Bernie Sanders Speaks Out Against Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
2

Blogger Meg White posted on her WordPress blog (@reflectionsined) about Senator Bernie Sanders’ opposition to vouchers, which are overwhelmingly used by students who are already enrolled in private schools and are free to discriminate. The Trump administration has passed voucher legislation and is encouraging the spread of vouchers. In theory, vouchers enable poor students to transfer to better schools. In practice and in reality, vouchers are a subsidy for the rich.

Meg is an advocate for public schools and co-author of a valuable book about desegregation in New Orleans and how it affected one school: William Frantz Public School: A Story of Race, Resistance, Resiliency, and Recovery in New Orleans.

White writes:

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) released a report that addresses the federal school voucher program. In the report, Sanders charges that “The Trump administration’s school privatization agenda threatens our nation’s public schools and harms working-class students, students with disabilities, and students from diverse religious backgrounds” (forbes.com). Sanders is a ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (HELP).

Sanders said, “President Trump and his billionaire campaign contributors have been working overtime to create a two-tier education system in America: private schools for the wealthy and well-connected and severely under-funded public schools for low-income and working-class students. That is unacceptable. This report makes clear that vouchers are being used to benefit private schools that reject students because they have a disability or because of their religion, and benefit some of the wealthiest families in America. Trump’s voucher program will only make a bad situation even worse (sanders.senate.gov).

The report analyzed state-level school voucher programs, including 111 SGOs and 1,600 voucher-accepting private schools across eleven states. 

The report finds that school voucher programs:

  • Subsidize private education for the rich. School vouchers, on average, cover just 39% of middle school private school tuition across the sampled states. Even with a private school voucher, tuition prices are often out of reach for working-class families, meaning that the vouchers function as a subsidy to the rich who can already afford to pay for private education.
  • Allow private schools to systematically deny admission to students with disabilities, limit how many students with disabilities they serve, only serve children with certain types of disabilities or charge extra tuition. While public schools must provide all students with the same opportunities to learn and excel, 48% of private schools analyzed in this report choose not to provide all students with disabilities with the services, protections and rights provided to those students in public schools under the IDEA.
  • Enable private schools to discriminate against students based on their religion. This report finds that despite the fundamental right of freedom of religion enshrined in our constitution, voucher programs benefit private schools that discriminate against students based on their religious beliefs. Specifically, 17% of private schools reviewed in this report charge different tuition rates based on the family’s religious beliefs.
  • Benefit private schools that lack basic credentialing, accountability and transparency requirements. Fewer than half of states reviewed require private schools to be accredited, while even fewer require student learning assessments. Unacceptably, only two states require teacher credentials in private schools receiving vouchers (sanders.senate.gov).

“Bottom line, in my view, we should be strengthening and expanding public education, the foundation of American democracy, where Black and White and Latino, rich and poor kids come together in one room” rather than privatizing public education, Sanders said (k-12.com).

The report comes ahead of a HELP Committee hearing where Arizona Education Association President Marisol Garcia will testify about the harms of private school vouchers in her state, which has the nation’s largest universal school voucher program and is a cautionary tale for the rest of the nation. The state is now spending nearly $1 billion annually on private school vouchers, while public schools are being forced to shut down (sanders.senate.gov).Researchers found that the use of vouchers in Arizona is highest in affluent school districts, and lowest in poorer school districts. More than half of voucher students came from the wealthiest quarter of zip codes in the state, with median incomes ranging from $81,000 to $178,000. Most of those students have never attended public schools (azmirror.com).

After Florida cleared the way in 2023 for any family in the state to get a taxpayer-funded school voucher regardless of income, students signed up in droves. Enrollment in the voucher program has almost doubled to half a million children. But by the end of the 2024-25 school year, the program cost $398 million more than expected. When students switched between public schools and voucher-funded programs, tax dollars did not move with them as lawmakers had promised. “On any given day, Florida’s education department did not know where 30,000 students were going to school and could not account for the $270 million in taxpayer funds it took to support them, according to the state Senate Appropriations Committee on Pre-K-12 Education” (msn.com). in 2023, of the 122,895 new students who signed up for vouchers, 69% (84,505) were already in private school, 13% (16,096) came from public schools, and the remainder were new kindergarteners (ncpecoalition.org).

According to the Arkansas Department of Education, 95% of the participants in the state’s universal voucher program had never attended public schools before receiving a voucher  (ncpecoalition.org).

Most students in Indiana’s voucher program come from well-off families. During the 2022-2023 school year, voucher recipients were more likely to come from families that made more than $100,000 per year than families that made less than $50,000 per year (the74million.org).

Since Ohio expanded its voucher program to wealthy families, the percentage of low-income students using vouchers in Cleveland fell from 35% to 7%. Now, most Ohio voucher students did not attend public schools before they took a voucher: the percentage of voucher students statewide who had already attended a private school in the year prior jumped from 7% in 2019 to almost 55% in 2023 (ncpecoalition.org).

State-provided data shows that about two-thirds of students receiving vouchers in Iowa’s new statewide program were already attending private schools before getting taxpayer money for tuition. Only about 13% of voucher recipients had ever previously attended a public school (ncpecoalition.org).

Savannah Newhouse, Department of Education Press Secretary commented, “Opponents of President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit are quick to lecture about equity and fairness, but they’re fighting to keep families trapped in failing government-run schools and environments that don’t meet kids’ needs. The reality is this historic tax credit, funded entirely from private philanthropic dollars, puts parents in the driver’s seat—supporting scholarships that can be used for tutoring at public schools, tuition, and essential services for students with disabilities. Expanding school choice levels the playing field so that every family, no matter their income or needs, can better prepare their child for success”. (forbes.com).

Sure, because it’s working so well.

