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Arkansas: “Abstinence Only” Approach is a Failure for These Teen Moms

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2026 //
3

The leaders of Arkansas–such as Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders–oppose abortion. They also oppose birth control. They apparently don’t teach sex education. They rely on “abstinence education,” or just say no.

But it’s not working the state has the second highest rate of births to unwed teen mothers.

The Arkansas Times reviewed a movie that explains the human consequences of this policy.

Watching “Baby/Girls,” a documentary about teen mothers in Arkansas that screened Wednesday at the Bentonville Film Festival, might be an impossible task if it weren’t for the youthful optimism of its subjects. The seriousness of what’s happened to them hasn’t sunk in, at least not in the opening scenes. They still speak in soft, girlish tones. They wear fake eyelashes, dye their hair teal. One giggles while trying to recall the word for “uterus,” the organ her baby will be emerging from in just a matter of weeks. By the end of the film, the light has gone out of their eyes.

One girl has taken off with her baby and run away from home. Another is pregnant again, on an 18-month waiting list for childcare, and desperately poor. The third, living in a dingy flop house with her boyfriend, chooses to give her baby up for adoption after leaving the infant alone on at least one occasion so she can hang out with her sisters. 

“Baby/Girls” is cinematic, but it’s a hard watch, and I don’t think the people who really need to see it — the politicians that enforce abstinence education and work to outlaw abortion, and the religious fanatics who treat sex like we’re living in Victorian England — will even bother. 

But the movie isn’t just for pro-lifers; it’s for the rest of us who need to be reminded that unplanned pregnancy is, for many women, especially teenagers, one of the absolute worst things that could ever happen, leading to a cycle of poverty, family dysfunction and more teen pregnancy. 

According to Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, “Arkansas is still 49th in the country for teen births with a rate that is almost double the national teen birth rate of 13.” (That is: On average, 22 of every 1,000 women aged 15 to 19 give birth annually in Arkansas.) 

The movie is a tastefully-done “scared straight” for the grownups in Arkansas who should be protecting these girls. I was not surprised to find on the film’s website that its creators, Jackie Jesko and Alyse Walsh, have launched a campaign advocating for sex education, birth control and better support for pregnant teens in schools, with links to Arkansas organizations including Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences’ LARC (Long-acting Reversible Contraception) Initiative.

“Baby/Girls” traces three girls — Grace, 15; Olivia, 16; and Ariana, 17 — from pregnant-and-near-bursting until their kids are infants or toddlers. They’re all living in Compassion House, a home for teen moms in Springdale, at the documentary’s start. 

The filmmakers are given incredibly intimate access to their births, family dynamics, home life, court dates and the like. We quickly learn all three grew up in terrible, neglectful situations — and their pregnancies are a continuation of a terrible, unending cycle. Grace was molested at age 3 by a man she thought to be her biological dad. Her mother was a drug addict. Olivia’s mom committed suicide when Olivia was 8 years old, and when we meet Olivia, a judge has ordered her to Compassion House because she’s decided that her grandmother’s house is not a safe place for her to be. Finally, Ariana, somehow the most well-adjusted, is the product of rape. Her mother — wire-thin and missing her teeth — is emotionally abusive and absent. 

It’s disturbing to watch the girls explain why they ever thought this would go differently. Grace watched the lives of glamorous teen moms on TikTok. They looked happy. “I wanted to feel that,” she says. Olivia simply didn’t realize that sex made babies — ”I didn’t even realize I had three holes down there,” she says, chortling. 

But none of them got pregnant on purpose. Grace forgot to take her birth control consistently. Ariana was too embarrassed to ask her mom for condoms. For Olivia, “it just kind of happened.” On the subject of abortion, Ariana is the only one who speaks about it directly. She’s religious. It was never an option. 

Crystal, the movie’s wise sage who works at Compassion House, says that girls aren’t learning basic sex education in school anymore.

None of that matters now, as the girls’ lives come spectacularly undone once they leave the shelter and support of Compassion House and move out on their own after the birth of their kids. The girls’ lives go so horribly wrong that I almost wondered if parts of the film had been staged.

Grace, a beautiful, impossibly childish girl, runs away again to live the life of a degenerate teen, vaping and doing shots around a bonfire. She leaves her baby behind with her mother, who, with four other kids to raise, is buckling under the responsibility. Grace is mystified as to why she doesn’t want to be a mom. It’s not your fault. Society failed you, the filmmakers want us to scream. And I do, silently. 

Olivia goes away to juvenile detention for a year, missing her baby’s first steps. The second she gets her ankle monitor off after returning home, she takes off with her kid. 

Ariana’s story is the saddest because, for a moment, the filmmakers let us believe she might beat the odds. Early in the film, still at Compassion House, we see Ariana’s list of goals, written out in pencil. She wants to get her own apartment and a nursing degree, find childcare, get on food stamps. It’s an impossible list for a 17-year-old but she seems so determined and clear-eyed. 

Even with a supportive partner and a tidy home, reality catches up to her. Without a GED and no time to finish it, she can’t get a better job and can’t afford childcare. The bills are piling up. And then she ends up pregnant again. 

How did we get here? The movie is careful not to blame the obvious scapegoats — pro-lifers and right-wing politicians — and equally careful to not suggest abortion as the only or even the most immediate solution. Crystal, a woman who manages Compassion House and a former teen mom herself, says that she’s a Christian and she’s pro-choice, but “the pro-life movement won the war against abortion a long time ago.” Her role in all this is just to give these girls a chance to survive. 

I want to be mad at the film for not advocating harder for abortion access but also have to agree that teen pregnancy is a multi-headed hydra that will be solved with a lot of different approaches. Helping girls know how to identify a uterus before they start having sex seems like an obvious place to start. 

Categories Accountability, Arkansas, Childhood, Cruelty, Gender, Poverty

Musk Insisted that No Child Died Because of His Cuts to USAID. Kristof Proves He Is Wrong.

By dianeravitch
July 15, 2026 //
8

When Elon Musk started his Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE), one of his first targets was USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency that sent food, medicine and health workers to the world’s neediest nations.

Musk and his DOGE shut down USAID. On February 3, 2025, Musk boasted on Twitter:

We spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper. Could [have] gone to some great parties. Did that instead.

Clearly, Musk was very proud of what he did. American farmers complained that they lost $2 billion in sales that had previously been purchased by USAID to ship abroad to needy people.

Immediately, there were dire predictions that people would die without the food and medicine provided by the U.S.

