The family of Tierra Walker, 37, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton because of her death. Walker died in December 2024 after she was denied an abortion that would have saved her life.
Paxton is running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat James Talarico.
The family’s lawsuit contends that the state’s near-total ban on abortion is unconstitutional.
Walker was 20 weeks pregnant. She had been diagnosed with pre-eclampsia. Her high blood pressure threatened her life.
Walker repeatedly suffered seizures and blood clots. She and her family asked for a life-saving abortion but were rejected by multiple doctors, who refused to treat her because of Texas’s harsh ban on abortions. Doctors who perform abortions will not only lose their license, they may be fined $100,000 and sentenced to life in prison.
The family is also suing the executive director of the Texas Medical Board, the University of Texas health system and individual doctors.
ProPublica reviewed Tierra Walker’s files in 2025, and at best, she was the victim of state-sanctioned malpractice. Under Texas law, the life of the fetus is protected; the life of the mother is not.
ProPublica condensed more than 6,500 pages of Walker’s medical records into a summary of her care with the guidance of two high-risk pregnancy specialists. More than a dozen OB-GYNs reviewed the case for ProPublica and said that since Walker had persistently high blood pressure, it would have been standard medical practice to advise her of the serious risks of her pregnancy early on, to revisit the conversation as new complications emerged and to offer termination at any point if she wanted it. Some described her condition as a “ticking time bomb.” Had Walker ended her pregnancy, every expert believed, she would not have died.
Many said that her case illustrated why they think all patients need the freedom to choose how much risk they are willing to take during pregnancy. Walker expressed that she didn’t want to take that risk, her family says. She had a vibrant life, a husband and son whom she loved.
Under Texas’ abortion law, though, that didn’t matter….
Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Michigan who reviewed Walker’s case, said a physician comfortable with high-risk pregnancies should have counseled her on the dangers of continuing and offered her an abortion. “The safest thing for her was to terminate this pregnancy, that’s for sure.”
During Walker’s many hospital and prenatal visits, 21 OB-GYNs were among the more than 90 physicians involved in her care. None of them counseled her on the option — or the health benefits — of a termination, according to medical records.
ProPublica points out that legislators in several states who have tried to introduce medical exemptions to their anti-abortion laws have been stopped by activists who claim that any exemption is unacceptable. They say that women will seek abortions under false pretenses and that doctors will prescribe abortion for women with nothing more than a headache.
They should talk to Tierra Walker’s family or at least read the ProPublica article.
In voucher debates around the country, parents of children with disabilities are often outspoken on behalf of vouchers. If they are dissatisfied with the services at the local public school, they feel sure they will find a private school that is better. What they don’t don’t know is that private schools do not have to follow federal laws. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not affect private schools. Stories like this one are a wake-up call. When they leave public schools, they abandon their federal rights.
Pepper Stelter of The HECHINGER Report wrote about a family in Ohio that decided to place their child in a religious school, using voucher money. When the school decided her care cost too much, they told her grandparents to withdraw her. Private schools are not required to comply with the federal disability law.
CINCINNATI — The meeting with staff members of Cincinnati Christian Schools began with a prayer. Then they told Mike Grimmer and Linda Kelly that their granddaughter could no longer attend the private school.
Annabelle Kelly had enrolled there three months earlier, in August 2025, in a program specifically for students who struggle in mainstream classrooms. Annabelle, 15, has Rett syndrome, a genetic condition accompanied by significant cognitive and developmental delays. Her grandparents, who took legal custody of Annabelle when she was 5, believed that the small, faith-based setting of CCS would be a better fit than the local public school. She received a voucher from the state through a school choice program specifically for students with disabilities, which authorized paying CCS up to $29,750 for Annabelle to attend tuition-free.
But at the meeting in November, Kelly said, the school’s director of academic support services told her and Grimmer that Annabelle’s physical and educational needs were too extensive for her to continue at CCS. If they wanted her to stay, Annabelle would need an aide to work with her one-on-one, and her grandparents would need to pay the additional cost, roughly $25,000 per year.
Disability advocates warn that as private school voucher programs spread, more parents will find themselves in similar straits. Federal protections for students with disabilities don’t apply to private schools, and neither the schools nor voucher programs like the one Annabelle qualified for are required to inform parents that they waive certain rights when they leave the public school system. When Congress passed legislation last year establishing the nation’s first federal voucher program, it did not include language that disability rights groups had lobbied for that would have required private schools receiving federal funds to follow the law known as the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act.
“If there are public funds being spent, public protections need to be afforded,” said Chris Roe, director of state policy at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, a policy advocacy organization that provides training and guidance in special education law. “At the very least, states that provide voucher programs should be required to inform parents of the rights they are giving up.”
Kelly said the decision from CCS came despite the family being transparent about Annabelle’s needs when they applied to the school: They shared medical information, copies of her academic evaluations and her learning plan from the public school she attended. The then-eighth grader attended three trial days at the school before enrolling, and several previous conferences with teachers had gone well, her grandmother said.
“We were blindsided by the school’s decision,” said Kelly.
Raymond Kochis, superintendent of Cincinnati Christian Schools, declined an interview but said in response to written questions that the costs of educating Annabelle exceeded what had been determined initially. “When a student’s needs evolve,” Kochis wrote, “the school works with the family to determine the most appropriate level of support.” (According to Kelly, Annabelle’s needs had not changed, and school officials quickly dismissed any alternative solutions she proposed.)
Private school voucher programs have proliferated in the United States in the last decade. The number of students with disabilities in these programs has grown too: In the 2025-26 school year, Annabelle was one of more than 200,000 students nationwide either using vouchers meant specifically for students with disabilities or enrolled in the country’s largest voucher programs, compared with more than 180,000 the year prior.