Public Schools in the U.S. educate 90% of the children. Strengthening and supporting public education is essential to maintaining a fair and equitable society. As Sanders’ report illustrates, universal voucher programs serve as a taxpayer-funded subsidy for the wealthy, leaving working-class families behind. Diverting billions of dollars to unregulated private schools not only creates massive budget shortfalls but also destabilizes neighborhood schools that serve the vast majority of American children.

These are my reflections for today.

If you like what you’re reading, consider sharing and following my blog via email.

@reflectionsined

Categories Education Industry, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Supporting public schools, Vouchers

What Motivates Trump?

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
6

Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for The NewYork Times, writes here about a question that has puzzled many observers: what motivates Trump? Some would say he ran the first time out of sheer egoism and the second time to stay out of jail. Or, he ran the first time because of his innate competitiveness and the second time because he figured out how to monetize the Oval Office.

Bouie has a different take.

He wrote:

What motivates Trump?

Not what motivates Trumpism, whatever that is. Not what motivates his MAGA supporters. Not what motivates the infrequent and marginal voters who delivered him his victories in 2016 and 2024.

No. What specifically motivates Donald J. Trump? What brought him into national politics? What drives him as a national political figure?

His allies say a love of country, but this is betrayed by his indifference to the nation’s ideals, traditions and symbols. It is unclear whether Trump has even read the Constitution, and there’s no evidence that he understands its history and significance to the nation he leads. (It would be unfair to ask whether he’s read the Declaration of Independence — we all know he hasn’t.)

The best way to understand the president’s motivations is to find him at his most unfiltered, which is to say, on social media, late at night. And Thursday night, Trump posted a video to his Truth Social account that depicted President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. The clip, which runs for roughly a minute and shows the Obamas at the end, is set to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

I try to avoid superlatives in my writing, but there is simply no question that this is the most flagrant display of presidential racism since Woodrow Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” in the White House in 1915. And for a sense of the racism of Griffith’s film, recall that it both reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan and gave the organization its modern iconography.

I doubt that Trump’s video — less a creative product than half-baked agitprop — will have the same effect. But it carries many of the same messages. It uses an old white supremacist trope to denigrate the Obamas and, by extension, every American who shares their racial background. It presents people of African descent as little removed from beasts, an insult used to great effect in “The Birth of a Nation,” as you can see in this clip from the film.

Initially, the White House defended the video as a joke. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, said. “Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public.”

But then Republicans began to speak out. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, the only Black Republican in the Senate and the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, posted online.

Representative Mike Lawler, an otherwise stalwart Trump ally, said the video was “wrong and incredibly offensive.” Representative Michael Turner of Ohio decried the “racist images” as “offensive, heart breaking and unacceptable.”

Here, I should probably note that Barack and Michelle Obama are among the most popular political figures in the United States. Trump, on the other hand, is barely treading water with the public, and majorities of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. It makes sense, then, that some Republicans would use this as an opportunity to distance themselves from an unpopular incumbent.

Let’s walk back to where we started. What motivates Trump? The answer is simple: racism. You might also say ego and raw self-interest, but the two are connected. Racism, among other things, is a kind of chauvinism, a belief in one’s inherent superiority, based on nothing other than a meaningless accident of birth. It’s an ideology that papers over feelings of inadequacy, that tells you that — no matter what you have or have not accomplished in your life — you’re still better than someone, some group.

Let’s suppose you’re the spoiled son of a self-made man. Let’s suppose that, despite your flash and bravado, you’ve failed at virtually everything you’ve tried. You’re the laughingstock of polite society, a punchline for the privileged. You think you’re superior enough to be the president of the United States — the highest honor in your country — but the actual president is a man of humble origins, a minority of the kind your family didn’t even rent to when you were in the landlord business. And he is claiming power that rightfully belongs to you. He’s even mocking you, ridiculing you for all the world to see.

For years, a cottage industry of political observers has contorted itself to obscure and occlude the obvious. That regardless of what others see in him, Trump’s entire political career — from his embrace of birtherism to his hatred of birthright citizenship — cannot be understood outside the context of his bitter, deep-seated racism.

Trump is not profound. He has been the same person this whole time. The question is why so many others have refused to see what he has never bothered to hide.

Categories Racism, Trump

Stephen Dyer: GOP Sponsors a Bill That Will Screw Trump Voters

By dianeravitch
February 11, 2026 //
0

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and critic of school privatization in Ohio, explains here how a Republican-sponsored bill will hit Republican districts hardest.

He writes on his blog Tenth Period:

It’s no secret that over the last decade, Ohio has gone from a battleground state to a pretty red one, especially when Donald Trump is on the ballot. The major swing that occurred between 2006 when Democrat Ted Strickland won 70+ counties and 2024 has occurred in rural and urban counties, especially around the Mahoning Valley.

Gov. Ted Strickland’s 2006 victory map

President Donald Trump’s 2024 victory map

So what does the Ohio GOP do this year, which is shaping up to be a tough year for them anyway, to hold onto their Trump coalition? 

10th Period is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Try this: Introduce a bill that would, if passed, require folks living in Mahoning County to increase their property taxes by an average of $2,300 per $200,000 home and Trumbull County by $1,886, or close their kids’ schools. 

During a year where everyone is so pissed about property taxes being high that they want to actually get rid of property taxes.

Yeah. Pretty stupid, right?

Why would they do something so stupid, you ask?

So they can maintain an unconstitutional private school tuition subsidy that lets Les Wexner — the guy who was best buddies with Jeffrey Epstein —get a taxpayer funded break on his private school tuition bill.

I can’t make up this shit, man. 

These guys obviously think they’re politically invincible. 

I ran some more analysis of the bill that Callender introduced (who was Ohio Charter Schools’ go to lawyer prior to returning to the House a few years ago), which would block state aid to any school district that’s suing the state over its private school tuition subsidy, which, again, has been found to violate the Ohio Constitution.

Needless to say, the results are not awesome. 

The average Ohio school district would have to go for a levy that runs about 32 mills and would cost a homeowner of a $200,000 home an additional $2,200 a year. And that’s only if they want to keep their kids’ schools open. 

