Why Chief Justice John Roberts Should Be Removed

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2026 //
11

Christopher Armitage, author of “The Existentialist Republic” blog on Substack is filing a complaint against Chief Justice John Roberts for failing to disclose his family income and failing to acknowledge his very significant conflicts of interest. He wants us to do the same. We knew that Justices Thomas and Alito failed to disclose gifts and income. Add Justice Roberts to the list.

Armitage wrote:

Over sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, Chief Justice John Roberts mischaracterized more than twenty million dollars in household income from law firms appearing before the Supreme Court. He concealed his wife’s equity stake in her employer for three consecutive years. He failed to recuse from more than five hundred cases argued at the Supreme Court by law firms that had paid his household millions in commissions. He architected the Court’s first ethics code and designed it to be unenforceable. This is a course of conduct stretching across two decades, connected by a single through-line: the belief that the rules that apply to every other federal judge do not apply to him.

The governing standard is 28 U.S.C. § 455, which applies to every federal judge including Supreme Court justices. Three of its subsections matter here, and a judge only needs one of them to trigger the recusal obligation. Roberts triggers all three.

Subsection (a) says a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” This is the appearance standard, and it does not require actual bias. It requires only that a reasonable person knowing the facts would question the judge’s impartiality.

That’s the lowest bar, and it’s the easiest to satisfy. The next two are more specific and even more difficult to evade.

Subsection (b)(4) says a judge shall disqualify himself where “he or his spouse, or a minor child residing in his household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome.” The language is broad on purpose. Congress wanted the net to catch exactly the kind of arrangement at issue here.

Subsection (b)(5)(iii) adds that a judge shall disqualify where a spouse “is known by the judge to have an interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” That subsection covers situations where the financial interest runs through the spouse rather than through the judge directly.

Bennett Gershman, a legal ethics professor at Pace Law School, reviewed the Roberts household arrangement in 2022 at the request of a whistleblower. His analysis applies all three. A law firm that paid the judge’s household hundreds of thousands of dollars in commission has an ongoing commercial relationship with the spouse, and that spouse has an interest, whether measured as past compensation, ongoing business relationship, or future commissions, that could be substantially affected by the judge’s rulings in cases the firm argues. Even under the narrowest reading of “financial interest,” a reasonable person knowing that a law firm had paid Jane Roberts hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions would question John Roberts’s impartiality in a case the firm argued before him.

Roberts’s defenders have a single counter, and they cite it often. The Judicial Conference’s 2009 Advisory Opinion No. 107 says recusal is not automatically required merely because a spouse worked as a recruiter for a firm with business before the court. But the same opinion says recusal may be required where the relationship is “substantial and ongoing.” $10.3 million in documented commissions over seven years, with clients including multiple firms that appear before the Court multiple times per term, meets any reasonable definition of substantial and ongoing.

The recusal obligation is not discretionary under § 455. The statute uses the word “shall.” Roberts’s defense would have to argue either that his wife’s commission income doesn’t constitute a financial interest in firms paying the commissions, which is a strained reading, or that the interest isn’t substantially affected by his rulings, which is also strained because firms that win at the Court get more business and firms that lose get less.

The whistleblower is Kendal Price, a former managing director at Major, Lindsey and Africa, the legal recruiting firm where Jane Sullivan Roberts worked from 2007 to 2014. Price filed a federal complaint in December 2022 with the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and the Department of Justice. He attached internal company spreadsheets, his own sworn affidavit, Jane Roberts’s 2015 arbitration testimony, and Gershman’s supporting legal memorandum.

An important note. This information was released because of a whistleblower, and some would say that means it is possible there is considerably greater corruption that just hasn’t been brought to the public. Some might say that it’s likely the tip of the corrupt iceberg. Few people would be willing to gather evidence on their employers activities, bring those to Congress, and risk attracting the enmity of the leader of the highest court in the land. Fewer will follow in that person’s footsteps if they see zero consequences follow from the whistleblowers disclosure.

The spreadsheets showed Jane Roberts earned $10,323,842.70 in commissions over those seven years on $13,309,433 in attributed firm revenue. An MLA partner described her in sworn testimony as the highest earning recruiter in the entire company by a wide margin.

The documented placements include former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to WilmerHale, Washington attorney Robert Bennett to Hogan Lovells, former United States Attorney Neil MacBride to Davis Polk, and New York Federal Reserve general counsel Michael Held to WilmerHale. Jane Roberts testified under oath that she placed senior government lawyers at starting partner salaries up to three million dollars. Successful people, she said, have successful friends. Mark Jungers, a former MLA managing partner, told Politico the firm hired her hoping to benefit from her being the Chief Justice’s wife.

The scope of Roberts’s corruption is not measured in individual cases. It is measured across the entire docket of the Supreme Court over two decades. WilmerHale alone, one of Jane Roberts’s documented client firms, had 18 cases at the Supreme Court in the single term of 2016, and Seth Waxman of WilmerHale has argued more than 85 Supreme Court cases across his career. Hogan Lovells, another documented client firm, argued 8 Supreme Court cases in 2024 alone and has represented nearly 10 percent of the Court’s entire docket in recent terms. Across Roberts’s two decades on the Court, the law firms paying his household in commissions have argued more than five hundred cases before him. He recused from none of them on spousal income grounds.
In 2019 she moved to Macrae and opened the firm’s Washington office, and her earnings from 2015 forward have never surfaced in public reporting.

Each year the Chief Justice signs a federal financial disclosure form required of every Article III judge under the Ethics in Government Act, and each year for more than a decade, the form described his wife’s compensation as salary.

The characterization was false. Jane Roberts earns commission, paid per placement, originating with the law firms that hire her candidates, and commission income and salary income are different categories of earnings governed by different tax treatment and different disclosure rules.

Gershman’s memorandum addresses this directly. Characterizing Mrs. Roberts’s commissions as salary, he wrote, is not merely factually incorrect. It is incorrect as a matter of law. Richard Painter, chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush and the man who prepared Roberts for his confirmation hearings, put it more bluntly. The Chief Justice “fudged the details,” Painter wrote in 2023, “misleadingly describing his wife’s earnings as salary.” Even that is generous. Painter is a Republican ethics lawyer protecting a Republican institution.

“Fudged” is what you say when you don’t want to say “lied.” Roberts has been knowingly lying on federal forms for more than a decade to profit from his position on the Supreme Court.

