Did This Exam Increase Suicide Rate for South Korean Youth?

By dianeravitch
December 22, 2025 //
9

CNN reported that South Korea’s crucial national test contained questions so difficult that the top official resigned. And, of course, there was no end to the parents and students who expressed their outrage about exam questions that were hopelessly obtuse. To read the exam questions, open the link.

This is the story:

Imagine this: You’re a South Korean teenager taking a notoriously grueling 8-hour college entrance exam. You’ve been prepping for this for months, perhaps years. You reach the English portion, and you see this:

If you thought that was difficult, how about this?

These were among the questions students faced in the exam – known locally as the Suneung – this November, which prompted such intense outcry that the exam body’s top official stepped down last week, according to public broadcaster KBS.

The exam body even issued a formal apology earlier this month, saying it “takes seriously the criticism that it did not meet the appropriate level of difficulty… for the English portion.”

The body “deeply apologizes for causing concern to the test takers and parents,” the statement said, adding that administrators would consult schools to “create questions within the scope of school education.”

But many angry test-takers and parents say an apology isn’t enough to make up for the damage in test scores and college applications – which are often seen as the key to a successful future in hyper-competitive South Korea.

Only about 3% of test takers earned a top score in the English portion – the lowest since a new grading system was introduced in 2018, according to the exam body.

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“The former head of the evaluation admitted the faults, as he resigned,” wrote one online user surnamed Choi on the Suneung’s website. “Is it not common sense to come up with a measure for test takers and parents, who are the victims impacted by the fault?”

“How can an investigation saying what they will do for next year’s entrance exam comfort the test takers that are discouraged this year?”

‘Killer questions’

The Suneung has long been famed for its difficulty and the intense pressure it places on young teenagers. For many, the education rat race begins before they can even talk, with parents racing to secure coveted spots in elite preschools.

By the time students are in middle and high schools, their days often revolve around studying – going straight from regular classes to after-school cram centers known as hagwons until late at night. All this hard work, families hope, can secure them a spot at a top university, and an advantage in the similarly ruthless job market.

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It’s not just the families – the whole country takes this exam seriously.

Passengers walk past an information board showing delayed flights at Gimpo airport in Seoul on November 13, on the day of the annual college entrance exam. Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Images

On November 13, as more than half a million students nationwide sat down for the Suneung, all flights across the country were barred from taking off or landing for half an hour to make sure there were no noisy distractions during a listening comprehension section. Financial markets opened an hour late and police were mobilized to make sure candidates could make it to their test venues on time.

But there’s a danger to such highly competitive tests: they are often viewed as both a symptom and contributor to wealth inequality, with richer students able to access more resources that could give them a leg up.

There’s also an illicit market involved. Police booked 126 people earlier this year on suspicion of selling Suneung questions to hagwons and tutors, according to Yonhap News Agency.

The heavy burden on students is frequently blamed for poor mental health in the country, which had the highest suicide rateamong OECD nations in 2020, the latest figures available.

It may influence the country’s steeply falling fertility rate, too.

Experts believe the staggering tuition expenses are a major factor behind South Koreans’ reluctance to have children – along with other burdens like long working hours, stagnant wages and sky-high housing costs.

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The government has tried to crack down on hagwons to even the playing field, and to lower the difficulty of the entrance exam.

In 2023, it announced it would remove so-called “killer questions” from the Suneung, which sometimes included material that isn’t covered in the public school curriculum – which, the then-education minister argued, gave an unfair advantage to those who can afford private tutoring.

Clearly, however, even the questions that remain may be too much.

“I’m so angry,” wrote a commenter surnamed Jung on the exam body’s website. “What are you going to do with the kids’ lives?”

CNN’s Marianna Kim contributed to this report

Categories International, Students, Testing

The Scientific Breakthrough of the Year!

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2025 //
2

Every year, Science magazine highlights the most innovative development of the year. While the United States retreats from efforts to protect the environment, China surges ahead with the use of American technology.

Here is its selection for 2025:

BREAKTHROUGH OF THE YEAR

The rise of renewables

Solar panels armor a hillside in China’s Anhui province, parting only for an access road. Distant ridges host wind turbines, another fast-growing component of an energy revolution that has helped ease air pollution and slow the growth of China’s carbon emissions.  GEORGE STEINMETZ

This year—for the first time—the world produced more energy via renewable sources than with coal. The meteoric rise of these greener energy technologies, particularly in China, has brought us tantalizingly close to the turning point where annual global carbon emissions plateau and even decline. “To many, the continued growth of renewables now seems unstoppable,” wrote Science News Editor Tim Appenzeller—“a prospect that has led Science to name the renewable energy surge its 2025 Breakthrough of the Year.”

While renewable technologies were pioneered in the U.S., it was China’s industrious production of them that changed the game. The country now makes 80% of the world’s solar cells, 70% of its wind turbines, and 70% of its lithium batteries. Increased production led to lower prices and increased demand, which in turn fueled even more production and even lower prices. As a result, “wind and solar became the cheapest energy in much of the world,” Appenzeller noted. Instead of investing in renewables because they are environmentally friendly, countries—and individuals—started buying them up because they were more affordable. “That change in motivation may be the most important breakthrough of all, ensuring that this year’s inflection points are just the beginning,” he concluded.

But there is one notable exception: the United States. “The U.S. is now squandering an opportunity to reap the benefits of its own technology, ceding the income and the geopolitical power to a nation that repeatedly puts technological prowess above politics,” wrote Science Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp in an accompanying editorial. While much of the world continues to increase its renewable energy capacity, “the U.S. marches boldly backward toward the past,” Thorp wrote.

Categories Creativity, Environment, International, Science

Texas: Why Not Monetize Everything?