The federal school voucher program goes into effect next year. After failing to persuade Congress to include language stating that voucher programs and participating private schools must comply with IDEA protections, COPAA and other disability rights groups are focused on pressing states that choose to participate in the program to enforce the IDEA even for private schools.
Signed into law in 1975, the IDEA states that everyone ages three to 21 with a disability must be provided a free public education that meets their particular needs. In collaboration with parents, public school districts must develop an individualized education program, or IEP, establishing learning goals and plans appropriate for the student. The law also states that students with disabilities must be taught alongside children without disabilities “to the maximum extent appropriate.” Today, 8 million public school students are served by the IDEA.
While voucher programs like the one Annabelle received, Ohio’s Jon Peterson scholarship, are publicly funded, participating private schools like CCS control their own admissions and enrollment decisions. Students using a private school voucher are considered “parentally placed,” and private schools are not required to follow an IEP or uphold any IDEA protections. Families that use these vouchers sacrifice key civil rights afforded by the IDEA, including protection against discrimination and removal from the school based on a disability.
Kelly doesn’t remember, when filling out the scholarship application and enrolling Annabelle at CCS, being told that the rights and protections that apply to students with disabilities in public schools do not extend to private schools. Since students must have an IEP to qualify for the Jon Peterson scholarship, she assumed that the IDEA’s rules and policies would be followed.
In a response to written questions, a spokesperson for Ohio’s Department of Education and Workforce said there are multiple safeguards for students with disabilities who attend private schools. The department’s website never explicitly states that private schools are not required to comply with the IDEA’s mandates and regulations. But it does mention on a page of regulations that if a student is enrolled in a school that is not public, it is “not obligated to provide the child” with a free appropriate public education. Ultimately, the private school is not required to follow the IDEA, and parents have little recourse if the school chooses not to.
Stephen Dyer, a former legislator, keeps count. His blog is called 10th Period:
Ohio’s charter schools have underperformed for years, as compared to district public schools, but Republican legislators and state officials don’t care. Charter schools open, fail, close, and are replaced by more charter schools. Public money sustains them regardless of their poor performance.
Dyer wrote:
So if you’re paying $1.6 billion a year for an education sector whose graduates make 20% less upon graduation than public school graduates, can we really call that an option? Or is it just a waste of money. 30 years. $20 billion. And THIS is what we get in return? Outrageous.
I have now written this post in one form or another for 20 years.
Ohio Charter Schools get smoked on state report cards by Ohio School Districts.
I know, Charter School honks, you only want your performance to be compared with the Big 8 urban districts — Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.
See, here’s the problem: 53% of the kids in Ohio charter schools come from those 8 districts.
That means 47% do not.
You can’t take $1.5 billion in state aid from kids attending all but a handful of school districts and then demand your performance be compared with 8 of those 607 districts — the 8 that are typically among the state’s lowest performing¹.
Here’s what this piss-poor Charter School performance looks like in charts:
The second chart kind of says it all.
Even though Charters received less than 1 in 4 of all the stars given, they received 2 out of every 3 1 Stars (F), all of the 1.5 Stars (D-) and about 2 out of every 3 2.5 Stars (C-).
Meanwhile, districts outperformed their overall grade share in every A, B and C category. Just a horrific performance by Charter Schools, considering they’ve had 30 years, $20 billion, just a fraction of the government oversight and incredible legislative and gubernatorial protection to achieve these gawd awful results.
In only 3 categories are more than 40% of Charter School grades C or higher: Overall (53%), Gap Closing (52.2%) and Progress (79%).
On the District side, the only categories where less than 86% of their grades are C or higher are Early Literacy (66%) and Progress (58%). That’s right. In all categories, the vast majority of School District grades are C or higher.
Take it easy, Charter Honk.
Just because Charters do better on the Progress rating² does not mean they’re better schools. Why can I say that with confidence?
Because Charters do so fantastically worse on the 6 other measures, including a stunning 58% 1 Star ratings on College, Career, Work and Military Readiness!
That CCWMR rating seems to be keeping in line with my post from this morning outlining how Charter School graduates make 20% less over their lifetimes than traditional public school graduates, which costs them hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Look, guys. All I can do is keep pointing all this out and hope that elected officials in Columbus stop drinking the Charter School Kool-Aid at some point.
To recap, here’s all we’ve found out over the last couple weeks about these things:
They receive 2 out of every 3 of failing grades on the most recent state report card
More than 1 in 3 are on the state’s lowest-performing building list.
More than 9 in 10 “Dropout Recovery” charters are on the list.
About 1 in 5 charters have been on the list since 2018.
More than 1 in 2 charter schools that have ever opened in Ohio are now closed.
They received more than 1/2 of all F grades ever given to schools on Ohio’s Report Card, despite representing about 10% of all Ohio school buildings.
They spend almost double the share of their funding on non-instructional administrators that Ohio’s traditional public schools spend.
They receive more than double the state funding that a traditional Ohio public school student receives.
They spend more, on average, per pupil than a traditional Ohio Public School District, even though charters can’t collect local revenue (except for a handful in Cleveland).
They produced the single largest taxpayer ripoff scam in Ohio history, largely enabled by Sen. Jon Husted, and are constantly being busted for fraud and other corrupt practices.
Charter School students are about 7 percent of the state’s school population, but receive 12 percent of the state’s funding for schools.
That funding (along with EdChoice vouchers) is preventing the state from fully funding its own formula to provide resources to the state’s 1.5 million traditional public school students.
