MS NOW is live-streaming the removal of Trump’s name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Right now.
Federal Judge Christopher Cooper turned down a request by the current administration of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to delay his previous order to remove Trump’s name from the building and all other signage.
Soon after his inauguration, Trump replaced the bipartisan board of the Kennedy Center with his allies, who promptly selected Trump as chairman of the board. The only non-Trump Democrat appointee who remained was ex-officio member Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio). The other board members tried to prevent her from participating in votes, but she persisted and filed the lawsuit to take Trump’s name down.
Trump has nearly destroyed the Kennedy Center since he took control. He replaced key administrators with his lackeys. The shake-up alienated audiences and performers. Artists canceled their performances, and ticket sales plummeted.
The board addressed the crisis by deciding to close the Kennedy Center for two years for renovations, possibly total demolition. The federal judge blocked that decision.
The dilemma now is that the Kennedy Center sits mostly empty now, with nothing lined up for the next season, when the board expected that the Center would be closed for renovation.
The Washington Post reported:
A federal judge Friday denied the Kennedy Center’s last-ditch motion to delay removing President Donald Trump’s name from the performing arts venue, as crews erected scaffolding next to the building less than 12 hours before the court-ordered deadline to do so.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that the Kennedy Center’s lawyers failed to demonstrate they were likely to win their appeal or that the center would suffer “irreparable harm” if Trump’s name were removed….
In February 2025, Trump purged the center’s board of trustees and replaced them with political allies who then elected him board chair. In December, those loyalists voted to rename the venue, and a day later, crews added Trump’s name to the exterior.
Trump claimed that the board’s vote to do so was a surprise, but he had joked about naming the center after himself for months. Within hours his name was on the website, and the next morning the building’s sign read: “The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.”
Justice Department lawyers representing Trump later acknowledged that, given the speed with which the signage was installed, it had been “prepared and/or purchased prior to the Board’s vote the day before.”
Masha Gessen, columnist for The New York Times, describes the Trump administration’s latest effort to dehumanize immigrants and to desensitize U.S. to Trump’s inhumane treatment of them.
Gessen writes:
“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And the scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.
“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.
This web page, which invites users to look up the number of immigrants supposedly arrested on charges of criminal activity in American cities and towns, belongs to a subgenre of Trumpian gestures that are menacing and sophomoric at the same time. “Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile,” is how Ernesto Verdeja, a genocide-prevention expert at the University of Notre Dame, described it to me. These gestures are hard to write about: The ugliness is undisguised, so what is there to say? And yet, these statements, step by preposterous step, change the world we live in.
With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”
Who are they? Elon musk? Peter Thiel? Dangerous immigrants!
No President in our history has ever sued the federal government that he leads. But Donald Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion because an IRS contractor released his tax returns during his first term in office. The public and the media learned that in some years, he paid no taxes and in one year, his tax payment was a total of $750.
He was insulted and “damaged” by the leak of his tax returns, but every other president since Richard Nixon in 1973 has released his tax returns (Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, released a summary of his returns).
Right before the case went to trial, Trump and Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. Attorney General, reached a deal and withdrew the lawsuit. Even before the trial got started, Federal Judge Kathlyn Williams, who would hear the case, wondered whether there were any real adversaries or was Trump suing himself.
Although other presidents released their tax returns to show they had no conflicts of interest, Trump broke this tradition. During his first term in office, he repeatedly said that he would release his returns when the IRS finished auditing them. A decade later, his taxes were never released. This must be the longest audit in history. By now, the public understands that he will never release his tax returns.
The deal was that Trump would “settle” for the establishment of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to pay to people who claimed to have been wrongly prosecuted by the Justice Department. Trump would chair the board of the fund and have the power to remove other board members. In short, Trump would control a slush fund for his allies, not only the insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, but other friends such Mike Lindell (the My Pillow Guy), Roger Stone, John Eastman, Rudy Guiliani, and others who joined Trump in claiming that the 2020 was “rigged.” Even rioters who had struck and injured police officers would be eligible.