In 2023, after Business Insider published the whistleblower documents, Roberts quietly corrected the entry. His 2022 disclosure report, which the Administrative Office released that June, described Jane Roberts’s compensation as base salary and commission. The same report, for the first time, disclosed an equity stake in Macrae valued between $100,001 and $250,000. She had acquired it in 2019, and Roberts had omitted it from three prior annual filings and attributed the omission to inadvertence.

Title 5, Section 13106 of the United States Code requires the Judicial Conference to refer any judge it has reasonable cause to believe willfully filed false disclosures to the Attorney General. Civil penalties reach fifty thousand dollars per violation. Title 18, Section 1001 makes it a federal crime to knowingly and willfully falsify a material fact on a document submitted to the federal government, punishable by up to five years in prison. The statutes carve out no exception for the Chief Justice.

Congress impeached and removed Federal District Judge Thomas Porteous in 2010 on a record that included false disclosure forms. Congress did the work the statute imagines, and no one has ever brought a referral or prosecution against a sitting Supreme Court justice for the same conduct.

After ProPublica broke the Clarence Thomas and Harlan Crow story in April 2023, Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin wrote to Roberts inviting him to testify. Roberts declined in a one-page letter on April 25, citing separation of powers concerns. All nine justices signed an attached statement affirming that individual justices, not the Court, decide recusal questions. The self-policing rule remained in place.

In November 2023 the Court issued its first formal Code of Conduct. The document ran fourteen pages, and its preamble conceded that the absence of a written code had produced the misunderstanding that justices considered themselves unrestricted by ethics rules. The code contained no enforcement mechanism. It designated no body to receive complaints, empowered no body to investigate, and gave no body authority to impose sanctions. The Congressional Research Service confirmed the absence of enforcement in a formal report. The Brennan Center for Justice called the code designed to fail. Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics scholar at Washington University, said nothing in the statement suggested the Court even understood what the problem was.

The Dobbs investigation followed the same pattern. After the draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked in May 2022, the Court’s marshal interviewed ninety-seven employees. Every employee signed an affidavit under penalty of perjury. The justices did not. The marshal’s January 2023 report said she had spoken with each justice, several on multiple occasions, but under a different standard than the one that applied to the staff.

The report concluded that she could not identify the source by a preponderance of the evidence, and the investigation closed.

Roberts is a primary architect of the ethics crisis that has broken the Court. He is a willing participant in the destruction of one of the three pillars of American checks and balances.

John Roberts is not a Trump lackey or a spineless rube. He is a builder of the world we are now living in. He is selling our future. He was appointed to the Supreme Court because of his belief that Republicans should be above the law and that the Presidency should be all-powerful so long as it’s run by a Republican. He might be an ideologue and a true believer, but not in regards to Christianity or Originalism. He is a true believer in the almighty dollar, and he sold his judicial soul to the highest bidder. May consequences someday visit him.

Five mechanisms exist to hold a federal judge accountable for the conduct documented here. Each of them is available. Each of them is being refused.

The law exists. 5 U.S.C. § 13106 makes willful false disclosure a civil violation with penalties up to $50,000. 18 U.S.C. § 1001 makes knowing false statements to the federal government a felony punishable by five years. 28 U.S.C. § 455 mandates recusal. These are laws Congress wrote. They apply to the Chief Justice.

Impeachment exists. Article II, Section 4 provides for removal of judges for high crimes and misdemeanors. Porteous in 2010. Claiborne in 1986. Hastings in 1989. Congress has the power and has used it on federal judges.

The Judicial Conference has a statutory referral obligation under § 13106. It exists. It just hasn’t been used against a justice.

The DC Bar has disciplinary jurisdiction over its members. It exists. It just carves out judicial capacity by policy.

The Supreme Court Bar has a complaint mechanism. It exists. It just answers to the Court.
The mechanisms exist. The political will of the people who control them does not. The Judicial Conference won’t refer. The DC Bar declines on intake. The Senate won’t impeach. DOJ won’t prosecute. Each institution points at another institution and says not my jurisdiction, not my moment, not my responsibility.

In the United Kingdom, a party who believes a judge should step aside can file a challenge, and a different judge decides. In Canada, the Judicial Council accepts complaints from any member of the public and can recommend a judge’s removal.

In Germany, the other members of a Federal Constitutional Court panel vote on whether a colleague must recuse, and the judge in question does not vote on their own case. In Australia, a statutory code requires federal judges to disclose spousal income in full rather than by category label. At the European Court of Human Rights, the plenary court has authority to remove a judge who fails to recuse where the law requires it.


What every one of these systems shares, and what the American system lacks, is an external body with the authority to receive a complaint, investigate it, and impose consequences. The self-policing rule is the American anomaly.

This is not recent drift. In December 2000, Roberts flew to Tallahassee at his own expense and met privately with Governor Jeb Bush to advise on the governor’s role in assigning Florida’s electors to George W. Bush. Nobody disclosed the meeting during his 2005 confirmation hearings. A December 2000 email from Bush to Roberts, which surfaced a decade later through the governor’s gubernatorial correspondence, thanked him for his input in this unique and historic situation. The advice concerned scenarios in which the Republican-controlled legislature could assign electors directly, bypassing the popular vote and the ongoing recount.

The Reagan-era paper trail at the National Archives contains memos in which Roberts argued against heightened constitutional scrutiny for sex discrimination, recommended that Reagan distance himself from the Centers for Disease Control’s conclusion that AIDS could not be transmitted by casual contact, described comparable-worth pay equity as staggeringly pernicious, and wrote that an effects test in the Voting Rights Act would amount to a quota system for electoral politics. Twenty-seven years later he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder gutting the same statute.

For twenty years the ethics conversation around the Supreme Court has run on a curve composed entirely of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. Roberts has played the institutional grown-up, the last one who cared about the Court as an institution, the one trying to hold the line. The line he held was the one that protected his own household. Thomas took gifts from Harlan Crow. Alito took flights from Paul Singer. Roberts took law firm money through his wife’s commission checks and mislabeled it on a federal form.