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2025 //
11

In Greg Abbott’s Texas, everything has a price or makes a profit.

Mothers Against Greg Abbott posted this video showing how it’s done.

A for-profit online charter school is opening in a for-profit prison whose inmates are families arrested by ICE.

The school will be supplied by a giant online corporation called Stride, which used to be K-12 Inc.

K-12 Inc. was known for low-quality instruction, low graduation rates, and scandals. Its executives are paid multi-million dollar salaries.

It’s ironic that the government is paying Stride to provide low-quality online instruction to hapless children whose families are about to be ousted from America.

Peter Greene has the story here.

The detention center in Dilley is operated byCoreCivic, a Tennessee-based for-profit operator of prisons, jails, and detention centers. In 2025, they scored $300 million in ICE contracts. 

CoreCivic was founded as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in 1983, by Thomas W. Beasley, Robert Crants and T. Don Hutto. Beasley served as the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party; Crants was the chief financial officer of a real estate company in Nashville; Hutto was the president-elect of the American Correctional Association, and according to a 2018 Time Magazine investigation, ran a Manhattan-sized Tennessee cotton plantation where Black convicts picked cotton for no pay…

One of its first big investors was Michael Milken. That investment came a decade after he pled guilty to six felonies in the “biggest fraud case in the securities industry” ending his reign as the “junk bond king.” In 1996, he had established Knowledge Universe, an organization he created with his brother Lowell and Larry Ellison (Oracle), who both kicked in money for K12. Steve Fink, a trusted Milliken confidant and lead independent director of Stride, is the brother of Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of Blackrock, which has been a longtime investor in Stride.

In 2011, the New York Times detailed how K12’s schools were failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers wrote tell-alls about their experiences. In 2012. Florida caught K12 using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cyber schools that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country, “despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012.”

In 2013 K12 settled a class action lawsuit in Virginia for $6.75 million after stockholders accused the company of misleading them about“the company’s business practices and academic performance.” In 2014, Middlebury College faculty voted to end a partnership with K12 saying the company’s business practices “are at odds with the integrity, reputation and educational mission of the college.”

In 2016 K12 got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, resulting in a $165 million settlement with then Attorney General Kamala Harris. K12 was repeatedly dropped in some states and cities for poor performance.

In 2020, they landed a big contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent); subsequently Wired magazine wrote a story about their “epic series of tech errors.” K12 successfully defended itself from a lawsuit in Virginia based on charges they had greatly overstated their technological capabilities by arguing that such claims were simply advertising “puffery.”

Well, who cares? Who cares if Stride-K12 provides high-quality education? So what if it’s a waste of taxpayer money? The “students” are children who are being deported. Their parents are being deported too. Who cares?

Categories Education Reform

Egomania Prevails: Board of Kennedy Center Renames It for Trump

By dianeravitch
December 19, 2025 //
26

Trump’s hand-picked board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in the nation’s Capitol has voted to rename it. It is now the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Early in his term, Trump fired Biden’s appointees to the Kennedy Center board and replaced them with his close allies, including his chief of staff Susie Wiles and Usha Vance, the vice-president’s wife. He named himself chairman of the board. He installed Ric Grennell, former Trump-named Ambassador to Germany, as the new president and executive director, although Grennell had no relevant experience. Trump made decisions about programming, and some groups canceled their appearances to protest his takeover.

Ticket sales and attendance have declined sharply since Trump took over. Many employees have been fired or quit, and were replaced by unqualified friends of Trump. He intends to remodel the center, and patrons of the arts are apprehensive about what he will do. In the decades that he lived in New York City, he never associated himself with venues for the arts, like Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.

Republicans have mused about renaming the Kennedy Center and changing it to the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. Some speculated about renaming the Opera House of the Kennedy Center for Melania.

Yesterday, the board changed the name to the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Trump’s press secretary said the vote was unanimous, but the only Democrat on the board, Rep. Joyce Pratt of Ohio, was muted during the vote and not allowed to speak.

This was no surprise. The board was prepared. The new logo was immediately rolled out:

In reality, the board does not have the power to rename the Kennedy Center. Its name was authorized by law and can be changed only by Congress, just as the Department of Defense cannot be renamed the Department of War without Congress.

What else can he rename for himself? Should the Washington Monument be declared the Trump Monument? Can he replace Lincoln in the Lincoln Monument? Instead of a brooding Lincoln, the new statue would be Trump swinging a golf club. Maybe that’s the purpose of the Arc d’Trump that he intends to build.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Administration Will Close Major Center for Research on Climate Change

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
3

The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.

Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.

Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.

The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.

But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.

Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

USA Today first reported on the White House plans.

Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.

The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.

Categories Environment, Evil, Extremism, Medicine, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Peter Greene: The Case for “Slow School”

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
18

I have said before that I love Peter Greene. He has turned his four decades of experience as a high school English teacher into a compendium of wisdom. He knows when to listen carefully to new ideas and when to throw them out with the garbage. He usually says what I have been thinking, but writes it up better than I could. This is one of those wonderful pieces that are trademark Peter Greene.

He writes:

Last week I had a bluesky post blow up, a simply referral to Dana Goldstein’s New York Times pieceabout how nobody reads whole books in school any more. It’s a good piece, pretty fairly balanced even as it points out the role of technology, Common Core, and testing in the decline of whole-book reading (and allows some folks to try to defend the not-very-defensible). 

The article itself drew well over a thousand comments, most of them supportive of the idea of reading whole books. The responses to my post were a more mixed bag, with responses that included variations on “Students would read more books if they were assigned good stuff like [insert your fave here] and not crap like [insert author who bugs you and/or Shakespeare here].” Also variations on “Aren’t books over, really?” and its cousin “I didn’t read any books and I am just swell.”