More than 1 in 10 Ohio charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list and 7 out of every 10 schools suspected of cheating on their state tests are charter schools.
More than 1 in 4 of the state’s “high performing” charter schools are on the state’s suspected test cheating list.
They have cost charter school graduates between $247 million and $321 million since 2018 and will cost them between $1.8 billion and $6.7 billion over their collective lifetimes.
Will any of this finally break through?
I guess we’ll find out in a couple months.
1.
I also don’t compare public school building performance with charters because the money for charters comes out of the same money pot meant for kids in districts. So the money comes out of the state aid to every building in a district — the lowest-performing and highest-performing ones. That’s why I’ve always only compared performance between districts and charters. Because if charters are going to be a worthwhile public policy endeavor, then they have to be worth taking state money away from kids in the state’s highest-performing buildings, not just the ones in the lowest-performing ones. I would argue that taking any state money from any public school kids, regardless of report card rating, to fund charters and unconstitutional private school tuition subsidies is public policy disaster. But that’s another argument for another day.
2.
About 43% of school district grades that are C or higher are Cs. Nearly 1/2 of all charter grades that are C or higher in Progress are Cs.
It is time for the Trump-appointed members of the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to be fired by Congress or to resign.
They have failed in their most fundamental duty, the duty to protect the function and reputation of the institution they serve.
Being a board member is not a perk. It’s a responsibility.
Above all, board members are responsible to safeguard the institution.
Before Trump, the Center had a bipartisan board and a nonpartisan reputation. It was dedicated to celebrating the best of American art and culture.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the reputation of an institution.
One doesn’t become a board member to destroy the finances of an institution.
The Kennedy Center was built as a living memorial to President John F. Kennedy. He had a singular interest in the arts. He frequently invited artists and poets to speak and perform in the White House.
The board of the Kennedy Center appointed by Trump has been slavishly devoted to turning the memorial into a center honoring both Trump and Kennedy.
They violated their oath and their fiduciary duty from the beginning.
Their rank politicization of the Center drove artists and performers away. It drove away the Washington National Opera. It drove the National Symphony Orchestra to financial ruin.
It drove away the audiences who loved the Center and never thought of it as a partisan performance space. Ticket sales plummeted.
The board fought in the courts to keep Trump’s name on memorial, where it did not belong.
The Trump board repeatedly lost in court; a federal judge concluded that Congress named the Center and only Congress could change its name.
So the board has now decided to close the Center, and Trump has said he will block funding for the Center’s renovation unless his name is put on the facade. He wants to share the Kennedy memorial.
It is not his to share, anymore than the Lincoln Memorial or the Jefferson Memorial.
The board has joined Trump in desecrating the Kennedy Center.
The members of the board appointed by Trump are responsible for this mess.
For some of us, it is a delightful surprise when the U.S. Supreme Court rules against a request by the Trump administration. We were stunned when Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected Missouri’s mid-term gerrymander and was backed by SCOTUS.
But nonetheless we worried about how SCOTUS would respond to Trump’s attempt to give the Postal Service control of voting. The Constitution is clear about the power of the states to regulate their elections. The Trump lawyers treated this radical shift of power as a minor regulatory adjustment. It was not. It was a power grab.
If Trump’s attack on mailed ballots had succeeded, it would have given a significant advantage to Republicans in the upcoming midterms because Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans in the last several US election cycles.
The decision is a rout. Trump didn’t just lose; the Court’s brief order slips in a line indicating that Trump exceeded his authority and cannot implement such an attack on voting by mail under any circumstances. Not one member of the Court, including the dissenting justices, argues that Trump had the power to shut down voting by mail in the way he attempted to. Trump, in other words, found a line that even this Supreme Court would not let him cross.
The decision in USPS is also the second Supreme Court decision in less than a week that shuts down a Republican Party effort to skew the 2026 midterms in its favor. Last week, the Court ruled that the state of Missouri must use the same congressional maps it used in 2024 (which elected two Democrats), instead of new maps that were expected to elect seven Republicans and only one Democrat.
All of this, from a Court where Republicans hold six of nine seats, and where that Republican majority is often unafraid to go out on a limb to benefit the GOP and its leaders. This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes.
So what’s going on?
The short answer is that, as the Court moves rightward, the mix of cases that reaches the Supreme Court also changes. Liberals and Democrats — or, at least, savvy liberals and Democrats — stop bringing lawsuits that rest on legal theories that right-leaning judges are unlikely to accept. Republicans, meanwhile, grow more brazen and start bringing cases that would be summarily rejected by a less friendly bench. And red-state lawmakers decide to roll the dice on laws that would be immediately declared unconstitutional if the federal courts were less Republican.
As Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote after the Court (despite its Republican majority) had an unusually liberal term in 2015, “the court’s recent decisions may reflect a change in the cases being considered by the court rather than a shift in the preferences of the justices.”
Eventually, however, lawyers and policymakers who raise dubious legal theories or who enact clearly illegal policies will do something that is so beyond the pale that the justices will start to push back, and that’s what happened in USPS. Republican lawyers and policymakers will undoubtedly make more attempts to skew the midterms in the coming weeks. At the very least, the USPS decision shows that there are some limits to what this Court will tolerate.
Trump lost, badly
Trump’s attack on voting by mail wasn’t just illegal; it also imposed such heavy burdens on state election officials so close to the 2026 election that it likely would have been impossible for many states to comply with Trump’s new policy.
USPS concerned a wide range of new restrictions on mailed ballots that the Trump administration announced in late August, just weeks before states needed to start mailing those ballots to voters. Among other things, the new rules required states to mail ballots in envelopes that include several federally mandated design features. These envelopes were to be preapproved by a federal official, and the Postal Service would refuse to deliver ballots that do not comply.