In a separate agreement, Blanche signed a document declaring that the IRS would not audit Trump nor members of his family nor his companies. Presently, Trump owes the IRS over $100 million because of a disputed deduction. That debt would go away. What was unclear in this agreement was whether this audit exemption applied not only to the past and present but also the future.
The uproar against this deal was bipartisan. Republican members of Congress spoke out against the slush fund. During the upcoming election, they could not defend federal payouts to insurrectionists, especially those who attacked law officers.
At hearings, Todd Blanche said the slush fund was dead (insurrectionists can still sue the Justice Department and win compensation). Trump has never said so.
But one part of the deal was left intact: the agreement that Trump and family would not be audited by the IRS.
This deal outrages me. Why should the Trump family and their business ventures be shielded from tax audits? Why not me? Why not you? Why not everyone who pays taxes?
“Maybe he doesn’t want the American people … to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes…”
Trump has a long and well-documented history of tax avoidance.
In the first presidential debate of 2016 between Hillary Clinton and Trump–at Hofstra University on September 16, 2026–Clinton said:
Trump immediately replied:
“That makes me smart.”
He added that if he had paid more taxes, the money would have been “squandered” by the government.
I remember thinking when he said that, “If everyone dodged their taxes or used every loophole, how would the U.S. fund its military or pay for Medicare or function in any way?”
This is not a man who should be exempt from IRS audits, nor should Eric, Don Jr. or the rest of the rapacious family and their corporate entities.
When Todd Blanche testified to Congress in defense of the agreement to protect the Trump family from IRS audits, Democrats expressed outrage:
Senator Ron Wyden (D) of Oregon said:
“It’s the ultimate case of an ultrawealthy individual living under one set of rules while everybody else lives under another,” Wyden said, adding about Trump: “I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating.”
Bessent “owes the committee an explanation of what the Treasury knows about the dirty settlement,” noting the Treasury Department’s role as both “defendant and a negotiator” in Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.
“This is an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything that I have any familiarity with…
“Trump has set the new high water mark for public corruption… everybody in 🇺🇸 is subject to IRS audit except the Trumps. I take it as an admission of his own guilt when it comes to tax cheating. Trumps have stuffed every dollar they can into their pockets.”
A tweet: Why does a president need immunity from committing TAX FRAUD unless he is and has been committing tax fraud?
I hope that someone is planning to take legal action. This deal is unethical, dishonest, and just plain wrong.
But lawyer Elie Honig wrote that Trump is likely to keep his audit exemption because no one is injured by his deal and no one has standing to sue.
One well-known way to encourage children to read is to give them access to school libraries, staffed by librarians.
But the Austin, Texas, school district is heading in the other direction. It is cutting librarians. This will hurt children.
Retired AISD librarian Sara Stevenson wrote this article for the Austin American-Statesman:
The Austin school district is projecting a historic $181 million deficit and is proposing to cut librarian positions to half-time in 23 schools that serve fewer than 400 students. The result would be the elimination of 10.5 librarian positions, while others are stretched between two campuses.
This proposal comes in spite of recent assurances. As a May 6 article in the Austin American-Statesman noted, superintendent Matias Segura told families at a budget meeting that the district wouldn’t consider cutting counselor or librarian positions.
I remember in February 2012, when the Austin Independent School District faced another budget crisis and school librarians were at risk. At a school board meeting, speaker after speaker testified so persuasively for librarians that then-superintendent Dr. Meria Carstarphen announced, “OK, everyone loves their elementary school librarian, so we’ll save them and only cut the secondary ones.”
She said this in frustration. But in a way she was also acknowledging that sometimes the most important things in an education, like the care and support of a librarian, are unquantifiable.
A librarian split between two campuses cannot provide the same level of instruction, collection management and student support that a full-time librarian can. And these newly proposed cuts to library staff will save the district an estimated $897,000, less than one-half of 1% of the projected deficit.
The fiscal situation is dire, not only in Austin ISD but in Dallas and other districts across the state. A major reason is that our state government refuses any meaningful increase to per pupil funding despite inflation exceeding 30% since 2019. The Texas Standard reportsthat the $55 per pupil bump the Legislature granted to school districts through House Bill 2 needed to be $1,590 just to keep up with inflation.