Because scores, if not hundreds, of school districts would cease operating under this bill

As you can see, the impact is worst for urban districts, but rurals are really hammered too.

This data is using the most recent Ohio Department of Education District Profile Report (for income and millage) and the most recent District Payment report for February 2026

I mean, you’re going to have poor, small town¹communities having to contemplate losing an additional 5% or more of their income to pay for Les Wexner’s private school tuition cut? That’s what you’re going with? This year?

Some other tidbits:

  • Trimble Local in Athens County would have to raise their property taxes by a staggering $11,355 per $200,000 home to replace the extorted money. That’s a 162.26-mill levy to raise what amounts to 23% of the average district resident’s income.
  • Steubenville — the home of Dean Martin and a famously Trump-y area — would need to go for a 119-mill levy, costing the $200,000 homeowner another $8,350 per year, which is 16% of the average family’s income there.
  • There are 56 Ohio school districts that would need to go for 50-mill levies or higher to replace the state aid Callender wants to cut. Or those kids — all 137,455 of them — will no longer have schools.
  • There are families in 22 Ohio school districts that would have to give up 10% or more of their average income to make up for Callender’s proposed cuts.
  • The average share of the cost in these districts that’s borne by the state is 47%. So the “you need to tighten your belt” argument ain’t working for these districts.
  • All so Les Wexner can get his private school tuition subsidized. 

I could go on. I posted the spreadsheet here, in case you want to look at more of these just amazing consequences. Not every school district has joined the lawsuit. So these data only apply to those who have. But there are so many of them (@300, or half of all Ohio school districts) that you can extrapolate the results. If every district joined, the effect would be nearly identical to what’s happening in those that have already.

I will say that this bill is clearly unconstitutional. I don’t know how the state will argue that removing funding from 700,000 students is going to provide those same students with a thorough and efficient system of common schools, as the Ohio Constitution mandates. 

So, in short, there is simply no way this bill survives even a modicum of legal scrutiny. So the chances of this happening are next to nothing.

Bu then if it’s clearly unconstitutional, as Callender must know it to be, then why do it? Scare local school districts form joining the lawsuit, or leaving it? Fat chance of that happening. I’ve been hearing districts and, more importantly, parents are more pissed now than they were before.

Like I said earlier, this is quite a play for Callender to make in an already tough political environment 9 months from an election that is expected to be focused on affordability and corruption.

But hey. It’s worked for these guys before and they keep winning in gerrymandered districts. 

So why change now, right?

1. These district types are ones developed by the Ohio Department of Education, not me.

Categories Charter Schools, Disruption, Funding, Hypocrisy, Ohio

Peter Greene: Charter Operators Ask Federal Government for Another Handout

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2026 //
2

Back in the late 1980s, when charter schools were a brand new idea, advocates said that charter schools would be more accountable, cost less, and would get better results.

It was also speculative, since no charter schools existed then. I believed it would turn out that way, as did other proponents of charter schools.

But none of those beliefs/hopes panned out.

We now know that charter lobbyists oppose accountability in state legislatures.

We now know that charter schools do not get better results than public schools, unless they exclude the kids who get low test scores.

We now know that charter schools do not cost less. Many of their leaders are paid more than public school leaders (some are paid $1 million a year). They lobby legislatures to give them the same funding as public schools. In some states, charters have won the power to locate rent-free in public school buildings.

Peter Greene here explains that the charter industry is seeking federal legislation to underwrite the cost of charter school facilities. The federal Charter School Program already provides $500 million a year to start new charter schools or expand existing ones. This grand gift, which the Trump administration increased, ignores the fact that demand for charter schools has declined while charters continue to close because of falling enrollments.

Peter Greene explains the latest grift here:

Among the various bills thrown at Congress is one that finds new ways to throw public money at charter schools.

HB 7086, the “Equitable Access to School Facilities Act,” proposes to send money to charter operators, via the state, to buy and build facilities for schools.

The cost of coming up with a building to put charter schools in might seem like part of the cost of being in the charter school business, but charter operators don’t much care for having to fork over the money. In some states, legislators have solved the problem by just allowing charter schools to just take public property. Florida is rolling out a law that lets charters take public school real estate in whole or in part just by saying, “Hey, we want that.” It’s an extraordinary law, sort of like the opposite of eminent domain, in which the facilities that taxpayers have bought and paid for suddenly belong to a private business.

HB 7086 wants to propose a similar federal solution, delivering grants to any states that come up with clever ways to gift taxpayer dollars to charters that want to build or buy some facilities, or want to come up with fun ways for charters to grab taxpayer-funded buildings.

The bill comes courtesy of Rep. Juan Ciscomani, an Arizona Republican, who just wants to make sure that every school is a great school. In a press release, he explains:

Sadly, access to appropriate and affordable school buildings for charter schools continues to be one of the biggest barriers to growth. Unlike district schools, charter schools aren’t guaranteed access to school buildings or traditional access to facilities funding sources like local property tax dollars.

Yeah, I was going to open a restaurant, but access to food and cooking supplies was a big barrier to growth, so maybe the taxpayers would like to buy that stuff for me?

Or maybe when you decide to go into a business, you do it with a plan that takes into account the cost of being in that business. Certainly the notion that building and financing facilities is easy peasy for public school systems is disconnected from reality. When West Egg Schools want a new building, they have to convince the taxpayers or else that school board will find themselves voted out of office.

If you want to get into the charter school biz, you need a plan about how you’ll manage the cost of getting into the charter school biz. “Well, get the feds to drain taxpayers to fund it for us,” is not such a plan.

Also delighted by the bill is BASIS Educational Ventures, the big honking charter chain that may have the occasional financial issues, but gets a pass on having to display financial transparency.