The new rules also required state officials to enter certain voter data into an online platform that doesn’t actually exist yet, but that the Trump administration has insisted will be available anytime now.
Many of the new rules appeared designed to make it impossible for states to distribute ballots by mail. One new requirement, for example, was that mail ballot envelopes must be individually scanned in a process that the Trump administration claimed will take “less than a minute per mailpiece.”
But, as several states that sued to block the rules pointed out in their complaint, the state of California alone needs to mail 23 million ballots to voters. So that adds up to as much as “23 million minutes…or more than 43 years” that state officials would need to spend just to comply with one small part of the new regulations.
Broadly speaking, the Court could have blocked these new requirements in two ways. They could have either concluded, as several lower courts already have, that the Trump administration lacks the legal authority to issue the new rules. Alternatively, the Court could have concluded that it would not be “equitable” to allow the new rules to go into effect during the 2026 election, given the high likelihood that states could not comply with them.
A majority of the justices, however, decided to go with both options. Though the Court’s order is brief — only three sentences long — it states both that Trump is “unlikely to succeed on the merits” of his claim that the new rules are legal, and also that “the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor” Trump.
Translated from the legalese, that means that most of the justices concluded both that the new rules cannot be implemented in 2026, but also that they most likely cannot be used in any election because the Trump administration lacks the authority to implement them.
Justice Samuel Alito is the Court’s most reliable Republican Party partisan, and so he did write a dissent, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, that would allow Trump’s attack on mailed ballots to take effect. But it’s notable that even Alito doesn’t try to argue that Trump’s rule is legal. Instead, Alito makes a convoluted procedural argument that, he claims, allows Trump to dodge judicial review of his new rules — at least for now.
Briefly, Alito argues that federal law makes it relatively easy for plaintiffs to challenge Postal Service rules governing “the mailability of matter,” but much harder to challenge rules that do not concern what can be mailed. He also claims that Trump’s new rules do not count as restrictions on “mailability,” even though those rules would forbid the Postal Service from delivering ballots that do not comply with a labyrinth of new restrictions.
Alito, in other words, is clearly much more willing to excuse weak arguments from the leader of his own political party than are many of his colleagues. But the biggest takeaway from the USPS decision is that not all of the Court’s Republicans are incapable of shame.
But there is apparently still a line that most of the Republican justices will not allow Trump to cross. And shutting down voting by mail a couple of months before an election crosses that line.
Audrey Watters is one of the very best writers about education. She specializes in debunking pretentious claims for technology.
In this post, she slices and dices the AlphaSchool, which is the highly-promoted fad of the moment.
AlphaSchool limits academic leaning to only two hours a day. It relies heavily on technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI).
Watters cites other critiques of AlphaSchool and adds her own. All in all, it is a valuable article.
Watters writes:
Perhaps you’ve read Ben Riley’s exposé on AlphaSchool’s “boot camp” — along with his follow-up in which the school provides even more creepy details on the bizarre eight-week training program that high school students enrolled in the private school must complete.
Perhaps you haven’t.
Perhaps you’ve blocked from your memory the whole AlphaSchool insanity: the promise of “two hour learning” – two hours a day spent clicking through AI-mediated educational programming – that seems to have captivated the imagination of the usual crowd of tech investors and evangelists (and sadly, a fair number of journalists). I don’t blame you. Indeed, I congratulate you if you’ve been able to ignore it, as the hype-sters won’t let us go a single day without hammering us with how transformative (and terrible) the “AI” revolution will be.
Or perhaps, like me, you simply cannot believe that we’re still talking about this very ridiculous “AI” revolution and, in particular, this very ridiculous school. (I’m cited in Ben’s piece calling AlphaSchool “snake oil” and I stand by that – the “two hour learning” claim merely the latest in a long history of educational gimmicks and fads where some hustler claims their product will enable buyers to quickly, even instantly, acquire new knowledge.)
Honestly, I felt as though Dan Meyer thoroughly debunked the whole premise of the school – and not just the “two hour learning” with “AI” instead of teachers bullshit – when he first wrote about AlphaSchool over a year ago. Over a year ago.
But instead of letting a bad idea fade away – and yes, we could say that for this whole “AI” brouhaha – there’s a group of very committed people sold on, and in turn, selling the story. It’s exhausting and it’s depressing, particularly as too many decision-makers in too many places still believe there is a magic ed-tech bullet. AlphaSchool keeps expanding to new cities and new states, even though it’s never being able to show that it works for all (or hell, even most) students. Indeed, reporting from Wired and 404 Media (and elsewhere) has underscored that there are all sorts of bad things afoot: both in the AlphaSchool software systems and in the classrooms themselves.
(I’ve noted this before…) There’s a scene that’s been stuck in my head for over a decade now, from a 2012 episode of PBS NewsHour, in which journalist John Merrow explored the promises of “hot new startup/school” of that decade: Rocketship. The charter school chain was also technology-driven (and tech-investor lauded and funded); it also promised to replace teachers with algorithms. Its students, most of them Black and brown children from lower socio-economic backgrounds, sat in colorful cubicles for much of their day, headphones on, bored and isolated and clicking away at their lessons.
For its part, AlphaSchool also has plans to expand into the (historically prettyterrible) virtual charter school territory. But the schools that have made most of the headlines have been its private brick-and-mortar locations – those with tuition that ranges from $10,000 to $75,000 per year. The target population for AlphaSchool aren’t disadvantaged students; and I suppose it might be easy to argue that these more privileged students will be fine even if the two hours of mandated teaching-machine-time is less than ideal, as the rest of their school day (and, of course, the rest of their lives) will be full of fun, enriching activities and opportunities.