If more than 88% of the budget is for personnel, the district has run out of alternatives to cutting staff. Teaching, like nursing, is a very hands-on profession that centers on personal relationships and connections. Cutting Music and Fine Arts, library programs, and crucial teacher planning periods while increasing class sizes and teacher class loads will cause students and their families to suffer.
When you eliminate the very people who do the work of education, you lower the quality of that educational experience. Families, including those who have always supported the district, will know and feel the difference. They’ll also do whatever they can for their children’s well-being. More will continue to leave.
Elementary school librarians are crucial in leading classes that not only supplement the curriculum but also directly teach it. Most importantly, they select books and provide the circulation systems and programming for children to practice their reading in order to improve their literacy skills, the very foundation of education.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book, “The Tipping Point,” that groups of 325 people or fewer have more informal cohesion and benefit from more personal connections and a shared accountability. We experienced this firsthand at Bryker Woods Elementary, where my children went and where I was a student librarian. Just because a school is small does not mean its students don’t deserve the same level of professional service.
Librarians also build one-on-one relationships with students. Often the children who flock to the library are the ones who most need individual attention and affirmation, either socially or academically. As former Ann Richards librarian Shawn Mauser once said, “The teacher gets to be the mother, but the librarian gets to be the crazy aunt.” They help the students who need extra intellectual stimulation beyond the classroom or more individualized practice in free reading. Without strong library programs with professional librarians, children and families will not be served.
As a former Austin ISD librarian and someone who has been advocating for library programs and more school funding for years, I am saddened to see our school district in such straits. I can’t help but believe that if we, as a community and as a state, really valued our children, who are our collective future, we would make wiser choices. A budget is not just a list of expenses but a moral document. It names our priorities.
Since Trump returned to office, he has made clear his hostility to protecting the rights of racial minorities and women. He was eager from the start to obliterate DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and to withhold federal grants from institutions that did anything to advance the progress of minorities and women. His words and deeds have gladdened the hearts of white supremacists. Racism is baked into this administration–from Pete Hegseth firing and refusing to promote women and Blacks in the military to Trump welcoming white South Africans to settle here. If he could, he would recruit whites from Nordic nations.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, writes about how the U.S. Department of Justice is now making war on civil rights.
Dean Chemerinsky wrote this article for The Contrarian:
A stunning opinion from the Justice Department on June 9 seeks to gut federal protections against employment discrimination. If allowed to stand, it would override a 55-year-old Supreme Court precedent and nullify a 35-year-old federal statute protecting workers from race and sex bias. Although it will change the practices of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Justice Department enforcement efforts, it is not binding on the courts, and they must reject this assault on civil rights.
In a series of decisions beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court said that proving race or sex discrimination in violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution requires demonstrating discriminatory intent. Because decision-makers rarely express racism or sexism as their motives for action, it is enormously difficult to prove intentional discrimination. Moreover, voluminous literaturedocuments that we all have unconscious biases that influence our choices. At the very least, we should be concerned when our laws or practices have the effect of perpetuating discrimination.
Therefore, many federal and state laws allow liability based on proof of disparate impact without needing to establish discriminatory intent. This is allowed because statutes can provide more protection of rights than exists under the Constitution.
In 1971, in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, the Supreme Court held that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, sex, or religion — creates liability when there is disparate impact. The court concluded that even if there is not discriminatory intent, an employer may not use a job requirement that functionally excludes members of a certain race or sex if it has no relation to measuring performance of job duties. The court rightly interpreted Title VII as saying that tests or measures used in hiring are not permissible if they have a discriminatory effect unless they have some proven connection to the job.
In 1989, the Supreme Court interpreted Title VII to make it more difficult to create liability based on discriminatory impact, so Congress adopted the Civil Rights Act of 1991. This law was explicit that disparate impact was sufficient for liability for employment discrimination. The 1991 act said that if there was proof of disparate impact, the employer had the burden to demonstrate that a challenged practice is “job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.” The law requires employers to show the practice genuinely relates to job performance, not merely that it serves some legitimate business interest.