The DC Bar accepts disciplinary complaints from any member of the public against any of its admitted attorneys. John G. Roberts Jr. is admitted to the DC Bar, and I am filing a complaint against him today, after this article goes live. The complaint alleges that Roberts violated DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c) across sixteen annual federal financial disclosure filings from 2007 through 2022, by mischaracterizing at least $10,323,842.70 in documented commission income from law firms appearing before the Court as salary, with unreported commission income across an additional eight annual filings from 2015 through 2022 estimated at a floor of $11.8 million based on the documented seven-year mean, and with the actual figure likely substantially higher given Macrae’s reported revenue growth during that period. The complaint further alleges that Roberts omitted a material equity interest in his wife’s employer from three consecutive annual filings between 2019 and 2021. The complaint cites 5 U.S.C. § 13106 and 18 U.S.C. § 1001 as the underlying statutory predicates.

The men and women running this system built their careers on the assumption that nobody was paying attention. That the forms would go unread. That the recusals would go uncounted. That the statutes would sit on the shelf. That the institutions would cover for each other and no one outside would notice the arrangement.
We noticed.

We see the ten million dollars documented and the eleven million more estimated. The millions more likely unseen. We see the sixteen years of false characterizations. We see the hidden equity stake. We see the stock trades and the missed recusals and the Code of Conduct written to fail and the justices who signed affidavits for no one. We see the Judicial Conference that won’t refer and the Senate that won’t impeach and the Attorney General who won’t prosecute. We see every institution pointing at every other institution and shrugging.

Here is what you can do.


One. Share this article. Every person who reads it is one more person who knows, and the thing they built their careers on is the assumption that nobody knows. Post it. Send it. Forward it. Break the quiet.


Two. Send a letter to the DC Bar Office of Disciplinary Counsel at 515 Fifth Street NW, Building A, Room 117, Washington DC 20001. Write it in your own words. The facts to include are that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. mischaracterized his wife’s commission income as salary on sixteen years of federal financial disclosure forms, omitted a material equity interest for three consecutive years, and did not recuse from more than five hundred cases argued by law firms paying his household in commissions. The relevant statutes are 28 U.S.C. § 455, 5 U.S.C. § 13106, and 18 U.S.C. § 1001, and the rule to cite is DC Rule of Professional Conduct 8.4(c). It takes about ten minutes.


All of this movement creates pressure. Pressure creates heat. Enough heat and things will change. Be the heat, be the pressure, and the system will bend. That’s how we take our damn country back.


We need 10 subscribers per article. Yesterday, despite hundreds of thousands of daily readers, we fell short of that number for the first time in nearly a month. If you want this all to continue, for everyone, then we need you!


Don’t let this be the reason you miss rent or skip a meal. For everyone else, you can be one of the ten today and make sure the articles, books, legislation, and training keep coming for everyone.

Categories Democracy, Ethics, Failure, Fraud, Justice

What Might Dr. Seuss Say About School Choice?

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2026 //
2

Almost everyone knows the zany rhyming of Dr. Seuss. Bruce Baker applied Dr. Seuss’s special blend of wit and rhyme to explore the topic of school choice. It’s very clever! And a good explanation of why the public good promotes well-being for everyone, not just the private goods that benefit consumers. Bruce Baker is chairman of the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Miami and one of the nation’s leading authorities on school finance.

He wrote the following parody of a Dr. Seuss poem:

In the town of Ka-Boodle by Lake Sneetchy Creek,
The folks all paid taxes each month and each week.
For schools and for sidewalks and fire trucks so red,
And libraries full of good books to be read.

But then came the Chortlers from Voucher Von Vee,
Who shouted, “That money belongs to each wee
Little child with a backpack! It follows them round!
Just stuff it in pockets and spread it around!”

“The money’s the CHILD’S!” cried the Bellowing Band.
“It does not belong to the schools or the land!
Just hand every parent a sack full of cash,
And schools can all scramble and boomity-crash!”

Now the Grickle-eyed Mayor scratched hard at his chin.
“That’s not how public goods work, my dear kin.

When taxpayers gather their dollars in pools,
They build mighty systems — like hospitals, schools.
The money’s not owned by one youngster named Ned
Who doodles green Yoppets and sleeps in his bed.

It pays for the buses! The pipes! The big roofs!
The science lab beakers! The gymnasium hoops!
The playgrounds! The band room! The boilers downstairs!
The nurses and counselors helping with cares!

And some of these things were bought long years ago
With debts that will linger through sunshine and snow.
So taxpayers all — even old Uncle Zed,
Whose children are forty and mostly bald-headed —
Still pay for the schools because everyone gains
From communities filled with smart citizens’ brains!”

“But what about choice?” cried the Chortlers once more.
“Shouldn’t each family shop school like a store?”

“Ah yes,” said the Mayor, “but schools are not socks.
They’re not jars of pickles or purple mail-box locks.
A public good works when folks plan it together,
Through rainstorms and hard times and wild Wumbus weather.

If every last dollar just fled with each child,
Whole systems would wobble and grow rather wild.
You still must heat buildings and run every route
Even when one little Who-zit skips out.”

The Chortlers grew quieter. Some scratched their knees.
One murmured, “Public goods aren’t private fees…”

And down by Lake Sneetchy, beneath truffula skies,
The townsfolk grew slightly more thoughtful and wise.

For schools are not gadgets to auction or trade.
They’re promises communities carefully made.
And taxes, though grumbly, when pooled with some care,
Can build things no single small person could bear.

Categories Humor

Scientists Protest Trump’s Firing of Every Member of the National Science Board

By dianeravitch
May 15, 2026 //
1

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE

Thousands of NASEM members have signed and this morning submitted an Open Letter to Congress urging them to demand Trump restore the 22 National Science Board members he illegally fired on April 24th.

Sign up here to join our effort.

OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESS DEMANDING THE RESTORATION OF THE NSB

The following is an Open Letter to Congress concerning the Trump Administration’s recent firing of all 22 seated members of the National Science Board, the entity which, by law, oversees the National Science Foundation and performs other functions. We invite the public to join us by signing below as a supporting endorser of this letter.

Dear Honorable Members of Congress:

We write to express our deep dismay at the abrupt dismissal by the White House of all 22 members of the National Science Board.  This body was created by Congress 76 years ago at the inception of the US National Science Foundation to oversee it, recommend national strategic policy for scientific research, and provide apolitical scientific advice to Congress and the President.  This dismissal comes at a time when the National Science Foundation has been moved from its dedicated facility to a different building, is operating with no Director and a drastically-reduced staff, and a proposed budget cut of more than 50% from FY 26 levels.  In short, the dismissal of the National Science Board members ramps up an alarming attack on the ability of the US to engage in basic and applied research, and to be competitive globally, particularly given that China is now investing more in R&D than the US. This dismantling of a critical national advisory body is but one of many such actions taken by the current administration that deprives our government of independent, apolitical, oversight and expert advice, not only in the sciences but also in healthcare and technology.

