Marc Elias: No Doubt! Trump Lost the 2020 Election.

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
3

Marc Elias is a leading lawyer in defense of democracy. He has won numerous federal and state cases in defense of voting rights. In this post, Elias refutes The Big Lie.

By Marc Elias · Democracy Docket founder

This weekend, in an interview with Ted Koppel on CBS’s Sunday Morning, Steve Bannon confirmed what I have been saying for years: “The core belief of the MAGA movement is [Trump] won the 2020 election.”

When confronted with the fact that Trump and his allies lost more than 60 court cases challenging dddddddssstsdtsrsrssssssssssrsrrerzzfzzrz sadp the election results, Bannon resorted to a familiar GOP tactic. He falsely suggested that the cases were thrown out on technicalities: “We can go debate this another time, but we didn’t have standing. We never even got into court.”

Even worse, Koppel told viewers that Bannon was “technically correct; they didn’t have standing. They couldn’t find a judge who thought they had a significant case worth hearing.”

Koppel may have meant that the cases failed because they lacked merit. But what he said is simply wrong.

Trump and his allies found plenty of judges willing to hear them out, in many cases through hours or even days of testimony and argument. Those judges listened, weighed the evidence and ruled against them.

I know, because I was the lawyer who helped Joe Biden defeat those cases one by one.

Correcting the record matters as we approach another election in which Trump and the GOP are once again spreading lies. So let me put this one to bed, once and for all.

In 2022, a group of prominent conservatives reviewed every one of the 64 cases that Trump and his allies brought in the six key battleground states. The group included former U.S. Solicitor General Ted Olson, former Republican Sen. John Danforth and retired federal appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, along with two other retired federal judges and another former Republican senator.

Their conclusion was stark: “Donald Trump and his supporters have failed to present evidence of fraud or inaccurate results significant enough to invalidate the results of the 2020 Presidential Election.”

Most importantly, their report directly rebuts the claim Bannon is making today: that Trump never got his day in court. “Of the 64 cases brought by Trump and his supporters,” they wrote, “twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, fourteen were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before a hearing on the merits, and 30 cases included a hearing on the merits.”

In other words, fewer than one-third of the cases were dismissed by a court before reaching the merits. In another 14, Trump’s side walked away rather than test its claims in front of a judge.

Trump’s problem was never a lack of opportunity. As the report’s authors put it, “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

Consider the record.

In Arizona, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and the state Republican Party went to court claiming that Election Day votes for Trump had been wrongly thrown out. Over a six-hour hearing, the claim that thousands of voters had been disenfranchised fell apart. The campaign narrowed its case to a handful of ballots and the judge dismissed it.

In Wisconsin, Trump requested recounts in Milwaukee and Dane counties, the state’s two largest Democratic strongholds. The recounts increased Biden’s lead.

Trump then lost in federal court and before the state’s conservative-majority Supreme Court.

The federal judge, whom Trump himself appointed, found that Trump had standing, held a daylong hearing, and ruled against him anyway: “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”

When the Trump campaign asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to throw out more than 221,000 absentee ballots, the conservative court refused. As one justice noted, the president “failed to point to even one vote cast in this election by an ineligible voter.”

In Nevada, Trump’s electors filed and litigated a full election contest, with evidence submitted by both sides. They alleged everything from a vote-buying scheme to illegal voting to malfunctioning voting machines in Clark County. In the end, the judge found that they had failed to prove their allegations “under any standard of proof.” The Nevada Supreme Court unanimously affirmed.

In Michigan, the Trump campaign’s lawsuit over ballot counting rested on a poll watcher’s account of what someone else had told her. The judge rejected it as “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.” In another Michigan case, a judge heard evidence on claims of fraud at Detroit’s TCF Center and found the plaintiffs’ version of events “incorrect and not credible.”

In Georgia, every ballot was counted three times, including a full hand count. There, one of the Trump campaign’s first lawsuits fell apart within a day. It concerned just 53 absentee ballots in Chatham County. County election officials testified that the ballots had arrived on time, and the judge dismissed the case at the end of the hearing.

Then there is Pennsylvania, where Rudy Giuliani appeared in court himself. He told the judge there was “widespread, nationwide voter fraud.” But under questioning, he admitted, “This is not a fraud case.”

In dismissing the lawsuit, the judge wrote that the campaign had offered “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations.” On appeal, a Trump-appointed judge wrote for a unanimous panel: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”

Many of these cases were reviewed by appeals courts or state supreme courts with Republican-appointed or conservative majorities. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up any of them.

The Big Lie survives because reporters fail to push back on claims like Bannon’s. The lie that Trump won the 2020 election is a disease, and every suggestion that Trump never had his day in court helps it spread.

Over the past six years, that disease has infected our politics and our culture, and it has bred new conspiracy theories along the way. It drove insurrectionists to storm the U.S. Capitol. And it helped Trump win a second term, and with it a second chance to undermine our democracy.

To fight back, we must correct the record — not just for the past but for the future.

Categories Arizona, Elections, Fraud, Lies, Trump

Students Pay the Price for Failing Voucher Programs Where Education is a Fiction

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
0

Bruce Baker has written a sterling article about the real price of voucher programs. Who pays? Students.

Universal voucher programs like those of Arizona and Florida provide little, if any, educational benefit to students. They attend schools where teachers need not be certified or experienced. Their curriculum is non-existent. Their standards are phony.

The state pays for them not to get an education. The same may be said of home schooling, where in many cases uneducated parents are sharing their lack of an education with their children.

The result of this negligence is that these young people will earn less money over their lifetimes and have limited opportunities because of their mediocre or non-existent education.

The parents and the state are stigmatizing children by giving them a voucher.

The infamous federal report called “A Nation at Risk” warned about “a rising tide of mediocrity.” Today’s vouchers and home schoolers are responsible for “a rising tide of failure.”