Musk at first ignored the critics, but eventually insisted that no child had died as a result of closing down USAID.

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times responded:

Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine.

“Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week.

I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said that Musk had “possibly sentenced to death” a large number of children, and Musk retorted that it was “time to sue this liar.”

“There is not even a single dead child!” Musk protested on social media. I noted that I had met many families of children who had died — and that’s when he concluded that I was lying.

Musk’s assertion that not a single child died is absurd, yet he doubled down: “They cannot cite a single name of someone who died out of the ‘millions’ they falsely claim have died. Not a single name!”

On X, I began to give Musk some names. Let me elaborate:

Jibia was a 10-year-old girl, ranking third out of 58 students in her fourth-grade class in Rwamwanja, Uganda. Aid cuts meant that the local clinic ran out of $2 bed nets to protect from mosquitoes, as well as anti-malaria medicines. Jibia died of malaria last July, her mother told me outside the family home. Medical records confirmed that, and health workers told me that she would have been fine without the aid cuts: Replacing her tattered bed net with a new one could have prevented malaria, and in any case drugs would have helped her to recover promptly.

Yamah Freeman hemorrhaged while pregnant with her third child in her village in Liberia. The United States had provided ambulances to the local hospital, but the aid cuts under Musk and President Trump meant that the ambulances had no fuel. The strongest young men in the village placed her on their shoulders and raced down the path toward town, shouting encouragement to her as they ran, but she bled to death along the way. Her parents and sister told me about this, and I visited her grave.

Achol Deng, 8, had been infected with H.I.V. at birth in South Sudan but had been kept alive by American-provided medicines costing just 12 cents a day. The dismantling of U.S.A.I.D. and the resulting chaos meant that she lost her caseworker and access to medicines, and soon died of an opportunistic infection, health workers told me.

I could keep going. A Boston University researcher estimated that the aid cuts have cost more than 750,000 lives worldwide. A study published in The Lancet, the British medical journal, forecast that at present rates, the aid defunding will cost 9.4 million lives by 2030.

These figures may not be accurate; we just don’t have solid mortality data, and the aid cuts have also reduced data collection. What I can say after visiting numerous impoverished villages is that aid cuts are unquestionably costing the lives of many children.

Some prominent conservatives leaped to the defense of Musk, saying in effect: Why is it our job to save the lives of children in South Sudan? Why don’t rich liberals write checks? Why don’t other countries do more?

Those are fair questions. But if any of us came across an ambulance that had run out of gas with a hemorrhaging woman inside, surely we would happily hand over a $10 bill to save her life.

Until Trump’s second term, American aid cost just 23 cents for every $100 of gross national income and saved a life approximately once every 10 seconds. Seems like a bargain to me. Certainly it appears wiser than spending billions of dollars on a war with Iran.

I say “wiser” because all this is not just about compassion but also about self-interest. Aid money serves national security and protects us from diseases. I’ve noted that the current Ebola outbreak in Africa may have gotten out of control precisely because we cut aid spending in the region.

Yes, other countries should do more, impoverished countries should be less corrupt, and our own aid can be allocated more wisely. But note that some countries in Europe are significantly more generous than America, spending up to 10 times as much on aid as a share of national income as we do.

Should liberals donate more to humanitarian causes? Sure. But compassion isn’t a liberal impulse — it’s a human one. It was evangelicals and Republicans who in 2003 started the single best aid program ever, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; it has saved more than 26 million lives so far. Some of the most heroic aid workers I’ve met in dangerous locations have been Christian missionaries, from nuns to doctors; they would dispute the idea that empathy is woke.

It’s reasonable to ask how much we should spend or how we should reform the system. But why would anyone begrudge $2 bed nets or $4 malaria vaccines to save children’s lives?

So let me offer a challenge to Musk: Come with me on a reporting trip to South Sudan or Somalia or Mozambique. Meet starving children whose lives can be easily saved. Hold them. Look into their eyes. Talk to their terrified moms.

You’ll understand that these kids are just like ours, except that they didn’t do as well in the lottery of birth — and that just because we can’t save every child’s life doesn’t mean we should save none of them.

Back in the late 1960s, opponents of the war in Vietnam used to torment President Lyndon B. Johnson by shouting at him,

Hey, hey, LBJ,

How many kids did you kill today?

I can’t think of a word that rhymes with “Musk.” Can you?

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Disruption, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, International, Poverty

Jan Resseger: Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Endangers the Well-Being of Children

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2026 //
0

Jan Resseger is a perceptive observer of policy and a passionate defender of children. She writes on this post about the myriad ways in which Trump’s signature legislation harms children. This bill will make many children hungrier, poorer, and less healthy.

She writes:

Huge omnibus laws filled with myriad amendments and unrelated provisions are always passed without sufficient public attention to the details and long term consequences.  House Resolution 1, which the President has called the “One Big Beautiful Bill” was an omnibus tax and reconciliation law. President Trump signed HR 1 into law just a year ago on the 4th of July. The law poses a number of threats to the well-being of children and to public schooling.  Many of us who follow public education policy are well aware of the Trump administration’s expansion of the privatization of public education with the new tuition tax credit school voucher program buried in HR 1, but other provisions of this federal law have also begun imperiling the welfare of our society’s most vulnerable children. The damage will only expand in the coming months and years.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently updated threats to children’s welfare in HR1: “Already the law is raising costs for families and taking away health coverage, food assistance, and other essentials from people who are already struggling to afford to meet their basic needs—all while showering more tax breaks on the wealthiest households and funding a violent immigration detention and deportation agenda. The law’s harm will only deepen as its more than $1 trillion in cuts for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act… marketplaces fully take effect and states fully implement SNAP eligibility restrictions and take drastic measures ahead of the federal government’s significant shift of SNAP costs to states… (T)he law’s cuts will expand the still-deep inequities long experienced by those who face the most economic discrimination and poverty, including Black, Latino, and Indigenous people and families with people who are immigrants.”

For political reasons, many of HR 1’s punitive provisions were delayed so that they will kick in only after the 2026 midterm election. The provisions with some of the most serious implications for families with children include future cuts to Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities predicts: “The harmful… megabill will take health coverage away from millions of people and dramatically raise health care costs for millions more.  The law cuts $1.1 trillion from Medicaid and ACA marketplaces… The work requirement… will take away coverage for childless adults and some parents who can’t prove that they are participating in countable ‘community engagement’ activities at least 80 hours per month.”