We stand with the staff of the National Science Foundation, many of whom have lost job protections, and whose alerts to Congress in July 2025 about the threats to the NSF mission have gone unaddressed.  We stand with the National Science Board, and call on Congress, as an equal branch of government, to rapidly and firmly support science by calling for the reinstatement of terminated National Science Board members and appointment of new ones to fill vacant slots, and that as required by law (NSF Act) the Board members are “eminent in the fields of the basic, medical, or social sciences, engineering, agriculture, education, research management, or public affairs” and chosen “solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service.”  Congress has in the past been a responsible and wise steward of our nation’s scientific infrastructure, and we ask that it once again meets the moment to protect our nation’s scientific competitiveness, economic well-being, and national security.

Respectfully signed by,

Elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in their personal capacities, along with our supporters and allies in the science, technology, medical, healthcare and business communities.

[After endorsing below, please view the NASEM signatories and endorsers here.]

Categories Ethics, Funding, Resistance, Science, Trump

ABC: Trump Wants Treasury to Set Up $1.7 Billion Fund for Allies and Insurrectionists

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
10

Trump is apparently willing to drop his demand for $10 billion from the IRS, which wouldn’t pass the smell test in a court of law (unless the judge was Aileen Cannon), if the Treasury sets up a $1.7 Billion fund to compensate anyone who was “wrongfully” prosecuted during Biden’s term.

That means that all of the MAGA crowd that attacked and defaced the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, will get not only a pardon but a payoff for their efforts to overthrow the Constitution. Also, the friends and allies of Trump who collaborated to nullify the 2020 election will be rewarded.

ABC reports:

President Donald Trump is expected to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service in exchange for the creation of a $1.7 billion fund to compensate allies who claim they were wrongfully targeted by the Biden administration, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.  

The commission overseeing the compensation fund would have the total authority to hand out approximately $1.7 billion in taxpayer funds to settle claims brought by anyone who alleges they were harmed by the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the legal system, including the nearly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as well as potentially entities associated with President Trump himself. 

While the settlement is expected to be agreed upon in the coming days, sources caution that the final terms will not be set until they are officially announced. Judge orders Trump, DOJ to justify why president’s $10B IRS lawsuit should proceed

In addition to a public apology from the IRS, the compensation fund is believed to be the main condition for Trump to drop a series of legal actions he filed against the federal government, including the $10 billion lawsuit related to the 2019 leak of his tax returns as well as $230 million in legal claims related to the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the Russia collusion investigation he faced during his first term in office, sources familiar with the ongoing deliberations said. 

The settlement terms are expected to prohibit Trump from directly receiving payments related to those three legal claims; however, entities associated with Trump are not explicitly barred from filing additional claims, sources said. 

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for President Trump’s legal team told ABC News, “The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people. President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

A spokesperson for the Justice Department declined to comment when contacted by ABC News. Representatives for the IRS and the Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

What Does “86” Mean?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
3

The U.S. Department of Justice has gotten an indictment against James Comey, former FBI Director, because Comey posted a photo of seashells that dumisplayed the number “8647.”

Trump is angry at Comey because he authorized the FBI investigation of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election to favor Trump. In actuality, he should be thanking Comey, because his decision to reopen the FBI review of her emails only 10 days before the 2016 election hurt her and helped Trump win.

FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency had spent “9, 10, 11 months” determining that the seashell message threatened the president’s life. (One reaction in Twitter was: “Let Savannah Guthrie find her own mother,” another showed Patel with a huge conch shell to his ear and was labeled “Law & Order: Special Seashell Victims Unit.)

I looked up 86 in various dictionaries and none of them said that it referred to murder.

In Wikipedia, the term 86 means:

Eighty-six or 86 is American English slang, originating in the hospitality industry, especially a food or drinks establishment, meaning that an item is no longer available, or that a person or people is not welcome on the premises. Its etymology is unknown, but it seems to have been coined in the 1920s or 1930s.

I asked ChatGPT about the meaning of 86, and it responded:

“86” is American slang with a few related meanings, all built around the idea of getting rid of something:

1) In restaurants and bars (most common origin)

  • “We’re 86 on the salmon” → the salmon is sold out / unavailable
  • “86 that order” → cancel it

2) About people

  • “He got 86’d from the bar” → he was kicked out / banned

3) More generally

  • “Let’s 86 that idea” → discard or reject it

Where it comes from (uncertain)
There’s no single confirmed origin, but popular theories include:

  • Old diner slang codes in the early 20th century
  • Prohibition-era bars using numbers to signal “no more” or “remove someone”
  • A reference to being “86 miles out” (i.e., gone)

The exact source is debated, but the meaning—remove, reject, or run out of—is consistent across uses.

A Substack blog blog titled “Home of the Brave” says that Trump doesn’t know what “86” means. It is not associated with murder or death.”

This week the Department of Justice indicted James Comey for a social media post of seashells spelling out “8647.” That put the term “86”—which in restaurant industry parlance means striking or removing something from the menu—in the spotlight.

From the Oval Office, here’s what Trump had to say: “If anybody knows anything about crime, they know ‘86.’ You know what 86 [is]? It’s a mob term for ‘kill them.’ You ever see the movies?”

We decided to take the president up on his suggestion, and checked “the movies” for 86 references:

  • In The Candidate (1972), Robert Redford is told to “86 the sideburns.”
  • In The Grace Card (2010), Michael Joiner plays a cop who is so annoyed by his partner’s singing that he asks “can we 86 it, please?”
  • In Make It Happen (2008), dancer Tessa Thompson says she’ll “just 86 the combo” in her routine.
  • In Chef (2014), Jon Favreau tells his fellow cooks that an item on the menu is going to be “86”-ed.
  • In a 2017 episode of the TV show Shameless, Emmy Rossum tells Richard Flood to “86” an ugly pocket door.

You get the idea. Trump is almost certainly pretending he thinks the seashells post was a threat on his life because he wants Comey prosecuted. Citing “the movies” as his support is laughable on its face.