But on Tuesday, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in a 25-page opinion, took the position that disparate impact liability no longer should be sufficient for liability under Title VII; there must be proof of discriminatory intent. And the opinion made it much easier for employers to show “business necessity,” saying that this “requires employers demonstrate only that the challenged practice rationally serves a valid business purpose.” The opinion says: “Workplace requirements and selection procedures — such as background checks, aptitude tests, and SAT score — are presumptively job related. Only irrational or arbitrary practices with no plausible job-relatedness can create disparate impact liability.”
In other words, the Justice Department opinion makes it much harder for plaintiffs to prove discrimination and much easier for employers to avoid liability. It completely nullifies the provisions of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has attacked disparate impact liability. President Trump’s April 2025 executive order, “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy,” declared: “It is the policy of the United States to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible to avoid violating the Constitution, Federal civil rights laws, and basic American ideals.”
The Justice Department opinion is directed to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It says that the “EEOC’s existing interpretations … embrace an unconstitutional reading of Title VII.” Of course, it is not the Supreme Court has held this. Rather, it is just the very conservative Justice Department on its own saying that the federal government no longer will follow the Supreme Court’s 1971 decision in Griggs v. Duke Power Company or the provisions of the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
The Justice Department opinion is based on a curious mix of authority. It relies heavily on a concurring opinion from Justice Antonin Scalia from 17 years ago, in Ricci v. DeStefano, in which he expressed concern that disparate impact liability in employment could cause employers to consider race to ensure that their practices did not have a discriminatory effect. Scalia expressed no conclusions but said that it was an issue the court would someday need to confront. The Justice Department memo also cites extensively an article by conservative law professor Gail Heriot opposing disparate impact liability.
The Justice Department repeatedly refers to the Supreme Court’s recent opinion in Louisiana v. Callais, which interpreted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Congress had amended that provision in 1982 to allow for liability upon proof that a state or local government had an election practice that had a discriminatory effect against voters of color. The court said in Callais that the government could not use race as a predominant factor in drawing election districts even if needed to avoid a racially disparate impact.
Callais was entirely about voting rights, not employment discrimination. In the voting rights context, Supreme Court precedent held that the government cannot use race in drawing election districts. But there is no such Supreme Court precedent that private employers cannot consider race or sex to avoid disparate impact liability. Quite the contrary, the only Supreme Court cases about affirmative action in employment — United Steel Workers of America v. Weber (1979) and https://www.oyez.org/cases/1986/85-1129 (1987) — allowed voluntary programs to increase participation of racial minorities and women in the workforce. Perhaps the conservative Supreme Court we have now will reconsider these decisions, but they remain the law.
Most important, even if the Supreme Court extends Louisiana v. Callais to employment and even if the court overrules its earlier decisions about affirmative action in employment, that does not provide a basis for the Justice Department’s making it very easy for any employer to win an employment discrimination case by asserting a business necessity.
Nor is there any basis for the Justice Department saying that proving employment discrimination under Title VII requires that the plaintiff demonstrate that there is an “equally effective alternative” that would have less discriminatory effect. The federal employment discrimination statute is explicit that if an employment practice has a disparate impact, it is illegal unless the defendant can show a business necessity. There is absolutely nothing in the law that creates the additional burden imposed by the Justice Department that the plaintiff must show another way to achieve the employer’s goals.
It is not surprising to see the Trump Justice Department trying to push the law in a very conservative direction. But it is astounding to see it disregard long-established Supreme Court precedent and nullify a federal statute. Hopefully, the courts — and even this Supreme Court — will say the Justice Department has gone too far in gutting the protection for workers in this country to be free from race and sex bias in employment.
Erwin Chemerinsky is dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.
Scott Maxwell is a columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. In this column, he argues that voucher schools in Florida should not be allowed to dodge accountability. And, he explains, they are completely unaccountable. The state Constitution requires that the state provide high-quality education, which voucher schools do not. He neglects to notice that the state Constitution states that no public money should go to religious schools. Not a penny, but most vouchers go to religious schools.