KFF adds: “For the first time, the law conditions Medicaid eligibility for Medicaid expansion enrollees on meeting work and reporting requirements. These work requirements, which will go into effect in January 2027, or sooner at state option, represent the largest source of enrollment declines in the law.”

There are, however, two areas in which HR 1 has already seriously impacted families with children.

Sharp Drop in SNAP Participation     It has been widely predicted that millions of families who need food assistance will, by 2028, loose access to food stamps (SNAP) due to the provisions of HR 1. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Dottie Rosenbaum and Joseph Llobrera report, however, that the sharp drop in access to SNAP has actually begun in 2026:

“Millions of people are losing food assistance through SNAP due to the 2025… HR 1.  This includes many children and others not targeted by HR 1’s eligibility restrictions.  In fact, more people are losing SNAP, and faster, than the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted.  The latest data show that about 4.7 million fewer people (including 808,000 children)  participated in SNAP in March 2026 compared to the average month in fiscal year 2025… The most likely reason is the impact of HR 1’s shifting of enormous new SNAP costs to states, which they owe starting in fiscal year 2028.  CBO estimated the cost shift mandate would have no impact until 2028, but it has already led many states to erect barriers to people’s SNAP participation, such as requiring more paperwork and imposing other requirements that states often don’t have the staff to administer.”  In 2028, HR 1 requires states to start paying part of SNAP costs, and states are already trying to make participation “harder to navigate” with “more paperwork, shortening certification periods or adding more case reviews.” (Emphasis is mine.) HR 1 ‘s SNAP requirements will reduce future coverage among parents by adding a work requirement for parents and caregivers of children who are 14 years old or over.

This week the Center for American Progress released a report demonstrating that HR 1 may eventually  also reduce free school meals for children and school districts that now qualify: “When children lose access to SNAP and Medicaid, they may also lose their direct certification for free school meals. This harm expands beyond individual impacts. As a result, schools participating in the Community Eligibility Provision CEP may fall below the 25 percent of direct certified students required to qualify for the CEP, ending free school meals for the entire school or district.”

Spending on Immigration     Last July, the American Immigrant Council summed up how HR 1 would help fund the President’s expanded immigration enforcement—what we have watched during the past year: “H.R. 1 provides $170.7 billion in additional funding for immigration- and border enforcement-related activities to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, as well as for the Department of Defense (DOD) for activities related to the military’s presence along parts of the southern border.”

The Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) details some of the consequences so far for children in immigrant families across the United States: “This historic ballooning of immigration enforcement funding has turbocharged family separations and child and family detention, threatening child safety and well-being. An estimated 205,000 children, 145,000 of whom are U.S. citizens, have experienced having a parent in detention… Moreover, the high level of disenrollment in SNAP and Medicaid is in part due to HR 1’s exclusion of lawfully present immigrants, such as asylum seekers and refugees, as well as the chilling effect on people whose children are likely eligible but are disenrolling because they are concerned about their participation being used against them in immigration proceedings.”

Research has shown for decades that family poverty and problems like hunger and homelessness contribute to achievement gaps as children enter school.  Thirty years ago in The Manufactured Crisis, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle declared: “the larger the proportion of citizens who live in poverty, the greater challenge for public schools.” (p. 220)

More recently the National Education Policy Center’s Kevin Welner explained the correlation of children’s economic circumstances with their school achievement: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America. School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economic inequality. When children are born in the United States, their educational and life outcomes can all be predicted based on their parents’ education, income and wealth… Inequality in the U.S. is stark and enduring.”

The tangled issues buried in the mammoth HR 1, what President Trump calls the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” threaten the well-being of millions of poor children enrolled in our nation’s urban and rural public schools. It will be urgently important for educators and public school advocates to press Congress to correct the bill’s myriad injustices.

Categories Childhood, Cruelty, Democrats, Evil, Extremism, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Vouchers

ACT Scores Show No “Miracle”

By dianeravitch
April 29, 2026 //
15

I begin by saying for the zillionth time that I do not believe in miracles or panaceas in education. There is not one way of teaching that is just right for all students. Teachers know this. And yes, I believe in the value of phonics as part of teaching reading.

I am not a proponent of the “science of teaching,” because I do not believe that there is only one best way to teach reading or math or science or history. I do not believe that legislators in the state or Congress should mandate HOW to teach. Well-prepared, experienced teachers know how to teach and are at their best when they have reasonable class sizes so they can give extra time to students who can’t keep up.

When state legislators start telling surgeons how to operate on patients, let me know.

Home life affects learning outcomes. All standardized tests show that family income affects test scores; the kids from the wealthiest families are typically at the top, while the kids who grow up in poverty typically have the lowest scores.

This is not because rich kids are inherently better than poor kids but because rich kids have advantages associated with family income, such as educated parents, regular medical care, good nutrition, economic security, better -funded schools, smaller class sizes, and predictability about where and how they live.

Poor kids often do not have these advantages because they are poor. The person who said it best and pulled together the data is Richard Rothstein, in his important book, Class and Schools. I first read it in 2007, and it was pivotal in changing my views about educational achievement and score gaps, and their causes.

Mississippi–and also Louisiana and Alabama–have been hailed for their improved reading scores on the NAEP. Fourth-grade scores have improved impressively. I am very happy for them. I have no doubt that their teachers work very hard and are not paid as well as they should be.

But I looked for an external monitor to see if there had been a “miracle.” A long-lasting miracle, based on their adoption of the “science of reading.” And I landed on the ACT, because in nine states (including Mississippi), 100% of students take the same test.

Mississippi started giving ACT to all juniors in 2015. First cohort for the “reform” hit 11th grade in 2022. If reading had improved dramatically, it should be reflected in rising ACT scores for the state’s students.

Here are the Mississippi scores:

Average ACT Composite Scores for Mississippi (Junior Year Administration)

  • 2025: 17.5
  • 2024: 17.4
  • 2023: 17.5
  • 2022: 17.4
  • 2021: 17.3 

Key Trends and Data

  • Graduating Class of 2023: Average composite score was 17.6.
  • 2024 Graduates: Average score was 17.7.
  • Participation: Mississippi typically reports 100% participation due to statewide testing, which contributes to a lower average compared to states with lower, self-selected participation rates.
  • Demographics: As of 2025, 9.5% of juniors met all four ACT readiness benchmarks. 

In states like Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, the average score for Black students typically ranges from 15.0 to 16.5, roughly following national averages for this demographic (which was 16.0 in 2024).