We have a handful of movies to recommend if Trump wants to learn the true meaning of “86”. He could have screened them in the White House Family Theater if he hadn’t already demolished it.

Home of the Brave exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies, and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.

Categories Trump

Worshipping at the Feet of The Great Donald

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
7

Rick Wilson wrote this brilliant post on his blog.

He nailed a question that has worried me. I had thought it was odd that the same Christian nationalists who worship Trump insist on posting the Ten Commamdments in every classroom. Have they ever read those Ten Commandments, any version of them? The first commandment is to recognize God as the only Lord and to put no other god before the real one. (“I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other god before me.”) No worshipping false gods, idols, or golden calves.

Nonetheless, these same supposedly devout “Christians” worship Trump and obey his every command. They ignore his many breaches of the Ten Commandments as well as the Constitution because he is their god.

Trump has a long and well-documented history as a con man with multiple bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits. Creating his MAGA cult to worship him, to believe his empty promises, is the greatest con of all. And the most profitable! Since he was inaugurated, he and his sons have grown richer by billions of dollars. Not millions. Billions.

Rick Wilson, former Republican insider, offers “A Reading from the Book of Donald.”

Donald 3:28-34

  1. And it came to pass in the year of the Tariff, whilst war raged across the lands of Elam, that the people of all the tribes of MAGA gathered upon the fairway on the Plain of Doral; and the priests came down from among them, both evangelical and influencers, with oil, with incense, and with selfie sticks and cameras.
  2. And they said unto the multitude, “Bring forth thy pelf and thy gold, clicking here, patriots, that we may overlay it; for behold, we have made thee a god of fourteen cubits, that the great orange LORD may know whom thou servest.”
  3. “Thou shalt make unto thyself a graven image; yea, the taller the better, and the gilding shall be thick, and the thinness of the frame shall show the orange LORD’s svelte and manly figure to best advantage.”
  4. And they said to the tribes of MAGA, “Thou shalt bow down before it, and serve it, and thou shalt photograph thyself beside it; for the patron thy god is a jealous patron, and exceedingly photogenic.”
  5. “As for the commandment of old which said ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ behold, we have CAST DOWN the Hebrew God; and VERILY we worship the One Orange God at Temple of the Reality Star, for it pleases the Donald, and the Donald’s pleasure is the law.”
  6. And the priests laid their hands upon the statue, and pronounced it good; and the people cried, ‘This is thy God, O MAGA, who delivered the billionaires from taxes, who clothed you in the red hats sacred to his worship, who didst provide you with the sacred crypto of his name, and who gave unto you his Tweets.”
  7. And Moses, hearing of it, came down from the mount in haste, with tablets in his hand; but the Secret Service would not admit him at the gate, for his name was not on the list and he had not offered either his donations or his worship.
Categories Religion, Trump

Why Have Test Scores Stagnated?

By dianeravitch
May 14, 2026 //
21

The New York Times published an article yesterday about the fall and stagnation of scores in reading and math in the U.S. it was written by Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh. The declines are no longer the fault of the pandemic. They cut across income, racial, and geographic divides.

The link above goes to s gift article, so please open and review the graphs and finish the article.

The authors attribute the stagnation to two likely phenomena: 1) easing the testing-and-accountability pressure of the NCLB-Race to the Top era; and 2) the ubiquity of Ed-tech in the schools.

I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of NCLB-RTTT pressures. Sure, they increased 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.”

Another way of putting it: “the more important a metric is in social decision making, the more likely it is to be manipulated.”

Lest we forget: NCLB brought us cheating on an industrial scale. Rigging the system to improve scores. Narrowing the curriculum, with schools making time for test prep by dropping the arts, recess, physical education, and allotting less time for subjects that were not tested, such as civics, history, foreign languages, and science. Fewer teachers assigned whole books, but instead focused on short passages, the kind that appear on standardized tests.

The tests themselves are flawed. The scoring is flawed. The underlying assumption that every question has a right answer and only one right answer is bad teaching.

I have written long essays and chapters in books about how standardized testing is toxic to the principles of good education. Guessing “the right answer” does not promote critical thinking, which might lead a student to pick a different answer or two right answers. As I have written elsewhere, asking the right question matters more than guessing the right answer.

Testing experts like Daniel Koretz have demonstrated their limitations. Todd Farley, in “Making the Grades,” showed how shabbily the tests are scored.

As the Times‘ article points out, other countries have experienced the same score decline and stagnation, even without NCLB and RTTT.

For God’s sake and for our children’s sake, let us not return to the horrid era of test and punish. Let it go. Students may get bigger test scores under pressure, but they may be less interested in learning.

Many European nations have concluded, as I showed in several articles posted here last week, that Ed-tech in the classroom has dampened students’ attention, persistence, and interest in learning. Sweden and Norway are pulling the plugs. Norway never fell for the tech revolution. See the Sweden article here. See the Norway post here.

If the testing industry and the heroes of yesteryear’s failed reforms want another go at killing love of learning, the parents of America will have to organize and stop them with massive opt outs. Again.

***********************

The Times’ story begins like this;

Something troubling is happening in U.S. education.

Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford.

Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides….

The new data provides the first national comparison of school districts through 2025, and offers a detailed picture of how individual school districts have performed over time. It underscores that many districts have experienced a long-term slump in student achievement, not just a blip during the pandemic.

From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.

Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly. The new data shows that scores inched upward 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, researchers said….

The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students….

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, 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 prepandemic.

In one in three school districts in the United States, students are reading a full grade level lower than they were in 2015…

Some experts believe that the end of No Child Left Behind, the contentious school accountability law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, explains some of the recent test score declines.

The law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties. It coincided with a period of rising test scores, especially in math, though reading scores improved more modestly. Low-performing students saw the biggest gains.

The law, though, was deeply unpopular with many educators and parents. Critics said it put an outsize focus on testing, pushing schools to teach to the test and spend less time on other important subjects, like the arts or social studies. In 2015, Congress replaced it, and many states dialed back on requirements. 

Like many who have studied the law, Brian A. Jacob, professor of education policy at the University of Michigan, showed that it increased test scores but had problematic elements.

“It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement,” he said. “There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

Beyond the policy specifics, its passage reflected a nationwide, bipartisan push to improve education, some experts said, that the country seems to have lost in its absence.