What is more, the voters of Florida rejected an effort to strip that language from the state Vonstitution in 2012.
Scott Maxwell wrote:
Teachers and parents have filed a landmark lawsuit challenging the legality of Florida’s billion-dollar school voucher system
The argument at the heart of their suit is that Florida’s constitution requires tax dollars be spent on “high-quality” education. Yet Florida’s voucher system is a black-hole of accountability, sometimes paying for kids to go to “schools” that are total disasters — where teachers lack degrees, inflate grades and use curriculum that is rubbish.
I’m not convinced the teachers and parents will win this lawsuit. In fact, I doubt they will. Similar challenges have been unsuccessful. And Gov. Ron DeSantis has done a pretty thorough job of stacking the courts with political allies, especially at the appellate level.
But I know for a fact the teachers and parents have a point. In fact, It’s inarguable. This newspaper has spent nearly a decade documenting voucher schools that failed children.
Often, the parents themselves were shocked and outraged to learn that schools were failing their kids and that there was little to no accountability.
The Sentinel’s multi-year “Schools Without Rules” investigation into voucher (or “scholarship”) schools found some schools employed teachers that lacked any teaching credentials or college degrees.
Some were such financial disasters, they shut down in the middle of the year, stranding families. (One in Orlando was evicted from a commercial complex where a neighboring tenant was “Drug Tests R Us.”)
Some refused to serve children with disabilities, whether it was autism or reliance on a wheelchair. Even more refused to teach children who are gay or had gay parents. These were schools eager for the public money but unwilling to serve all the public. None of this was discreet. Some had written policies saying that they wouldn’t serve children with Down’s syndrome or who uttered the sentence: “I am gay.”
Some schools taught junk science and bogus history, suggesting that dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and downplaying slavery and segregation.
And at some schools, parents were so appalled at what they found that they reported to the state things like “Cleaning lady substituting for teacher” and “I don’t see any evidence of academics.”
If you think any of that represents “high quality” education, you might also believe the mini tacos at 7-Eleven are five-star dining.
Many private schools that accept vouchers do stellar jobs and fill niche needs that public schools have historically struggled to meet. But too many taxpayer-funded schools are total trainwrecks. And the reason is that Florida has very few standards for voucher schools.
That is, in fact, the crux of the lawsuit, which lists about 20 different things that public schools are required to do by state law, but which all voucher schools are not.
Like providing certain levels of school safety staffing and having threat-management plans in place. Offering vetted curriculum and providing transportation. Hiring qualified teachers. And publicly posting test scores from state assessments that show whether students are actually learning anything. Public schools must do all of that.
The argument from choice-without-standards supporters is that parents should be able to choose any education they want for their kids without exception.
There are two problems with that argument.
One is that no other government-funded voucher program works that way — and for good reason. We don’t let recipients of food vouchers use them on Twinkies and Mountain Dew. This is public money meant to provide nutritional sustenance. So there are guidelines. The same way there is for Medicaid and Medicare. You don’t get to spent public money that’s meant to fulfill a public purpose on anything you like just because you invoke cries of “freedom” or “choice.”
The other problem is that using this money to provide “high quality” education isn’t optional. It’s part of the Florida Constitution — a point the lawsuit addresses when it says: “… choice does not change the Constitution. When public funds are used to educate a child, that child is entitled to the same level of educational opportunities, the same quality standards, and the same basic protections.”
You can certainly make the argument that some public schools have failed some students. Do you know how we know that? Because these schools were required by law to disclose their test scores, standards, hiring practices and curriculum.
In fact, newspapers in Florida were often the ones that exposed problems at public schools.
And most anytime we did, public officials would spring to action and agree reform was needed.
Yet most every time we’ve exposed problems in taxpayer-funded voucher schools, state lawmakers leaders looked the other way.
The most pathetic part of all this is that it’s easily fixable.
Florida could still offer “choice,” but also demand that any schools that receive public money meet basic standards. Hire qualified teachers. Post the results of nationally-normed standardized test scores and graduation rates. And ban discrimination.