“What the hell are we doing to these children?” I thought when I watched PBS NewsHour. To me, Rocketship exemplified the ways in which – despite all the language of “progress” often wielded to make ed-tech seem appealing to schools, to parents, to communities – these technologies and associated practices served to reinforce regimes of surveillance and control, utterly dehumanizing students as it datafied them.
Many of the charter schools that were so popular – then and now, I suppose – with the ed-tech and ed-reform crowds also touted a focus on “character education.” They demanded compliance, indeed often silence, from students. These programs were obsessed with behavior, linking students’ outward expressions to their inward development.
AlphaSchool is eerily similar, even though its private schools are not marketed to low-income or marginalized families. AlphaSchool too operates a regime of surveillance and control. As Ben’s reporting underscores, it too is committed to dehumanization, humiliation, shame. And personalized learning software – whether you market it as “AI” or not – always relies on behavioral engineering.
But the “character education” that AlphaSchool doesn’t demand silence or compliance in the same way – again, the appeal here is to parents who believe their child is the next genius tech entrepreneur billionaire. But it is damaging in its own right. AlphaSchool, as we can see in the details of the bootcamp, actively demands students mold their behavior and their identity, in this case into some sort of John Galt figure. The school’s programming leans into the kind of pseudoscience that litters the pages of bestselling “get rich quick books” – psychological pseudoscience, economic pseudoscience alike – and the ideology of Silicon Valley’s startup hustle. All of this is the kind of messaging you can regularly find on social media, no surprise, since this seems to be a school fixated on the anti-expertise of influencer-culture, the sociopathy of tech-culture: move fast and break things.
“What the hell are we doing to these children?”
“Do not obey in advance.”
I often think about Timothy Snyder’s first lesson in his book On Tyranny – his guidance for protecting democracy. “Do not obey in advance.” It works for fighting fascism; it works for fighting “AI” – they’re inextricable.
This week it seemed as clear as ever that “AI” is being marketed, even by its makers, as a threat. A threat to everything and everyone; a threat to life, to the very idea of future itself.
And sure, it’s a lot of “misleading metaphors” as Melanie Mitchell put it. I don’t think that “AI” is going to kill us all (although the rapacious, climate-destroying commitment to fossil fuels and data centers is sure gonna try). But when “AI” proponents say this, they really do mean it as a threat, even if they don’t necessarily believe it to be an existential one. “AI” is a threat, and they want us to comply. They want us to consume. They want us to obey. They want us to click. They want us to cower. They want us to fear. They want us to be reliant on their machinery, their answers, their ideology.
Of course, as Ryan Broderick put it, “AI is still boring and also bad and also expensive.” Resisting it really shouldn’t be that hard. It sucks. Software sucks. The oligarchs’ vision of the future sucks.
There isn’t really conclusive evidence that asking “good questions” means that you get better answers from “AI.” I know it might seem true. We’re taught that asking good questions – learning to form and ask good questions – is essential to knowledge acquisition, to knowledge expansion. We glorify the Socratic method. We admire people like Terri Gross, for example, because as an interviewer she has a knack for asking very good questions that, in turn, elicit very interesting responses from the guests on her show.
But that is not how LLMs or chatbots function. “Good questions” aren’t necessarily what elicits “good answers” – indeed no amount of “good questions” will consistently lead to a “good answer” from a probabilistic technology. Learning how to type “good questions” into the chatbot, teaching students to think of their inquiry as “prompt engineering” – these involve demanding students bend their thinking, in form and in content, to suit the interface, the machinery of surveillance and extraction.
Sure, asking questions is important. We should all wonder. We should be curious, and we should all have the right and the courage to question. But forming those questions – even outside the chat interface – is just one piece of how we think and learn. The questions themselves are never really the goal; but nor are some sort of finitude in the answers we uncover in turn. And questions are not always framed first or formed fully before understanding starts to happen.
We aren’t machines, so let’s stop instrumentalizing every part of our cognition, constrained by that terrible metaphor.
(We might stop to think too how, in light of all the compliance that the technology industry craves from us, “good questions” – again, whatever that means – are the one place where they promise we will still retain agency and control over “AI.” See? Maybe “good questions” really don’t matter at all.)
The culture war battles we fight over our public schools are fundamentally disagreements about American values: what does it mean to be an American, and in whose image do we build our public schools?
“When Americans start fighting over their schools, you can be fairly sure of one thing: it probably isn’t really about school.”
— Jennifer Berkshire & Jack Schneider,
The Education Wars: A Citizen’s Guide and Defense Manual
From working as Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration to laying the foundation of the modern conservative education reform movement, Diane Ravitch—a one-time champion of No Child Left Behind—spent most of her life as a Republican with conservative values. The story of her life, as told in her 2025 memoir, is the story of the American Century. As today’s culture war on “wokeness” and “leftist indoctrination” targets diversity, equity, and inclusion in schools, Ravitch’s memoir makes a powerful case study for teaching these core American values.
Born in Houston in 1938, Diane recounts celebrating VJ Day with her family as a young child, surrounded by returning sailors and the pop of firecrackers. She learned to write with a quill pen and attended a segregated high school when the Supreme Court declared that unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. The descendant of Polish Jews who came to America in the 1850s, Diane experienced a level of antisemitism and misogyny in her personal and professional life that by today’s standards would be galling (and illegal). She learned as an adult that the entire Jewish community where her grandfather was born was murdered in the Holocaust.