As of 2025 and 2026, nine states have maintained 100% ACT participation because they mandate the test for all public high school graduates.

States with 100% ACT Participation

  • Alabama
  • Arizona
  • Kentucky (Note: Kentucky plans to switch to the SAT in Spring 2026)
  • Louisiana
  • Mississippi
  • Nevada
  • Oklahoma
  • Tennessee
  • Wyoming 

Recent and Upcoming Changes

Illinois: Switched to the ACT as its mandatory college entrance exam starting in the 2024-2025 school year, making it a graduation requirement for all public high school students.

South Dakota: Scheduled to join the list of states requiring the ACT starting in the 2025-2026 school year.

Nebraska: Frequently reports near-universal participation (often cited at 95-100%) due to state-funded testing initiatives. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Why Participation is 100%

In these states, the ACT is typically used as a statewide accountability assessment. The exam is provided for free during regular school hours, ensuring that every student—regardless of their college plans—takes the test. This leads to more equitable access but often results in lower statewide average scores compared to states where only high-achieving, college-bound students self-select to take the exam.

You can check the ACT State-by-State Average Scores on the official ACT Website.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Equity, Funding, Poverty

Trump Cancels Annual Hunger Survey

By dianeravitch
September 21, 2025 //
10

The Trump administration is canceling the federal government’s annual report on hunger, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Why? The administration says the data gets “politicized.” I think that means that lobbyists for the poor use the data to seek more funding for programs to feed people who are hungry.

The data, which is collected each December and analyzed by the U.S. Agriculture Department, measures food insecurity across states and demographic groups. 

The data has been collected every year since the mid-1990s, and is widely used by federal, state and local policymakers to make funding decisions for food-assistance programs, and to evaluate how well those programs work.  

The decision to discontinue the survey for 2025 was announced in meetings with USDA employees this past week by an administrator for the Economic Research Service, an arm of the Agriculture Department, according to people present at the meetings….

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said. 

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued…

Employees inside the USDA as well as economists outside the agency who work closely with the data reacted with shock and anger as word spread about the cancellation. 

“For the past 30 years, the USDA food insecurity measure has provided insight into the extent that American families have been able to cover their food needs,” said Colleen Heflin, a professor at Syracuse University, who has been studying the data since its inception, and learned of the study’s cancellation from contacts inside USDA. “Not having this measure for 2025 is particularly troubling given the current rise in inflation and deterioration of labor market conditions, two conditions known to increase food insecurity.”

The administration has criticized government data related to the job market, saying it had been used as a political weapon. President Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after a particularly poor jobs report. He accused her of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad, which economists have refuted…

The decision to end the USDA data collection comes at a time when more Americans are struggling to get enough to eat. Food banks have seen requests for assistance from households rise over the past few years, driven by the end of pandemic aid programs and the impact of inflation on grocery prices. 

In 2023, the USDA reported that an estimated 13.8 million children lived in households that struggled to get enough food at times, the highest number in nearly a decade, according to the most recent USDA survey. Data from 2024 is set to be released next month. 

Ignorance is bliss.

Categories Data, Poverty, Trump

Richard Rothstein: The Soft Bigotry of High Expectations

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2025 //
13

This may be the most important article you will read today.

Richard Rothstein has had a distinguished career as a journalist who writes about social science, most notably, achievement gaps, housing segregation, and the impact of poverty on academic performance. He has long been a fellow at the Economic Policy Institute and before that was education editor of The New York Times.

Rothstein writes here about the origins of the belief that teachers are directly responsible for student academic performance. If students score poorly on tests, goes the theory, it’s because their teachers have low expectations for them. In the case of black students, teachers’ racism is likely to explain their low expectations. From this perspective, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top made perfect sense. The teachers needed high expectations or needed to be fired.

Rothstein writes:

Social psychologist Robert Rosenthal died at the age of 90 last month. He was best known for his 1968 book, Pygmalion in the Classroom, co-authored by Lenore Jacobson, an elementary school principal in South San Francisco.

No book in the second half of the 20th century did more, unintentionally perhaps, to undermine support for public education, and thus diminish educational opportunities for so many children, especially Black and Hispanic children, to this day. The book and its aftermath put the onus solely on teacher performance when it came to student achievement, disregarding so many critically important socioeconomic factors—at the top of the list, residential segregation.
How did it do that?

The book described an experiment conducted in Ms. Jacobson’s school in 1965. The authors gave pupils an IQ test and then randomly divided the test takers into two groups. They falsely told teachers that results showed that students in one of the groups were poised to dramatically raise their performance in the following year, while the others would not likely demonstrate similar improvement.

At the end of that year, they tested students again and found that the first and second graders in the group that was predicted to improve did so on average, while those in the other group did not. The book, as well as academic articles that Dr. Rosenthal and Ms. Jacobson published, claimed that the experiment showed that teacher expectations had a powerful influence on student achievement, especially of young children. Pupils whose teachers were told were more likely to improve then apparently worked harder to meet their teachers’ faith in them.1

Some psychologists were skeptical, believing that the experimental design was not sufficiently rigorous to support such a revolutionary conclusion. Even the reported results were ambiguous. Teacher expectations had no similar impact on children in grades three through six. Similar experiments elsewhere did not confirm the results even for first and second graders.2

Nonetheless, the book was very influential.
In the decades after Pygmalion, other studies examined teacher expectations. They showed that teachers have greater expectations of higher achieving students but couldn’t determine whether the teacher attitudes helped to cause better pupil performance. Perhaps teachers only developed those expectations after seeing that students were higher achieving.3 Only an experimental study, like Pygmalion, could establish causality, but contemporary ethical standards would often prohibit such experiments, requiring, as they must, lying to teachers about their students’ data.

Minority children in the South San Francisco school where Rosenthal and Jacobson experimented were Mexican-origin, not African American. Yet ignoring how scanty the evidence was, education policymakers concluded from their research that the Black-white gap in test scores at all grade levels resulted from teachers of Black children not expecting their pupils to do well. And that, they reasoned, should be an easy problem to solve—holding teachers accountable for results would force them to abandon the racial stereotypes that were keeping children behind.

The accountability movement grew in intensity during the Bill Clinton administration, while in Texas, Governor George W. Bush implemented a mandatory standardized testing program whose publicized results, he thought, would force teachers to improve by shaming them for the lower scores of their poorer Black and Hispanic pupils.

