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Paul Thomas on the Fake “Crisis” in Education

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2026 //
7

Paul Thomas taught in South Carolina public high schools for many years, then became a professor of education at Furman University. He is an articulate critic of the decades-old “crisis in education.”

If you are confused by the different fonts, please open the link to read the original article.

He wrote:

People try to put us d-down (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin’ ’bout my generation)
“My Generation,” The Who

Born in 1961, I am a young boomer, but a boomer none the less.

I began teaching high school English in the ominous year of 1984, my first students having been born at the end of the same decade as I had, the 1960s.

That means across my career as an educator, I have taught most living generations, including my own. My grandchildren as Generation Alpha.
It does seem valid to note that humans experience generational shifts that can be identified in fair ways, especially in ways that may help those of us who teach better serve our students.

Those characteristics, however, are not universally defining and the cut off dates we decide are more blur than fact.

Being at the end of the boomer generation makes me often quite similar to Gen X folk I meet, including the first wave of students I taught high school.

What seems less valid, is the historical and current urge older generations have to negatively characterize younger generations, often through never-ending cycles of crying “Crisis!,” especially about education (notably reading and math).

The US has been riding a high tide of crisis rhetoric about reading—both that students can’t read and the students don’t read—for about a decade now.

It seems this cycle of crisis has reached a new stage according to The New York Times:

A report on the new data describes a decade-long “learning recession.”…
Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990 — then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind, which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops.

The decade analyze attempts to compare, even with the caveat above, learning using test data that itself has shifted several times and ways even in a relatively brief decade window.

As I have noted about reading proficiency, the US has no standard definition of “reading proficiency” or “grade-level reading,” but instead, we have NAEP achievement levels (that are confusing and misleading) drawn from random sampling about every two years along with annual (except for the Covid blip) testing at the state level, where every state establishes its own cut scores for proficiency (with most state proficiency level overlapping with NAEP “basic”).
Analyses such as these also suffer from compelling but questionable metrics such as days, months, or years of learning. What metric researchers choose and then how data is displayed significantly impacts how the conclusions are interpreted.

Unfortunately, most analyses of education are designed to create the appearance of crisis.
While this rhetorical shift to “learning recession” is yet another oversell that likely will do more harm than good, the immediate responses should prompt even greater skepticism:

Tweet by David Frum, May 13, 2026:

Seven months ago, the David Frum Show hosted former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings for a discussion of why US K-12 scores are declining. Her answer: the decline in testing and accountability since 2015.

Resurrecting former Secretary of Education Spellings deserves a reminder about her misinformation and misunderstanding concerning tests data, which she used to falsely claim success for NCLB (the testing and accountability she is sad to see gone, although that claim isn’t true either):

During President George W. Bush’s tenure, NCLB was a corner stone of his agenda, and when then-Secretary Spellings announced that test scores were proving NCLB a success, Gerald Bracey and Stephen Krashen exposed one of two possible problems with the data.

Spellings either did not understand basic statistics or was misleading for political gain. Krashen detailed the deception or ineptitude by showing that the gain Spellings noted did occur from 1999 to 2005, a change of seven points. But he also revealed that the scores rose as follows: 1999 = 212; 2000 = 213; 2002 = 219; 2003 = 218 ; 2005 = 219. The jump Spellings used to promote NCLB and Reading First occurred from 2000 to 2002, before the implementation of Reading First. Krashen notes even more problems with claiming success for NCLB and Reading First, including:

“Bracey (2006) also notes that it is very unlikely that many Reading First children were included in the NAEP assessments in 2004 (and even 2005). NAEP is given to nine year olds, but RF is directed at grade three and lower. Many RF programs did not begin until late in 2003; in fact, Bracey notes that the application package for RF was not available until April, 2002.”

This recent claim from Spellings, then, must be taken with a gigantic grain of salt because most politicians see education crisis as an opportunity to score political points, not as a way to better serve students.

That we are really about to have testing and accountability nostalgia sold to us is almost laughable—if it weren’t so insidious.

Reasonable people have noted that our testing obsession has resulted in deforming what and how students read, more passages to answer question and less whole book reading.