Goldstein gives Common Core a few graphs of defense, because the world still includes people who think it’s great. I am not one of those people, and I have filled up a lot of space explaining why. But in the drop in book reading we can see a couple of the long-term ill effects of the Core (including all the versions hiding in states under an assumed name).

One problem is the Core’s focus on reading as a set of discrete skills that exist in some sort of vacuum absent any content, like waves without water or air. The Core imagined reading as a means of building those skills, and imagined in that context that it doesn’t matter what or how much you read. If today’s lesson is on Drawing Inferences, it doesn’t matter whether you read a scene from Hamlet or a page from a description of 12th century pottery techniques. You certainly don’t need to read the entire work that either of those excerpts came from. Read a page, answer some questions about inferences. Quick and efficient.

And that emphasis on speed and efficiency is another problem.

The Big Standardized Test doesn’t just demand that students get the right answer. It demands that they come up with the right answer RIGHT NOW! And that scaffolds its way backwards through the whole classroom process. The test prep emphasizes picking the One Correct Answer to the question about the one page slice o’writing, and it emphasizes picking it quickly. There is no time allotted for mulling over the reading, no time for putting it in the context of a larger work, certainly no time for considering what other folks have thought about the larger work.

To read and grapple with a whole book takes time. It takes reflection, and it can be enhanced by taking in the reactions of other readers (including both fancy pants scholars and your own peers). I reread Hamlet every year for twenty-some years, each time with a different audience, and I was still unpacking layers of ideas and language and understanding at the end. I taught Nickel and Dimed for years, and the book would lend itself very easily to being excerpted so that one only taught a single chapter from it; but the many chapters taken together add up to more than the sum of their parts. And it takes a while to get through all of it.

If you think there is more value in reading complete works than simply test prep for reading “skills,” then you have to take the time to pursue it.

It is easy as a teacher to get caught up on the treadmill. There is so much you need to cover, and only so much time. There were many times in my career when I had to take a deep breath and walk myself back from hammering forward at breakneck speed. And education leaders tend only to add to the problem and pressure (the people who want you to put something else on your classroom plate rarely offer any ideas about taking something off to make room).

And look– I don’t want to fetshize books here. We English teachers love our novels, but it’s worth remembering that the novel as we understand is a relatively recent development in human history. Some works that we think of as novels weren’t even first published as books; Dickens published his works as magazine serials. And reading novels was, at times, considered bad for Young People These Days. For that matter, complaints about how Kids These Days don’t read full works takes me back to a college class where we learned that pre-literate cultures would sometimes bemoan the rise of literacy– “Kids These Days don’t remember the old songs and stories any more.”

Reading entire works is not automatically magical or transformative. But there is a problem that comes with approaches to comprehending the world that emphasize speed rather than understanding, superficial “skills” over grappling with the ponderable complexities of life. The most rewarding relationships of your life will probably not be the ones that are fast and superficial. And I am reflexively suspicious of anyone who does not themselves want to be seen, heard, or understood on anything beyond a swift and shallow read.

If education is about helping young humans grasp the better version of themselves while understanding what it means to be fully human in the world (and I think it is) then students need the opportunity to grapple with works that mimic the depth and size and complexity of real humans in the real world.

The case has been made for slow school, analogous to the slow food movement, and it can have its problems, like fetishizing a selective view of tradition. But I like the basic idea, the concept of slowing down enough to be able to take in and digest large slices of the world. That should certainly take the form of engaging students with complete works, but I expect that it can take other forms as well.

Test-centric schooling has narrowed and shallowed our concept of education in this country, and while there has never been a reason to stop discussing this issue over the last twenty years, much of the conversation has moved on to other issues, like the current emphasis on culture panic and dismantling the system. But we can do better, dig deeper, tap richer educational veins, if we are just honest about our goals and our obstacles. I hope we’ll get there before my children and grandchildren get too much older.

Categories Common Core, Creativity, Education Reform, Freedom to Read, Literacy, Literature, Real Education

Mark Green: Don’t Let Trump Hijack July 4. How to Resist.

By dianeravitch
December 18, 2025 //
2

Mark Green is a progressive activist in New York City. He was the city’s Consumer Affairs commissioner, then New York City’s first Public Advocate. He is a lawyer and author.

He writes on his Substack blog,

Trump taking over 250th celebrations of July 4, 1776 is less urgent than going to war with Venezuela over oil or deporting law-abiding immigrants without due process..but it’s maddening and obscene to allow such a Tory to lecture us Patriots about The Story of America.
Fyi, this Substack explains why and how to slow down his narcissistic nationalism.

Celebrating Trump on July 4, 2026

Mark Green wrote on his Substack blog:

“It was the most consequential Revolution in history…When you control how people discuss the past, you control how they see the present and imagine the future.” – Ken Burns

It’s bad enough that a raging egomaniac wants to paste his name on physical public assets: a Peace Institute, Washington Arch, “Trump Baby Bonds,” coinage, the Commanders football stadium, the Kennedy Center, and a new White House ballroom larger than the White House itself. But it would be historically obscene for a temporary Oval Office occupant, far closer in philosophy to the Tories than the Patriots, to rewrite the very idea of 1776.

Donald Trump’s irresistible urge to imitate Ozymandias and Caesar should be opposed, mocked, and someday reversed. But until the jury of voters issue their 2026 and 2028 verdicts, that resistance should at least mean rejecting his attempts to view the Semiquincentennial (the 250th anniversary) through the lens of narcissistic nationalism. Instead, we should adhere to the radical principles of the Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights: freedom, rule of law, separation of powers, free speech, and consent of the governed.