In 2000, Bush was elected president; his campaign promised to demolish teachers’ “soft bigotry of low expectations.” During his first year in office, he led a bipartisan congressional majority to adopt the “No Child Left Behind Act” that required every state to conduct annual standardized testing in reading and math for pupils in the third through eighth grades. 

Shortly after the bill was signed, I met with the congressional staffer who had been primarily responsible for writing the legislation. She predicted that within two years, the publication of test scores would so embarrass teachers that they would work harder, with the result that racial differences in academic achievement would evaporate entirely.

Nothing of that sort has happened. Although test performance of both Black and white students has improved somewhat, the gap is not much different than it was two decades ago. But the public reputation of our teaching force has continued to deteriorate, as a conclusion spread that failure to equalize test results could be remedied by gimmicks like naming a school’s classrooms for the Ivy League colleges that teachers expected their students to attend.4 

Enthusiasm for charter schools escalated from a belief that operators could choose teachers with higher expectations, yet charter schools have not done any better (and in many cases worse) in closing the gap, once the sector’s ability to select students less likely to fail (and expel students who do) is taken into account.5

In 2008, I taught an education policy course for master’s degree candidates, many of whom had taught for two years in the Teach for America (TFA) program. It placed recent college graduates without teacher credentials in schools for lower-income Black and Hispanic students.

Funded heavily by private philanthropies, TFA embraced the low-expectations theory of below-average performance. Prior to their teaching assignments, TFA corps members were required to attend a summer institute whose curriculum featured a unit entitled “The Power of My Own Expectations” and required them to embrace the “mindset” of “I am totally responsible for the academic achievement of my students.”

None of my master’s degree students claimed that in their two years of teaching, their high expectations actually produced unusually high achievement. But most were so immunized against evidence and experience that they enrolled in a graduate program with the intention of creating new charter schools infused with high expectations. Only a few wondered what had gone wrong with their theory, besides having goals that still weren’t high enough.

Certainly, there are teachers with low expectations and harmful racial stereotypes, and it would be beneficial if those who can’t be trained to improve were removed from the profession. But I’ve visited many schools serving disadvantaged students. Most teachers I observed, white and Black, were dedicated, hard-working, engaged with their students, and frustrated about the social and economic challenges with which children daily came to school. I don’t claim that my observations were representative; I was more likely to be invited to visit schools that took great pride in their efforts, despite conditions they struggled to overcome.

No matter how high their expectations, teachers can’t do much about:

*their pupils’ higher rates of lead poisoning that impact cognitive ability;

*more frequent asthma—the result of living with more pollution, near industrial facilities, in less-well maintained buildings with more vermin in the environment—that may bring them to school drowsy from being awake at night, wheezing;

*neighborhoods without supermarkets that sell fresh and healthy food;

*stress intensified by being stopped and frisked by police without cause, and a discriminatory criminal justice system that disproportionately imprisons their fathers and brothers for trivial offenses;

*frequent moves due to rising rents, or landlords’ failure to keep units in habitable condition;

*absenteeism from a need to stay home to care for younger siblings while parents race from one low-wage job to another;

*poor health from living in neighborhoods with fewer primary care physicians or dentists;

*lower parental education levels that result in less academic support at home, combined with less adequate access to technology, a problem exacerbated since the pandemic;6

*and many other socioeconomic impediments to learning.7

Not every Black child suffers from these deprivations that affect their ability to take full advantage of the education that schools offer. But many do. Concentrating disadvantaged pupils in poorly resourced schools in poorly resourced and segregated neighborhoods overwhelms instructional and support staffs.

Such realities contributed to my conclusion that residential segregation, not low teacher expectations, was the most serious problem faced by U.S. education. It is what led to my recent books, The Color of Law, and its sequel (co-authored by my daughter, Leah Rothstein), Just Action; How to challenge segregation enacted under the Color of Law.

Robert Rosenthal’s Pygmalion theory set the stage for a national willingness to deny educational disparities’ true causes: the unconstitutional and unlawful public policies that imposed racial segregation upon our nation.

Footnotes:

1. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson. 1968. Pygmalion in the Classroom: teacher expectation and pupils’ intellectual development. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). For a technical summary by the authors, see. Rosenthal and Jacobson, “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968: 16-20.

2. See “Pygmalion in the Classroom.” The Urban Review 3, September, 1968, footnote on p. 19.

3. For example, see Thomas L. Good, Natasha Sterzinger, and Alyson Lavigne. 2018. “Expectation Effects: Pygmalion and the initial 20 years of research.” Educational Research and Evaluation 24 (3-5): 99-123.

4. See, for example, Richard Rothstein. 2010. “An overemphasis on teachers.” Commentary, Economic Policy Institute, October 18. 

5. Martin Carnoy, et al. 2005. The Charter School Dust-Up. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute).

6. In early 2020, I wrote that the pandemic would widen the achievement gap. The consequences turned out to be worse than I could have imagined. Teacher expectations had nothing to do with it. Richard Rothstein. 2020. “The Coronavirus Will Explode Achievement Gaps in Education.” Shelterforce.org, April 13.

7. Richard Rothstein. 2004. Class and Schools. Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the black–white achievement gap. (Washington, D.C.: The Economic Policy Institute).

The text of this post was originally published on January 30, 2024 on the Working Economics Blog of the Economic Policy Institute.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Equity, Ethics, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Parents, Poverty, Students

The Biggest Liar in Texas

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2025 //
3

Michelle H. Davis writes a blog called “Lone Star Left,” where she chronicles the usually corrupt politics of Texas. In this post, she eviscerates Governor Abbott, who loves to brag about the economic success of his state. She calls him out for ignoring the people who are nott part of the state’s prosperity.

She writes:

Today, our feckless leader gave a State-of-the-State Address at the Baylor Club in Waco. Now, if you didn’t know, the Baylor Club is a prestigious private social club nestled within McLane Stadium, offering floor-to-ceiling panoramic views of the stadium, downtown Waco, and the Brazos River.

While many Texans are choosing between groceries and insulin, Abbott delivers big promises from an elite club perched over McLane Stadium. That should tell you all you need to know. 

It was about an hour long, so I watched it for you. Below, I’ve broken down everything he said and what he conveniently left out. 

He began the speech by bragging about having dinner with Governor Glenn Youngkin and then told him that Texas’ budget for building roads was $146 billion. He claimed Youngkin dropped his spoon, saying it was bigger than Virginia’s entire budget. He went on to say that Texas had the “largest road building fund in America.” 

It’s only partly true. According to TXDOT’s 10-year plan, we have allocated about $101.6 billion for projects and $45 billion for maintenance. But this road-building bonanza feels stupid without high-speed trains. Seriously, what are we doing? 

