I read three critiques of Kamala Harris as she prepared her MLK day announcement and I was surprised that each article highlighted an odd issue: truancy.
The three articles are:
Gray leads with truancy and a link to a Fox News story about a woman who was jailed after keeping two kids out of school for more than 50 days. The rest of her story largely recaps Bazelon. Levin and Beckett cover the same ground as Bazelon but they include deeper reporting from California and present a more complete picture of Harris’s career. Bazelon works with the Innocence project, so she leads with allegations of prosecutorial abuse but adds truancy in her fifth paragraph.
Each article claims that criminalizing truancy is not progressive. This is odd because the 19th century Child labor and compulsory education acts, which established criminal penalties for parents of truant children in a successful effort to eliminate child labor, are the earliest and most enduring progressive victories. Every state in the union and every developed country criminalizes truancy to one degree or another. In 1948 compulsory education was enshrined in article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The idea grew into the larger concept of children’s rights, documented in Hillary Clinton’s famous 1973 article “Children Under the Law” and codified in 1989 with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, article 28. The fight for compulsory education is a central pillar of progressivism worldwide.
One hundred years later school is almost universally valued in the United States, the larger problem is the system excluding children. A key issue for progressives is chronic absenteeism, an umbrella term that covers truancy, excessive suspensions and systemic obstacles to education. The NEA documents that chronic absenteeism disproportionately effects poor children and children of color, reduces economic prospects and feeds the school to prison pipeline. Fines and criminal penalties can worsen absenteeism if too broadly used.
Harris, as San Francisco District Attorney in 2004, implemented policies to gather data on absenteeism, identify the sources of the problem (like bus schedules and disproportionate suspensions), pressured school districts to fix those problems and provide wrap-around services to parents and students in trouble. Her office worked with thousands of families to resolve absentee problems, and prosecuted about 25 parents whose children missed more than 50 days of school and where mediation failed. The Guardian reports that chronic absenteeism dropped by a third and no parents were arrested or jailed for absenteeism during her tenure in SF or since. As California Attorney General Harris worked with the California Teachers Association to pass legislation to implement her successful SF policies. By 2015 In School + On Track had pressured most California school districts to improve policies, a quarter reduced time lost to suspensions.
I decided to track down where this peculiar truancy argument came from. Historically the primary American groups to oppose compulsory (and, as a right, equal) education were segregationists and the libertarians who used segregation to build their movement. As I researched more I saw lots of rose twitter had very strong objections to compulsory education, which again is odd as all social democratic and socialist countries implement compulsory education.
Bazelon’s op-ed was the first mainstream criticism of Harris’s record as prosecutor, and researching her piece gave me the first clue. Her op-ed is a lightly re-written version of a January 9th Reason review of Harris’s book:
But the review doesn’t mention truancy, and Bazelon hasn’t written on truancy before. She works on the innocence project, Gage’s situation is what motivates her animus. So where did Bazelon get the truancy argument from? If you search for Kamala on Reason.com you’ll find an article for each point in Bazelon’s op-ed, including a 2015 Reason article by CATO senior fellow Walter Olson that made this critique of Harris: Jail for Missed Days at School? The Madness of Truancy Laws.
Olson uses the usual libertarian form: an appeal to the extreme, like Gray’s Fox News story, to indict the whole concept of government. An appeal to authority, Milton Friedman, on why compulsory public education is unnecessary. Ignore and distort the substance of progressive arguments, since obviously government cannot be a force for good. Blame teachers unions (“the education lobby”) for a nefarious urge to punish. Blame liberalism (“carceral liberalism”) for an imaginary authoritarian desire to imprison everyone. And, of course, blame the “impeccably progressive California attorney general Kamala Harris.”
Olson reveals the agenda here: it’s the standard GOP effort to dismantle progressive achievements like public education. Bazelon is rewriting Koch sponsored libertarian claptrap and laundering it through the New York Times to attack Kamala Harris from the “left”.
This is not the first time Bazelon has been used to launder Koch messages, she was part of a Betsy DeVos campaign to delegitimize Title IX in the NYT just a month ago. The Intercept, of course, was a primary conduit for 2016’s Russian influence campaign and has long smuggled libertarian narratives into progressive spaces to undermine and divide the left. The New York Times’s role in legitimizing GOP narratives — from Whitewater to Iraq WMD to “No Clear Link to Russia” — is legendary.
So be careful out there. Those white, beardy rose people who seem too misogynist to be progressives? They might be libertarians cosplaying as socialists to troll progressives.