In his effort to renounce loyalty to royalty, Jefferson laid out eighteen “facts” in his July 4th Bill of Particulars involving trade, taxes, armies, and courts that justified rebellion against England. Below are eighteen parallel reasons to rebel against Trump’s contemporary power-grab and his attempt to redefine the Story of America for generations to come.

A BILL OF PARTICULARS, July 4th, 2026

1. Sedition
January 6, 2021. Trump inspired the worst insurrection since 1861 and later pardoned hundreds of convicted rioters, including Proud Boys and others who assaulted 139 police officers, leading to five deaths. He called it a “day of love.”

2. The Department of Retribution
He publicly ordered the DOJ to indict political enemies, leading to humiliating dismissals targeting James Comey and Letitia James (“she’s very guilty of something”). This inverts equal justice by targeting people first and searching for crimes second. Reuters has tallied at least 470 names on what could be considered his vendetta list. The words “retribution” and “vendetta” do not appear in Article 2.

3. “Faithfully execute the laws”
Trump interpreted “execute” in his oath literally, engaging in unlawful conduct over 170 times in ten months, according to federal and state courts, while dismantling agency Inspectors General. Replacing the rule-of-law with the law-of-rule led numerous judges from both parties to condemn DOJ deception and hundreds of experienced lawyers to resign.

4. The First Felon President
He was found guilty of 34 felonies by a New York City judge and jury for falsifying business records and campaign finance fraud, avoiding prosecution in four other criminal cases largely due to reelection.

5. Pardon Abuse
He transformed a constitutional prerogative into a near fourth branch of government, issuing pardons to donors, corporate executives, white-collar criminals, crypto partners, and drug traffickers based not on mercy but on blandly and unspecifically repeating ‘“people have told me they were treated very unfairly. When granting clemency to twelve Members, including the clownish George Santos, he actually admitted all were “loyal Republicans.”

6. Usurpation of Congress
Acting as both president and de facto speaker, Trump routinely violates the separation of powers by, for example, governing through executive orders and ignoring Congress’s Article I power to tax. Justice Jackson condemned the “stench” of rulings based not on what’s precedent but who’s president.

7. Foreign Affairs for “America Alone”
While history shows the U.S. succeeds with allies, Trump embraces dictators and threatens to abandon NATO. Nor did he impress Western leaders by predicting Europe’s “civilizational erasure” and dispatching two realtors to negotiate about the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts with strongmen Putin and Netanyahu.

8. Speech Not Free
Calling the press “enemies of the people” and belittling journalists who ask tough questions reveals his belief that everyone’s-entitled-to…his opinion. MAGA-style McCarthyism seeks to shake down law firms, universities, news networks, and even individual targets —SNL, Jimmy Kimmel— using the immense power of federal spending and law enforcement.

9. Emolumental Self-Enrichment
Despite attacking Hunter Biden, Trump turned the presidency into a personal ATM. Family ventures in crypto, memecoins, and branded properties increased their net worth by an estimated $3.5 billion in 2025, according to The New Yorker.

10. Economic Inequality
Wealth disparity now rivals the Gilded Age due to policy choices, not natural law. Shifting trillions from the middle class to the ultra-rich reflects the priorities of Reagan-Trump-Norquist economics, as documented by Piketty, Stiglitz, and Reich.

11. Spurring Violence
He governs through menace, encouraging assaults on protesters, failing to condemn mass shootings, and using dehumanizing language repeated by actual mass murderers in, for example, the Pittsburgh synagogue and Buffalo supermarket slayings. Even the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s murder was a Trump supporter who repeated that Biden stole the 2020 election. FBI data shows roughly 80 percent of political murders originate from the Far-Right.

12. Commander-in-Chief Abuse
Renaming the Department of Defense the “Department of War” was a tell. Trump invoked fabricated emergencies to deploy troops domestically, treating soldiers as personal enforcers and flirting with war crimes to look like, in Hegseth’s favorite words, “warriors” who favor “lethality not legality.”

13. Racism
From “shithole countries” to mass deportations without due process, his rhetoric and policies reflect collective guilt and ethnic scapegoating. If “racism” is considered too strong a word to describe Trump telling all citizens of Somali descent “to go back to your country” and J.D. Vance supporting those who object to non-English speaking neighbors, what’s a better word?

14. Repeated Sexual Misconduct
He actively covering up his close ties to Jeffrey Epstein, was accused by dozens of women of sexual abuse, and was found by a civil jury to have raped E. Jean Carroll, resulting in an $80 million judgment.

15. Chronic Indecency
Trump openly declares hatred for opponents, refers to them as “scum” and “traitors,” and celebrates their humiliation. After the White House posted a cartoon of a Trump-labeled plane dropping tons of excrement on protesters, renowned Conservative columnist George Will labeled Trumpism a “moral slum.”

16. Opposing the Franchise
He supports restricting mail ballots, discarding valid votes, and eliminating the Voting Rights Act, last reauthorized unanimously in 2006 and signed into law by W43..

17. Incorrigible Lying
While past presidents lied episodically, Trump normalized deception, producing over 34,000 falsehoods in his first term alone, including claims about a stolen 2020 election. This volume sabotages an informed democracy and ought to persuade voters and judges not to give him the traditional benefit-of-the-doubt of earlier presidents that, as columnist David French put it, “others have earned.”

18. Soft on Fascism
Trumpism checks nearly every box of fascism: extreme nationalism, one-man rule, plutocracy, xenophobia, suppression of dissent, lawlessness, and normalized violence. Complaints about the label rang hollow when he told General John F. Kelly that Hitler “did some good things.”