But research being ignored, makes the opposite and evidence-based argument from Spellings’s self-serving observation:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….
Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Crisis rhetoric has never and will never serve even good intentions well in terms of seeking better ways to serve the needs of all students, regardless of the generational differences.
But let’s also resist this new push to go back (?) to the good ol’ days of testing and accountability NCLB-style.

Let’s instead recycle an old (and silly then) chestnut from the Reagan era.

When it comes to crisis rhetoric as well as testing and accountability in education reform, just say no.

See Also

The Reading Crisis Paradox: On Moral Crisis and Thought-Terminating Clichés

How to Manufacture Crisis with Line Charts: NAEP Reading Edition

Recommended: Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered, Gerald Bracey (2006)

“Kids Today”: Perpetually Dumb and Lazy as a Box of Rocks

Reading Crisis 1961: Tomorrow’s Illiterates
1959: “yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills”

Reading Full Books in Secondary English Language Arts Classrooms


Categories Accountability, Fake News, Hoax, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Rep. Steve Cohen Introduces Six Articles of Impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2026 //
4

The U.S. Supreme Court was designed to be a separate branch of government, the one that monitored the adherence to the Constitution by the other two branches. The Court disappoints sometimes, but it has never been as nakedly partisan as it is under Chief Justice John Roberts. The far-right wing of the Republican Party has a reliable friend at the Court.

It’s hard to say which of their decisions is the worst.

Some might say it was their recent decision to overturn the Voting Rights Act, which will sharply reduce the number of Black members of Congress.

Some might say it was their decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, despite promises by most of them not to do so.

Some would say it is their decisions that tear down the wall of separation between church and state.

I say it was their decision in Trump v. United States, in which the majority decided that the president was above the law and could not be charged for anything he did while in office as part of his official duties. We can be certain that the same court would claim that whatever he did was part of his official duties, including tearing down the East Wing of the White House without seeking anyone’s approval.

Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee has had enough. He introduced six articles of impeachment of Chief Justice John Roberts. Good for him!

Scott Dworkin reported on his blog:

Rep. Steve Cohen

Rep. Steve Cohen has represented Memphis, Tennessee, for 19 years. Republicans cut his district into pieces, and he decided to retire—but not without a fight.

Cohen told The Dworkin Report in 2019: “[Trump’s] life has been one crime after another. One misdeed after another. One lie after another.” Now he’s applied that same standard to the man who put Trump above the law.

On May 21, Cohen introduced six articles of impeachment against Chief Justice John Roberts. Charges include allowing the Court to become a partisan weapon, placing the president above the law, endorsing a corrupt campaign finance system, and failing to recuse himself while his wife collected millions recruiting attorneys for law firms with cases before the Court.

Cohen was direct: “Under Chief Justice Roberts’ stewardship, [The Supreme Court] is now understood as biased: with decisions designed to benefit Republicans at the expense of representative government.”

They gerrymandered Cohen’s district to silence him. John Roberts now has six articles of impeachment to his name—an award no other Chief Justice has ever received in US history.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Corruption, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, History, Injustice, Justice, Trump

Colorado Parents and Educators Want an End to High-stakes Testing

By dianeravitch
May 26, 2026 //
5

A group of activists in Colorado speaks out against standardized tests. Angela Engels’ article was printed in the Colorado Times Recorder.


A Message from Judy Solano, Chair, A4PEP (Advocates for Public Education Policy).

“It takes courage to speak out about the injustices in the world, especially when policy-makers funded by wealthy education reform organizations hold the power.  May we all be warriors in the battle for truth.”

COLORADO TIMES RECORDER

Test-Based Accountability Is Failing Colorado’s Children

by Angela Engel                                                       May 15, 2026

As the Colorado General Assembly wraps up the 2026 session, lawmakers once again failed to confront one of the most costly and disruptive features of public education: high-stakes standardized testing.

Key legislative proposals that would have addressed the burden of high-stakes testing were defeated again. SB26-068would have reduced CMAS standardized tests to the minimum extent possible, and HB26-1291 would have reduced teacher evaluations for non-probationary teachers from annually to every three years. Both had bipartisan sponsorship and were supported by teachers, parents, and community members, but opposed by billionaire-backed education reform lobbyists.

