The Network for Public Education will hold its annual conference in Conroe, Texas–right outside Houston, on September 26-27.
We have a stellar line-up of speakers, panels, and workshops.
Join me and hundreds of others who fight to protect and improve our public schools.
The National Center on Education Policy frequently publishes reports, studies, and articles about important issues in education. This one makes a point that I have long believed: the rhetoric of “failing public schools” is intended to advance the privatization of public school funding, specifically, charter schools, voucher schools, and home schooling.
All of these are worse alternatives than public schools, but the media has lapped up the negative message.
The reality is that academic performance (test scores) is highly correlated with socioeconomic status. There are schools that are in need of smaller class sizes, physical upgrades, and intense professional support. But most parents are highly satisfied with their children’s public school and its teachers. Public schools offer more options than charter schools or religious schools. And most public schools are successful.
This study is titled: “The Cycle of Disinvestment in Public Schools: How Public-School Criticism Drives Policy and Disinvestment.” The study was written by Huriya Jabbar and Daniel Espinoza. The link is at the bottom of this post.
They say in the abstract:
Critiques of public education have intensified, and while some reflect real needs for improvement, many are manufactured crises that portray schools as broadly failing. Centered on claims of underachievement, inefficiency, inequality, lack of choice, and indoctrination, these narratives often ignore counterevidence on poverty’s impact, the benefits of increased funding, and the harms of large-scale voucher programs. Though targeted reforms are warranted, sweeping failure claims erode public support and fuel a cycle of disinvestment—reduced funding and enrollment that weaken schools and invite further criticism—advancing privatization and deepening inequality at a moment of heightened political and fiscal threats to public education.
Suggested Citation: Jabbar, H. & Espinoza, D. (2026). The cycle of disinvestment in public schools: How public school criticism drives policy and disinvestment. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/disinvestmen
Congress just added another $70 billion to the budget of ICE and the Border Patrol. Meanwhile, there are no apparent efforts to improve living conditions at ICE detention centers. There seems to be an intention to make life miserable so that detained people ask to be deported. ICE is given leeway to arrest anyone, regardless of their lack of any criminal record. Even citizens and others with valid papers have been held in detention for weeks or months. So much for deporting “the worst of the worst!”
The Columbia Journalism Review reported:
In 2024, Narges Dehghani fled Iran for the United States. She had been a dissident, fighting against the regime, and had been detained, violently interrogated, and sexually assaulted by Islamic Republic agents. In America, she hoped to finally find freedom. Instead, she has been held for fourteen months at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.
When Dehghani arrived at the Eloy Detention Center, in Arizona, she was “emotionally, mentally and physically wrecked” from her journey to the US-Mexico border. During her intake assessment, she told a psychologist that she was having suicidal thoughts and was immediately put on “suicide watch” in solitary confinement, where she remained for three days. “It’s not like a treatment; it’s a punishment,” Dehghani told the Arizona Daily Star. “That place is not a place you should put a human being.”
Dehghani shared her story with Emily Bregel and Emily Hamer for their excellent series “Inside ICE Detention,” produced by the Daily Star and Lee Enterprises, which examines the impact of detention on immigrants without criminal records. Bregel and Hamer’s reporting found that “ICE is misusing and overusing solitary confinement in ways that violate immigrants’ rights and ICE’s own policies.” Over the past seven months, they have interviewed more than thirty detainees.
“The people who are in detention centers are largely not criminals—about 70 percent of them have never been charged with any kind of crime at all,” Hamer told me. “We wanted to look at the conditions that people are facing in detention because it’s civil detention. It’s not criminal. The conditions are not supposed to be as bad as prison, legally, and yet Eloy Detention Center in Arizona basically looks like prison.”
Last week, the pair published a piece documenting the increasing use of solitary confinement in detention centers to coerce detainees into self-deporting. “ICE is subjecting them to really harsh conditions so that they’ll just give up,” Hamer told me. “We have had detainees tell us that guards are telling them, ‘That’s my whole objective, is to make your time in here as miserable as possible so that you self-deport,’ which is unconstitutional.”
Maksim Borisov, a twenty-two-year-old who faced persecution in Russia for being gay, spent more than a year in ICE detention. At one point, a guard presented him with papers and repeatedly pressured him to self-deport. When he refused, he was thrown into solitary confinement. “This is torturing. They’re torturing me,” Borisov said. “I never broke any law, and I’m being punished because I don’t want to die in my country.”