CONCLUSION: Yes to July 4th. But not HIS July 4th.

Individually, many of these abuses justify impeachment or invocation of the 25th Amendment. A compliant Congress and devoted MAGA base make accountability impossible…for now.

Progressive patriots can still resist symbolically by rejecting co-opted celebrations and embracing Enlightenment values of reason, science, and law. Alternatives include:

• Local and state celebrations—which utilize community groups and schools—can explicitly counter historical revisionism. As founding father Benjamin Rush said, “the Revolution never truly ends.” Democracy requires renewal, not Originalism weaponized by power.

• A national coalition, such as “No Kings Days,” should organize a July 4, 2026, alternative with mass participation and prominent public speakers.

• Blunt editorials from major media that dramatically begin on their front pages should reframe Real Patriotism and rise to the unique threat of an American Despot.

Let’s just-say-no.

— 

Mark Green

@markgreennywreckingamerica

Categories Character, Trump

Trump’s Illegal Demolition of the U.S. Department of Education

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
3

Senator Maxie K. Hirono of Hawaii conducted a forum on Trump’s illegal demolition of the U.S. Department of Education.

Trump promised to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education but he needs the approval of the U.S. Congress to wipe out a Department authorized by Congress. There are Republicans who would not support this reactionary step, so Trump bypassed Congress and took a different, blatantly illegal path.

Acting through his Secretary of Education, wrestling entrepreneur Linda McMahon, he began laying off employees. Then his DOGE crew closed down whole sections of the Department, including its historic mission, the collection of data and statistics about education, as well as its research arm.

The legal way to achieve his goal was to seek Congressional action. Instead, he broke up the Department and handed its functions to other Departments.

McMahon likes to say that the Department spends lots of money, but test scores haven’t gone up. That’s not the purpose of the Department. it exists to equalize funding to some extent, to add extra funding for students who are low-income, who have disabilities, or who have other needs. It also funds postsecondary education and, though its Office for Civil Rights, protects students against discrimination. OCR is now in the hands of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which is hostile to the traditional definition of civil rights; its highest priority appears to be the protection of the straight white makes.


WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) held a spotlight forum titled, “Dismantling Education: What the Trump Administration’s Illegal Attacks on Federal Programs Mean for Students, Families, and Educators,” highlighting the dangerous consequences of the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education (ED) for our nation’s students, families, educators, and schools—among others. During the forum, a panel of witnesses comprised of K-12 education leaders and civil rights experts spoke about how abolishing ED and moving these programs to other federal agencies would harm students across the country, especially those who come from low-income, rural, Native, migrant, and federally-impacted communities.

 

“From Day One, President Trump and his regime have been illegally attacking and undermining the Department of Education, in an attempt to abolish the Department altogether,” said Senator Hirono. “Trump has sown and continues to sow chaos for students across the country: directing the closure of the Department of Education; firing nearly half the Department workforce; slashing, withholding and rescinding funding for federal education programs; and creating a national school voucher program—to name a few things. In the process, he has jeopardized our children’s futures. Today’s forum provided an important opportunity to inform individuals and communities about the destructive actions he has taken so far. Every child in our country deserves access to a quality education, and I will continue working with my colleagues to make sure that is the case.”

 

Specifically, the forum focused on this administration’s recent proposal to illegally move nearly all federal K-12 programs and many higher education programs to other federal agencies that have limited capacity to run these programs and have no experience with dealing with them. ED announced last month that it would partner with the Departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services, and State to conduct the transfer of these programs. This move would essentially fulfill Trump’s promise to eliminate the Department altogether and remove the federal government’s role in helping to ensure that all students have access to a quality education.

 

The forum featured testimony from:

  • Randi Weingarten, President, American Federation of Teachers
  • Rachel Gittleman, President, American Federation of Government Employees Local 252
  • Denise Forte, President and CEO, The Education Trust
  • Dr. Amy Loyd, CEO, All4Ed
  • Chad Rummel, Executive Director, Council for Exceptional Children
  • Angelica Infante-Green, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, Rhode Island Department of Education

 

At the forum, Senator Hirono was joined by a number of her colleagues, including Senators Peter Welch (D-VT), Jack Reed (D-RI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Dick Durbin (D-IL).

 

“The Trump Administration has taken a wrecking ball to essential federal education programs like Title I, which ensure first-generation, rural, and lower-income students get an equal opportunity to learn and grow. Despite our taxpayers spending one of the highest rates in the country for our students’ education, Vermont now ranks well below the national average on reading and math scores. Just a decade ago, our students scored the 4th highest in the country,” said Senator Welch. “Instead of trying to dismantle the Department of Education, we should be doing everything in our power to give students the resources they need to succeed.” 

 

“The Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education isn’t about streamlining or efficiency.  It’s whittling down or just completely abandoning critical programs and support for public school students, teachers, and entire communities,” said Senator Reed.  “I’m fighting to ensure our teachers and schools have the support and resources they need to give every child a top-notch education that prepares them for success.  I am grateful for Rhode Island’s Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green and education leaders from across the nation who joined us today to discuss their work protecting and preserving opportunity for our students.”

 

“After a year that included mass firings, cancelling critical grant funds for our local schools, and cutting access to student loans, the Trump Administration is trying to make good on their promise to shutter the Department of Education,” said Senator Van Hollen. “While there are many ways to improve our education system, dismantling the department piece by piece only threatens our longstanding goal of ensuring that every child has access to a quality education. We should be investing more in this objective, not less – for the success of today’s students and the future of our country.”

 

“The Trump administration’s attempts to dismantle the Education Department are an attack on public education and public schools,” said Senator Warren. “I’m fighting to ensure every kid, no matter their zip code or how much money their family makes, has a shot at a quality education.”