The bill does display one of the lies of the charter movement– that we can finance multiple school systems with the same money that wasn’t enough to fund one. Not that I expect any choicers to say so out loud. But no school district (or any other business) responds to tough money times by saying, “I know– let’s build more facilities.” The inevitable side effect of choice systems is that taxpayers end up financing redundant facilities and vast amounts of excess capacity, which means taxpayers have to be hit for even more money. Legislators continue to find creative ways to A) ignore the issue and B) legislate more paths by which taxpayer money can be funneled to choice schools.

This bill hasn’t died yet. Tell your Congressperson to drive a stake through its heart.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Ethics, Funding

Nancy Bailey: Will School Choice Kill School Sports?

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2026 //
5

Nancy Bailey is a retired educator and a dedicated ally of public schools. She understands the importance of public schools as the heart of communities, which bring parents together and teach citizenship.

In many communities, Friday night lights are an important civic ritual. Why should they be dimmed?

In this post, she voices a concern that many parents and educators share: Will school choice kill school sports?

Bailey writes:

Americans love sports, but what happens to athletic programs when democratic public schools close? Privatizing public education, so-called school choice, means drastic changes, as school officials grapple with the effects of school choice legislation.

Communities rally behind high school football in the fall, basketball during the winter, and track and field in the spring. Public schools might offer swimming, soccer, and other sports, critical for helping young people obtain college scholarships. Even though they aren’t easy to obtain, about 180,000 NCAA D1 and D2 student-athletes earn athletic scholarships each year.

School choice, including charter schools, vouchers, homeschooling, and open enrollment, alters who plays sports and undermines community pride in public schools. Defunding public schools ruins sports programs. Which students get access? Will only the wealthiest private schools get sports?

In 2023, West Virginia headlined How lawmakers helped ruin high school football in West Virginia reflecting on game “blowouts” in that state. When private schools corral all the best players, it changes the competition. It also makes for boring games. Brooke High Coach Mac McLean, whose team always struggled in the AAA class, said it’s only going to get worse: The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

School choice crusaders seem not to have thought through what happens with sports. Olivia Nutter recently wrote in Athletics Directors 411:

Proponents of school choice argue that parents should be free to choose what’s best for their children, including athletic opportunities. But that freedom raises difficult questions about fairness and competitive balance. If top talent continually migrates to a handful of programs, the very structure of high school sports could change, creating a system where access to success depends less on effort and more on ZIP code flexibility.

Consider that between 2010–11 and 2021–22, 4,000+ public secondary schools closed due to declining enrollment, unaffordable housing, lower birth rates, and an overall defunding of public education by school privatizers seeking to create schools for profit.

Parental school choice is also deceptive. Private schools, not parents, ultimately choose students. Gifted athletes will likely be welcome at a private school that prioritizes sports. Wealthy private school teams will compete with other private schools, but what about students who never got swept up in the choice program, never got identified in their poor charter schools, or in their homeschools?

Undiscovered students who haven’t yet shown their prowess in sports may not have the opportunity to do so, relegated to a fledgling public school that has lost its resources, a charter school, or homeschool, where they remain unrecognized. What if they never get the opportunity to practice sports under the eyes of a good coach?

Charter schools often lack the budget or incentive to offer quality sports programs. Sports facilities, football fields, tracks, or access to swimming pools is costly. Some may rent facilities or partner with community organizations for practice, but this can be expensive.

States like Florida allow charter school and homeschool students (7.d) to participate in traditional public school sports, but this is controversial. It dismisses the community school pride factor, a significant all-American feature of school sports. If parents don’t want their child at that public school, take tax dollars elsewhere; why get the advantage of a public school sports program? What happens when the school ultimately closes?

Missouri is another state that permits homeschool students to participate in public education sports.

Students might also leave public school sports programs for sports clubs, which have become synonymous with college recruitment across areas, though in football, they appear less so.

Athletic organizations see the problems with school choice. Both the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association (OSSAA) and the Alabama High School Athletic Association (AHSAA) ran into difficulties with their states choice programs.

As one parent puts it:

Private schools often have access to resources that public schools do not – such as better facilities, more experienced coaches or even the ability to attract top talent through scholarships. This creates an uneven playing field during playoff competitions. According to a study by The Atlantic (2013), private high school students are over twice as likely as public school students to reach Division I college sports.

Some private schools are small and also lack resources, but will be expected to compete against wealthier private schools.

School board members in Hamilton, Tennessee, voiced concern that the state’s Education Freedom Scholarship, allowing students to attend private schools, siphons desirable athletes from public schools. They worry about a drop in public school attendance, likely related to the school choice program. Sports success skews toward wealthier super schools, leaving fewer high school teams for competition.

Texas exemplifies the problems school choice creates for sports. At 2.22 on the video below they discuss how football, basketball, and track, public school sports programs beloved in that state, could be affected. It might mean laying off school coaching staff.

Cultural overemphasis and concernsabout sports injuries leave critics to advocate for the end of school sports altogether. But athletics are an ingrained American tradition, and it’s hard to see public schools successfully survive without vibrant sports and extracurricular programs.

Sports aren’t only about making future successful athletes, of course. Students benefit physically and mentally, and team sports promote positive socialization and all around good health. Students learn how to win gracefully, build confidence, but also how to lose and accept defeat without always quitting.

But if public education is fully privatized, once unimaginable, public school sports could end. Most Americans are not on board for school choice and want to see better and more support of public schooling. The loss of sports might be added in as a reason to reject school choice. It may be time for pushback and Americans rallying around their democratic public schools. Could it be?

Consider Mississippi where football in small towns is called “the fabric of the community.” Parents worried about their public schools, and the Mississippi legislature recently killed the school choice bill which would have sent public school funding to private schools.

Maybe there’s hope, not only for school sports, team building, but for democratic public schools. Perhaps we’ll soon see a public school renaissance and a great refocus on the greatness of our country and its children and their schools, not only with sports but learning. Now that’s truly a winning idea!