A memorial backed by the Advocates for Public Education Policy (A4PEP), urging Congress to return authority to locally elected school boards, as provided in the eww hearing.

These decisions deserve more than a procedural explanation.

The issue of high-stakes testing is neither marginal nor new. Since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, policymakers have imposed lengthy and expensive criterion-referenced standardized tests on students, then incorrectly used that data to make high-stakes decisions about teacher pay and school closures. Because test scores are most closely correlated with income, policymakers have tolerated the practice of closing schools in low-income neighborhoods at the expense of our most vulnerable students.

A 2014 study showed that Colorado’s testing requirements cost up to $78 million annually in combined state and district expenditures. Adjusting for inflation, that would equal more than $100 million today. Approximately 450,000 students spend an average of 20 hours of classroom instruction each year on these assessments — more than 9 million hours diverted away from teaching and learning.

Meanwhile, the number of students identified as at-risk has increased by 118%, more than doubling since 2000. After more than two decades, the results of this approach are clear. Achievement gaps have not closed. Teacher attrition continues to rise. Families increasingly question a system that prioritizes testing over learning, with many choosing to opt out altogether.

This is not a policy in need of minor adjustment. It is an accountability structure that has failed to deliver on its core promises — and it deserves fundamental sreplacement. And yet, it remains firmly in place. Not because the evidence is unclear, but because the accountability system itself is protected.

Standardized testing is no longer just an educational tool. It is embedded in a network of contracts, compliance requirements, testing vendors, consulting firms, and political interests backed by well-funded lobbying efforts. There are real financial and political incentives to preserve it, regardless of outcomes.

Spending more than $100 million annually on a system that continues to produce the same disparities while costing students millions of hours of learning time reinforces a governance model that rewards compliance and discourages challenge.

This climate — where profits and political interests are prioritized before children — did not emerge on its own. It has been shaped over time by a campaign finance system that rewards candidates who support policies centered on test-based school accountability.

When you see something wrong, something inhumane, don’t just say something. Do something. It’s time policymakers stop protecting harmful practices and confront the consequences of policies that continue to waste taxpayer dollars, diminish learning opportunities, and drive many of our most talented and experienced teachers from the profession. After twenty-five years, the ramifications of inaction are impossible to ignore.

Public education should not revolve around protecting systems, contracts, corporate profits, or political interests. It should revolve around children. Colorado students deserve a well-rounded education that values critical thinking, creativity, and civic engagement over excessive testing and data collection. For too long, corporate education groups and privatizers have robbed students of a meaningful education and carefree childhood. This accountability model offers the illusion of control while costing Colorado a future of empowered, well-educated leaders.  

To view the planned Senate memorial, click here.  

Angela Engel is a mother, educator, and facilitator. Learn more on her website, www.angelaengel.com. Don Perl, Judy Solano, Mike DeGuire, and Manuel Solano contributed to this article.  https://coloradotimesrecorder.com/2026/05/test-based-accountability-is-failing-colorados-children/79032/

Categories Accountability, Colorado, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Education Industry, Every Student Succeeds Act, Evil, Extremism, Fake News, New York, Standardized Testing

Jennifer Rubin on Trump’s Rumored Deal with Iran

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2026 //
4

Ever since Trump decided to go to war in Iran, we have heard only good news from the administration. Trump has said repeatedly that “we won,” but it is not true. Iran still has uranium and now controls the Strait of Hormuz, choking off the world’s supply of oil.

Now, rumors again say that a deal is soon to be announced. This is the closest I could find to a description of the deal that will be announced. According to The New York Times, many Senate Republicans are unhappy with the deal.

Jennifer Rubin at the Contrarian questions the details of the deal:

According to news reports, Iranian and U.S. negotiators are closing in on a deal to end Donald Trump’s reckless, unconstitutional war. As the terms revealed that Trump’s war failed to attain his aims (e.g. permanently ending Iran’s nuclear ambitions), Republicans began blasting the deal. A Trump Truth Social post attempted to contain the backlash. He insisted he had told the negotiators to proceed carefully because time was on our side.