Baker writes:

Back in January 2013, I wrote about three Kansas judges who saw right through the state’s claim that deep funding cuts would cause no harm. The Shawnee County District Court panel in Gannon v. State of Kansas (decision, p. 188) put it this way:

Simply, school opportunities do not repeat themselves and when the opportunity for a formal education passes, then for most, it is most likely gone. We all know that the struggle for an income very often – too often – overcomes the time needed to prepare intellectually for a better one.

If the position advanced here is the State’s full position, it is experimenting with our children which have no recourse from a failure of the experiment.

The Kansas experiment was a legislature cutting school budgets and betting that nobody would be hurt. That was bad enough. But at least in Kansas, the children were still in schools. There were still teachers, curricula, and test results that a court could look at.

A decade later, Arizona and Florida are running a different experiment. They hand public money to parents, place few limits on how it is spent, and ask almost nothing about whether the child learned anything. If that experiment fails for a particular child, who answers for it? Who does the 18-year-old sue?

The new experiment: money out, no questions asked

Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) program, expanded to all students in 2022, now serves more than 100,000 children and is expected to cost over $1 billion a year. Florida followed in 2023 with universal eligibility and a homeschool ESA, the Personalized Education Program (PEP), worth roughly $8,000 per child.

Consider what the statutes actually require of the parent. Under A.R.S. § 15-2402, the Arizona parent signs an agreement to use “a portion” of the money to provide instruction in reading, grammar, mathematics, social studies and science. That is the whole of the academic obligation. Then comes the remarkable part, subsection I: a signed agreement “constitutes school attendance” for purposes of the state’s compulsory attendance law. The contract is the education, as far as the state is concerned.

There is no testing requirement for ESA students in Arizona, no curriculum approval, no portfolio, and no evaluator. Even homeschool guides that are friendly to the program say so plainly. The state checks receipts, not learning.

Florida asks slightly more. PEP families must submit a student learning plan and have the child take a nationally norm-referenced test each year, with results sent to the scholarship funding organization (FLDOE PEP FAQ; Step Up PEP Family Handbook). But what triggers loss of funding is failing to take and submit the test, not the score. A child can test at a first-grade level in tenth grade and the money keeps flowing.

That is the experiment. The state funds the choice, defines the choice as compliance, and measures nothing that would tell anyone whether the child is learning.

What the money has bought

Reporters in both states have spent three years documenting what this money buys. Some of it was approved under the rules. Some was flagged as improper only after the fact. All of it was spent from accounts that exist, by law, to educate a child.

Baker here posts a chart that includes tickets to theme parks, video games, pianos, lingerie, jewelry, gift cards, payments to parents, trampolines, kayaks, appliances, paddle boards, LEGO sets, dolls, stuffed animals, surfboards, treadmills, swing sets, and much more. Open the link to see his chart.

In fairness to the programs’ defenders, Arizona’s education department maintains that most purchases are valid and that misspending is a small share of the total. Florida’s administrator, Step Up For Students, requires a statement of educational benefit for theme park tickets and caps them at $500 a year (WFTV). When Florida legislators tried to tighten the list in 2024, families lobbied against it and the restrictions failed.

But “small share” is the wrong frame. Arizona auto-approved purchases under $2,000 — over a million requests and $124 million — to clear a backlog, with plans to audit later. Of 18,000 parents flagged for $10.3 million in banned purchases, only six were referred for prosecution. And every audit is an audit of purchases. None asks the only question that matters to the child: was anyone teaching me to read?

The legal question: who does the 18-year-old sue?

Imagine a young woman turning 18 in Phoenix or Orlando. For a decade, her ESA paid for theme park passes, a television, a trampoline and a lot of LEGO. Nobody ever taught her to read beyond a primer. She has no transcript and no diploma. The state that funded all of it called her “in attendance” the entire time. What are her options?

I’m not a lawyer, and what follows is a policy researcher’s tour of the doctrinal terrain, not legal advice. But the terrain is not encouraging.

1. Sue the parent. Arizona abolished parental immunity in Broadbent v. Broadbent (1995), replacing it with a “reasonable and prudent parent” standard. Florida has never gone that far. So in Arizona, at least, a negligence claim against a parent is not barred at the door. But she would then run into the doctrine of educational malpractice. Since Peter W. v. San Francisco Unified School District (1976), courts have refused to recognize a duty of care for academic outcomes. They cite the lack of a workable standard of care, uncertain causation, and the burden on schools. If courts won’t hold trained, licensed educators to a duty to teach a child to read, a court is unlikely to impose one on a parent the legislature expressly freed from any measurable standard.

A narrower theory may be stronger: misappropriation. The Arizona statute says ESA money may be used “only” for the expenses of the qualified student. A diamond necklace or a family Disneyland trip is not that. A custodial-account or constructive-trust theory, treating the parent as having diverted money held for the child’s benefit, at least fits the facts. But that recovers the misspent dollars, not the lost education. And a judgment against a parent with no assets is worth little.

2. Sue the vendor. The private school, the online program, the tutoring center or the “ESA-approved” camp are private actors. A contract or consumer-fraud claim might reach a vendor that took money and delivered nothing. But a vendor that delivered exactly what was purchased (a ski pass, a paddleboard) did nothing wrong. And educational malpractice bars claims that the instruction itself was inadequate.

3. Sue the state, under the federal Constitution. This is where the Kansas panel’s warning bites hardest. San Antonio v. Rodriguez (1973) held there is no fundamental federal right to education. DeShaney v. Winnebago County(1989) held the Due Process Clause generally imposes no duty on the state to protect a child from harm inflicted by a private actor, including a parent. The one federal appellate ruling to recognize a right to a basic minimum education, Gary B. v. Whitmer (6th Cir. 2020), was vacated when the full court took it up after the case settled. She might argue that the state created the danger by funding the deprivation and deeming it lawful attendance. That theory is untested in this setting.