Yet some other countries have seen similar declines in scores, suggesting additional factors may be at play.

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. Virtually all schools give children laptops or tablets in class, as early as kindergarten.

Few rigorous studies have teased out the role of devices in academic outcomes. Yet educators say there’s no question that swiping has decreased students’ focus and persistence, and time on devices has displaced time spent reading or studying. Far more teenagers — nearly one in three — now say they “never or hardly ever” read for fun.

In turn, schools expect less from students, assigning fewer whole books and simplifying the curriculum, said Carol Jago, associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“There’s no other way, except volume, in order to become a really proficient, fluent, avid reader,” she said.

Radnor Township, an affluent district outside Philadelphia, is one of the highest scoring in Pennsylvania. Teachers still expect students to read full books, including novels like “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The vast majority of students are proficient readers. Still, fewer score at an advanced level on state tests — under 40 percent last year, down from 51 percent in 2015.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Sued IRS for $10 Billion. How Much Will He Pay Himself?

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
10

Never in U.S. history has a President so brazenly enriched himself while serving in office. Trump’s family makes business deals with countries that pay enormous profits. Trump sells Trump-branded merchandise at every opportunity. Meme coins, crypto, invitations to dine with him for a hefty price. The money-making opportunities are abundant. Since the start of his second term, his net worth has increased by billions.

But the biggest grift of all is not yet settled. Trump sued the Treasury Department and the IRS for $10 billion for leaking data about his income taxes, an act done by a contractor who was punished with a five-year jail sentence.

The irony is that every president since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released their tax returns, to demonstrate that they have no financial conflicts of interest and would not profit by serving as president. So, Trump is suing the IRS for doing what he should have done voluntarily but refused to do. He ran three times without releasing his tax returns.

By suing the IRS, he is in effect suing himself. Scott Bessent, appointed by Trump and serving at his pleasure, is on the other side of the table. What will he give his boss?

The plot thickens as the Justice Department, also under Trump’s thumb and eager to please him, is trying to reach a settlement in the case of Trump V. the Treasury Department/IRS controlled by Trump.

Trump sued in southern Florida, expecting or hoping to get a judge appointed by him, but must have been stunned when the judge turned out to be Obama appointee. This creates an incentive to settle the case before it goes to the judge.

Of all Trump’s many lawsuits, this may be the most sickening because it is the most corrupt and self-dealing.

Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer reported in The New York Times:

The Justice Department is holding internal discussions about settling President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Servicein the coming days, according to three people familiar with the deliberations, a move that could involve the government directly providing taxpayer funds or another public benefit to the president.

Whether to settle the suit and on what terms remains up in the air. One of the settlement options the Justice Department and White House officials are reviewing is the possibility of the I.R.S. dropping any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or businesses, according to two of the people.

In January, Mr. Trump, along with two of his sons and the Trump family business, sued the Internal Revenue Service for at least $10 billion over the leak of their tax returns during the president’s first term. The Trumps argued that the I.R.S. should have done more to prevent a former contractor from disclosing tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica.

Given that Mr. Trump oversees the I.R.S., the agency that he is suing, the judge in the case has taken a series of novel legal steps to probe whether there is a genuine controversy between the Justice Department and Mr. Trump. For a lawsuit to be valid, the two parties must actually be on opposite sides, otherwise the judge can throw out the case. The judge has ordered Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers — along with the Justice Department, which represents the I.R.S. in federal court — to submit briefs by May 20 explaining whether they are in conflict with one another.

White House and Justice Department officials have in recent days been exploring ways to potentially settle the suit before that deadline, according to the people.

Mr. Trump has long maintained that the federal government was weaponized against him by political opponents, and he has spent much of his second term seeking retribution against, and sometimes compensation from, those he holds responsible. But depending on its terms, a settlement with the I.R.S. could be among Mr. Trump’s most brazen efforts to bend the government to his personal will — an agenda often carried out through the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump and his family have repeatedly disregarded Washington’s ethical guardrails aimed at preventing government officials from profiting from public office, including by pushing for more than $200 million in a separate administrative case with the Justice Department. But a settlement payment even a fraction of the size of Mr. Trump’s requested $10 billion could be much larger than his other attempts at private gain, potentially doubling his net worth.

The Justice Department declined to comment. The White House referred questions to Mr. Trump’s lawyers in the case, a spokesman for whom said, “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”

In a previous filing in the case, Mr. Trump’s lawyers said they were in discussions with unidentified Justice Department attorneys “designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation.” A government attorney has yet to make an appearance in the case.

A settlement in the coming days would fly in the face of efforts by the federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama in the Southern District of Florida, to try and manage the conflict of interest in the case. Not only has she requested briefings from Mr. Trump’s lawyers and the government by next week, she has appointed a group of six well-respected lawyers not otherwise involved in the case to provide her with their views on whether Mr. Trump’s lawsuit is legitimate.

If a settlement is reached before Judge Williams has a chance to make a decision about whether the underlying lawsuit is valid, it could frustrate her, though legal experts say that her authority beyond that would be limited.

She would not likely be able to prevent Mr. Trump from simply withdrawing the suit and coming to a private agreement with the federal government. Even if the judge were to ultimately find that the settlement was collusive or reached in bad faith, she would likely be hamstrung in any effort to stop money or other benefits from changing hands.

Former government lawyers and experts see a clear defense to Mr. Trump’s suit, and do not see it as one the Justice Department would typically settle on its merits. A group of former I.R.S. and Justice Department officials filed an amicus brief in the case arguing, among other things, that Mr. Trump filed the suit too late and that his request for at least $10 billion was far too large.

Charles Littlejohn, the former I.R.S. contractor sentenced to five years in prison for the leak, provided tax return information about thousands of other wealthy Americans to ProPublica. Some of those people have also sued the I.R.S., and the Justice Department has defended those suits, in part by arguing that the government can’t be held liable for the actions of a contractor.

One of those suits against the I.R.S., from hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, was settled in 2024, but the government did not pay Mr. Griffin any damages. Instead, the I.R.S. made a public apology for the leak.

It is unclear or how much money Mr. Trump could receive in a settlement, or if he will be paid at all.

But protection from I.R.S. audits could prove quite valuable. I.R.S. procedures call for the mandatory audit of the president and vice president’s annual tax returns. The series of Times articles at the center of Mr. Trump’s suit, published in 2020, showed that he had paid little or no income tax for years. In 2024, the Times reported that a loss in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million.