Melissa Brown of Chalkbeat wrote about a lawsuit in Tennessee that challenges the state’s ban on religious charter schools. Since the state is currently paying tuition at religious schools with vouchers, the lawsuit seeks to overturn the ban. The state is not defending the ban, inasmuch as its Republican leadership wants to pay tuition at religious schools.
Brown writes:
A Tennessee lawsuit challenging the Knox County Board of Education over the state’s religious charter school ban is heading to trial after a federal judge denied the board’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
The Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville sued the school board last year after the local district asked it to affirm it planned to open a non-religious school, per state law.
In federal court filings, the school board argued Wilberforce never actually submitted a charter school application, nor has it targeted state officials in its lawsuit, despite the school board following state law enforced by the Tennessee Department of Education. The board had asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit entirely.
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But U.S. District Judge Charles E. Atchley, Jr. in late May ruled Wilberforce didn’t have to submit an actual application to challenge an “allegedly unconstitutional barrier” to applying.
Neither party has commented on the lawsuit.
Tennessee officials have left the Knox County board on its own to defend the state law, which Atchley noted in his May opinion.
Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti declined to intervene in the lawsuit earlier this year, months after he published a legal opinion that argued there was “no compelling interest” in excluding religious charter schools from participating in a “public benefit.”
Skrmetti’s office is also currently paying Wilberforce’s main attorney $400 per hour in a separate case to help Tennessee defend its criminal abortion ban against ongoing legal challenges.
The legal fight over religious charter schools in Tennessee – and the lack thereof from state officials – signal major changes may be on the horizon for the state’s charter landscape.
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This spring, lawmakers signed off on a new state law that now allows religious colleges and universities to operate public charter schools. Though the new law currently blocks those institutions from providing religious curriculum in their charter schools, it opens the door to a new class of charter operators in the state that could quickly stand up religious charters if the state’s religious charter ban law were to fall.
And now public dollars are flowing to private religious schools through Tennessee’s voucher program, which is paying millions in private school tuition.
In its lawsuit, Wilberforce focuses in part on this program, arguing the public education funds now funding private religious tuition support the case that religious charters should be included in public funding.
“This enshrined hostility to religious charter schools stands in marked contrast to Tennessee’s recent support of religious schools through its Education Freedom Scholarship Program,” a Wilberforce attorney argued in court documents last year.
A full trial on the lawsuit is scheduled for January 2027, and a group of Tennessee parents and non-religious charter school officials have also intervened in the lawsuit to oppose Wilberforce’s claims.
They have argued opening the door to religious charter schools will result in charter schools being “classified and treated as private schools,” which could effect on things like Tennessee’s public school funding formula and disability protections.
John Oliver took a piercing look at Ron DeSantis’s takeover of New College in Sarasota.
When DeSantis first became governor of Florida, a legislator told him about this little bed of radicalism, and DeSantis admitted that he had never heard of it. But then he realized that attacking it and remodeling it would help build his resume for his bid for the Presidency.
New College was, like Hampshire College, a progressive institution where there were no grades and students could design their own courses. It attracted free-thinking students and professors, and this was intolerable to people like DeSantis. The fact that it was funded by the state made it vulnerable to political interference.
DeSantis decided that New College’s inclusion of gender studies and its welcoming of LGBT students was, in fact, a pretext for indoctrinating students into a Communist, socialist, anti-American way of thinking.
New College was woke, and the governor had to take control. He ousted the president and the board of trustees and replaced them with rightwing allies and political buddies. The new president of New College had no experience in higher education but had been Republican Speaker of the House in Florida.
One new board member, Chris Rufo, was an anti-woke crusader who wanted to turn New College into a model for how to take control of progressive colleges and turn them into rightwing colleges.
It’s a harrowing story. Set aside some time and watch it. The best part might be the new Dean at comedy night telling a story about exposing himself to a 7-year-old girl. He thought it was funny.
Early on in Trump’s second term, he rolled out executive orders demanding censorship of exhibits and signage at museums and national parks, as well as other institutions that received federal funds. He complained that federal funds should not support anything that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion, anything that he deemed “woke,” and anything that reflected badly in our history. On Friday two federal judges ruled against his administration’s censorship of historically accurate accounts.
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked the National Park Service from removing or revising signs, films and other materials at national parks across the country to comply with a directive from President Trump.
The ruling pauses enforcement of an executive order that called for removing or covering up materials at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans” or cast the United States “in a negative light.”
The judge, Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, also ordered the Park Service to restore within three weeks any exhibits that it had dismantled or altered.