4. Sue the state, under the state constitution. Both states have education clauses. Florida’s is among the strongest in the country, declaring education a “paramount duty” and requiring a “high quality system of free public schools.” In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the Florida Supreme Court struck down a voucher program for diverting public funds to private schools outside that uniform system. But in Citizens for Strong Schools v. State Board of Education (2019), a divided court held that “high quality” offered no judicially manageable standard. More fundamentally, state adequacy litigation produces prospective, system-wide remedies. It is not a damages action for an individual who already aged out.

5. Ask the state to step in. Ordinarily, a child receiving no education might trigger truancy enforcement or an educational neglect inquiry. In Arizona, that door is closed by statute: the signed ESA agreement constitutes school attendance under § 15-2402(I). When the state does catch misspending, its remedy is to suspend the account or send it to collections. Any money recovered goes back to the state, not to the child whose education it was meant to buy.

So the honest answer to the legal question is: almost none. The 18-year-old is, in the Kansas panel’s words, a subject of an experiment with no recourse from its failure. The difference is that in Kansas, the state was cutting the budget of institutions still obligated to teach her. In Arizona and Florida, the state has written itself out of that obligation and handed the obligation, and the money, to someone the law does not hold to any measurable standard.

Please open the link and finish reading this excellent critique.

Categories Arizona, Education Reform, Florida, Privatization, School Choice, Students, Vouchers

Note to Elite Media: Stop Promoting Rahm Emanuel!

By dianeravitch
October 13, 2026 //
9

Paul Waldman was a reporter for The Washington Post . He now writes a Substack blog. As this article shows, he is a journalist with insight and a long memory. A certain sector of the Democratic elite likes him.

Paul does not. Neither do I.

Back when Rahm was President Obama’s chief of staff, I was invited to meet with the top officials of the Obama administration at the Old Execurive Office Building (next door to the White House). Rahm was there (but strangely, not Arne Duncan), along with Melody Barnes, the chief of the President’s Domestic Policy Council, and Roberto Rodriguez, the President’s education advisor.

I answered a series of questions:

*What did I think of merit pay? It never works.

*What did I think of Common Core? Try it out in 3-5 states and see what happens, said I.

*What did I think of Race to the Top? Not much, said I.

Needless to say, they disregarded all my warnings.

Rahm jumped in to ask, “Why are Catholic schools so much better than public schools?”

I explained that Catholic schools do not have to accept students they do not want and they are free to expel students who persistently misbehave. Even if they never use that power, they have it.

I asked Rahm if he had met my son, who had worked on business deals with his brother Ari, who ran a major talent agency.. Rahm said, “Never heard of him.”

He might have said something polite, like “no, but I will ask my brother.” But Rahm is rude, always.

With that, he stormed out of the room.

I understood why people think he is obnoxious.

Then, when he closed 50 Chicago public schools in a single day, I wrote him off as a dunce about education and children.

Waldman writes:

To a certain kind of political reporter, Rahm Emanuel is a compelling figure, a politician of deep wisdom and experience, just the kind of person who ought to be given serious consideration as a candidate for president. And if the voters themselves aren’t all that interested? Well that can change, with a sufficient volume of lengthy profiles and interviews.

And so a campaign has begun to make Rahm happen, engineered by the man himself but with the active assistance of a good portion of the elite news media. The good news is that Rahm is not going to happen, because he represents everything that Democratic voters are eager to reject at this moment.

Rahm is everywhere, whether you asked for him or not

Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CNBC. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Fox News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by CBS News. Here’s Rahm being interviewed by Politico. Here’s a big profile of Rahm in the New York Times, which says “he has emerged as a behind-the-scenes force in his party’s push to flip the House this fall.” And going back a few months, here’s Politico saying “His pugilism and his critique of the party’s leftward lurch will create a gauntlet his would-be rivals will have to navigate.” Everyone will have to deal with Rahm, so powerful a presence is he!

Readers under 30 or so might not have a deep familiarity with Emanuel, so the short version is this: He’s had a long list of jobs (campaign operative, fundraiser, White House staffer, congressman, White House chief of staff, mayor of Chicago, Wall Street rainmaker, ambassador to Japan), in which he earned a reputation as, to put it plainly, an asshole. Reporters profiling him will describe incidents of him shouting and swearing at people, or mention that sometimes he has been referred to as “Rahmbo,” but what it comes down to is that he’s an asshole.

That isn’t necessarily disqualifying, even if it should be; lots of politicians are abusive to people around them, as are bosses in a million workplaces. But unlike some of them, Emanuel isn’t a silver-tongued charmer whose charisma will hypnotize voters on the campaign trail.

What is disqualifying, however, is that Rahm’s inclinations run toward caution and centrism, and that is the opposite of what Democratic voters want at this moment. It’s not just about ideology, it’s about a style of politics those voters are absolutely fed up with, one driven by the belief that the way to succeed is to constantly look over your right shoulder, not do anything that might make Republicans too angry, and not just spend your time chasing independent voters but do so by trimming back your ambitions until they’re a shapeless lump of timidity and compromise.

To me, the emblematic Rahm Emanuel moment came in early 2010, when Democrats were struggling to pass the Affordable Care Act. For a brief time they had a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate (though some of those were very conservative Democrats), and as they approached the finish line, needing only to get the two chambers to agree on a single bill, Ted Kennedy died and a Republican, Scott Brown, won a surprise victory to replace him. At that point, Emanuel counseled retreat: throw the big bill in the trash, then try to pass a bill to expand coverage for low-income kids, something far less ambitious but likelier to get bipartisan support. In addition to misreading what Republicans would accept (absolutely nothing, then as now) it amounted to abject surrender. As Molly Ball reported in Time magazine, Nancy Pelosi wasn’t having it:

Pelosi told the White House to rein in Emanuel and get him to stop pestering her members about his “eensy weensy bill.” At a meeting in the Oval Office, Pelosi confronted the subject directly. “Mr. President, I know there are some on your staff who want to take the namby-pamby approach,” she said. “That’s unacceptable.” Obama took her side. They were going to go for it.