It bears repeating that Trump’s overly cheery take that we are on the verge of a deal may be nothing more than Trump spin. (Axios reported the deal could take days to complete.) Negotiations could stall at any time, leaving the Strait of Hormuz closed and no agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

The agreement reportedly under discussion would simply continue talks about Iran’s nuclear program. A final nuclear deal, if concluded, would require Iran to give up its stockpile of enriched material (or reduce the level of enrichment) and suspend enrichment for a fixed time (as under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). One imagines Iran will be happy to talk and talk and talk. The purported agreement, according to U.S. sources, would permit free shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. That would simply be a return to the status quo.

But most galling for Republicans, Trump’s agreement reportedly would unfreeze $25 billion in Iranian assets, a significant achievement for the economically hobbled Iranian regime. Recall that Republicans and Trump personally excoriated President Barack Obama’s agreement to unfreeze a mere $1.7 billion in conjunction with the JCPOA, which they claim amounted to funding Iran’s nefarious activities.

War hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) freaked out as details of the agreement dribbled out. “If it is perceived in the region that a deal with Iran allows the regime to survive and become more powerful over time, we will have poured gasoline on the conflicts in Lebanon and Iraq,” Graham warned on X. “A deal that is perceived to allow Iran to survive and possess the ability to control the Strait in the future will put Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Shia militias in Iraq on steroids.” Graham was not done with his scathing review:

This combination of Iran being perceived as having the ability to terrorize the Strait in perpetuity and the ability the inflict massive damage to Gulf oil infrastructure is a major shift of the balance of power in the region and over time will be a nightmare for Israel.

Also, it makes one wonder why the war started to begin with if these perceptions are accurate.

He was not alone. “The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith—would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught,” tweeted Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the Senate Armed Services Committee chairman.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) chimed in as well, saying he was “deeply concerned” about the reported deal, the New York Times reported. “It would be a ‘disastrous mistake’ if an agreement resulted in Iran being able to enrich uranium, develop nuclear weapons, and have effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, he said.” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on CNN observed, “It doesn’t make sense to me … now we’re talking about a posture where we may accept nuclear material remaining in Iran?”

The deal under discussion would dispel any notion that the United States “won” the war. The Wall Street Journal was quick to conclude: “The agreement, if completed, wouldn’t achieve Trump’s main goal of preventing Iran from ever acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

If this deal holds, there will be no question that Trump’s war amounted to a major strategic failure. Maybe we get an agreement similar to the JCPOA, which would have been in place had Trump not exited the deal. (Getting back in war something you already had is nothing to cheer about.) The agreement would leave the regime (perhaps more radical than ever) in place, deny Israel any permanent end to the Iranian threat, reveal the limits of U.S. influence and power in the region, and, by default, afford China (as evidenced by Trump’s pathetic showing at the summit) increased stature and confidence. Preventing a restart of a war no one wanted and an end to the energy shock Trump provoked can hardly been called “wins.”

The entire episode underscores the utter fecklessness of the Republicans in Congress, who don’t exercise their constitutional authority or conduct even minimal oversight. The deaths and injuries to U.S. troops, the deaths of thousands in the region, the physical destruction in Iran and Lebanon, the damage to the Gulf states’ oil operations, the extensive depletion of U.S. munitions, the tens of billions in costs, and soaring energy costs (and broader inflation spike) have achieved no lasting, positive result for the United States or its allies in the region. At best, we would be back to an agreement akin to the JCPOA but with a much emboldened, more dangerous, and well-funded Iranian regime.

Whether this deal gets finalized or not, Congress must conduct extensive oversight to fully investigate the Trump regime’s malfeasance, incompetence, and lack of honesty. If war crimes were committed, the officials responsible need to be held accountable. And finally, Congress needs to pass legislation to prevent this and future presidents from unilaterally blundering into unnecessary, ill-advised and illegal wars in the future.

Categories Accountability, Hoax, International, Lies

Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
7

Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

She writes:

Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.

Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “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 economical inequality.”

Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”

The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores.  The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of  No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.  Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “

Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014.  The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”

Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73)  His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era.  And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)

Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes.  First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.  Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.”  Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.

Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly.  The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”

I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome.  No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.

Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.

Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Rick Wilson: Trump’s Trades Don’t Look Good or Smell Good

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.

He wrote:

Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700. 

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design. 

So let’s not.

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

WSJ: Trump Made Over 3,700 Stock Trades in First Quarter of 2026

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump made thousands of stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In many instances, actions he took as president directly affected the price of the shares he bought or sold.

Previous Presidents put their assets into a blind trust or invested only in bonds.

Before he entered the White House, President Trump was a real-estate developer and speculator. Lately, his fortune has been wagered on some Big Tech stocks.

Money managers for the president made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, including million-dollar purchases of Nvidia, Dell and other Big Tech stocks. Trump’s managers pared his holdings in Microsoft and Amazon with sizable sales in the quarter. 

Canny investors should read Trump’s account on his social media site “Truth Social.” If he praises a company, it’s likely that he just bought the stock and is encouraging others to join him.

Bloomberg reported that experienced traders were stunned by the sheer number of trades on behalf of Trump.

President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account…

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general…

The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.

“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

The billionaire president’s stock trades were no doubt made to protect the best interests of the American people.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

John Thompson: Let NCLB Die, It’s Done Enough Damage

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
8

This week, a report by the Education Scorecard, led by Sean Reardon at the Stanford group; Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard; and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth proclaimed that we are in a decade-long “learning recession.” It found that 83% of state reading scores declined from 2015 to 2025. 

While I respect the Scorecard’s skills in compiling test score patterns, due to my time as an academic historian, an education researcher, and an inner city teacher, who witnessed the extreme harm done to students by the No Child Left Act of 2001 and the 2010 Race to the Top, I must challenge many of the conclusions that are being drawn from the test score patterns that Reardon, Kane, Staiger, and their partners present.

For instance, Thomas Kane told NPR that around 2013, “‘school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.’” When I read this statement, my response was that Kane must be living in a different world.So many districts are still looking over their shoulders prioritizing accountability metrics, not real learning.

Kane then claimed that accountability-driven mandates due to the NCLB and the RttT produced gains that “‘may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about.’” That statement has been refuted by numerous studies including RAND’s research which concluded that the failure of attempts to improve learning through high-stakes testing added to the proof,  “that one does not fatten a hog by weighing it.”I believe the test-driven teacher evaluations that Kane pushed were the most destructive education policy that I’ve ever heard of, and were a major factor in undermining teaching background information and reading for comprehension.Their test results patterns, I argue, actually support the opposite of the defense of NCLB and the RttT; it was the full implementation of high stakes testing, not the rejection of those failed policies, that was one of the top two causes of the sharp decline in literacy.

On the other hand, I agree that a main reason for the decline is the failure to manage social media, and that chronic absenteeism is a major factor.

But, first, I want to explain the political reasons why reading outcomes in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), and the Oklahoma City Public School System (OKCPS) fell so far. Secondly, I want to help defuse the “blame game,” and push back against the ramping up of unfair criticism of urban schools that is likely to get worse.  

Reardon previously led the research by the Equal Opportunity Project which found that the TPS’s 3rd through 8th grade growth rates were the 7th lowest in the nation from 2009 to 2015.

TPS students had gained only 3.8 years of learning over five years. Moreover, the OKCPS students only gained 4.4 years.

The TPS had had better schools than Oklahoma City, and we repeatedly visited Tulsa to learn from them. But, in 2010 they received a Gates Foundation grant for evaluating teachers, that Kane and Staiger helped create. Then, I frequently visited Tulsa and listened to both teachers and frustrated consultants as they complained about the damage being done to teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, it became much harder to recruit or retain teachers.

Now, the TPS, when compared with around 10,000 schools with similar demographics, “ranked higher than 1% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” 

Also, data from American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus showed that the TPS’s chronic absenteeism rate was 48.2%, compared to the nation’s 31.9% chronic absenteeism rate for similar schools.

Similarly, the Scorecard said, “Oklahoma City ranked higher than 0% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” Its students performed 3.93 grade levels below the 2019 national average. Moreover, chronic absenteeism was 42.8% compared to the national rate of 33% for similar districts. 