The ruling provides a temporary reprieve for the plaintiffs, a coalition of advocacy groups that sued over the executive order in February, while the litigation continues to unfold.
To comply with the president’s directive, the Park Service has taken down plaques about slavery at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, a sign about climate change at Fort Sumter in South Carolina and a sign about Indigenous people at Acadia National Park in Maine.
Another federal judge has already ordered the Park Service not to make further changes to the slavery exhibit at the President’s House Site at Independence National Historical Park, as she considers a separate lawsuit filed by Philadelphia.
Judge Kelley, who was nominated by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., sharply rebuked the Trump administration for taking down materials. “Not only does this undermine the integrity of the national parks; it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization,” she wrote.
Judge Kelley began her 63-page ruling by listing examples of national parks that help educate visitors about difficult periods of American history, as well as contributions made by people of color, gay and transgender figures, women and other marginalized groups.
“From the echoes of abolition in John Brown’s Fort in Harpers Ferry, to the genesis of the modern L.G.B.T.Q.+ civil rights movement at the Stonewall National Monument, to the retreating ice of Glacier National Park in Alaska, the national parks preserve the multifaceted and multilayered history of our nation, including the good, the bad and the ugly,” she wrote.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs argued that removing the materials was “arbitrary and capricious,” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. They also accused the Park Service of exceeding its legal authority.
Katie Martin, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, the parent agency of the Park Service, suggested that the administration would appeal the ruling.
“This ruling is from a liberal activist judge,” Ms. Martin said in an email. “The department will look at our appeal options while we celebrate U.F.C. Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House this weekend in honor of our nation’s 250th with the greatest president in the history of our country — President Donald J. Trump.”
Emily Thompson, the executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, one of the advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, applauded the ruling.
“National parks are not propaganda tools, nor should they be used for partisan purposes,” Ms. Thompson said in a statement. “They exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling is an important step to help ensure that remains the case.”
The Network for Public Education, which I co-founded with science teacher Anthony Cody in 2012-2013, supports the improvement of public schools and opposes privatization of public funding for schooling. Nearly 90% of children in the U.S. are enrolled in public schools. Their schools should be staffed by qualified teachers and fully funded. NPE works with state organizations that share our commitment to the principle: Public funds for public schools.
The following report was produced by NPE Executive Director Carol Burris and staff. Burris retired as a career teacher and award-winning high school principal.
NEW REPORT GIVES 17 STATES FAILING GRADES FOR ABANDONING PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Network for Public Education’s Most Comprehensive Report Card Finds Privatization and Disinvestment Go Hand in Hand
New York, New York
The Network for Public Education (NPE) released Public Schooling in America: Measuring Each State’s Commitment to Public Schools (2026), an expansive state-by-state assessment of support for public education. The report evaluates all 50 states and the District of Columbia across four categories: Privatization, Protections for Homeschooled Students, School Funding, and Conditions for Teaching and Learning. It documents a troubling national pattern: the statehouses most aggressively redirecting public money toward private alternatives are the most neglectful of their public schools, teachers, and students. NPE’s analysis found a strong, statistically significant negative relationship between privatization and policies that support public schools (p < 0.0001).
Only two states — Nebraska and Vermont — earned an A. Seventeen states received an F, failing to meet even 40% of the points allocated across NPE’s 39 standards. Florida ranked last, scoring 14 out of 102 possible points, with Arizona close behind. “The data confirm what we have long suspected: privatization and disinvestment go hand in hand,” said Carol Burris, Executive Director of NPE and the report’s author. “These are not states struggling with limited resources. They have made deliberate choices to abandon their public schools while directing billions in public dollars to private alternatives.”
The report draws on original research in addition to research from other organizations — including the Education Law Center, the Learning Policy Institute, and EdChoice — to deliver a comprehensive assessment of public education and privatization across 39 distinct factors. These include teacher-to-student ratios, teacher satisfaction, school funding levels, and the degree to which laws governing vouchers, charter schools, and homeschools protect both taxpayers and students.
Public Schooling in America also provides a roadmap for reform, showing policymakers and advocates exactly where laws and policies must change to better serve students and rein in the serious, well-documented problems created by privatized alternatives.
“Public schools are the only institutions in American life obligated to welcome every child, regardless of circumstance,” NPE President Diane Ravitch added. “They build community and democracy. They are as American as apple pie.”
The full report is available here.
About the Network for Public Education
The Network for Public Education is a nonprofit advocacy organization dedicated to protecting, preserving, and strengthening public schools for every child in America.