“To me, this is just common sense,” said Stephanie Vanos, an Orange County School Board member who also happens to be an Orlando mom and joined the lawsuit as a plaintiff in that capacity. “I’m not saying they need the thousands of pages of rules that apply to us, but we need a common-sense set of rules that should apply to everybody.”
She is, of course, right. Schools that do good jobs shouldn’t be afraid of accountability and transparency. Most aren’t.
In fact, ask yourself these basic questions:
Why shouldn’t parents and students be guaranteed qualified teachers?
Why shouldn’t taxpayers be able to see what kind of test scores are being produced at all the schools they’re funding?
And why shouldn’t taxpayers be assured that the money they’re spending is actually providing “quality” education, as the Constitution requires?
Better yet, ask those who defend the status quo.
Texas State Commissioner Mike Morath took control of the Houston Independent School District in 2023. Morath fired the respected superintendent, replaced the elected board with an appointed board, and named Mike Miles as the new superintendent on June 1, 2023.
Miles had already served in a similar role in Dallas, where his top-down style alienated teachers and drove many of them to quit. Morath, a computer software guy, served on the school board in Dallas. Otherwise, he has no education experience. Gina Hinojosa, who is running for Governor against Greg Abbot, has said the first thing she will do if elected is to fire Morath.
Miles’ tenure in Houston has been controversial. He imposed a lock-step, scripted curriculum. He has fired large numbers of respected principals, and many teachers have quit. But test scores are up!
This column by Lisa Falkenberg, Pulitzer-Prize winning senior columnist for The Houston Chronicle, provides a different perspective on Miles in this article.
She writes:
Stuck in traffic one morning in October, I tried to make small talk with my 13-year-old daughter in the back seat.
“What are you reading these days?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
Nothing.
I felt a thud in my soul.
This was the same big-eyed girl, the same consummate straight-A student who, just a few years earlier, had to have her nose physically dislodged from a book several times a day so the family could reacquaint ourselves with her face.
In elementary school during the pandemic, she finished “Little Women” in two days. If you had asked her if she loved reading, she might have responded similarly to Scout Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I never loved to read. One does not love to breathe.”
“You’re not reading anything?” I prodded the middle-schooler. “Not even in English class?”
She paused, giving me a look that said I should know better.
“Mom,” she said. “I don’t even have an English teacher.”
Ah, yes. I had forgotten.
For months, I had written about other schools within Houston ISD, scrutinizing superintendent Mike Miles’ reforms in the state’s takeover, his closure of libraries and sidelining of storybooks, all the while harboring some relief that my own three kids’ campuses had been somewhat insulated from the changes.
Until this year, that is, when the district’s instability, fluctuating expectations and teacher exodus hurt my kid, too.
Some like to pretend that Miles’ move-fast-and-break-things approach is only affecting students at the poorest-performing schools for whom any change must be better than what they had. That’s not true. The Houston Chronicle has reported that aspects of Miles’ controversial curriculum or instructional model have seeped into virtually all of HISD’s 274 campuses.
That includes some of the highest-performing schools that never needed academic rehabilitation in the first place. These are schools for which families sweat lottery admissions to gain entry, and some even buy houses or rent apartments just to be zoned to them.
My middle child attends one of these, an “A”-rated Vanguard campus for advanced students that we entered through a lottery. When I tell people what’s happening there, some don’t believe me. I can’t blame them. Miles’ effect on HISD’s best schools isn’t what grabs headlines.
Still, here’s a glimpse of what we’ve seen. I’m not naming the school because my goal isn’t to have this column tied permanently to the campus name in Google searches. It’s to open eyes.
A week or two before that conversation with my daughter in the car, she told me she feared her English teacher would quit because district observers were prodding him about his lackluster use of whiteboards and response cards — key tools in Miles’ New Education System.
The observers even handed out their own worksheet packets, she said, as the teacher stood by and watched. By October 24, an administrator informed parents that the teacher had submitted his resignation.
