NY Senator Kirsten Gillebrand photographed by Annie Leibovitz, *Vogue*, November 2017

Watching Bernie or bust progressives trying to malign the reputation of New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is a distressing experience, in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's defeat in the 2016 presidential campaign. To me, Gillibrand's record is sound as a progressive, even if she does hail from Troy, New York and a more conservative zone in the liberal state.

Gillibrand says 'calm down', that she has been recognized more in the last six months than in the entire eight years since being appointed to fill Hillary Clinton's New York State Senate seat. "I'm not sure what it is," the mother of two boys tells Jonathan Van Meter in her Vogue November 2017 interview. "Maybe it's just seeped in more."

It's easy enough to jump to Gillibrand's 2017 record of voting against Trump's Cabinet appointees more often than any other senator and her vocal condemnation of his record on Charlottesville and his transgender military ban. Note that Gillibrand sits on the powerful Armed Services committee and has been an outspoken advocate against sexual violence in the military.

What gets my attention are Van Meter's observations over several days is Republican women coming up to Gillibrand. This is not a surprise, with the senator's home district being two to one Republican.

But it is not just Democrats. Over the next couple of days I see others approach her and say some version of “I am Republican, and I really appreciate what you’re doing in Washington.” Even this afternoon, the day after Trump threatened North Korea from his golf club in New Jersey and scared the bejesus out of everyone with his “fire and fury like the world has never seen” voodoo, a frail, elderly Republican lady comes up to Gillibrand looking like she has seen a ghost. She wishes the senator “luck” in dealing with Trump and tells her she was “up all night” because of his press conference from Bedminster. As she walks away, Gillibrand shakes her head and mumbles almost to herself, “Oh, my God, everyone’s worried about North Korea. It’s not . . . it’s not good.”

California Senator Kamala Harris is said to be eyeing 2020, as is Gillibrand. Harris has attracted major applause for her tough-talking approach in senate hearings for Trump's cabinet nominees. Gillibrand comes across in the same way in Vogue's November 2017 profile.

Gillibrand left her first major mark in the Senate as a leading voice on the repeal of DADT (Don't Ask Don't Tell ban on gays in the military).

DADT was the first time Gillibrand’s colleagues began to realize how tough she can be. “She will go right up to anybody on the floor,” says New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, also eying a run in 2020, “and just get in their face until they say yes in a way that sometimes makes me feel uncomfortable. She is singular in that way. She fights and fights and fights.”

Seasoned women in politics writer Rebecca Traister has profiled both Gillibrand and Clinton multiple times. Traister believes that being 20 years younger than Hillary and not coming with her baggage is a crucial difference between the two women. “Gillibrand understands that she is capable of presenting herself as feminine and maternal in a way that Hillary could never have done and still been taken seriously in politics. Women of Hillary’s generation were expected to excel in male worlds by conforming to male norms.” Gillibrand, who was born in 1966, followed a far more liberated path.

“Gillibrand understands that she is capable of presenting herself as feminine and maternal in a way that Hillary could never have done and still been taken seriously in politics. Women of Hillary’s generation were expected to excel in male worlds by conforming to male norms.” Gillibrand, who was born in 1966, followed a far more liberated path.

In this wide-arch interview and Kirstin Gillibrand, the senator is quoted speaking to a crowd gathered to hear her speak at the Johnstown Historical Society and Museum, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton's hometown. Her words make an impression on this writer, who believes in her heart that the third-wave moment of feminism really never happened. If it did, the third wave movement was weak and lost ground every step of the way to social conservatives determined to make America a theocracy.

At a dais set up in the grass with a small white awning pitched over it for shade, Gillibrand gives a short but surprisingly moving speech, one that feels like the bare bones of a stump speech. She talks about why national paid family leave matters, because without it the “workforce is stuck in the Mad Men era. I have a great bill that makes it affordable. Two dollars a day.” She pushes affordable day care and health care, and then she gets to the one thing that clearly matters to her the most: more women running for office. “Just imagine what it would be like if we had 50 percent of women in Congress? Imagine if we had a woman president.” A mordant chuckle ripples through the crowd, still smarting from Hillary’s excruciating loss. “Things would change, I promise you. There would be different issues raised, different solutions offered. And we wouldn’t still be fighting for access to contraception; we wouldn’t still be fighting for equal pay for equal work. These things would be done, foregone conclusions. Our economies and communities are suffering because we don’t have enough diversity in Congress. I think there is an urgency to this. But I’m very hopeful. Something’s changing. Frankly, we are the suffragists of our generation.”

As Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seeks to expand school choice nationwide, including online, Pennsylvania serves as a case study in the shortcomings of the virtual charter school model. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

US education secretary Betsy DeVos is a big proponent of charter schools, so much so that she and her husband have put their money behind their values and beliefs. Over a decade ago, DeVos invested in junk-bond king Michael Milken-backed online charter-school operator K12, which targeted the growing homeschool market. But K12’s overly expansive business model made it both significantly less profitable and more prone to regulatory and operating deficiencies than smaller, less ideologically driven competitors, wrote The Atlantic prior to Besty Devos' senate confirmation. K12 still trades below its IPO price from 2007 and documents discovered by The Atlantic suggest that DeVos was a backer of Milken's parent company Knowledge Universe, now defunct.

It's not the case that no charter schools are successful. Over the same period, Bright Horizons emerged as a focused and successful leader in employer-sponsored early learning centers. Translated, Bright Horizons Family Solutions is also the largest provider of employer-sponsored childcare in America and Fortune's 2017 list of America's best companies puts Bright Horizons at #90.

Not so with K12 and the home school business in Pennsylvania, writes Politio in its Oct. 8, 2017 DeVos champions online charter schools, but the results are poor. The article focuses specifically on Pennsylvania and the 48 percent graduation rate in its virtual charters. Three states California, Michigan and Pennsylvania represent half of all charter schools in America. Michigan is another state with terrible charter schools results, and California is also struggling, based on an updated August 12, 2016 story the Mercury News reported California charter school scores dive.

“Here’s what I would say to Betsy DeVos — do those parents really understand what they’re sending their kids to?” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators in the Politico article.

Research by Bryan Mann, now an education professor at the University of Alabama and who studied virtual charters while at Penn State, establishes a strong connection between uneducated parents and their preferences for virtual-learning charter schools, writes Politico.

In America today, about six million good-paying, skills-rich jobs are unfilled. In an ideal world, uneducated parents would all follow the sacrifices made by many immigrants of working around the clock in order to send their kids to some of America's finest educational institutions.

It's a well-established fact that uneducated parents who want their kids educated online hold deeply conservative, religious-based views. Their do not want their kids to be contaminated by outside ideas -- more liberal ideas -- associated with higher learning. One asks if this is fair to children and a question of sacrosanct parental rights injuring the future of their own kids. Presumably, these are questions the Trump administration will never ask Betsy DeVos, given their commitment to this voter block of uneducated, evangelical white Americans.

Bottom line, there are many problems in America's education system -- problems that go far beyond America's teachers' unions. As Trump moves to end immigration in America, one expects our education scores to plummet even further.

PEW Research wrote in Feb. 2017: US students' academic achievement stlll lags that of their peers in many other countries. These new scores represent a major decline in the last five years. At one time, the US education was considered the best in the world. This PEW analysis shows just how far America has fallen, compared to other countries in the world. For example:

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38thout of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

Michigan Gambled on Charler Schools. Its Children Lost. The New York Times