At the same time, federal law prohibits the president from ordering the start or conclusion of an I.R.S. audit of a specific taxpayer.

Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. 

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

Jennifer Rubin: Reasons for Optimism about U.S. Politics!

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
8

This a great article that will uplift your spirits!

Jennifer Rubin is a journalist and lawyer who was hired by The Washington Post to be its conservative columnist. But Trump radicalized her, and she became a leading voice for liberal policies. After Jeff Bezos decided to placate and woo Trump, she resigned her job and started a new and wildly popular blog called “The Contrarian,” where she and other brilliant writers gathered to critique the madness of MAGA.

She recently posted an optimistic analysis of American politics. Despite the gerrymandering, despite horrible court decisions, Democrats are in a great position to wash the MAGA stain out of the nation’s government.

It’s the most optimistic piece I’ve read in a long while, and I think you will enjoy it too.

Rubin writes:

In a span of less than two weeks, the U.S. Supreme Court (contravening the text and intent of the post-Civil War amendments and decades of court precedent) and the Virginia State Supreme Court (overturning the will of Virginia voters and inventing a new definition of “election”) have bulldozed through the electoral landscape to slant the 2026 midterm playing field in Republicans’ favor.

In Louisiana v. Callais, the U.S. Supreme Court demolished 60 years of progress in voting rights, robbed Black and Hispanic communities of the power to elect representatives of their own choosing, and aimed to decimate the ranks of non-white U.S. House members, state legislators, and local officials. This is nothing short of an attempt to reimpose white supremacy.

(MicroStockHub/iStock)

Voting rights legal guru Rick Hasen wrote:

This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation…. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters.

As infuriating, partisan, and legally unsound as these rulings are, they are not the final word on either the midterms or the future of our multi-racial democracy.

The Midterms

Even with the loss in Virginia, Democrats’ five-seat pick up in California should more than counteract the original Texas re-redistricting (where two of the five seats Republicans sought to steal may well go to Democrats). And despite the Virginia decision, Democrats may still pick up one to two more seats under Virginia’s old map. The net pickup for Republicans currently is less than ten before Democrats pursue their own redistricting in New York, Illinois, Colorado, and Maryland.

However, even with the advantage of, say, a dozen rigged seats, Republicans are unlikely to keep the House majority. Since 2024, Democrats have swung the electorate substantially in their direction, over-performing in comparison to Kamala Harris in 193 of 226 state legislative races, by 20 points in some cases. On average, Democrats are doing more than 10 points better than they did in 2024. (Brookings’ William A. Galston wrote: “In the six special elections for the House conducted in 2025-2026, the swing toward Democratic candidates averaged about 15 points, while the swing toward Democratic gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia averaged 14 points.”)

More than 20 Republican House seats were won by less than 10 points in 2024; 43 Republicans won by less than 15%. Given the electoral shift, Democrats’ list of targeted seats expands each week.

The New York Times reported that gerrymandering “tells only part of the story” about the midterms. While “Democrats could end up losing at least half a dozen safe seats, and possibly more,” depending on new maps drawn in Southern states, Republicans face gale-force “headwinds” thanks to Donald Trump’s atrocious approval numbers, his reviled Iran war, soaring gas and other consumer prices, snatching away healthcare coverage from millions, disaffection of Hispanic voters, and rampant corruption.

In short, gerrymandering, however outrageous, will not be enough to save Republicans if Democrats generate huge turnout, especially among those voters enraged that they have been stripped of voting power. (As Hungary demonstrated, a determined opposition can overcome a raft of unfair impediments imposed by a corrupt, unpopular regime.)

Democrats, independents, and disaffected Republicans know that the MAGA cult has no message — which is why MAGA lawmakers and courts must rig the election to cement white supremacy. That’s all they’ve got.

Democrats have their targets

The enormity of reversing 60 years of progress on voting rights necessitates a new era of intense organizing and public education — a new civil right movement to counter MAGA’s court-imposed Jim Crow. That effort kicks off with a grassroots National Day of Action on Saturday, May 16, in Alabama. Organizers declared, “The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a reminder that we have unfinished business. The fight is ours and we are going to finish it.” Scores of democracy groups, faith-based organizations, and civil rights organizations will rally to oppose Jim Crow redistricting and to support multi-racial democracy.

The goal: Democrats must win, and win big, in 2026 and 2028. Senate seats, governorships, and other statewide offices cannot be gerrymandered. A massive registration and turnout-the-vote operation must expand deep into Republican areas, appealing to disgruntled independents and Republicans while firing up the base. Democrats will need a broad, inclusive electoral coalition to pursue bold reform. As former attorney general Eric Holder likes to say, progressives “need to be comfortable with acquiring power and using power.”

What then? If Democrats come out of the 2028 election with House and Senate majorities, and the presidency, they will have all the motivation and tools required to reverse the slide into Jim Crow, beginning with substantial reform of the discredited Supreme Court. The MAGA justices’ willful misreading of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution to concoct a “color blind” interpretation of voting rights (coupled with their monstrous expansion of executive power and abuse of the emergency docket) should unify democracy defenders on the urgency of Supreme Court reform through court expansion, term limits, revised appellate jurisdiction, and ethics reform.

Election law guru Rick Hasen argued:

The Supreme Court itself has shown itself to be the enemy of democracy. If and when Democrats retake control of the political branches, it will be incumbent on them not only to write new voting legislation protecting minority voters and all voters in the ability to participate fairly in elections that reflect the will of all the people. They will also have to consider reform of the Supreme Court itself.

With the election of aggressive Senate Democrats running in 2026 and 2028, Democrats should have little trouble carving out a filibuster exception, especially if they win by large margins that affirm voters’ rejection of MAGA assault on pluralistic democracy.

In addition to reforming the MAGA Supreme Court, a myriad of solid proposals for undoing the damage wrought by Callais include: state voting rights’ protections, a federal statute that requires nonpartisan redistricting, proportional representation, and a constitutional amendmentguaranteeing the right to vote. Democrats should pursue an “all of the above” approach, not merely to regain but to expand diverse voters’ participation and power.