I couldn’t understand why the district was meddling with a good school that supposedly had autonomy. Miles has argued that even some top schools need NES methods because achievement gaps persist. That’s apparently not the case at my daughter’s school, which earned high marks in achievement, progress and closing gaps.
Miles’ methods — top-down management, strictly controlled curriculum, frenetic pace and high-stakes quizzes — appear to have led to some testing gains in schools where students were severely behind. HISD has gone from 56 “F” campuses to zero. That does seem like progress.
But Miles’ charter-like approach is less effective with advanced students, such as those attending Vanguard or International Baccalaureate programs known for rigorous, often individualized and project-based curriculum that go far beyond worksheet packets.
Miles’ strict protocols have driven away thousands of teachers at all levels of talent and tenure. In the 2024-25 school year, one in three teachers didn’t return, nearly double the state’s rate. This school year alone, more than 30 of the 73 teachers at my daughter’s school have left, double the annual average of the first two years of the takeover, according to Chronicle reporting and district records I obtained through a public information request.
Miles argues that high teacher turnover isn’t a problem. He says HISD retains around 90% of exemplary teachers. But most teachers we lost at “A” schools were clearly doing something right. The problem is that Miles defines “exemplary” in part by obedience to his program.
Our loss is someone else’s gain. When my daughter told me in tears that her cherished cheerleading sponsor was leaving to teach science somewhere else, I hugged her and asked if she knew where the teacher was going.
“St. John’s,” she told me. [St. John’s is an elite private school.]
Yes, St. John’s School in River Oaks, one of the most prestigious private high schools in the nation.
In some ways, higher-performing HISD campuses are more vulnerable to the instability caused by high turnover. Unlike Miles’ NES campuses, they don’t have a “teacher’s apprentice” ready to take over if a teacher quits.
When my daughter’s English teacher left, the class was led for weeks by a string of substitutes who mainly assigned worksheet packets — sometimes ones they’d already completed.
“I don’t mind,” my daughter told me at one point. “We’re not learning anything anyway. It’s English. You just pick the longest, best answer.”
When I was her age, growing up in Seguin, Texas, I was holding my breath with Anne Frank in the attic. I was losing the feeling in my toes as a Jack London protagonist struggled to light a fire in sub-freezing temperatures. I don’t remember my eighth-grade English teacher being particularly inspiring, but we read some inspiring literature that stays with me 30 years later.
My daughter’s class was without a teacher for several weeks before the school announced a replacement. The new teacher’s start was delayed by training and illness, emails explained, but finally, she was in the classroom.
After a few days, I asked my daughter if the teacher was actually teaching.
“Yes,” she said. “She reads from the slides.”
Just before Christmas break, I attended a parent meeting that filled the library with worried, frustrated moms and dads complaining of even bigger problems. Several described how their straight-A students were failing algebra because the teacher refused to teach or answer questions about the district slides she was reading. Some parents said they had to hire tutors. It was affecting their kids’ confidence. School administrators assured parents they were bringing over kids from a nearby Vanguard high school to tutor the middle-schoolers in algebra.
My daughter wasn’t affected by that situation. But in English, midyear testing showed she’d dropped 10 points – “low average growth” – putting her back to where she’d been a year earlier.
In late January, yet another note came from administrators: “An Update On Your Child’s English Teacher.”
The new teacher had resigned as well.
The administrator wrote that he was “pleased to share that there will be no gap or delay in the continuity of instruction for your children.” A language arts interventionist had agreed to step in to teach the class. She had been at the school for a while, and our kids were “in good hands.”
“We know that changes and transition can sometimes cause anxiety,” the email noted in closing. “We are here to support your children.”
I didn’t doubt the administrator’s sincerity. I doubted that he had any real power in this top-down regime to fix things.
The new teacher soon assigned a book, an actual book. I started to celebrate. Turns out, my daughter had been assigned the same book the year before. (She tells me she’s read “The Giver” several times, first in elementary school.)
In a parent meeting, I asked the principal why, when whole books are so rarely assigned these days, students were repeating titles. His response was unresponsive.
“We didn’t read it anyway,” my daughter told me later. “We just read parts of it.”