Trains would alleviate traffic, carbon emissions, congestion, and get us from Dallas to Houston in just 90 minutes. It’s faster and greener than driving, but we’re investing all our money in roads? 

Modern marvel, or not, no one likes this shit: 

But Republicans do it all for the fossil fuel industry. 

In related news, ConocoPhillips, headquartered in Houston, plans to lay off 25% of its global workforce. 

Then, he stoked the bigwigs in Waco for a little bit. 

Abbott discussed Waco’s significant economic success, noting its high job numbers and record-low unemployment. 

The unemployment rate in Waco in July was 4.1. In DFW, it was 4.0. In the Austin area, it was 3.5. So, really, it’s comparable to Texas. 

What he failed to mention at this invite-only event was that the poverty rate in Waco is about 24.3%, nearly double the state’s average. Or that in some neighborhoods in Waco, it’s as high as 38%. Meanwhile, 57% of Black children in Waco live below the poverty line.

And that’s the optics, right there. While Abbott spoke from his panoramic perch, over half of Waco’s Black children struggle to make ends meet. This is the story of what Texas has become under Republican control. 

It wouldn’t be a boastful Abbott speech if he didn’t brag about Texas’ economy. 

He always does this. 

Texas is the #1 state for doing business.

Texas is the #1 state for economic projects.

Texas is the #1 state for economic development.

Texas is the #1 state for exports.

Texas has a GDP $2.7 trillion.

But he never talks about how we’re the worst for basic health. Or how we have the most uninsured adults in America. Texas sits 43rd for overall child well-being. And 22% of Texas kids are hungry. In fact, over 5 million Texans don’t know where their next meal is coming from. He also forgot to mention that there’s a housing insecurity crisis, and that Texas cities rank the worst for air quality.

They wine and dine behind glass walls and chandeliers, as Abbott brags to the wealthy. The Baylor Club is a fortress of privilege where the powerful toast each other on gold plates, high above the city streets. 

Down below, children go to bed hungry, their bellies gnawing at them while Abbott gloats about GDP. Senior citizens, the same ones who built this state with their hands and backs, are being taxed out of their homes, cast onto the streets, the newest members of the unsheltered community.

How could you hear that and not burn with anger?…

Then, Abbott told the biggest, most monstrous lie of them all. 

I had to clip this 30-second video for you to see it. Otherwise, you might not believe a whopper this big. 

Abbott claimed that since the 2021 storm (Uri), they have bolstered the Texas electric grid, and it has remained perfect. He went on to say that since 2021, no Texan has lost power due to a deficiency in the grid. 

This is flat-out false. This is such a fucking stupid lie, do I even need to fact-check it? 

Ask the 2.3 million CenterPoint customers in Houston who lost power for over a week after Hurricane Beryl in July 2024. Or the nearly 1 million Texans left in the dark by the Houston derecho just two months earlier in May 2024. Families sweltered in the heat, elderly neighbors died waiting for oxygen refills, and Abbott wants to call that a “perfect” grid?

What he’s really doing is splitting hairs. ERCOT didn’t order rolling blackouts in those disasters. The distribution system collapsed. In other words, the wires and poles failed instead of the generators. But tell that to the family sitting in the dark with spoiled food and no air conditioning. To everyday Texans, it doesn’t matter whether it’s ERCOT or CenterPoint. The lights are off, the fridge is warm, and the Governor is lying.

This isn’t a story of resilience. It’s a story of deregulation, neglect, and profit over people.

Abbott claimed the Legislature made a “generational investment” in water. 

Also, bullshit. We talked about this in June: Did the 89th Legislature Address Texas’ Water Problems?

Voters will decide in November whether or not we make that investment, which will not be nearly enough money to cover the extent of Texas’ water problems, but it’s a start. 

Abbott claimed that they prioritized small businesses with the new “DOGE law.” A spin if there ever was one. It’s a new bureaucratic agency added to the Governor’s office, which will look for “ways to make regulations more effective, streamline the regulatory process, reduce department costs, and increase public access to regulatory information.”

If you followed along with Lone Star Left during the weeks where we watched the Texas budget hearings, you may remember that every Texas agency is running on outdated computer systems (if they aren’t still using paper), they are all understaffed, they are in buildings that are falling apart, and most government employees aren’t even making a livable wage. 

Republicans have already run every inch of this state into the ground, and the idea that they are going to use a new government agency to run it into the ground even further is ludicrous. 

Running our state agencies in such an inefficient, broken-down way doesn’t save money. It raises costs. Outdated systems, paper records, and skeleton crews result in Texans waiting longer for services, errors piling up, and agencies paying more in overtime and contract work to keep the lights on.

Republicans are really bad at governing. 

The human toll is brutal. Employment turnover in some state agencies runs as high as 50%. Think about that, half the workforce gone, year after year. When you’re constantly training new people instead of keeping experienced staff, services collapse. And nowhere is this clearer than in our Health and Human Services agencies.

These are the people who process Medicaid applications, SNAP benefits, and health services for children and seniors. Understaffed offices and burned-out employees mean months-long backlogs. Families in crisis are told to wait for food assistance. Elderly Texans often lack home health care due to a shortage of caseworkers. Disabled children get lost in the system while Abbott’s donors laugh from the Baylor Club balcony.

This is intentional sabotage. Republicans have hollowed out the very agencies that keep Texans alive. Then they use the dysfunction as an excuse to privatize more, deregulate more, and funnel more contracts to their cronies. The suffering of everyday Texans is the plan.

Governor Abbott said the Texas Legislature fully funded public schools. 

The basic allotment (the base per-student funding) sat at $6,160 from 2019 through 2024. 2025’s package adds $8.5B with strings and only a modest BA bump debated (far short of inflation, per district leaders). Many districts still report deficits and cuts. “Fully funded” is another flat-out lie.

But when your audience is a bunch of wealthy CEOs who paid $2,000 a plate to get in to hear you speak, lies like that don’t matter. Surely all of those CEOs are sending their kids to private school, on the taxpayer’s dime, with the shiny new vouchers Mr. Let-Them-Eat-Cake got for all his wealthy donors. 

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to vote this motherfucker out. 

Every year he lies a little bigger, every year he sells us out a little deeper, and every year the gap between those sipping cocktails at the Baylor Club and those wondering how to feed their kids grows wider.