Categories Accountability, Charters, Ethics, Home Schooling, Parents, Students, Vouchers

Part 2: The Kind of Schools We Need Right Now!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2026 //
4

Once in a while, I make a big technical error while writing and/or posting on this blog. I made one yesterday. I wrote the first part of the blog, then accidentally posted it before it was finished.

So I’m going to summarize yesterday’s post and finish it here, although I recommend that you read part 1.

Yesterday’s post began by quoting from Rick Hanauer’s 2019 article in The Atlantic, titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.“

Rick, a wealthy venture capitalist who palled around with Bill Gates, realized that charter schools were not going to be the salvation of America, as so many of his friends believed.

He saw the light. The big problem that is ruining our society, he discovered, was not the schools, but economic inequality. Build a thriving middle class, he urged, and the schools will also thrive.

My reaction to his article was this: What do we need more of? Efforts to reduce poverty and to meet the needs of children and families. Understanding that test scores generate rewards for the wealthiest students and discouragement for the neediest. Awareness that “the achievement gap” between rich and poor never closes because standardized tests are normed on a bell curve; the bell curve, by its nature, is designed never to close.

What do we need less of? The misuse of standardized testing to rank children, teachers, and schools. The diversion of public funds from public schools to charter schools, homeschooling, cyber schools, and vouchers for nonpublic schools.

[This is where I pick up from yesterday’s unfinished post.]

With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.

In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders consider is test scores. But that is not right. For many young people whose family lives are marred by deep poverty, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They choose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.

What kind of a school is that? The closest approximation of the school that I imagined is a community school.

What are community schools?

There is no standard model, but the overall goal is to serve the urgent needs of students and their families, be they health, nutrition, academics, social, or economic. Schools can’t cure poverty, but they can directly help those in poverty to lead a better life. We don’t measure health and nutrition by their effect on test scores, but we know they are crucial.

Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents. Those wraparound services include medical check-ups, dental examinations, screening for eyeglasses.

Community schools typically have a food pantry. They also maintain a closet with warm coats and clothing.

They have social workers who connect parents with resources they need: where to find jobs, how to find housing, how to access government programs designed for them, English language classes, and other services that help them.

Annie Lowery wrote a compelling article in The Atlantic about the importance of community schools. It is titled “The Program That’s Turning Schools Around.” The subtitle, which is misleading is “The key to closing the achievement gap may lie outside the classroom.” As I said before, the achievement gap may narrow, but it never closes, because bell curves never close. And this is not the purpose of community schools. Their purpose is to meet the needs of students and families. Being well-nourished and healthy is important and necessary, regardless of its relationship to test scores.

She opens:

On a chilly day before Christmas, Teresa Rivas helped a tween boy pick out a new winter coat. “Get the bigger one, the one with the waterproof layer, mijo,” she said, before helping him pull it onto his string-bean frame. Rivas provides guidance counseling at Owen Goodnight Middle School in San Marcos, Texas. She talks with students about their goals and helps if they’re struggling in class. She’s also a trained navigator placed there by a nonprofit called Communities in Schools.

The idea behind CIS and other “community school” programs is that students can’t succeed academically if they’re struggling at home. “Between kindergarten and 12th grade, kids spend only 20 percent of their time” in a classroom, Rob Watson, the executive director of the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. If America wants kids to thrive, he said, it has to consider the 80 percent. Educators and school administrators in San Marcos, a low-income community south of Austin, agreed. “Tests and academics are very important,” Joe Mitchell, the principal of Goodnight Middle School, told me. “But they are secondary sometimes, given what these kids’ lives are like away from here.”

Along with mediating conflicts and doing test prep, Rivas helps kids’ families sign up for public benefits. She arranges for the nonprofit to cover rent payments. She sets up medical appointments, and keeps refrigerators and gas tanks full.

Lowery points out that the Trump administration is cutting the federal programs that support community schools:

But the country is veering in the other direction. The White House has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from a free-school-meal initiative, ended a $1 billion grant covering mental-health counseling, and revoked $170 million from the federal community-schools program, which helps cover the salaries of hundreds of workers like Rivas. Other whole-child initiatives might lose financing if they are found to fall under the Trump administration’s DEI rubric. At the same time, the White House is reducing financial support for low-income families, cutting more than $1 trillion from SNAP and Medicaid.

The United States wants schools to act as a “great equalizer,” yet socioeconomic differences among students remain the central drivers of student outcomes. Community schools can’t prevent homelessness, pay for health insurance, or stop parents from getting deported; they cannot construct a strong safety net. Still, they can help to close the gap.

Lowery writes about one long-lived program called Communities in Schools, which has been active for half a century and serves 2 million students in 26 states. she notes that CIS is three times the size of Headstart.

The nonprofit has a few unusual qualities. For one, it doesn’t apply rigid criteria or means tests in determining who gets help, and doesn’t provide a set menu of benefits to students and families. The model is adaptable.

In some districts, navigators focus on violence prevention or absenteeism. In San Marcos, they focus on behavioral health. Inside schools, CIS staff members created lamp-lit, womblike rooms, stocked with fidget toys and snacks, where kids can calm down and talk about their feelings. Some middle-school girls told me that Rivas helped them with “drama and stuff”—meaning “girls fighting over boys.” One boy who was having trouble sleeping and had a 69 average in math told me that Rivas was helping get his eyes shut and his grades up. “You only need one more point!” she said, beaming…

CIS workers help families navigate existing public programs. “The traditional economist view would have been, Just give people cash. They’ll figure out what to do with it,” Goldman told me. But decades of studies have found that families in crisis don’t know that help is out there, possess limited capacity to research complex social-safety-net initiatives, and are averse to signing up for benefits, given the stigma. Community schools take paperwork away from stressed-out families and put it on trained employees.

Jeff Bryant has been writing about community schools for years. Jeff is chief correspondent for Our Schools, a project of the Independent Media Institute and director of the Education Opportunity Network, a messaging center for progressive education policy.

Jeff recently published an important article about Trump’s draconian cuts to programs that support community schools.