 

“When I was young, my father took me to the doors of the schoolhouse and told me ‘If you walk through those doors and work hard, you can do just about anything because we are fortunate to live in America,’” said Senator Merkley. “I’m grateful that a public school education opened the doors of opportunity for me, but today that dream is harder and harder to achieve as the Trump Administration undermines the tools and resources students need to succeed. We must fight to protect programs like TRIO that expand opportunity for all and strengthen the four foundations working families need to thrive – including health care, housing, good-paying jobs, and education.”

 

“A good education for every American is one of the very best investments we can make in our future as a nation,” said Senator Klobuchar.“That is why I so strongly oppose President Trump’s attempts to dismantle the Department of Education and retreat from our commitment to education and our nation’s future. Instead of working with states and school districts to support students, this administration is adding more layers of bureaucracy that will make it even harder for students and schools to succeed.”

 

“The Trump Administration is sabotaging our nation’s future by dismantling the Department of Education,” said Senator Durbin. “So many students rely on the programs and protections provided by the Department, and without that support, the next generation will have less access to the resources they need to thrive.”

 

“No government agency is perfect, and the Department of Education is no exception. Improvements and efficiencies can always be made. But what we are seeing now is not reform—it is abandonment. The administration is walking away from the federal role in education and effectively selling it off for parts,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten. “Families deserve safe and welcoming public schools that are relevant, engaging, and inclusive. These schools, along with thriving universities, are the bedrock of our children’s future and the nation’s economic, scientific, and medical success. We must strengthen—not abandon—public education. Our economy, our democracy and our children depend on it. Every American deserves nothing less.”

 

“The Trump Administration’s plan to dismantle the Congressionally created U.S. Department of Education is unlawful and an insult to the tens of millions of students who rely on it to protect access to a quality education,” said AFGE 252 President Rachel Gittleman. Splintering the Department’s core responsibilities across agencies that lack the expertise to carry them out creates more red tape for states and communities, not less. After attempting to fire the public servants who do this critical work, the Administration is now pushing those responsibilities onto agencies unequipped to serve students and families—creating confusion, eroding public trust, and leaving students and families to pay the price.”

 

“The focus of this Administration has been to deliver on the Great American Heist. The administration’s talk of efficiency and bureaucratic bloat is a cover for stripping students of civil rights, destabilizing millions of student borrowers, and pushing privatization through massive tax credits that subsidize wealthy families’ private and religious schooling,” said Denise Forte, President and CEO of EdTrust. “The federal government should be working with States to improve and strengthen public education for all students, instead of cruel attempts to steal students’ futures.”  

 

“At a time when the U.S. Department of Education faces unprecedented threats—weakening oversight, equity protections, and student supports—every policy decision matters,” said Dr. Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed.“The Trump Administration’s attempt to dismantle the Department is illegal, ineffective, and reckless. Rather than one agency coordinating federal education funding, accountability, and oversight, responsibilities are scattered across five departments—Labor, HHS, Interior, State—and a hollowed-out Department of Education. This is not streamlining government; it is fragmenting our national commitment to learners of all ages. I applaud Senator Hirono’s leadership in sounding the alarm and urge Congress to halt these unlawful actions and restore the Department of Education.”

 

“Special education is facing a five-alarm fire,” said Chad Rummel, Council for Exceptional Children Executive Director. “Current actions to close the U.S. Department of Education, fire nearly everyone in the Office of Special Education Programs and deplete the Office for Civil Rights are fracturing the federal education system designed to support all children, and pose a cruel and unnerving threat to the education of children with disabilities.”

 

“As a state education chief, a daughter of immigrants, a lifelong educator, and a mother of two school-aged multilingual children, including one who is on the autism spectrum, I know that a quality education can make all the difference in a child’s life,”said Angelica Infante-Green, Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. “During this critical time for our students, the federal government should be finding ways to better support local school communities rather than providing less and creating chaos and concern by proposing to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Federal support is not optional; it is essential for continued academic recovery and for advancing the success of children in Rhode Island and across the nation.”

 

Video of the full forum can be found here and photos can be found here.  

 

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Categories Disruption, Extremism, Special Education, Trump, U.S. Department of Education

How Jeffrey Epstein Became Wealthy: The New York Times Investigates

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
8

This is a link to a gift article.

Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.

Categories Character, Cheating, Corruption, Ethics, Evil, Fraud, Hoax, Lies, Scandals

Glenn Kessler: Trump’s Top Ten Lies of 2025

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2025 //
14

Glenn Kessler spent 15 years as the Washington Post fact-checker. He stepped aside recently and now writes at his Substack blog. For years, he has had the daunting task of counting Trump’s lies. Trump has the unparalleled ability to lie with great sincerity even when he knows he is lying.

He writes:

The hardest part about building a list of Donald Trump’s ten biggest lies in a year is the abundance of material.
When I ran The Fact Checker at The Washington Post, our team counted more than 30,000 false or misleading claims in his first term. That’s more than 20 erroneous claims a day. No one is keeping such a comprehensive list in his second term — it’s a thankless duty — but I’m sure he’s keeping the same pace.

