as a client on its website, which means the same lobbyist pushing to expand public funding of private schools in our state is also representing ASTA members. In addition, the Walton Foundation has given millions of dollars to the AAE Foundation, including $200,000 in 2017. 

AAE also produces a pro-privatization newsletter, and its foundation is an associate of the State Policy Network, alongside the American Legislative Exchange Council (which writes pro-corporate legislation for lawmakers to use), the Reason Foundation (which was part of the attack on the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System) and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Fund (which has used the courts to attempt to weaken educators’ collective voice). WFF also gave the State Policy Network nearly $120,000 in 2017. 

Another organization working to privatize the education system is also collecting membership dues from some public school districts. The Arkansas Public School Resource Center offers Walton funded grants and professional development opportunities to charter schools and rural public school districts. In addition, APSRC lobbies at the state Capitol and at the Federal level for privatization legislation. The US Department of Education, under Secretary Betsy DeVos, recently awarded APSRC more than $20 million in tax dollars to expand charter schools in Arkansas. The board of APSRC includes the Speaker of the House, President of the Senate, Jim Walton, Randy Zook (head of the state chamber) and Fitz Hill, (former president of Arkansas Baptist College which operated a Walton-funded charter school on its campus) a current member of the State Board of Education.  

In addition, DeVos’s dark money group American Federation for Children has now appeared in Arkansas and paid for ads in the 2018 election attacking candidates who stood strong for students in opposition of vouchers during the 2017 Legislative Session.   

SPONSORING RESEARCH  

According to a 2018 national poll, a strong majority (70%) of public-school parents give the traditional public schools in their neighborhoods either an A or a B – higher grades than they have given in years. However, the public more broadly gives only 4 in ten local schools an A or B and even fewer think give top grades to public schools nationally (19 %).  2019 PDK poll 

What is behind the disconnect? A decades long propaganda attack on educators and public schools, led by those who wish to shift to a market-based system. Creating alternative facts through the infiltration of institutions of higher education and funding think tanks is another tactic pro-privatization organizations are using.  

Much like the tobacco industry sponsored research to misrepresent the health effects of smoking, these organizations twist data in an attempt to justify shifting public dollars away from neighborhood public schools and into private or charter options. These think tanks are operating all over the country to provide cover for policies the general public does not support. 

The University of Arkansas Fayetteville – Office of Education Reform was founded in part by a $10 million gift from the Walton Family. This branch of our flagship state university consistently produces pro privatization policy papers as well as leaders in the privatization movement. The department is headed by Dr. Jay Greene, who came to the school from the Manhattan Institute, a pro-privatization think tank that also receives Walton funding and is an associate of the State Policy Network. Greene also sits on the advisory board of ASTA’s national affiliate.  

Two faculty members at the Office of Education Reform currently preside as officers on the board of the Advance Arkansas Institute (another member of the State Policy Network). Further, many graduates of the program end up working at the Walton Family Foundation, pro privatization think tanks, and perhaps most alarmingly in top posts at the Arkansas Department of Education.   

Dr. Sarah Moore, a current State Board Member is an alumna of the graduate program. Moore also served as Governor Asa Hutchinson’s education policy advisor for three years.  

The U of A department also includes the “Office of Education Policy” or OEP, which just this year hired another Manhattan fellow who came from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. This foundation, along with the WFF funded the groups that made special trips to Arkansas to support and testify during a legislative hearing in favor of policies that seek to undermine the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System. The ATRS is a vital recruitment and retention tool to ensure quality teachers.  

The Pew Foundation, the Reason Foundation and Bellwether Education Partners were invited to testify before the joint retirement committee by a lawmaker in 2018. During testimony attacking defined benefit plans in favor of 401(k)s, legislators forced each of the groups to admit on the record they received funding from the Arnold Foundation. In addition, a staff member from the UA’s Department of Education Reform participated in the attack. While the groups have been successful in other parts of the country, including Kentucky and most recently Colorado, Arkansas legislators stood strong with our state’s educators and shot down every piece of anti-retirement legislation filed as a result of the effort.

Although this report includes a lot of names, it is just one slice of the nationwide effort to plunder our public schools. These organizations have a vast infrastructure and deep pockets that can seem daunting, but our students are counting on us to stand up and speak out.  