The truth is, the wealth inequality in Texas right now is more drastic than the wealth inequality in France shortly before their revolution. You know what happened then.

And I’ll leave you with this, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: 

“When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.”

So let’s be ready. Let’s be angry. And let’s be organized. Because November 2026 is coming, and it’s time to flip this state.

Categories Bigotry, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Deregulation, Economy, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Health, Inequality, Poverty, Texas, Vouchers

Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

Arnold and Carol Hillman: What We Learned in Our Nine Years in South Carolina

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2025 //
2

Arnold and Carol Hillman spent their careers as educators in Pennsylvania. When they retired, they decided to live in a retirement community in South Carolina. But while other retirees were playing golf or relaxing at the pool, they decided to get involved in rural schools. They wanted to be helpful. After nine years in South Carolina, they decided to move closer to their children, so they moved to Massachusetts. I invited them to write about their experiences in South Carolina. And Arnold wrote this account, edited by Carol.

We have always been compulsive people. On a cold winter’s day in February of 2015, we decided to move to a senior community (Sun City) in Bluffton, South Carolina. We did have some friends there who encouraged us to join them. So, on July 31st of that year, we moved there— lock, stock and barrel.

It wasn’t more than a week or two, after disposing of our many boxes, that we decided to go to a local school board meeting. We lived in an especially wealthy area of SC. The reason for its wealth were the many grey heads that retired to SC because of the meager taxes that one had to pay. 

We were very surprised at the board meeting. There were issues that were foreign to us. Although much of the meeting revolved around educational issues, the tone of the meeting was not to our liking. For one thing, they never mentioned the students or education. The superintendent acted as if he was the school district attorney. He was later fired because of ethics violations. An elderly member of the board spoke about books that he did not like and made no sense. The meeting seemed disorganized from our perspective. We came away from the meeting with the idea of finding out more about education in South Carolina.

Since we were familiar with the superintendent’s organization in Pennsylvania, we discovered that the then Superintendent of Education in South Carolina was the former executive director of the SC organization of superintendents. We called her, Molly Spearman, and invoked our PA connection and got to speak with her. 

We said that we had been advocates for rural schools and communities for many years and would like to see if we could be of some assistance to them here in South Carolina. She told us of five rural school districts around the area in which we lived and suggested that we give them a call.

We called all five and only one returned our call. Dr. Vashti Washington, Superintendent of the Jasper County School District, one of the poorest districts in the state, said that she would be happy to see us and work out some things that we could do in the district.

We eventually began a program called “Roso” – Reach one Save one. It was already in the works at the Ridgeland Hardeeville High School. The assistant principal, L.R. Dinkins, had been looking for someone to help him get it started, and we were the ones.

The program involved mentoring 10 young men and 10 young women and having them mentor fifth graders who were having trouble in school. The program lasted from 2015-2021. It ended when Covid began. However, the students that we worked with are still in touch with us and many have been successful in their lives. Others have not had that kind of success.

During the time we were working at Ridgeland Hardeeville, we decided that we would try to visit as many rural school districts as we could. We wound up visiting 21 districts out of about 35 (consolidation has made that 30 rural districts).

We were astonished at what we saw in each of those districts. What we saw was the equivalent of shoveling against the tide. Administrators and teachers do their best without the proper resources. 

In some districts the buildings were dilapidated. One in particular startled us when we saw sewage seeping into the hallways. Fortunately, that school was closed and replaced by a new building.

Many school districts lacked teachers of science, math, and special education. Many rural districts recruited foreign teachers to fill vacancies, but these teachers often had difficulty communicating in English. Those who stayed for more than a year became more fluent in English and more successful as teachers. Nonetheless, rural districts often lacked the courses available in economically advantaged districts.

Most rural districts lacked student services. Guidance counselors and psychologists were in short supply, as were career counselors and STEM counselors.

Like many other rural areas across the country, Internet connections are not readily available in rural South Carolina. Thus many schools were unable to produce online coursework for their students during the pandemic.

Some of the outcomes were spectacular, but in the end the children did not get all that they needed for success in life.

As we have learned during our time in South Carolina, and over the past year, the children in the rural areas of South Carolina must climb mountains to gain the same kind of success that their brothers and sisters have in the well-resourced school districts.

Some statistics will show the differences. At the beginning of the 2024-25 school year there were 1,043 open positions for educators in South Carolina. Most of these vacancies were in rural school districts. From January 2020 till now, of the 75 school districts in SC, only 21 school districts have retained their school superintendents. Of those 72% that have left, many of them are from rural school districts.

South Carolina’s legislature and administration have succeeded in raising teachers’ salaries. However, their priorities have not addressed the problems with resources for rural schools. The new Superintendent of education is a right-wing conservative, with a former Heritage Foundation background and a less than stellar resume in education. She has instigated a program in cooperation with Prager University that will provide school districts with videos that rewrite American history to minimize the underside of the past..

The legislature and the administration have viewed budget surpluses as a means of getting votes from their constituents. Although state taxes are low, they have consistently rebated taxes to taxpayers. In the 2022 legislative session they rebated almost one billion dollars. This was done when school districts and other parts of the state could have used those funds to improve the number of children and other needy folks.

South Carolina does not fare well in comparison with other states in the nation when it comes to education. Looking at 4 differing rating agencies, SC ranks 44th, 43rd, 41st and 41st. You may not agree that these are the most accurate numbers, but a number of agencies use many variables to come to these conclusions.

And how is South Carolina doing in comparison to other states and the nation on national tests such as the ACTs? According to the South Carolina Department of Education and their statistics, the average of all states using an ACT composite is 19.4. South Carolina’s composite score is 18.4. The ACT is widely used in Southern and Mid-Western states. There are 24 states that use it primarily and of the 24, two states switched to the SATs, but still use the ACTs. Many of the rural school districts are far below the 18.4 mean.

To counter some of these negative things about South Carolina education, Carol and I, along with several rural school superintendents, created an organization called SCORS (South Carolina Organization of Rural Schools). Its purpose was to alert South Carolinians to the plight of rural schools and communities. We did research, wrotearticles, and even interviewed gubernatorial candidates. Most of what we did may have helped a small bit, but not enough to move either the legislature or the administration.

It will take many years and the rise of a new generation before anything changes in South Carolina. We still are in contact with many of the young people whom we mentored. 

Most of the students that we mentored came from very economically depressed backgrounds. Their parents sometimes worked two or three jobs. The students also worked to supplement family incomes. They were wonderful youngsters who would have had many more opportunities if they lived in different states.