Trump makes many false statements, big and small, and I tried to keep this accounting to substantive issues, both domestic and foreign. Even so, I found myself removing claims that others might consider worthy of inclusion.
For instance, he regularly claimed an executive order he issued on prescription drugs would “slash drug prices by 200 percent, 300 percent, 400 percent, 500 percent, 600 percent, 700 percent, 800 percent.” That’s a mathematical impossibility. A 100-percent cut would mean prices were zero. Trump is surrounded by so many lackeys that no one appears to have the heart to tell him.
Another arithmetic-challenged claim is Trump’s frequent boast that under his leadership the United States has secured nearly $20 trillion in new investments. That’s double the official White House count, which itself is a misleading brew of aspirations and vague promises, not actual investments. One clue this is bogus: Trump’s number is two-thirds of the annual gross domestic product of the United States.
Then there’s Trump’s claim that “Portland is burning to the ground,” apparently because he watched a Fox News report that included B-roll from 2020. This year, a few protesters outside an ICE facility have set some small fires, quickly extinguished. Again, why doesn’t his staff set him straight?
Another runner-up was Trump’s outrageous accusation that Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, had manipulated jobs numbers. He fired her after job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he fumed on social media, even though the estimates are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below the director. Trump never offered evidence for his claim.
Readers may have other nominations. Here’s my list for Trump’s biggest lies in 2025, in no particular order. Taken together, these falsehoods demonstrate how Trump governs — impulsively, defiantly, and often detached from reality.
“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.”
Is it a lie if someone appears to firmly believe something? Trump may love tariffs but he’s been lying to himself as well as the American people about the impact. Every economist agrees that tariffs are a tax on consumers — not countries. Yet in his inaugural speech, Trump said the opposite. It is economic nonsense. Trump, of course, made this claim throughout the 2024 campaign (and in his first term), but it merits inclusion on the 2025 list because this lie had such real-world implications. Trump likely circumvented the Constitution by imposing such sweeping tariffs without congressional authorization, though the final verdict will come from the Supreme Court.
Throughout the year, Trump made many false claims about tariffs — “We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars. … We were losing $2 billion a day. … Now we’re making $3 billion a day” — and offering empty promises to use the “trillions” from tariffs to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. The money raised from tariffs is not enough to reduce income taxes — and it is in fact another tax — and it won’t pay down the debt. That didn’t stop Trump from falsely claiming in November that tariffs would reduce the federal budget deficit by 25 percent.
By the end of the year, Trump offered $12 billion in aid to farmers hurt by his trade war with China — an unstated acknowledgment that tariffs do have costs for Americans.

“We identified and stopped $50 million being sent to Gaza to buy condoms for Hamas.”
On the face of it, this sounds idiotic, but Trump kept repeating it (and sometimes inflated the figure to $100 million) to justify terminating the U.S. Agency for International Development — an effort led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. But USAID, which distributed condoms to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted disease, spent less than $50,000 on condoms in the entire Middle East in a year — and nothing in Gaza.
In a striking example of the White House’s sloppy staff work, someone appears to have confused Gaza, the Palestinian enclave on the Mediterranean, with the Gaza province of Mozambique in Africa — and then USAID funding with Health and Human Services Department money given to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation for HIV/AIDS prevention. It would be funny if it were not so sad.
Nevertheless, despite such fiction, USAID was dismantled, at great cost to the United States’ global reputation and with little impact on the $7-trillion federal budget. Though Trump in February claimed that DOGE had already saved as much as $500 billion, DOGE itself only tallied $214 billion by December. Of course, that’s also an exaggerated figure. When Politico scrubbed the data in August, it found the savings amounted to less than five percent of the claimed value. That’s because DOGE would count the ceiling value of contracts, which is far more than what the government has agreed to pay.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
Trump said this in February about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who has, against the odds, managed to fend off a Russian assault on his country for nearly four years.
Trump, who for some inexplicable reason always tilts toward Russia, echoed the Russian position that it was pushed into the conflict. It’s akin to saying Japan was forced into attacking Pearl Harbor because the United States imposed a trade embargo in 1940, depriving Japan of oil. The trade embargo came after Japan’s provocative actions in the Pacific, such as the 1931 occupation of Manchuria following a Japanese-manufactured incident.
This comment is emblematic of a series of Trump’s lies about Ukraine — that Zelensky admitted U.S. aid is missing, that Zelensky has never said he has been grateful for American assistance, that the United States provided more aid than Europe, and so forth. Despite sometimes suggesting he was exasperated by Russia, Trump throughout the year has consistently favored Moscow over Kyiv in the conflict that, in the 2024 campaign, he claimed he would solve in 24 hours.

“We’ve ended weaponized government where, as an example, a sitting president is allowed to viciously prosecute his political opponent like me.”
Trump made this proclamation in his annual speech to a joint session of Congress, a clear example of a lie of commission. He and his allies already had fired career Justice Department and FBI employees who worked on the Jan. 6 cases or the Trump prosecutions, launched investigations into political groups and donors, and targeted law firms who worked on cases against him.
Soon, Trump ordered the indictments of former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, after firing the U.S. Attorney who decided the cases were weak. The cases rested on such shaky ground that they were soon dismissed. But they could be revived and Trump’s point was made — cross him and you will be in the crosshairs.
(For the record, there is no evidence that Joe Biden directed the Justice Department or local prosecutors to pursue the four criminal cases against Trump.)

“Just about everything is down. You know, this whole thing is, they use the word affordability. It’s a Democrat hoax.”
By year’s end, Trump’s approval rating had fallen sharply, largely because Americans perceived he was not focused on “affordability” — the rising cost of goods and services.
As usual, Trump thinks he’s doing great. In December he gave himself a score of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” for his handling of the economy. When asked by Laura Ingraham why Americans were anxious, he dismissed the concern: “I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.” Even though grocery prices were up, Trump insisted they were down.
Instead, he lied that any problems faced by Americans were the legacy of Biden’s presidency, claiming that “we inherited from the last administration an economic catastrophe and an inflation nightmare.” In fact, Trump inherited an economy with relatively low unemployment, falling inflation and strong growth. The month before the November election, the Economist newspaper published a cover story declaring that the U.S. economy was “the envy of the world.” Taking office, Trump upended the economy — and sent prices higher — by imposing sweeping tariffs.