Heather Cox Richardson covered some of the same ground as my previous post, but with more.
Before noon on Saturday, June 13, Charles M. Floca, whom Trump installed at the head of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, certified to the court that “the Center and its Board have complied with the Court’s order.” They had, he wrote, “[r]emoved all physical signage on the Kennedy Center building and grounds, including the front portico, that purports to rename the Kennedy Center after President Trump or any other individual besides President Kennedy,” updated the website, removed references to Trump from letterhead, promotional materials, and so on, and “[w]ithdrawn any trademark application officially referring to the Kennedy Center as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center’…or any similar formulation.”
What they did not do was take down the tarp workers installed last night around the scaffolding they erected yesterday, hiding the portico wall. Through a crack between the tarp and the wall, photographers caught a few images of letters coming down shortly after 3:00 AM—Cliff Owen of the Associated Press got an iconic shot of a worker loosening the P from the wall—but so far the public has not seen the restored facade. The portico remained shrouded all day.
In a statement, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said that the center was “fully compliant with the court’s directive” and that the board was evaluating “legal options.” Tonight workers were back at the Kennedy Center, where they created passageways in the tarp to make the center’s doors accessible while keeping the wall where Trump had put his name covered.
Last night, while workers were putting up scaffolding at the Kennedy Center, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fighters held a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the UFC cage matches to be held at the White House on Trump’s 80th birthday on Sunday. Trump sent the United States Army Herald Trumpets, the U.S. Army ensemble chiefly responsible for playing the entrance and exit fanfares for the President of the United States, to open the event.
The fighters walked from Lincoln’s statue down the steps of the memorial through the Armed Forces Full Honor Cordon, a pathway formed between two groups made up of sixteen service members in dress uniforms. This is the U.S. military’s highest ceremonial formation, usually reserved for heads of state, foreign dignitaries, senior officials, and funerals for military heroes.
This morning the weigh-in for the UFC fights at the White House also took place at the Lincoln Memorial. Heavyweight fighter Josh Hokit seemed to pretend to throw up, dribbling colored liquid from his mouth. “So what? Maybe I was drinking last night,” Hokit told the media there. “Who wouldn’t be? I’ve got a giant man who wants to knock me out,” he said, referring to his scheduled opponent Derrick Lewis, whom Alex Pattle of Yahoo! Sports identifies as Trump’s favorite fighter. “He has the most knockouts in UFC history.”
Today stunt performer Travis Pastrana performed a backflip on his dirt bike over the UFC octagon fight arena on the South Lawn of the White House. Other riders performed stunts as well. They were filmed on their bikes, flying across the facade of the White House.
On the eve of his 80th birthday, the president posted an image of the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a homeless encampment. Then he posted an image of himself leaving his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in 2024, when a jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts, under the caption “Only Trump.” Then he posted an image from 2018 of himself walking with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Then he posted a picture of himself speaking at a lectern in front of Air Force One while he was campaigning for reelection in August 2020.
Then he posted an AI image of himself on a ship looking out at battleships from different eras, including a wooden sailing vessel, flying the American flag, with fighter jets in formation overhead; the back of his jacket is emblazoned with “COMMANDER IN CHIEF,” and the caption reads: “YOU’RE GETTING DISCOMBOBULATED.”
Then he posted an image of himself on the cover of Fortune magazine from December 8, 1986. And then he posted a black and white image of himself as a younger man in the same era, looking pensive, seated in a chair on an ice rink, with the caption: “Years ago after saving the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park—Long before I fixed The Reflecting Pool, and everything else in Washington, D.C. including, most importantly, CRIME! President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Tomorrow night, the fighters will enter the ring from the Oval Office. The fight will be carried live on Paramount Plus, for a fee of $8.99 and up.
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Notes:
https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/ufc-white-house-fighter-throws-201255308.html
https://usarmyband.com/ensembles/the-u-s-army-herald-trumpets
Bluesky:
muellershewrote.com/post/3mo6js2mvak2u
lukerussert.bsky.social/post/3mo6c4eg7us2w
thejenniwren.teamlh.social/post/3mo7ox7sghk25
bjkeefe.bsky.social/post/3mo7s3fmxyk2r
Instagram:
Friday night I was glued to the CSPAN livestream of the work to remove the name of Donald J. Trump from the Kennedy Center. It never belonged there.
I began to fantasize Trump inserting himself into the Lincoln Memorial, with a sculpture of him seated next to Lincoln, in the newly renamed Trump Lincoln Memorial. Why not slap his name on the Washington Monument? Who would stop him? What else can he name for himself?