She was right, and the ACA passed. If Emanuel had had his way, it wouldn’t have happened.

The problem is not that he believes in nothing, it’s what he does believe in

One might look at where Emanuel is now and say he’s changed, at least a little. In July he went to Israel and gave a speech excoriating Benjamin Netanyahu, and now says the Israeli government should no longer get support from the U.S. taxpayer (though he says they should be free to buy American weapons with their own money if they want, just like other countries). He’s still advocating small-bore policy changes, but ones that are updated for the present moment, like a ban on lawmakers betting on prediction markets and a mandatory retirement age of 75 across the federal government.

I’m sure there will be more to come, as Emanuel tries to present himself as a man for this moment. But while he may evolve a little bit here or there, he’s still the same guy he always was, and that’s the problem. He’s the avatar of a certain kind of Democratic centrist politics, one that yearns to win the votes of Republicans but views progressives with little but contempt. Like many others, he believes that the way to win votes across the center is to engage in some vigorous hippie-punching (Rahm is eager to talk about how awful the DSA is), then present some ideologically denuded, tiny policy ideas under the guise of “pragmatism.”

If he really believed in those policy ideas, that would be one thing. But it’s never been clear that Rahm believes in much of anything. He wants power, but he has never seemed animated by doing much with power; he has never presented a vision of how he’d like government and society to work that goes much beyond “What we have now, but a little better.”

Back in 2020, Democrats had no greater goal than getting rid of Donald Trump, which is the biggest reason Joe Biden got their nomination; he was widely seen as the safest and most electable choice. But this is a very different moment. Yes, they’re desperate to win, and still will be in 2028. But even more, they’ll be drawn to candidates who can sell them on a vision of something deeper, more fundamental, and more lasting.

That’s not who Rahm is, and to his credit (I guess) he’s not trying to pretend it is. Which is why I’m fairly sure that as the primary process goes on, we’re likely to see him coming in 10th or so in all the polls, even as he gets inordinate attention in the news media.

There have been times when his brand of corporate-approved, right-leaning centrism was attractive to voters; in many ways that what his old boss Bill Clinton offered in 1992. But this is not 1992, and Rahm Emanuel is no Bill Clinton. Fortunately.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Democrats, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

I’m Off on the Road to Morocco!

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
21

Yesterday, I took a flight to Casablanca with Brooklyn friends who belong to the same church. They are Catholic, I am Jewish, and we are not likely to encounter many active churches or synagogues. Their annual trips are well-organized, and this is the first time I was available to join them. We will be touring in Rabat, Fez, and Marrakech.

The blog will continue without interruption.

I’ll stay in touch.

P.S. If you are a film buff or as old as I, you may recall that Bing Crosby and Bob Hope made a series of “on the road” movies in the 1940s, all very silly and good fun. My 31-year-old grandson reminded me that we watched “The Road to Morocco” together when he was 7 years old. Now, I’m on the road, but not with Bing or Bob or Dorothy Lamour.

Categories Ravitch, Diane

Trump Makes a Deal with Putin That Betrays Ukraine, the U.S., and Our Allies

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
12

When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, western nations imposed sanctions on Russia in an effort to persuade him to stop the war through economic pressure. Despite sanctions, Russia has managed to continue its oil exports, using a “shadow fleet” of unmarked tankers. In recent months, Ukraine has been hitting Russian oil storage facilities and oil refineries in hopes of suppressing Russia’s oil revenues. Those oil revenues fund Russia’s war.

Day after day, Russia has relentlessly sent missiles to bombard civilian targets in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, killing men, women, and children. Without the American Patriot missile systems, Ukraine is almost defenseless.

Trump sent his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his friend Steve Witkoff to talk to Putin about negotiating a peace deal. They left the meeting wreathed in smiles, saying it was a day they would never forget. But they weren’t negotiating a ceasefire or an end to the war. They were negotiating a partnership with Putin to get Russian oil to the U.S. before the midterm elections.

Barely a month ago, Congress passed the Lindsey Graham Russian Sanctions Act, which gave Trump the power to impose 100% tariffs on any nation buying Russian oil.

Guess who is buying Russian oil? The United States! Trump will have to tariff his own country. The members of Congress who passed the Russian Sanctions Act must feel very foolish indeed.

Trump announced triumphantly that Russia would sell the (no longer sanctioned) Russian oil in order to lower prices of diesel in the U.S.

Senator Thom Tillis (NC) said on national television that Trump may be breaking a law passed in 2022. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Tillis said the 2022 law banned oil imports from Russia unless all Russian troops were out of Ukraine.

Trump announced the Russian oil shipments as “tons,” not gallons. The U.S. consumes about 4 million gallons of diesel daily. The first release of Russian diesel (300,000 tons) is about 2.2 million gallons, or a half day of diesel consumption in the U.S. Even the larger amounts that Trump has announced would not last long, a matter of days, maybe weeks.

The closure of the waterways that transit oil from the Middle East is the fundamental problem, a problem of Trump’s making.

Having called on Zelensky to stop bombing Russian oil targets, he added that Zelensky should step down as president of Ukraine because he refused to stop bombing Russian oil targets. Zelensky’s response was to bomb another Russian oil facility.

Trump reacted by saying he would stop negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. When he campaigned in 2024, he claimed he would get a peace deal in one day. It’s almost two years later, and he has no deal. He makes demands only on Ukraine, never Russia.

Trump blamed Zelensky for the high price of oil in the U.S., sidestepping his own responsibility for shutting down the global oil supply when Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz after Trump ordered his war on Iran.

Russia comes out ahead. Trump is either a fool or a traitor.

Putin must be laughing. In addition to being free of sanctions on its sale of oil, Russia is supplying Iran with weapons to kill Americans.

It’s a win-win for Putin.