Ravitch’s interest in education didn’t begin until she began attending community meetings as the only white person in the room with parents in Harlem, New York who had felt shut out of the school district’s planning process. As a member of the Silent Generation, she made explicit demands of American wealth and greatness:
“Why shouldn’t all people in our rich society—regardless of their wealth or class or race or personal attributes—have a decent life, meaning health care, decent housing, good schools, food security, and physical safety?…I think these are preconditions for a good society.”
If Diane’s values were informed by a life lived in the greatness of the American Century, what made America great was the steady—and always imperfect—realization of those values in action. The New Deal aligned our immense national resources toward popular economic recovery from the depths of the Great Depression, even as jobs and housing programs discriminated against Black Americans. The GI Bill helped create a thriving post-war middle class by providing housing to millions of veterans and their families and sending millions more to college, even as Black veterans were segregated out of the nation’s suburbs and universities.
As we underwent a decades-long civil rights revolution at home, the postwar world we rebuilt in our image was of an idealized United States that overcame a violent and prejudicial past to renew itself as a more diverse, pluralistic, multicultural, democratic, and egalitarian nation.
E Pluribus Unum. Out of Many, One.
Uneven and flawed as it was, American prosperity did grow in proportion to our inclusivity: by expanding citizenship and voting rights, integrating and publicly supporting schools and universities, asserting our obligations to the elderly and those in poverty, and protecting the rights of marginalized groups. The American Dream became a shorthand for people who came here to start their lives over, even from countries victimized by U.S. foreign policy, knowing their best days were ahead of them. And as Americans watched the Times Square ball drop on the eve of Y2K, they were standing in the most powerful, prosperous, innovative, and culturally dominant nation in the history of the world.
Now, at age 87, Ravitch reflects on how conservative politics abandoned these core values and caused her to leave the Republican Party in the early 2000s, as they became increasingly dominated by self-serving corporations, wealthy donors, and religious interests. “To use current parlance, I went from being a staunch conservative to being ‘woke,’” she writes, adding, “I wear the label with pride. To me, it means that I awakened to the inequity and injustice that deprives millions of people of a good life, the life that everyone wants and deserves.”
In other words, by taking seriously the charge of our founding documents to become “a more perfect union”, taking up “the unfinished work” of the American experiment, and bending the moral arc of the universe toward justice over the course of the 20th century, Diane Ravitch—like America itself—became woke.
Our fights about schools are really battles over American values and what it means to be an American, and the War on Woke has always been a war on American values.
At the start of this midterm election year, Moms For Liberty hosted Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidates in a debate that focused largely on education. Candidates spent their time hammering“leftist indoctrination” in teacher education and classroom teaching, with one complaining about “downright evil” ideology pushed on students in reference to a book about a boy wearing a dress to school. Another called for the installation of the Ten Commandments as a way to put the “concept of God” back in schools. Zach Lahn, founder of the unaccredited private Wonder School and current Republican nominee for governor, offered the closest thing to a positive vision with a partisan twist arguing, “Public school is to promote civic virtue, to understand the principles of faith in our country and our culture.”
The trouble comes in whose answer we enshrine in law, turn into policy, and live in the public sphere through our public education system:
What kind of nation are we?
What is the role of public education—that is, the system of tuition-free common schools mandated in our state constitution, accessible to all students, and maintained by taxpayer dollars—in a nation like ours?
What subjects and practices will inform such a system?
Whose values will we train in the adults who teach our children?
Today’s Republican Party demands that we forget the hard-fought lessons of history and remove challenging perspectives, making easier for children to believe in nationalist mythology than the imperfect lived reality of people like Diane Ravitch. A closer look at their changing values and legislative agenda tells us exactly what today’s Republican Party means when they appeal to “civic virtue” and “principles of faith in our country and our culture” in education: in the guise of a war on “woke” diversity, equity, and inclusion, Republican policies are at war with the very materials that made America great.
In Iowa, this has manifested as de-facto book bans and banning so-called “specific defined concepts” from public school curriculum. In response to Iowa’s vague and punitive “age appropriate” school materials law in 2023, schools immediately removed more than 3,000 books. The most removed literary classics included Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners written by Nobel Prize laureates: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Bluest Eye, Beloved, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Brave New World, and Slaughterhouse-Five among them.
These are perspectives that speak honestly about racial, sexual, and gendered abuse and violence, sometimes all at once, and inform a shared past that tolerated and protected it. They’re also some of the most acclaimed and influential works in American and English literature. It’s no accident that most of them are either written by Black authors, by women, or center the experiences of Black people in America.
Iowa Republicans have also banned so-called “specific defined concepts” from mandatory staff or student training. House File 802, in effect since July 2021, makes it a violation to conduct training that the United States and Iowa “are fundamentally or systemically racist or sexist,” that anyone “bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex,” or that “meritocracy or traits such as a hard work ethic are racist or sexist.” One banned concept forbids including in mandatory training that any student “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.”
Although the law states that it does not “Prohibit the use of curriculum that teaches the topics of sexism, slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination,” and does not “Prohibit discussing specific defined concepts as part of a larger course of academic instruction,” it was widely misunderstood to prohibit classroom teaching about those topics.
The impact of House File 802 has been a documented chilling effect and over-compliance owing to the vagueness of the law as written and interpreted. In one interview-based study, Iowa educators described themselves as surveilled, isolated, and self-censoring. The researchers reported that “the perceived lack of clarity and guidance on this law fueled concerns about their ability to be effective justice-oriented administrators and classroom teachers,” and that teacher candidates are afraid of unintentional violations of the law.