So to see his name removed, letter by letter, was a historic event, as well as a profound humiliation for Trump. But I didn’t get to see it because it didn’t happen until 3 am, which I thought happened not only because of a rain delay but because of purposeful, deliberate slow-walking to make sure few people saw it.
Since the Kennedy Center opened, it has had a bipartisan board. It was not political. It attracted leading artists. It was, as intended, a great cultural institution for artists. It was an honor to perform there. Until Trump.
Until Trump dismissed the members of the board appointed by Biden and replaced them with Trump toadies. Trump named himself to the board, and the new board elected Trump as its president, a position never before held by the President. Trump is petty, wracked by envy, a hunger for respect, and a passion for retribution.
As the Kennedy Center turned political, wholly owned by Trump, artists began canceling their performances. The biggest blow was the cancellation of Hamilton, which was sure to be sold out.
He fired the professional arts administrator who led the Kennedy Center and replaced her with a Trump loyalist, Richard Grennell, Ambassador to Germany in Trump’s first term, lacking any relevant experience.
In short order, other nonpolitical administrators left or were fired.
Ticket sales plummeted.
The Washington National Opera left the Kennedy Center and continues to perform at different venues around D.C.
The National Symphony Orchestra decided to stay.
Faced with a financial and artistic backlash, the board decided that the building needed major renovations and announced that the Center would close for two years. Grennell laid off staff in anticipation of the long closure. The National Symphony Orchestra was looking for alternate venues to stay alive during the two-year hiatus.
Meanwhile the Washington National Opera–which left in January 2026–was deadlocked with the Center, because the Center refused to give the Opera the $17 million that was its endowment, made up of gifts given specifically to the Opera. The Center said the Opera ran a deficit, so the Center claimed the Opera’s endowment as payment. The Opera sued the Center on June 11.
So…I wanted to see Trump’s name come down. It was history. The removal crew started before noon. They began erecting an elaborate scaffold, laboriously. This was odd because when Trump’s name went up, the workers were elevated by scissor lifts and quickly attached his name. The rise of the scaffolding was delayed by a heavy rain. When the rain ended, the erection of the scaffold was sluggish, at best. It went on for hours. The workers kept piecing the scaffolding together. Occasionally they would all climb down and nothing was happening.
At midnight, I gave up and went to bed. The next morning, I googled to see the renewed facade, the one without Trump’s name. I couldn’t find it anywhere, in any format.
I read that the workers began removing his name at 3 am, but their work was hidden by white tarps. No one could photograph them doing it. Presumably, Trump couldn’t bear the humiliation. The front of the building remained covered the next day.
What a baby! What a self-centered, narcissistic baby!
The hero of this saga is Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio. She was an ex-officio member of the Kennedy Center by virtue of her role in Congress. Trump couldn’t fire her. The board tried to exclude her. At the meeting where they voted to approve the name change, they muted her mic so she could not participate.
It was Representative Beatty who sued to have Trump’s name stripped from the Center. The federal judge who decided the case ruled that Congress named the Center, and only Congress could change the name.
Here is Representative Beatty, inside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, dancing and celebrating her victory the way Trump dances.
Thank you, Congresswoman Beatty!
The crisis of the Kennedy Center is far from over. The board is still packed with allies of Trump. Its staff, what’s left of it, is led by Trump partisans. Because the board wanted to close it for two years, there has been no programming for next year.
Trump has proved once again that he is the master of chaos. As the adage goes, whatever Trump touches, dies.
The Kennedy Center must not die. Congress must intervene to restore the nonpartisan nature of the Kennedy Center.
Earlier today, a federal appeals court rejected an appeal by the Trump-selected board of the Kennedy Center to delay the removal of his name from the structure that houses the Center. They said in an unsigned decision that the board should comply with the decision of Federal Judge Christopher Cooper to remove Trump’s name by midnight tonight.
Construction crews began erecting scaffolding this morning but had to stop work because of a heavy rain. They resumed work and are still erecting the scaffold to reach Trump’s name.
Many media outlets are live-streaming the work in front of the building.
Jim Acosta is live-streaming the event along with hundreds of people who have come to witness the event.
Acosta has his own show and is also on Substack, YouTube, and BlueSky.
C-SPAN is also live-streaming the event, as are other cable networks and stations.
Almost midnight, and work on the scaffold continues. Odd the way they built the scaffold up til now. The left side doesn’t reach the letters THE DO.
The right side covers a large blank space.
Diane Ravitch's blog 