Jeff spoke to educators at Curie High School in Chicago, who complained about the cuts and their effects on students.

Chicago schoolteacher Claudia Morales may have been reflecting the feelings of most Americans about life under the Trump presidential administration when she told Our Schools, “Every day, there’s yet another abuse. It’s scary. And it’s coming from our own government.” In her work as a bilingual program teacher and bilingual coordinator at Curie High Schoolin Chicago Public Schools (CPS), she’s been witness to one trauma after another.

“First, there were the funding cuts the Trump administration made,” said Morales, referring to the federal government’s decision to withhold more than $4 billion in funds for public education at the start of the 2025-2026 school year. CPS was particularly hit hard by the cuts, with the district losing millions it had counted on to pay for staffing positions and programs.

“Then we had ICE invade,” Morales recounted, noting that the Archer Heights neighborhood, where most of her students come from, was one of the communities targeted by the federal government’s immigration crackdown. The Trump administration’s decision to rescind the protected status that prohibited immigration raids at schools and student gathering places, like bus stops and playgrounds, made her school’s largely Hispanic student population—many of whom are recent immigrants—especially vulnerable.

“And now this,” she concluded. “This” is the December 2025 announcement from Trump’s U.S. Department of Education, signed by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, to withhold some $380 million in federal funding that was previously granted to schools from the department’s full-service community schools (FSCS) program. The initiative provides support for the planning, implementation, and operation of the community school approach to school improvement. The community school approachtransitions traditional schools from being strictly academic institutions into community hubs that provide student and family support services based on resources and voices of the surrounding community. The strategy is showing promise in improving student outcomes nationwide, but that seems irrelevant to current federal officials.

As a result of the funding cut-off to Chicago schools, according to Morales, Curie will lose money it needs to pay for tutors, after-school programs, parent education courses, and academic support for students who struggle with learning. These are programs and services parents specifically asked the school to provide, said Morales.

The loss of funding for in-school and after-school tutors will be especially damaging to the students’ academic achievement, according to educators at Curie.

When it comes to the most vulnerable students and their families, the Trump administration seems determined to make their lives harder and to cut the federal programs in which they rely.

Categories Community Schools, Education Reform

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Bad Bunny, Love, Family, Redemption, Recognition

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
5

Julian Vasquez Heilig watched the half-time performance of Bad Bunny at the NFL’s Suprrbowl and was moved to tears.

Here is why:

Some of us watched the halftime show and cried. Others changed the channel. That difference tells you everything.

If you were scrolling through Facebook or other media after the Super Bowl, what you saw depended entirely on your sphere of inclusion. Some timelines were full of joy, pride, and tears. Others filled instantly with the familiar chorus: worst halftime show ever, too political, too foreign, controversial, divisive, not for “real Americans.” Algorithms did what they always do, amplifying outrage in some spaces and celebration in others. 

What struck me most wasn’t the criticism itself, but how ready so many were to dismiss what they hadn’t even tried to feel, while others were overwhelmed by recognition. For many Latino viewers, that split wasn’t shocking at all, because it echoed a lifetime of us being told we belong in some rooms but not others, sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, often disguised as concern, taste, or tradition.

What made this rejection cut deeper is that it didn’t begin after the performance ended. It began weeks before the game, when commentators openly questioned whether this show would “connect,” a word that so often means conform, flatten, or assimilate. No one ever wondered aloud whether Kid Rock was American enough, even when his music is built on grievance, exclusion, and nostalgia for a past that never belonged to everyone. His belonging was assumed. His presence never put on trial.

At the same time, Latino culture was quietly framed as foreign, no matter how many generations it has lived here, worked here, fought here, and died here. Our music was treated like a visitor, our language like an interruption, our joy like something that needed justification. The stage was never neutral. The judgment was never waiting for the music. It had already been made, long before the lights came up. But what unfolded on that field at the Super Bowl refused to ask for permission. 

So let’s talk about what I noticed.

Sugarcane as the Opening Wound

Bad Bunny did not open with spectacle. He opened with a field covered in sugarcane, not just a backdrop, but a world presented on the field. The plants stood tall, swaying as if carried by an unseen breeze, but what most people didn’t realize in the moment is that nearly 400 humans were carefully costumed as sugarcane, blending into the scene with astonishing precision. Tall. Quiet. Unflinching. Heavy with memory. Sugarcane is how so many people of color came to the Caribbean, through chains and colonial economies that fed empires while consuming lives. It is the crop that reordered entire islands around extraction, turning land into profit and people into labor, and normalizing suffering as an economic necessity.

In Puerto Rico, sugarcane marks the moment when native Taíno worlds were shattered, not faded, not replaced, but violently erased. Declared “extinct,” even as their descendants lived on in bodies, in words, in bloodlines history tried to deny. To begin with sugarcane was to begin with truth instead of fantasy. It was to say our joy has a history, and that history was paid for with survival, endurance, and refusal to disappear.

From Fields to the Streets

The performance moved from the sugarcane fields into a different kind of economy altogether. From the fields into the cultural economy of the streets. Tacos on griddles, fruit drinks poured by hand, small businesses that exist because families willed them into being to suppor their families. What once took everything now gave way to spaces that feed people and keep memory alive through work that is chosen, not imposed. It was a quiet but powerful shift, from wealth taken to culture made, from plantations to livelihoods, from what was stolen to what was built and shared.

The Casita

From extraction to shelter. From labor to life. From history imposed to culture chosen. The Casita was not nostalgia placed on the field for sentiment. It was survival made visible, a place where memory rests without apology. I recognized it instantly because The Casita is a central feature of Bad Bunny’s current DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS world tour, and I saw it myself at his concert in Mexico City in December 2025. 