But, before Oklahoma City’s educators in high-challenge schools are blamed, the extreme segregation they face must be taken into account. Oklahoma County has 14 school districts.  along with magnet, charter, and private schools. School choice resulted in neighborhood schools with intense concentrations of students from extreme, generational poverty, who have endured multiple traumas (known as ACEs), thus driving down the OKCPS’s test scores. 

Consequently, in 2015, suburban and exurban schools Edmond, Mustang, Moore, and Yukon were ranked higher than the national average by 1.6; .6; 1; and .8 years. By 2024, their scores declined by the same or by lower rates as similar national schools. So, it’s hard to make the case that the lack of teacher accountability, as opposed to segregation by choice, drove those drops in reading. 

At the risk of sounding too nerdy, the historian in me needs to recall the chronologies for test score gains and decreases. I argue that the most meaningful reading metric is the 8th grade NAEP, which had been improving incrementally from 255 in 1971, to 263 in 2012, before it fell to 260 in 2020, and to 256 in 2023. 

Both my experiences in the classroom, and the reading of the data, support the narrative that it took a while for the destructive policies of both interconnected reforms to be put in place, but when that happened, both laws drove meaningful learning down.    

On the other hand, some claim that the reversal of the most punitive parts of RttT caused that decline. But those changes didn’t occur until 2015, after 8th grade reading scores were already in decline. Even so, in Oklahoma, the conservative Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) blamed State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister for the drop in state reading scores because she ended the practice that made us second in the nation in retentions. 

Getting back to today’s national discussion about literacy, one data-driven scholar, Brian Jacobs, was cited for supporting NCLB despite its problematic features. He said, “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement.” 

But, if you follow the link to his research, it concludes, “Our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders.” And it gives virtually no evidence that it didn’t undermine learning about science, history, arts, and music.    

Reading the news coverage of the Education Scorecard brings me back to three sets of memories. During the early 1990’s, our school superintendent bragged about implementing the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. So many of my students who grew up in that era would thank me for teaching in a meaningful manner, and then complain that they had previously been “robbed of an education” by its testing.

Secondly, at the turn of the century, I repeatedly talked with smart, sincere data experts about methodological problems when using their metrics for real world policies, as opposed to economic theory. I repeatedly heard the reply that their job was to show that data-driven accountability can improve teaching. If I’m right, they would say, they would run some more controls (presumably after the policies were in place). But it wasn’t their job to predict what will happen if those policies are adopted.    

Thirdly, as the RttT was implemented, my students from the poorest elementary and middle schools would repeatedly thank me for showing them respect by teaching them in a meaningful manner. And, they kept volunteering that they had been “robbed of an education.”

It is also important to remember that the majority of OKCPS students are Hispanic, and remember that the OKCPS probably would have collapsed if it had not been for immigration. Now, when ICE is terrorizing immigrants, we must come together in support of our threatened students in order to reduce its contribution to chronic absenteeism. 

And Oklahoma has long ranked near the nation’s top for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and near the bottom for children’s wellness.

Moreover, I don’t recall talking to a parent who doesn’t see the need to help young people control, and not be controlled, by their digital devices.

And I almost never talk to a parent, a student, or an educator who doesn’t want to cut back on high-stakes testing and test prep.

So, I agree we need to take the Education Scorecard seriously, but we should use it as a diagnostic tool to help us come together for the team efforts required for bringing back the joy of reading.   

For instance, I agree with Elaine Allensworth, the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, who responded to the Scorecard saying we should not panic, but “We need to really start asking questions about what we can do to support students so they feel engaged in school.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Why Trump Wanted Immunity from Audits

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
4

The New York Times explained why Trump wanted immunity from audits by the IRS. Before his first presidency, Trump appears to have had a tax liability of nearly $80 million. The IRS claimed that he used the same business failure twice to decrease his tax debt.

The new exemption from audits that he gave himself saves him what he owed, which would now be nearly $100 million. It’s not clear whether he will ever again be audited by the IRS.

The Times reported:

A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.

The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.

Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.

It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.

Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.

The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.

Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.

In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.