These explicit bans on books and the implicit self-censoring of difficult curriculum leave our kids less prepared for the world outside of school, and outside of Iowa, and create a gap in our children’s public education that is ready to be filled by social media influencers, misinformation, and propaganda.
Public schools are the institution where American values are practiced and lived, not just taught, and where we build shared American identity. All of our fights about books, curriculum, and school choice programs are really arguments over whose answers to these questions we write into law and into the lives of children where the stakes become very real. Through intention or its absence, built by us or built for us, the very real and shared world we inhabit is built bit by bit each day.
The question isn’t whether we teach values in public schools—we always have and we always will. The question is whether we teach the values that actually made this country great: pluralism, inclusion, democratic participation, honest history, and the belief that every child deserves a free and appropriate public education.
“I was a patriot who never questioned my country and its leaders. My complacency was a reflection of my comfort and affluence; radicalism had no appeal to me. If I were to meet that version of myself today, we would have a vigorous argument over everything related to education, race, and politics, although I still abhor violence. Today I want change, demonstrable change that narrows the gap between rich and poor; that provides equal opportunity to all; and that ensures health care and good education as a matter of right, not income. I am still not a radical. I don’t want to overthrow the government. I want it to work on behalf of its ideals to benefit everyone.”
— Diane Ravitch,
An Education: How I Changed My Mind About Schools and Almost Everything Else
President Trump wants to put his name on the performing arts center established as a memorial to the assassinated President. A federal judge said no. Congress named the building and only Congress may change its name.
The board tried again, determined to acknowledge Trump for the work he had not yet performed to renovate and repair the building. Trump wants a legacy, even if it means adding his name to a memorial for another president. Trump was a young man when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Trump must have thought it would be impressive to make himself a co-equal of Kennedy.
Washington — A federal judge again blocked the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Board of Trustees from adding President Trump’s name on the building on Tuesday, finding that a proposed resolution to add Mr. Trump’s name to the building “bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with Rep. Joyce Beatty, a board member who sued last year over Mr. Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center. Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, argued that the board’s recent efforts to recognize the president violate federal law, and her legal team asked Cooper to issue emergency relief blocking the changes.
“Defendants are hereby enjoined from inscribing “renovated and restored by Donald J. Trump” on the main building or renaming the campus the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza,” Cooper wrote in a 22-page opinion. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing. The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
Steve Schmidt used to be a prominent Republican strategist. Then came Trump, and Schmidt became a never-Trumper.
In this post, he shares his hope that South Carolina will reject Lindsey Graham’s sister in the race for his Senate seat because she is unfit to be a senator.
I don’t share his optimism. Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, and Marsha Blackburn are senators. Trump is President.
There is a considerable segment of the population that chooses Senators who are dumb, who are unworthy.
Will South Carolina be different?
The choice for South Carolinians: Darline Graham or Dr. Annie Andrews
Darlene Graham is an imbecile — a peerless puppet for the MAGA poltroons.
Here she is on national security:
Despite national security not being “her thing” she also said that Israel is “one of our strongest allies,” and vowed to “continue supporting Israel in any way.”
She is a United States senator.
Think about that.
For the record, here is the Constitutional oath she took — and doesn’t comprehend at any discernible level:
I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
It is beyond her grasp.
Most things seem to be.…
I have a great friend by the name of Paul with whom I have travelled all over the world. I consider him to be one of the funniest people I have ever known. Everywhere we go, whether it be fishing, rafting, skydiving or anything else, he asks the guide the same question: what is the stupidest question you’ve ever been asked? His dream is to write a book with all of the answers, and trust me, it would be a bestseller.
At any rate, a Montana fishing guide told us about a woman he had taken on a float trip down the Madison River, which starts at point A and finishes at point B.
When this particular trip ended, the woman in question was astounded to see the same vehicle waiting at the end that had dropped her off at the beginning. She declared that she had no idea the river was a circle just like the lazy river at the amusement park.
Americans have long been raised to believe that there are no stupid questions, but that isn’t true. All one need do to understand the flimsiness of the theory is to turn on a Sunday morning show, or watch the White House press corps in action, minus Kaitlin Collins.
Elections are choices, and choices are always rooted in a question.
The last question is a perfect refutation to the idea there are no stupid questions because there are few choices that have ever been more clear, and maybe no two Senate candidates separated by a wider gulf.
While Annie Andrews was at medical school I imagine Darline Graham struggling to interpret the TV guide, and processing the fact that “Will and Grace” wasn’t evidence of sorcery.
Darline Graham doesn’t know anything about the military.
Nothing.
She doesn’t support the troops. They are invisible to her. They matter not in her service to Trump.
Think about the stunning reality that U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Randy George was cashiered by Pete Hegseth for refusing to interfere in the findings of a safety investigation concerning the awful judgement of two army helicopter pilots, who took their $20 million taxpayer-paid-for machine and weapons platform on a joy ride to Kid Rock’s house.
The man who is lining up to replace him is similar to the new CNO Admiral Daryl Caudle, who earned the job the MAGA way — with knee pads on, mouth open, facing Trump’s bruised hands laying gently above his knee, two feet above his engorged ankles.
Let’s just say it is unbecoming, to say the least.
Supporting the troops means appreciating their cause, which is our cause
It is America.
General Mark Milley’s portrait will one day hang in the currently disgraced Pentagon.
Here are the words he spoke that so enraged Trump and his drunken Fox News crackpot Pete Hegseth that led to it being taken down.
The blood we spill pays for our freedom of speech, our right to assemble, our due process, our freedom of press, our right to vote, and all the other rights and privileges that come with being an American.