When it appears during the concert and now the Super Bowl, the entire feeling of the space changes. The arena stops feeling like something meant to be consumed and starts feeling like a neighborhood gathering, like a block party where everyone knows why they’re there. Ricky Martin, Jessica Alba, Karol G and Cardi B and Pedro Pasqual were spotted on The Casita porch at the Super Bowl. For a song, the focus shifted inward, toward intimacy, memory, and shared recognition rather than outward toward scale or spectacle.

Familia Without Age Limits

Then there was a wedding, and everything softened. Children stood beside elders, small hands near hands worn smooth by time. Adults moved between them, linking generations without needing to explain why. No one was ornamental. No one was hidden or pushed to the margins. This was not a beauty showcase designed for perfection and polish. It was a life showcase: messy, intimate, and unmistakably real.

After the vows a salsa performance broke out in the wedding party. In Latino culture, dance moves through generations like inheritance, passed the way names and recipes are passed. Young people hear rhythm before they speak, absorbing belonging before language. Grandparents hum songs older than memory, melodies tied to places they left, places they carry, places that never really let them go. Teenagers take those sounds and bend them toward the future, making something new without breaking what came before. When that wedding appeared on the field, it wasn’t spectacle. It was continuity. It was culture saying, softly but firmly, we are still here together, and we are not done loving.

Spanish Without Apology

Bad Bunny sung and spoke Spanish the entire performance. He did not translate. The screen did not translate either. In fact, my TV screen didnt even get the Spanish lyrics right. And still, the message landed. For Latino families, this moment felt deeply familiar, because they translate everything else every day. At school. At work. In hospitals. In courtrooms. In moments where clarity is demanded of us but rarely offered in return.

This time, the burden was not on us. It wasn’t defiance. It was dignity. It was a reminder that our language does not need permission to exist, and that when language is treated as a threat, the issue is not understanding. It is whose comfort has been prioritized for far too long.

Bad Bunny at the Album of the Year grammy

Then Bad Bunny paused one of the biggest stages in the world to do something profoundly delicate and human. In the middle of a performance steeped in Latino/a history, memory, and pride, he handed one of his recently won Grammy Awards to a five-year-old child actor. The gesture was quiet, unhurried, and unmistakably intentional. It was meant to represent a younger version of himself, but it also reached far beyond biography. In that moment, the Grammy became a symbol of possibility placed gently in the hands of the future.

For many watching, that was the first moment the tears came. Not because it was sentimental, but because it felt like restoration. In communities where so much has been taken—land, labor, language, and often the right to dream publicly—the act of handing something earned to a child carried enormous weight. It said that success does not have to end with one generation, that recognition can be shared, and that pride can be inherited. 

When the Flags Rose

And then it happened. The moment that broke something open. Flags from across the Americas rose, and the field turned into a family reunion. Bad Bunny spoke the names of them all. Music, movement, and memory collided in a fiesta on a field, joy too big to hold only 100 yards of field. You could feel it traveling living room to living room, chest to chest.

This wasn’t spectacle. It was release. It was the sound of people recognizing themselves all at once, across borders, accents, and histories that have always been connected.

Daring and Well Executed

Some viewers said they didn’t understand what was being said. That, in itself, is a statement about whose histories we teach and whose we erase in this nation. Nothing about this performance was accidental. It was layered, intentional, and deeply rooted in memory, lineage, and love.

So no, this wasn’t the safest halftime show ever, and it certainly wasn’t the worst. It was one of the most daring because it chose truth over comfort and belonging over approval. It trusted that love, memory, and pride could fill a stadium without asking permission.

And for families watching together, something special happened. Memories. Parents thought of grandparents who never saw themselves reflected on this stage. Representation. Children saw peers performing and honored. Wisdom. Elders watched their roles honored. 

For a few luminous minutes, the biggest stage in America felt like a home open to everyone, a casa abierta. And when Bad Bunny held out a football and the words appeared—“Together we are America”… it wasn’t a slogan. It was a recognition. Across a record 135,000,000 living rooms and kitchens, across generations gathered on couches and around tables, there may not have been a dry eye at all. There was only the quiet certainty that we are still here, still together, still carrying one another forward—together—on a stage that, for one night, felt unmistakably like the Benito Bowl.

Bad Bunny holds football with message of unity

Julian Vasquez Heilig is a Bad Bunny fan who believes that music is one of the most powerful archives of social truth. A nationally recognized policy scholar and education advocate, he examines culture not as entertainment alone but as a lens through which people understand belonging, resistance, and possibility. From his first encounter with “Vete” in a late-night Puerto Rican lounge at La Concha on Friday, December 6, 2019, to standing inside a packed Mexico City arena during the DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour, observing how crowd energy, memory, and identity move together, he approaches Bad Bunny’s work with the same curiosity he brings to public policy. For him, these moments are not just concerts or cultural events; they are data points of feeling and meaning, asking the same enduring question that guides his scholarship: What does this moment reveal about who we are, who gets to belong, and who we are becoming together?

Categories Creativity, Democracy, History, Joy, Love

The Kind of Schools That We Need Right Now

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
10

Some years back–actually it was 2019–I read an article that gladdened my heart. It was written in The Atlantic by gazillionaire Nick Hanauer. It was titled “Better Schools Won’t Fix America.”

Nick is an interesting guy. He is an entrepreneur in Seattle. He works alongside other successful venture capitalists, and for a time, partnered with Bill Gates to persuade the Washington legislature to endorse charter schools as a remedy to replace “failing” public schools.

But somewhere along the way, he had a change of mind and heart. He realized that the basic problem in the U.S. was income inequality, not “failing schools.”

He began his 2019 article:

Long ago, I was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could cure much of what ails America.

This belief system, which I have come to think of as “educationism,” is grounded in a familiar story about cause and effect: Once upon a time, America created a public-education system that was the envy of the modern world. No nation produced more or better-educated high-school and college graduates, and thus the great American middle class was built. But then, sometime around the 1970s, America lost its way. We allowed our schools to crumble, and our test scores and graduation rates to fall. School systems that once churned out well-paid factory workers failed to keep pace with the rising educational demands of the new knowledge economy. As America’s public-school systems foundered, so did the earning power of the American middle class. And as inequality increased, so did political polarization, cynicism, and anger, threatening to undermine American democracy itself.Great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around.