But not for the U.S.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Ethics, Extremism, International, Trump

Julian Vasquez Heilig: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Her Daughter

By dianeravitch
October 12, 2026 //
3

Recently, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long essay for The New York Times Magazine regretting her decision a decade earlier to put her daughter into a local public school in New York City. Not only was the school segregated, it had a disengaged principal, indifferent teachers, and low-quality academics. She came to realize that she was imposing her ideas on her daughter at the cost of her education. Now that her daughter is in high school, she is attending a highly desirable high school with high standards. Hannah-Jones told her daughter to make her own choice within the public school system. She chose an excellent public school.

There’s hardly a commentator who has not passed judgment on the essay. Right-wingers praised it as an endorsement of school choice or a condemnation of public schools. Former NYC Chancellor wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the persistence of bad public schools was the fault of Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions. His article was titled “Nikole Hannah-Jones Vs. Randi Weingarten.” He maintained that it was the unions that preserved bad schools. The solution, he argued, was non-union charter schools.

But his argument dodged the responsibility of school leaders like himself to weed out incompetent principals and replace them with good principals who set high expectations for staff and students. And, of course, he neglected the failure of thousands of charter schools, due to academic failure, misappropriation of funds, or low enrollment.

In the following essay posted on his blog, Cloaking Inequity, scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig presents a different argument. In addition to his professorship at Western Michigan University, he is a founding member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay about her daughter’s education is heartbreaking because it poses a question almost every parent understands: Did I make the right choice for my child?

Hannah-Jones made the choice more publicly and politically than most. A decade ago, she and her husband sent their daughter, Najya, to a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. They could afford other options. Instead, they wanted their own choices to reflect their belief that privileged families help reproduce educational inequality when they abandon schools serving poor Black children. Then their daughter grew old enough to judge that decision for herself.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya asked her mother after discovering how her middle school compared with New York City’s most prestigious public schools. Later, she put the question even more painfully: If her parents had the resources to get her a better education, why hadn’t they? That is not really a question about school choice. It is a question about parenthood.

Every parent makes these tradeoffs, although few of us have to explain them in The New York Times. Families choose schools because of academics, income, housing, sports, religion, culture, race, language, safety, disability services, discipline, transportation, friendships, family traditions and often simply what they can afford. Rarely does one school maximize everything a family values.

A parent might choose a Seventh-Day Adventist school with fewer Advanced Placement courses because faith formation matters deeply. Another might choose a suburban school for its academics but watch a Black child struggle culturally. A family might remain in a less prestigious district because grandparents live nearby. An athlete may choose a school because of a coach or a starting opportunity. A parent of a child with disabilities may value services more than test scores. Another family may choose a culturally affirming school where their child feels known. None of those choices can be reduced to a ranking on GreatSchools.

That is partly what makes Hannah-Jones’s conclusion so complicated. Najya did experience serious academic failures. Her elementary school sometimes failed to assess her properly, return graded work or even recognize substantial gaps in her mathematics preparation. Her mother eventually discovered assignments riddled with mistakes that had never been corrected. Those are not imaginary problems created by standardized tests or middle-class expectations. Children deserve competent teachers, rigorous instruction and honest feedback.

My own research has found that teacher preparation and teacher quality matter (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005). Defending public education should never require pretending otherwise. But an educator responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay on Facebook raised the concern that has stayed with me: the article can leave readers “to blame structural problems on the usual scapegoats who never had the power to create them.” That is where I think we need to be careful.

Hannah-Jones herself provides the evidence for a more structural conclusion. Najya’s middle-school principal explains that her school enrolled everyone, including children arriving years behind academically, while selective schools concentrated students already prepared to succeed. More than one-third of students at Najya’s middle school had identified learning disabilities, compared with 17 percent at her selective high school. The school was simultaneously expected to remediate years of lost learning, teach grade-level material, manage social and behavioral needs and prepare its strongest students for elite high schools.

That is not simply a teacher-quality problem. It is institutional sorting. My research has documented versions of this dynamic for two decades. Jennifer Holme and I found persistent racial, economic and linguistic segregation long after Jim Crow formally ended (Vasquez Heilig & Holme, 2013). My colleagues and I later found intense racial segregation in charter schools as well, reminding us that giving families more choices does not automatically dismantle inequality (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2019). Research on accountability similarly showed how schools serving marginalized students can be punished for outcomes produced partly by unequal opportunities to learn (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2018).

School finance matters too. Davíd Martínez and I have argued that educational opportunity is fundamentally a civil-rights question because children cannot be held equally accountable when they have not been provided comparable opportunities to learn (Martínez & Vasquez Heilig, 2022). This does not absolve the adults who failed Najya. It changes the scale of the indictment. So Hannah-Jones’s story ultimately demonstrates why the parental decision is harder than “choose the better school.”

Najya eventually chose one of New York City’s highly selective public high schools. Academically, she initially struggled because her previous schooling had left gaps. But there was another cost. She had gone from Black schools where, as Hannah-Jones writes, nobody questioned whether Black children could be smart to an environment where classmates used racial slurs and questioned her intelligence. She briefly wanted to leave.

By the end of the essay, Najya herself recognizes the tradeoff. She tells her mother she is glad she did not spend her early childhood in predominantly white schools because her Black schools helped give her a strong racial identity and the confidence to challenge racism. She had also discovered something important about her more privileged classmates: They were not necessarily smarter or better behaved. “They just had more.” That may be the most important sentence in the essay.

Parents make choices. Systems distribute what there is to choose from. Honestly, I personally understand Hannah-Jones’s regret. When your child says, “I never really got the education I wanted,” intellectual arguments about the common good become painfully inadequate. I have heard that same argument from my children. Parents have a special obligation to their own children, and there is no shame in acknowledging that. But we must resist those who are turning this deeply personal story into another argument that the solution to educational inequality is for parents to make better individual choices via vouchers and charter schools. That road leads exactly where we already are.