“Don’t take Tylenol. Fight like hell not to take it.”
Trump’s news conference in September claiming a link between Tylenol and autism was an appalling display of ignorance and hubris.
He falsely suggested autism rates were soaring — from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 36 — when in fact the diagnosis of autism has increased because of better detection and expanded definitions. He seized on a disputed report to blame Tylenol, despite decades of research failing to find a causal link. He claimed nonsense that Amish don’t have autism because they refuse vaccinations. Surveys show many Amish vaccinate their children and that there is autism in the community. He cited a “rumor” that Cuba has no autism because the island can’t afford Tylenol. That curious claim was news to Cuba doctors. And then he told American women that they shouldn’t take Tylenol even if they suffer a fever — though fevers can be very harmful to fetuses. (Indeed, it may be fever, not Tylenol, that is linked to autism.)

“I’ve ended eight wars.”
No one can accuse Trump of modesty. In his desperate bid to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — Barack Obama won one, after all — Trump over the course of the year has added to his list of “wars” that he claimed he’s ended. But few of these were wars, Trump’s role was often tangential, and the resolution of the conflicts are likely temporary. Many of the pauses require careful follow-up to ensure implementation, and already some are falling back into bloodshed.
Yet that has not stopped Trump from claiming credit and even asserting “we’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war.” That’s obviously false. Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for negotiating peace in the 1904-5 war between Russia and Japan, while Jimmy Carter negotiated the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
What’s on Trump’s list? Cambodia and Thailand (A border dispute keeps flaring up, and indeed restarted in December); Armenia and Azerbaijan (They signed a U.S.-brokered peace deal in August, with Trump hosting an Oval Office ceremony, but it must be ratified and Armenia needs to change its constitution); Israel and Iran (a ceasefire was declared after a 12-day conflict but the decades-long conflict continues); India and Pakistan (The long-running dispute over Kashmir continues, though a ceasefire was reached in May; Trump’s claim of credit has been rejected by India); Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Fighting continues though a peace agreement was signed with U.S. involvement); Egypt and Ethiopia (This is a mystery entry on Trump’s list as the nonviolent dispute is over hydroelectric dam opened by Ethiopia); Serbia and Kosovo (Another mystery entry as tensions have never eased since Kosovo broke off in 2008); Hamas and Israel (Trump pushed Israel to finally agree to a ceasefire in the two-year war, a real accomplishment, though a final resolution to the conflict appears elusive).
As you can see, it’s inflated and rather crass, much like accepting a dubious “world peace award” from FIFA and renaming the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself after the administration fired the staff and destroyed it.

“Every boat that you see get blown up, we save 25,000 – on average – 25,000 lives.”
Trump has been under fire for the administration’s military strikes on alleged Venezuelan drug boats in international waters, and in defense he offered a nonsense figure. Dutifully, other administration officials have echoed the lie.
First of all, the administration had not provided evidence that the boats carried drugs. Trump asserts they were transporting fentanyl but that makes no sense since Venezuela mainly supplies cocaine to Europe. In three months, about 20 vessels have been hit by airstrikes, killing more than 80 people, so using Trump’s math that would mean 500,000 Americans lives supposedly were saved. Yet provisional federal data shows that the total number of U.S. overdose deaths was about 75,000 in the 12 months ending in April (the most recent period available).
In other words, Trump invented these numbers. (The “on average” is an effort at verisimilitude.) It’s not supposed to make sense — just sound good.

“These [Epstein] files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden.”
One of the few issues Trump could neither spin nor shrug off centered on demands that his administration release the investigative files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a onetime friend from the 1990s with whom he later fell out. Trump had promised to release the files during the 2024 campaign, but then the Justice Department refused to do so. Pressure built in Congress for passage of a law to force the files’ release, and in July Trump lashed out, claiming the files were all made up by Democrats, name-checking former FBI director James Comey, Obama and Biden.
This claim is simply nuts. The files represent investigative evidence, so nothing was invented. Neither Obama nor Biden were in office when the FBI investigated Epstein — that happened under George W. Bush in 2007-2008 and Trump in 2018 — while Comey wasn’t even in government at the time. Epstein, who molested hundreds of girls, at first received a sweetheart deal that minimized his crimes, and then the case was reopened under Trump after a Miami Herald investigation. He was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial, an apparent suicide.
Trump’s instinct is to deflect problems onto his opponents, but he wasn’t successful in this instance. Congress passed the law, requiring the files be released by Dec. 19. The Justice Department has indicated it won’t meet the deadline.

“It won’t interfere with the current building. It will be near it but not touching it. And pays total respect to the existing building.”
This was Trump in July, speaking about his plans to add a ballroom to the White House complex.
Then, suddenly, in October, wrecking crews ripped down the entire East Wing of the White House. Trump was unrepentant about the fierce public outcry, dismissing the East Wing as “common brick, little tiny windows, it looked like hell.” (The White House skipped the requirement to submit its demolition plans, claiming the National Capital Planning Commission has no jurisdiction over demolition.)
In July, Trump had said the ballroom would hold 600 to 700 people and cost $200 million; now the plans call for about 1,000 people, the budget ballooned to more than $300 million, and the architect was replaced because he objected to Trump’s grandiose ambitions. The resulting 90,000-square-foot building will overshadow the existing 55,000-square-foot White House structure.
Is there any lie more emblematic of how Trump has approached his second term? He forges ahead, destroying any obstacles in his path, including the truth, while paying little heed to what Americans might think.

Categories Evil, Extremism, Lies, Trump
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