While they may have more cash, we have the power of numbers and common sense. Arkansas’s taxpayers and students would be better served by investing our scarce resources to improve our neighborhood public schools and helping all of the students who attend them.  

Our public schools are the anchor of our communities, and the best way to expand opportunity for all. This idea does not require twisted statistics, or market tested language to trick people into supporting it. It’s as old as the country itself.

KIPP vs. Feinberg: Battle of the Moral Sewer Dwellers

For almost 25 years, Mike Feinberg broke enough rules to bull his way up to the top of a morally-compromised heap of paternalistic charter hell school operators. 

In the early days of KIPP, Feinberg is remembered as the hothead without boundaries who threw a TV through a plate glass window at KIPP Houston--the same reckless wild man who would load KIPP students into an unventilated U-Haul trailer for a "field lesson" across town. 

"Whatever it takes" was "Cage-Buster" Feinberg's mantra, and he and David Levin believed that, as KIPP's top leaders, they should model the aggressive, hyper-macho, and abusive "let the stallions run" style of leadership for their clueless regiment of KIPP "school leaders."  No holds barred, take no prisoners, let the rules be damned.

Who knows if their schooling "philosophy" of reckless abandon contributed to Feinberg's eventual bust for sexual harassment of two KIPP employees, sexual abuse of a middle school student, and another charge vaguely referred to as “repeatedly violat[ing] KIPP’s technology usage policies.”  

Sexting? Porno? Who knows what the "cage-buster" was up to?

When it became obvious to KIPP in 2017 that Feinberg's behavior could be the source of a major scandal that could damage the brand and, thus, jeopardize the flow of hundreds of millions of federal and private dollars to KIPP, KIPP launched its own very hush-hush investigation into allegations that Feinberg had sexually assaulted a middle student some years before.  That was in April 2017. See documents here.

On September 7, 2017, KIPP notified Feinberg that he was off the hook, while entirely downplaying the sexual assault charges with this: "Other than what the former student alleges, now almost 20 years after the alleged acts, there is no evidence of any wrongdoing." In other words, KIPP chose to ignore the charges and "to consider the matter officially closed."

Obviously, the allegations did not go away as easily as KIPP would prefer.  Just two  months after Feinberg was "exonerated,"  KIPP Houston hired a law firm, WilmerHale, to conduct a real investigation beginning in November 2017.  Contrary to KIPP's own findings just two months before, WilmerHale found the charges of sexual abuse with a middle schooler credible.  The law firm, whose specialty is investigating sexual misconduct allegations, also uncovered two sexual harassment cases involving Feinberg and KIPP employees, one of which resulted in a settlement in 2004.  

Did the KIPP Board know about this part of Feinberg's history when it gave him a free pass just months earlier?  How could they not know if a settlement had been paid?  

Unable to sweep all this under the rug any longer, KIPP sent a letter to Feinberg on Feb. 22, 2018 announcing that, as of that day, he was fired.  Furthermore, he was told that his email account had been closed and that he was to return all technology (computers, tablets, phones) that belonged to KIPP.  His belongings would be mailed to him.

In other words, Feinberg was fired the same way that Feinberg and the KIPP hierarchy have treated so many thousands of disposable teachers and staff over the past 25 years.  Such irony.

It is likely that Feinberg believed that he would be able continue his lucrative career as a "no accountability" charter kingpin.  After all, this has been the pattern for fired KIPP administrators, who have been able to move into higher management slots with other charter chains. That doesn't seem to be the case, however.  

Recently in an effort to reclaim a reputation that his own egomaniacal recklessness destroyed, Feinberg has decided to sue KIPP for its handling of his dismissal.  For its part, KIPP stands by bare-knuckled firing of Feinberg with its entire absence of due process, and they offer Feinberg this parting shot:

“This is a baseless and frivolous lawsuit. Mr. Feinberg’s employment was terminated last year after thorough investigations uncovered credible instances of misconduct incompatible with KIPP’s values. We regret Mr. Feinberg is choosing to put the women who came forward to share painful experiences, the witnesses who supported them, and the entire KIPP community through further distress.”

Stand by.  Who knows how much more of the truth will emerge during the trial?  Will we find out what was on Feinberg's computers, phones, and tablets?  Will victims get their day in court?