We called the groups that we mentored Jasper Gentlemen (they all lived in Jasper County). The young ladies were named Diamonds and Pearls. As you suspect, I worked with the young men and Carol the young ladies. There were about 25 students in all. We took them to colleges in South Carolina and even sent some of them up to Howard University in Washington on bus trips set up by a friend who was the head of the Howard alumni association of South Carolina. Of all the students we mentored, none of them dropped out of high school. They all graduated.

I believe only about 30% of them went on to college. Many of the parents wanted the youngsters to stay home and did not want them to leave the area. Money was the biggest problem. The cost of college, even the state schools, was too much for the family to fund. Even with Pell grants and other scholarships it was just too much.

We did offer them some scholarships that we funded personally. Some of the students dropped out after their freshman year. We even had some athletes who got partial scholarships that did not last. Some of the South Carolina colleges, both public and private, had terrible 4-year graduation rates. One of them, a state school, had a 4-year graduation rate of 14.5%.

The “Corridor of Shame” refers to the rural school districts in South Carolina along route 95. It was part of a short documentary about education in South Carolina by Pat Conroy, whose book is about his teaching in Daufuskie Island. Most of the school districts in that area were predominantly African American.

It is difficult to describe the pervasive racism in South Carolina. It is not hidden. It is all on the surface. As members of the NAACP, Carol and I saw it everywhere–from gerrymandering of voting districts to the daily treatment of the African-American community. The neglect of human capital in South Carolina is astounding. Those in charge do not see education as an important economic development tool. Nor do they consider the tragic waste of human potential that is the result of neglecting education.

Here is an example of the blatant racism we saw. A good friend of ours–a person with a doctorate who teaches at a university—would always ask us to call to make restaurant reservations. She also asked that we call stores to get information about products. The rude treatment she received at car dealerships and local stores was beyond our comprehension. Of course, she is Black.

The children had to climb huge barriers compared to most students in the United States to get to college. It is a wonder to Carol and me that any of them were able to do it. We are so proud of some of them who not only got through school but went on to get master’s degrees. We are still not sure if we made a difference, but we tried. 

We are proud of our mentees. Some have climbed over the barriers to achieve success. Jeremiah comes from a wonderful family with few resources. He is the first of his siblings to go to college. He is a phenomenal football player and an even better student. He hopes to play in the NFL in a few years. He graduated from Hampton University and is studying for his master’s degree in logistics at Alabama State. He has one year of football eligibility. To complete his college degree, he took 21 credits in his final semester and was saddened when he got one B+ instead of all As.

Irvin was the valedictorian in his senior year at Ridgeland Hardeeville High School. He was also the drum major in the band, among many extracurricular activities. He went to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida. He applied for a job at Boeing. It took a year and some to get his security clearance. While he was waiting, he worked in construction. He now works at Boeing in Virginia on things he cannot tell me about.

Rashamel is closer to us than any of the other students. We have known him for 10 years. He is not only a fine student but a wonderful basketballl player. When he was in high school, he wrote for the local newspaper. They seem to have been written by a professional. His post-high school years were confounded by advice he got from his coaches to go to a community college in Rochester, New York. The school was set up for basketball. Since Rashamel was not an inner-city African American, his coach had no clue about how to approach him. He was placed in remedial courses. He got As and A+s. However, since these courses were non-credited, he was behind 15 credits when he left. He spent two years at South Carolina State, an HBCU, and did well academically. He did not enjoy playing there. He finally left and had a great year at Pfeiffer University in North Carolina. He is now taking his master’s degree in sports psychology and working two jobs in Augusta, Georgia.

Lakiasa entered the service because she did not know what she wanted to do in college. She enlisted in the Army where she was trained to help military personnel deal with financial problems. In the Army, she realized that she had grown up very poor. Her Army experience taught her how to handle money. In the three years that she has been in the Army, she has purchased her first car and is the only one in her family who has bought a house. Because she likes to help people, she has made plans to study and become a radiology technician.

Lataye went to a leadership camp between her sophomore and junior year in high school, sponsored by Clemson University. It was the first time she had seen a waterfall, went swimming in a lake, and sat around a campfire singing songs. As a result of that experience, she was determined to go to college. She was studying to be a teacher when she was invited to be a volunteer in the college’s lab school, where she taught math to fifth graders and followed them through their eighth grade year. She made the honor society’s

Geovana was her family’s interpreter. She was expected to go to college. She thought seriously about becoming an attorney. She now wants to be a peduatrician. She is working in a dermatologist’s office for the summer. She will spend a post-college year working while studying for the MCATS.

In the Fall of 2023, I was afflicted with chronic kidney disease. It came to a point where I was about to have dialysis. The only good hospital in the state was in Charleston. They invented a procedure that allowed me to get back to normal.

However, our children insisted that we move closer to them. We went up to Massachusetts to look around for a place that was close to our daughter. We found a continuous care community and moved in on October 23, 2024. We have been there ever since.

As I said, we are still in contact with many of the students we mentored and try and help out any way that we can. We are also in contact with a number of families. Many of them are still not doing well. We hope that the future holds more positive results for them. We miss them all.

​

 

Categories Funding, Poverty, Rural Schools, South Carolina, Students

Congressional Budget Office: Trump Tax Plan Will Enrich the Rich, Reduce Income for the Poor

By dianeravitch
June 13, 2025 //
11

Democratic leaders asked the nonpartisan, highly respected Congressional Budget Office to evaluate the consequences of the Trump tax plan. In brief, the bill would widen the gap between haves and have nots and would increase the number in poverty.

The Financial Times reported:

Donald Trump’s landmark tax bill would make the most prosperous Americans $12,000 richer each year, while wiping $1,600 off the disposable income of the nation’s poorest, Congress’s fiscal watchdog said on Thursday. 

Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” narrowly passed the House of Representatives last month, extending tax cuts introduced during the US president’s first term in the White House in 2017. 

The Congressional Budget Office said in a letter that the top 10 per cent of Americans by income would, on average, see their resources rise by $12,000 a year, or 2.3 per cent of their projected income, should Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” pass the Senate in broadly the same form that it passed the House. 

“The changes would not be evenly distributed among households,” said CBO director Phillip Swagel in the letter addressed to Democrat lawmakers Brendan Boyle and Hakeem Jeffries, who had requested the analysis. 

“The agency estimates that, in general, resources would decrease for households towards the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources would increase for households in the middle and the top of the income distribution.” 

Categories Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Economy, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Poverty
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