During his first campaign, Trump contended that it was “smart” to avoid taxes. He may be the first billionaire to skip them altogether.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act Was a High Point of Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
0

Jamelle Bouie, columnist for The New York Times, wrote several columns (see here) about the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision. This one is titled “The Law They Hate Was a High Point of Our History.” The high court majority, six hard-right Republicans, decided that partisan redistricting is just fine, but redistricting that takes account of race is not. Thus, a state legislature dominated by one party can justly produce a voting map that gives every seat to its own party, but it may not permit districts created to encourage representation of racial minorities.

In the wake of the Callais decision, some states of the Confederacy quickly carved up districts to eliminate seats held by Democrats and by Blacks. Some of these states will have only white Republicans in Congress.

Bouie wrote:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t the top-down dictate of a rogue, liberal Supreme Court — if such a thing has ever existed.

It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington, nor was it some kind of martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy.

It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.

This, somehow, has been lost in the discourse around the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The court’s clear hostility to the law, as well as the glee with which conservative Republicans have dismantled the South’s majority-minority congressional districts in its wake, makes it seem as if the V.R.A. was a handcuff placed on American politics by some outside force.

The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy. And it was, itself, the product of an explosion of democratic energy.

The V.R.A. was forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grass roots activists in the Civil Rights Movement, who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans. It was signed into law by a president who had won election in one of the largest landslides in American history. It was subsequently reauthorized by Congress, after Congress, after Congress, after Congress.

The most recent reauthorization in 2006 was nearly unanimous, and there was broad support from the public — so much that to justify the Supreme Court’s attack on the law in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts had to fabricate a constitutional doctrine about the “equal sovereignty” of states, and Justice Antonin Scalia had to characterize the reauthorization as an unfair “racial entitlement” that politicians would never remove for fear of backlash.

If there is any single law that you could plausibly say represents the general will of the American people, it might be one that was reaffirmed nearly every decade for 40 years by the people’s representatives.

This isn’t just a historical point or a piece of idle trivia. It is essential. And it gets to what is so egregious about the court’s campaign against the law.

The Voting Rights Act was an attempt by the people of the United States, affirmed across two generations of voters and lawmakers, to make good the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — itself the hard fought product of war and reconstruction. It was an attempt to wield the authority of the federal government to secure the fundamental right to vote as well as the fundamental right to representation. It stood for substantive equal protection — the chance to make democracy real.

The V.R.A. was not, contra John Roberts and the rest, an expression of colorblindness, indifferent to the social realities of the United States. It did not pretend to treat supposed neutrality as truly neutral, nor did it place racial inequality outside the remit of the Constitution. And it was not, as this court would have it, the bland expression of a bloodless commitment to anti-discrimination. In fact, it was the most significant attempt in this country’s history to realize the promise of political equality.

The Voting Rights Act has more — much more — democratic legitimacy than this Supreme Court has ever enjoyed. After all, most of this court’s conservative majority was appointed by presidents who entered office as winners of the Electoral College but not the popular vote.

It is that relative difference in democratic legitimacy that makes this court’s voting rights jurisprudence so offensive.

Those voting rights rulings, from Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Callais in 2026, come from a court that has placed itself above the people at large. It is a court that will, according to its whims, ignore the clear commands, directions and intent of Congress. It is a court that treats voters and legislators as errant children to be corralled and disciplined by wise jurists. It is a court that doesn’t answer hard constitutional questions as they arise as much as it imposes constitutional meaning based on its narrow interests and ideological preoccupations.

It is a court that is trying to shape the political system to its liking, despite the claims of the chief justice, with no limits other than its partisan preferences. It is a court, in other words, that is wielding a cramped and parochial vision of the Constitution against American democracy, rather than treating the Constitution as a tool for realizing our democratic aspirations.

There have been many frustrating decisions from this Supreme Court. Louisiana v. Callais may not even be its worst decision — that prize might still go to Trump v. United States, where the chief justice conjured, out of thin air, an anti-constitutional doctrine of criminal immunity for the president.

Callais, however, might be the most emblematic of this court’s decisions: a flashing warning that our democracy is being crushed underneath the imperial authority of an arrogant and reactionary juristocracy. We can either discipline that court — and put it in its place — or accept our fate as its subjects.

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Democracy, Injustice, Ethics, Bigotry, Racism, Elections
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