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million eachto an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

Hanauer recognized that the hollowing out of the middle class was harming our entire society:

In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

Hanauer’s turnaround resonated with me. He was boldly breaking ranks with his peers. I doubt he suffered ostracism, because many of the elites toy with education; it is not a vital interest to them. In my limited experience, watching the uber-rich participate on behalf of charter schools, it appeared that many were going along with the crowd, while some thought that privatization was a miracle cure.

Hanauer understood that children need a good start in life and they need a stable, secure home life to do their best in school. He understood that economic inequality undermined many children’s interest in school, which was less important than survival or a warm winter coat or medical care. He even understood that the decades-long efforts to stamp out unions contributed to economic inequality.

We spoke on the phone. I did a podcast with him. I was impressed by his keen intellect and independence of mind.

With each book I wrote about privatization, I insisted that schools are vital institutions in educating children, but they can’t do it alone. In Reign of Error, I spelled out what I considered a life-course approach to improving the chances of giving children the education they need and deserve.

In the competition between public schools and charter schools, the only measure that outsiders considered was test scores. But I knew that was not right. For many young people, it’s miraculous when they manage to show up for school. They chose to go to school, not to babysit a younger sibling, not to take a part-time job delivering to customers, not to hang out in the local park.

What kind of a school was that? I came to understand that the closest approximation of a school that I imagined was a community school. Community schools provide wraparound services to students and their parents.

Categories Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Funding, Health, Innovation, Medicine, Parents, Philanthropy, Students, Teachers

Stephen Dyer: Ohio Wants to Punish Districts That Joined a Lawsuit to Block Vouchers

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
2

Stephen Dyer, former legislator and current public school advocate in Ohio, is outraged that legislators are considering a bill to punish public school districts that joined to oppose vouchers.

In his Substack blog called “Tenth Period,” Dyer rails against the legislators who want to defund public schools.

Dyer writes:

Ohio’s Public School Districts need to be pissed. Like REALLY pissed. 

That’s because Jamie Callender — long a champion of failing Charter Schools — just introduced legislative blackmail.

House Bill 671 would withhold billions of dollars of state aid to the 330+ school districts that are suing the state over its unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies. 

Nothing like holding the futures of hundreds of thousands of Ohio’s public school students hostage to score cheap political points. 

Think of it this way: Callender would rather shut school down for hundreds of thousands of Ohio Public School students than argue for his pet program in court. Sounds like someone who thinks they’re about to lose. Bigly.

And why? So rich adults can have you, the taxpayer, subsidize their private school tuition? 

That’s one helluva hill to die on, Jamie. 

One helluva hill.

This bill is especially rich coming from Callender — a guy who stood up for ECOT and David Brennan for years while they ripped off taxpayers for hundreds of millions of dollars and failed their students. 

Obviously, if this bill passes, it will be litigated. And Callender will lose. 

What this bill truly reveals is this: Ohio Republican fear. They know their tuition subsidy program is a legal loser. They know people hate the fact that Les Wexner can get a private school tuition subsidy courtesy of Bob and Betty Buckeye. So their only hope is to cow school districts into dropping the suit.

But I know these people. And they won’t give up. In fact, this will drive more districts into the arms of Vouchers Hurt Ohio. 

Because the only way to deal with legislative extortionists is to call their bluff. 

Then beat the living shit out of them in court. 

Then beat the living shit out of them in the court of public opinion.

Then beat the living shit out of them politically. 

I have a simple message for the leaders of Ohio’s Public Education system: Are you going to let this extortionist hold your students’ futures hostage?

Our state’s 1.5 million public school students need you to fight. Not cave. 

My friends, War has been declared. 

Battle must be joined. 

To arms.

Categories Education Reform

Trump Is Selling Access to Him for $1 Million as Part of Nation’s 250th Celebration

By dianeravitch
February 9, 2026 //
5

The New York Times reported that Trump is peddling access to him for $1 million and more as part of the nation’s 250th anniversary. I have posted a link to a gift article so you can read it in full.

President Trump’s allies are offering access to him and other perks to donors who give at least $1 million to a new group supporting flashy initiatives he is planning around the nation’s 250th birthday, according to documents and interviews.

The group, Freedom 250, is threatening to overshadow years of plans meant to reach the broadest cross section of Americans for semiquincentennial celebrations. They are now taking on a Trumpian flare, replete with marble and machismo.

But Freedom 250 has also emerged as another vehicle, akin to the White House ballroom project, through which people and companies with interests before the Trump administration can make tax-deductible donations to gain access to, and seek favor with, a president who has maintained a keen interest in fund-raising, and a willingness to use the levers of government power to reward financial supporters..

Several of Freedom 250’s planned events and monuments lack obvious connections to the Boston Tea Party, the signing of the Declaration of Independence or other seminal moments in the nation’s founding. Rather, they are tailored to Mr. Trump’s political agenda and his penchant for spectacle, personal branding and legacy. They include the construction of an arch overlooking Washington, an IndyCar racethrough the nation’s capital, a national prayer event and an Ultimate Fighting Championship match on the White House lawn to coincide with the president’s 80th birthday.

Meredith O’Rourke, the president’s top fund-raiser, is amassing private donations for Freedom 250. Her team is circulating a solicitation, obtained by The New York Times, offering “bespoke packages” for donors.

While there are inconsistencies in the solicitation language, the detailed breakdowns of packages for donors indicate that those who give $1 million or more will get invitations to a “private Freedom 250 thank you reception” hosted by Mr. Trump, with a “historic photo opportunity.” Those who give $2.5 million or more also are being offered speaking roles at an event in Washington on July 4.

There is no end to the possibilities for selling access to Trump.

.

Categories For-Profit, Trump
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