Though the tools to sustain multi-racial democracy may be different from those employed in the 1960s, Madeleine Greenberg of the Campaign Legal Center reminded us: “Every generation has faced attempts to restrict access to the ballot box, and every generation has pushed back.” If Democrats win elections decisively and fully exercise the power they obtain, they can fix what MAGA white supremacists have broken. Only then can we fulfill the promise of pluralistic democracy.

The midterm elections of 2026 are approaching. Start working now to reclaim our democracy! Our time is now.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Democrats, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Health, History, Justice, Trump

Jan Resseger: Rebuffing the Attacks on Teachers and Public Schools

By dianeravitch
May 13, 2026 //
4

Jan Resseger is a careful researcher in Ohio who tracks education issues with careful attention to facts, details, and context. In this post, she notes that public schools have become the targets of ideologues in state legislatures and even the U.S. Department of Education. All too often, politicians use the public schools as a punching bag, but know nothing of their work or their accomplishments. werethe fsmiliar with the work and the accomplishments of teachers, she believes, state and federal officials would thank teachers instead disparaging them.

In recent local elections, voters in nearly 2/3 of school districts turned down relatively small property tax increases to fund the schools, usually repairs and physical upgrades. Legislators said this proved that voters are not happy with public schools, but Jan believes the election results reflect the squeeze of inflation and affordability caused by Trump’s policies and by the state’s failure to fund public schools adequately as it continues to expand charters and vouchers. Ohio has a Republican supermajority in both houses of its legislature, and they are eagerly funding charters and vouchers despite disappointing results.

As Jan writes, if the critics were familiar with the daily work of teachers, they would be champions of public schools, not critics.

She writes:

Attacks on the nation’s public schools fill the news. After last week’s May primary election in Ohio, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee reportedly blamed public schools for a statewide property tax revolt: “(T)hrowing money at schools stuck in an old way of thinking won’t solve any problems.”

And at the federal level at the end of April, the U.S. Department of Education, by amending federal guidance, stopped defining public school teachers and administrators as professionals by setting formal regulations that will mean graduate students in education cannot borrow as much money to pay for graduate school as others the Trump administration defines as professionals.  Education Week’s Evie Blad reports that a new federal regulation finalized by the U.S. Department of Education would “exclude education from a list of  ‘professional’ graduate degrees subjected to higher loan limits… The final rule lists the following graduate degrees as ‘professional’: pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, chiropractic, law, medicine, optometry, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, theology, and clinical psychology.”  The new rule will make it harder for educators to afford graduate school by setting “new limits on federal student loans” for teachers and school administrators seeking advanced degrees to enhance their content knowledge and meet requirements for licensure.

The Department of Education must publish in the Federal Register new rules that are being proposed, and receive public comments prior to making the new rules final.  In the case of redefining graduate programs in education as non-professional, there was considerable pushback from the public. Secretary McMahon’s department ignored the comments.  For K-12 Dive, Anna Merod and Ben Unglesbee report: “Commenters told the department that impacted degree programs include master of arts in teaching, master of education, education specialist, master of library sciences, and doctor of education… The department’s final rule said the agency received many public comments calling for including education as a professional degree or to otherwise allow higher borrowing levels for students pursuing advanced education degrees.  In their arguments, commenters cited teacher shortages and the importance of graduate programs for licensure advancement… Additionally commenters noted that career changers who want to enter the profession pursue master’s degrees in education for certification, especially in high-need areas.”

Many of us value public education, but increasingly we take these institutions for granted. While schools are essential to our neighborhoods, our communities and our children, most of us have not been inside a school for years due to lockdowns during our society’s epidemic of gun violence. Constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black recently shared some statistics which ought to remind us why public schools are so essential and at the same time so vulnerable to politics: “(A)s the largest government institution in the United States, public education is an obvious potential target of those aiming to undermine faith in government institutions. Public education is twice the size of the entire federal government. More important, it represents the most extensive and persistent relationship that citizens ever have with government. Public schools educate roughly ninety percent of Americans for more than a decade during their formative years.”

The Attack on Public Schools

The late Mike Rose, who devoted his long career at UCLA to preparing future members of the teaching profession, worried about what has, since the Reagan administration’s 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, been a political attack on the nation’s public schools: “Citizens in a democracy must continually assess the performance of their public institutions. But the quality and language of that evaluation matter. Before we can evaluate, we need to be clear about what it is that we’re evaluating, what the nature of the thing is: its components and intricacies, its goals and purpose…. Neither the sweeping rhetoric of public school failure nor the narrow focus on test scores helps us here.  Both exclude the important, challenging work done daily in schools across the country, thereby limiting the educational vocabulary and imagery available to us. This way of talking about schools constrains the way we frame problems and blinkers our imagination…”   (Why School? 2014 edition, pp 203-204)

Rose responded with a three year series of visits across the United States to the classrooms of excellent teachers identified by academics, by their peers, and by school district leaders. In the book which grew out of his school visits, Possible Lives, Rose described teachers at work and reflected on what school teachers do: “Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination. I visited schools for three and a half years, and what struck me early on—and began to define my journey—was how rarely the kind of intellectual and social richness I was finding was reflected in the public sphere… We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries… We are offered, by both entertainment and news media, depictions of schools as mediocre places, where students are vacuous and teachers are not so bright; or as violent and chaotic places, places where order has fled and civility has been lost.  It’s hard to imagine anything good in all this.” (Possible Lives, p. 1)

What do teachers do?

Here instead, however, is what those three years showed Rose about school teachers and the complexity of their work: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.”  (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

In a comprehensive 2014 summary, Rose defines what teachers do:  “Some of the teachers I visited were new, and some had taught for decades. Some organized their classrooms with desks in rows, and others turned their rooms into hives of activity. Some were real performers, and some were serious and proper. For all the variation, however, the classrooms shared certain qualities… The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety…. but there was also safety from insult and diminishment…. Intimately related to safety is respect…. Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority…. A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed…. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility…. Overall the students I talked to, from primary-grade children to graduating seniors, had the sense that their teachers had their best interests at heart and their classrooms were good places to be.”

Reacquainting ourselves with Mike Rose’s thinking is one way for us all to consider the complexity of public schools as institutions and the challenges faced by the professionals who spend six or seven hours every day working with our children.  I fear that few of the state legislators and federal officials who deride teachers, who insult teachers by denying their professional status, and who chronically underfund public schools have recently spent much time visiting a public school.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Failure, Ohio, Teachers, Teachers and Teaching, Teaching, Tennessee
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