This middle school, to which I sent both my girls, is still excellent in many ways.
It has some dedicated, truly inspiring teachers who are hanging on. It’s a racially and ethnically diverse campus that offers rigor to smart kids from all kinds of neighborhoods. It molds bright minds into award-winning debaters, dancers and leaders. It still provides some high-quality instruction to kids whose families can’t afford private school or prefer a public school for their child.
For a long time, it was a shining example of what a public school could be.
I thought the point of this takeover was to make more of those. Not fewer.
My daughter’s situation is nowhere near what some special-education students are facing amid district-ordered relocations.
She’ll be OK. She began her own reading regimen this semester and was able to boost her end-of-year English score by several points. I’ve bought a copy of Anne Frank’s diary, which we plan to read this summer before she heads off to high school.
Hopefully, she’ll have another teacher down the road — perhaps a book whisperer like her Harvard Elementary librarian, Ms. Garcia — who can help rekindle her passion for reading.
But let’s not pretend what my daughter got this year in English class was quality.
Let’s not pretend it exemplified the “high-performance culture” that Miles champions, a culture that leaves no time for hallway chatter or holiday parties, no time for the small rituals that make school feel like school, and yet, somehow, tolerates the incessant disruptions of thousands of teacher departures, including from the best schools.
Miles said he could bring up the bottom in HISD without bringing down the top. I wanted to believe him.
I’ve seen something else.
Lisa Falkenberg is a three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the Houston Chronicle’s senior columnist. Falkenberg formerly led the Chronicle’s editorial board as vice president and editor of opinion. In May, Falkenberg shared a Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing for a series on the dangers of stopped trains in Houston. In 2022, she led the editorial board to their first Pulitzer Prize for a series debunking the “Big Lie” of voter fraud and examining Texas’ long history of voter suppression.
The Network for Public Education will hold its annual conference in Conroe, Texas–right outside Houston, on September 26-27.
We have a stellar line-up of speakers, panels, and workshops.
Join me and hundreds of others who fight to protect and improve our public schools.
Greg Olear writes delightful posts, in which he calls of his vast knowledge and research to say something that no one else has said or will say. This post explains why Jared and Ivanka want Sazan Island, a few miles off the coast of Albania.
They think they discovered it, and they want to turn it into a super-deluxe resort where people like themselves can find the quiet and luxury that they seek.
The people of Albania don’t like the idea of turning Albanian property and nature reserve over to these Americans, and the protests grow louder and larger every day.
Olear points out that the Kushner’s already own an estate on a secluded island in Florida. Why another one?
And that brings him to the fascinating story of Sarawak, which was gifted to a British adventurer named James C. Brooke, who became the Rajah of Sarawak. It’s a great story:
Brooke was certainly well-off, but hardly the scion of a British robber baron. Nor did he work at some cushy desk job. He was a professional soldier and seafarer. He was enterprising. He was bold. And he was opportunistic. Adventuring in the East Indies, he found himself doing mercenary work for the Sultan of Brunei—putting down uprisings and blowing up pirate ships and saving the Sultan’s uncle from assassination attempts. As gifted as he was at taking out pirates, Brooke was positively elite—Epstein-like, one might even say—at currying favor with the rich and powerful.
From the Sultan, Brooke received the governorship of Sarawak, the Malaysian slice of northern Borneo. In 1841, he was given sovereign power over the region, as well as a new title: Rajah of Sarawak. It’s kind of nuts, in hindsight. An upper-middle-class Englishman, a white guy, became head of state of a new nation in the East Indies! And it wasn’t some bogus title, either. Brooke cannily allied himself with Britain, so while he enjoyed absolute power, he also had the world’s most powerful navy to protect him when he needed it—the best of both worlds. He issued currency, putting his portrait on the coins and banknotes. He established a hereditary monarchy, the White Rajahs of Sarawak, that only ended because the Japanese overran Borneo in the Second World War.
It’s a neat trick to tie Sarawak to Sazan Island., and Olear does it.
Read it to see how he pulls all these threads together.
Diane Ravitch's blog 