Families with money purchase tutoring. Families with information navigate admissions systems. Families with mobility purchase homes near preferred schools. Families with social capital advocate successfully. Families without those advantages receive whatever the system leaves behind. The problem is not that parents love their own children too much. The problem is that we have constructed a competitive education system where high-quality education is rationed and doing the best for one’s own child can require leaving other children behind.

The goal should therefore not be to tell parents which sacrifice to make. Choose academics over culture. Choose integration over belonging. Choose religion over coursework. Choose athletics over proximity. Choose the collective over your child. Those are family decisions, and reasonable parents can weigh them differently. Our public responsibility is different. It is to make the consequences of those choices less brutal.

Conclusion

I should also say that I have long admired Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work. I first met her in Oakland in 2017 at the Network for Public Education conference, and I have been a fan of her scholarship and journalism (see photo). That is part of why her essay stayed with me. I read it not as an argument to defeat, but as an extraordinarily difficult question posed by a parent whose choices illuminate the choices millions of families are forced to make.

A Black child should not have to choose between cultural affirmation and rigorous academics. A poor child should not have to attend school with less because her parents earn less. A student should not need admission to a selective school to encounter advanced mathematics. And teachers in high-poverty schools should not be expected to repair years of accumulated inequality while working with fewer resources and then be blamed when they cannot perform miracles.

Hannah-Jones asks whether fighting for every Black child meant betraying her own. I think her essay points to this conclusion: There was never a perfect choice available. That is the real indictment. And it is not an accident. For generations, American education policy has created and maintained systems in which access to rigorous coursework, experienced teachers, enrichment, safety, social capital, and opportunity too often follows race, wealth, and geography. Parents are then asked to make intensely personal choices inside inequalities they did not create.

The question, then, is not whether Hannah-Jones made the right choice for her daughter, or whether another family would have been more virtuous for choosing differently. The harder question is why we continue to tolerate the American education system that makes families choose among things every child should receive together.

Please share.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Curriculum, Democracy, Equity, Ethics, Failure, New York City, Racism, Research

Florida Wants to Be First State to Repeal All Vaccine Mandates

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2026 //
2

Florida is one crazy state. Its state leaders interfere in every aspect of people’s lives. Under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, it passed a rigid abortion ban, denying every woman in the state the right to control her body and her life choices.

DeSantis has led a campaign to destroy the state’s public schools, so the state now spends billions yearly to subsidize charter schools, unaccountable voucher schools, and home schooling. Most of the voucher schools are religious schools with uncertified teachers.

As his Surgeon General, DeSantis chose a doctor with extremist views against vaccines. Parents can still get their children vaccinated, but they will be in school with unvaccinated children.

Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s goal is to eliminate all vaccine requirements.

CBS News reported:

TALLAHASSEE — The Florida Department of Health is moving forward with its push to remove the requirement for four vaccines for children entering schools, but has dropped its attempt to expand exemptions for the immunization requirements.

In August, the DOH struck the words “sincerely held moral or ethical belief” from a proposed rule change that would have allowed parents to opt not to get their children vaccinated for various diseases, which are normally required to attend K-12 public schools. The exemptions currently in place must be based on religious tenets and practices.

Meanwhile, the DOH also announced a public meeting next Thursday in Lake Mary to discuss repealing the requirement of four vaccines from entry requirements for PreK-12 public and private schools.

Immunizations for Hepatitis B, varicella (chicken pox), Haemophilus influenza type b (Hib) and pneumococcal conjugate would no longer be required to attend Florida schools under the proposal. The move has been in play for over a year after Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced his intent to get rid of all vaccine mandates in the state.

The immunization requirements considered for repeal by DOH are an agency rule, not in state law, and can be repealed by the agency itself.
The Florida chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a statement they “remain concerned,” about the state’s move to weaken the state’s vaccination mandates.

“Florida’s pediatricians will continue to make their voices heard in opposition to this proposed rule that would undermine the health of Florida’s children and communities,” the statement reads. “When school vaccine protections are eliminated, immunization rates decrease, leaving more people, including those too young or medically unable to be vaccinated themselves, vulnerable to contracting these dangerous illnesses.”

In a comment submitted by FCAAP in opposition to the proposed rule, the advocacy group estimated the repeal of vaccination requirements in Florida would result in a reduction of the state’s GDP by $74 million in the first year and nearly $9 billion over a decade.

Attempts to repeal all vaccine mandates in the state began over a year ago when Gov. Ron DeSantis and Ladapo called on the Legislature to change state law. Legislative action is needed to remove the requirements for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, polio, diphtheria, rubeola and tetanus vaccines.

But even though the move to repeal all vaccine mandates was supported by DeSantis, First Lady Casey DeSantis and then-Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas, no legislator filed a bill in any of the multiple legislative sessions in 2026.

Multiple attempts at a “Medical Freedom” bill that would have expanded vaccine exemptions and mandated doctors to provide an alternate vaccine schedule passed the state Senate but failed to pass the state House.

Categories DeSantis, Ethics, Extremism, Florida, Health, Medicine, Science

Should Religious Schools That Accept Public Money Be Allowed to Discriminate?

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2026 //
5

The U.S. Supreme Court has opened a can of worms by its recent decisions allowing public dollars to flow to religious schools.

Some of the conservative Justices claim to be “originalists,” devoted to the original text of the Constitution as it was written. Yet the Court’s six conservative Justices have blithely discarded the “separation of church and state” that was continually upheld in principle (though not always in practice).

The First Amendment to the Constitution says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Those who think the United States was meant to be a Christian nation will find no support in the Constitution. The word “religion” appears only once, in the First Amendment. The word “religious” appears only once, in Article VI, clause 3, which says that there shall be no religious test for holding public office. (“…but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”)

The word “God” does not appear in the Constitution, nor any reference to The Ten Commandments, nor to Christianity, nor to any Biblical precepts.

The Founders clearly opposed government “establishment of religion,” which the Supreme Court interpreted as no direct government subsidy of religion or religious schools for at least 200 years. And the Founders believed that Americans should be free to practice their religion or no religion.