It is the blood of our fallen, it is the blood of our wounded that sustains our freedom. We should always be inspired by them, we should never forget them, and we should always honor them. We, the American military, never turn our back on those that came before us. And we will never turn our back on the Constitution. That is who we are, and that is why we fight.
Supporting the troops is something Darline Graham will never be accused of doing, and neither will any fool who votes for her. When I say fool, I mean it.
Only a true fool would vote for an imbecile to decide matters of war and peace, life and death, right and wrong on their behalf.
I have another friend, not Paul, who doesn’t believe Lindsey Graham is really dead.
For the record, Paul believes both Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham are dead, and burning in hell — which he really doesn’t believe in — but believes those two are now there together, hot tubbing in a vat of sulphuric lava.
Anyway, my other friend’s theory is that since he can’t recall ever having seen Lindsey and Darline together before Lindsey’s early check-out that, in fact, Lindsey has transitioned into Darline with Trump’s full permission and understanding they won’t play golf together again.
You see, at Mar-a-Lago the ladies can chase after golf carts, be assaulted in the locker rooms or on the massage tables, be buried on the first tee, and even tee off on Tuesday afternoons, but playing with the Führer, not so much.
At any rate, as Pope Francis said, “Who am I to judge?”
Lest there be confusion I mean my friend — not Darline, whom I do judge.
She is a perfect puppet because she is a perfect know-nothing, a rubber stamp with no character.
She has no character, not because she is an imbecile, but rather because of her seeming joy in punching down:
Boys do not have any place in girls’ sports, certainly not in the locker room.
She is focused on transgender issues, while we are losing a war with Iran and starting trade wars with China, Canada, and most of our allies.
Babies and toddlers are being abused in concentration camps named Dilley.
The American economy is en route to implosion as the AI bubble pops.
America has become corrupt, weak, mean and dangerous.
We have been disgraced by our own hand and our own choices as a free people.
We have dishonored our ancestors and betrayed our descendants. We are the generation that succumbed to the demagogue whom the founders feared.
We are the generation that elected Donald John Trump to the office first held by George Washington.
We are the generation that has lost the capacity to tell right from wrong, tell the difference between the lie and the truth, and understand the meaning of patriotism.
Or have we?
This is why South Carolina matters.
The choice on the ballot is America or Trump.
The choice is loyalty or betrayal.
The choice is Dr. Annie Andrews because she is exceptional, and Darline Graham is dumb, lazy, ignorant and mean.
The death of Dolly Parton of Locust Ridge, Tennessee, has reverberated around the world because she was a giant whose gospel was kindness and love, not cruelty.
She said this of politics with a big ole’ American smile plastered on her face:
My father was a Republican, my mother was a Democrat, and I’m a hypocrite.
Some people say Dolly Parton stayed out of politics, but I think that misses the mark. Her statement above makes clear she understood the business and America better than almost anyone who holds elected office in it. She chose to be above politics by being a great American.
Darline Graham is an unaccomplished American who has achieved nothing, stood for nothing, fought for nothing, and understands next to nothing about anything that is happening around her.
Her campaign is vicious and small, perfectly molded for a vapid and idiotic electorate that MAGA believes is an impenetrable redoubt.
I’m not so sure.
My money is on better.
My faith is that Dr. Annie Andrews is going to the US Senate because, in the end, I think South Carolina is an American state, not a MAGA colony.
Several years ago, I posted an item critical of homeschooling. I was bombarded by angry letters written by homeschooling parents. How dare I? The reaction made me cautious about stirring that hornet’s nest again, but I feel compelled to say what I believe.
Homeschooling is a bad idea. A terrible idea. Very, very few parents have the knowledge and skills to teach their children well. No matter what curriculum they buy, very few have the ability to provide the resources of a good public school.
Teachers are prepared to teach reading, writing, mathematics, and social studies. Their work is supplemented by teachers of science, art, music, and foreign languages.
In good public schools, students with disabilities get well-educated teachers, small classes, and individual attention.
Students in public schools may participate in drama, orchestra, jazz band, and advanced technology classes, all supervised by well-trained professionals. They may choose to participate on sports teams, in film-making, and in other activities. If they want to go beyond, there are advanced classes in most subjects.
Homeschooling means that children are completely dependent on their parents, for better or worse. If their parents are ignorant, so too will be their children. If their parents are sadists, no one will know or care.
In 2018, a couple with 13 children claimed to be homeschooling them. Instead, they were chained to their beds, beaten, starved, sexually abused--and the state of California didn’t pay attention. Edwin Rios of Mother Jones wrote about the ferocious homeschooling parents and their lobbyists who opposed any effort to regulate them.
Riverside, California (CNN) — A California district attorney painted a horrible picture of physical and emotional abuse as he announced torture charges Thursday against a Riverside County couple accused of keeping their 13 children captive and malnourished in their home.
Recently, I wrote a post about two grandparents in Florida who imprisoned four children in the cab of their semi-truck for six years. During that time, the grandparents “homeschooled” the children by purchasing Khan Academy ideas. The children reported frequent sexual abuse.
David Turpin, 56, and Louise Turpin, 49, were charged with 12 counts of torture, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said. David Turpin also was charged with a lewd act on a child by force or fear of duress….
Of the victims, Hestrin said: “They’re relieved. … Their health is being looked at. They’re in good hands. As far as where they’re going to end up, I don’t know.”
The 13 siblings range in age from 2 to 29. Six are minors.
Germany bans home schooling. It wants children to have a real education, not to live at the mercy of their parents, who may be abusive and ignorant.
In the United States, we pay parents who refuse to send their children to school.
Diane Ravitch's blog 