The Founders’ silence about religion did not signify that it was unimportant, but that it was a matter of private conscience, no business of the state to control, subsidize, censor, ban, support, or aid. This was for most of our history the long-hallowed tradition of separation of church and state.

There were, as I noted, exceptions to that principle of separation. In 1947, in the Everson decision, the Court allowed the state of New Jersey to pay transportation costs for Catholic students. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act allowed students in Catholic schools to receive remedial services from public school teachers. That part of the law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1985 (Aguilar v. Felton), but the Court reversed that decision in 1997 (Agostini v. Felton), so long as the students were received remedial instruction in secular subjects). In 1968, the Court allowed New York to pay the cost of textbooks for children in religious schools. In 1983, the Court allowed Minnesota to pay parents for educational expenses, including parents whose children attended religious schools. In 2002, the court approved a voucher program in Ohio for religious schools.

Clearly, the “wall of separation” had many exceptions and holes through which public aid went to students in religious schools.

In recent years, the Court has gone even farther, basically concluding that any public benefit to public and private schools should be extended to religious schools. Excluding religious schools from the same benefits as other schools, so went the argument, was a denial of religious freedom.

The prohibition of an “establishment of religion” continues shrinking with each new decision touching the issue of public funding and religious schools. The convenient fiction that sidesteps the “establishment clause” is that the public money doesn’t go to the religious school; it goes to the parents who choose the religious school.

Today, many states whose constitution unambiguously prohibits any public funding of religious schools are directly funding religious schools, without bothering to amend the language of their state constitution.

In response to the new permissiveness of the Supreme Court towards vouchers, such programs have spread in the states, although voters have never approved a state referendum to endorse vouchers. Voters don’t like vouchers, but rightwing billionaires like Jeff Yass in Pennsylvania do. Billionaires fund political campaigns. Money talks.

Now, the public awaits the crucial decision from the Supreme Court–the one that is likely either to eliminate the line between church and state. Or to draw a line in the sand.

Linda Greenhouse covered the U.S. Supreme Court for The New York Times for thirty years, from 1978 to 2008. Here are her thoughts on the issue (gift article):

Chief Justice John Roberts has accomplished so much of his agenda that it’s not easy, as he begins his 22nd Supreme Court term, to think of what unfinished business might remain.

Affirmative action is dead. Roe v. Wade is a fading memory. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is in shreds, rendered incapable of serving its original mission of preventing states from undermining the political power of minority citizens. The executive branch agencies known collectively as the administrative state have lost their independence, with the president now able to fire nearly all agency heads for any reason or no reason at all. Federal judges are no longer to defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own authority, instead being told to decide for themselves the validity of agency regulations. Historical claims that fly under the banner of “originalism” have frozen the government’s ability to regulate the ownership of lethal weapons.

While it’s a daunting list, some readers might notice that I have omitted one major focus of the Roberts court. Doesn’t religion belong in any inventory of completed projects?

Not yet.

That may seem a startling conclusion, given how significantly the court over the past decade has reoriented the relationship between church and state — a recent law review article by three constitutional law scholars calls the shift “a systematic dismantling of the previous legal regime.” A series of decisions, most of which bear the chief justice’s name, has established the principle, without precedent in constitutional history, that whatever public benefit secular institutions get, religious institutions are entitled to as well. The first of these, in 2017, required Missouri to include a church’s school in a state program to resurface school playgrounds, despite a “no aid” provision in its Constitution that barred the state from giving money to churches. Exclusion of the church from the program, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, was “odious to our Constitution.”

In 2022, the court declared unconstitutional Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a program that subsidizes private school tuition for families in districts without a public secondary school. If the leap from preschool playgrounds to secondary school tuition seemed head-spinning, it was a leap the chief justice did not acknowledge in his opinion, Carson v. Makin. The principles of the first decision “suffice to resolve this case,” he wrote.

That is a huge amount of ground for the Supreme Court to have traversed in a short time. More is on the way. In its new term, which begins next week, the court will decide whether the equality principle these cases have established is enough, or whether religion is entitled not just to equality but also to preference, in this instance a carve-out from the rules that constrain secular institutions. The case is from Colorado, where a state “universal preschool” program operating since 2023 offers free prekindergarten to all 4-year-olds. Families can choose any participating preschool, secular or religious, that meets the quality standards established at the direction of the legislature. One of the standards is a nondiscrimination requirement: In admitting students whose families apply, the school may not discriminate on the basis of “race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level or disability.” Some 2,000 public and private schools, including dozens of religious schools, take part in the program.

For the Archdiocese of Denver, the sexual orientation and gender identity portions of the nondiscrimination provision posed a conflict. The archdiocese requires that parents who send their children to its schools accept the Roman Catholic Church’s teachings on marriage and family, asking them before enrollment to sign a statement of “community beliefs.” Same-sex and transgender parents need not apply. The archdiocese told its parishes not to participate in the program and requested an exemption from the two provisions. The state’s Department of Early Childhood replied that there was no option in state law for an exemption; every aspect of the nondiscrimination policy applied to all.

Two parishes, St. Mary, in Littleton, and St. Bernadette, in Lakewood, sued the state, along with a husband and wife from Littleton who wanted a state-funded Catholic education for their children. (The archdiocese joined the lawsuit but was dismissed for lack of standing.) The plaintiffs’ basic argument was that under the analysis the Supreme Court applied in the secondary school tuition case from Maine, Colorado’s refusal to grant the exemption violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of the free exercise of religion. The Federal District Court in Denver, in a decision affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, disagreed.

“This case is different,” the appeals court said. It explained that while the Maine case and the cases that preceded it concerned a public program’s actual exclusion of religious schools, Colorado has “welcomed and actively solicited their participation.” The court added: “The only relevant limitation on any preschool’s participation is the nondiscrimination requirement which applies to all preschools regardless of whether they are religious or secular.” It noted that the state was neither targeting religion nor “attempting to prohibit funds from being used for religious purposes.”

The anodyne sound of that observation — that of course the state wasn’t preventing the direct use of public money for religious education — shouldn’t obscure the full dimension of the change the Supreme Court has wrought in the constitutional law on religion. The notion that the First Amendment’s other religion clause, the prohibition against the “establishment” of religion, might have anything to say about this arrangement sounds now like the vestige of a distant past, so thorough has been the establishment clause’s erasure from constitutional notice.

This case, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, puts to the justices the question of whether they are satisfied with what they have accomplished so far. Is equality enough? And if discrimination is an issue in the case, wherein does the discrimination lie?

For the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the powerhouse religious law firm that brought this case to the Supreme Court, the question is clear. The news release it issued in April, when the court granted its petition, offered this account: “The Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether Colorado can continue excluding Catholic families and preschools from the state’s ‘universal’ preschool program because of their faith.” A tendentious framing, but well tailored to reach the ears of those justices primed to take an apocalyptic view of any seeming incursion on the interests of religious believers.

A “friend of the court” brief filed on the state’s side by Marci Hamilton, a religion scholar known for opposition to the court’s current course, proposes this counterframing: “This court should not undermine Colorado’s commitment to equality by transforming religious freedom into a doctrine that mandates taxpayer-subsidized discrimination.”

This case has flown under the radar in the months since the court granted the Becket Fund’s petition, but it won’t remain there as the Nov. 3 argument date approaches. Equality or preference? The choice is stark — and Chief Justice Roberts’s project, for now, remains unfinished.

Categories Colorado, Injustice, Justice, Religion, Separation of church and state, Vouchers

Snopes: Is There a Golden Statue of a Naked Trump at European Parliament?

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2026 //
6

Snopes investigated the question.

The answer is yes.

Trump is a laughing stock in Europe.

He thinks his bullying and lying makes him look tough.

It doesn’t.

It makes him look ridiculous.

If you are on Twitter, please find this hilarious clip. Trump is giving a speech in Texas, ridiculing James Talarico, calling him a vegan (he’s not), as if that’s criminal (it’s not). Then, he says his wife told him, “Sir, it’s pronounced “vegan,’ not ‘vagan.'”

This clip brought forth hilarious responses.

  1. Why would Melania address him as “sir”?
  2. Whenever he tells a “sir” story, it’s fake.
  3. He must have confused Melania with Natalie Harp.
  4. Melania’s command of English would not enable her to know the difference between the two pronunciations.

And many more.

The unasked question: why is being a vegan worse than being impeached for corruption by the Republican-controlled House in the state legislature?

Poor James Talarico: he has to eat meat constantly to prove he’s not a vegan. Daily ribs or steak. Not the worst punishment but indicative of the absurd campaign of lies against Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, who is running for governor. The Republicans have uncontested power, so they don’t want to talk about issues or policy. So they make personal attacks, usually lies.

Categories Humor, Trump

Trump Ambassador to Greece Begged Donor for Money

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2026 //
1

Kimberly Guilfoyle, ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., current Ambassador to Greece, is embroiled in a scandal. She allegedly pleaded with a Trump donor to pay her American Express bill of $100,000. Not a good move for a federal employee, especially since she was allegedly offering to get favors for him.

Mediate reported:

Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, pleaded with a Republican donor to send her $100,000 to pay off credit card debt, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

The request came as Guilfoyle, the ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., was gearing up for her Senate confirmation hearing last year.

“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal to Eric Deters, a donor to President Donald Trump. “Please.”

The Journal, which reviewed the Signal correspondence, said Guilfoyle and Deters had communicated for months as Deters sought help from the Trump administration on some tax and legal problems. Deters had promised Guilfoyle as much as $1 million if she was able to use her connections to the president to help him. The outlet reported that Guilfoyle relayed Deters messages she had sent to the Internal Revenue Service on his behalf. Guilfoyle also told Deters she was lobbying the Department of Justice for him.

Shortly before her confirmation, Guilfoyle pleaded with Deters to send $100,000 to her American Express account:

“Honey please I need you to get this done for me today,” she texted Deters, adding a prayer hands emoji and a PDF with bill payment instructions from American Express. “You could just send it here,” she wrote on July 3, 2025, just days before her July 9 confirmation hearing.

The Journal added that Deters, a 63-year-old lawyer and former co-owner of Snappy Tomato Pizza, declined to pay Guilfoyle the money, telling her that he would lose his wife if he did. Additionally, the publication noted a recent scandal in which Guilfoyle had promoted a Greek company, a lobbyist from which had traveled with her throughout the Balkans.

Guilfoyle’s attorney disputed the authenticity of the Signal messages, though he did not specify. Meanwhile, a U.S. Embassy official defended the ambassador.

“Guilfoyle’s career in and out of public service is guided by deep and abiding values,” the official told the Journal. “She was fully vetted by the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations committee and confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The Ambassador remains committed to representing the American people with dedication and integrity.”

Deters told the Journal that Guilfoyle’s inability to help him with his tax and legal issues had soured him on the Trump administration. Specifically, she had been apparently unable to make headway on Deters’ behalf with then-IRS Commissioner Billy Long, who is now U.S. ambassador to Iceland.

“Deters said Guilfoyle told him if he came up with the Amex money, ‘I will be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever,’” the outlet stated. “But, he said, ‘she never came through on anything.’”

Indeed, a message reviewed by the Journal sbowed Deters griping to Guilfoyle.

“I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote to her on Signal, attaching a photo of a printed memo claiming his consulting firm owed Guilfoyle $50,000. “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker. I need results.”

During their communications, Guilfoyle became concerned about Deters’ apparent lack of discretion.

“Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things,” she wrote to him. “It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on [S]ignal.” She also complained that Deters had mentioned their arrangement to a producer on Guilfoyle’s podcast.

“It’s unbelievable when we have a private arrangement with you that you would now CC a producer talking about money,” she said. “Do not say we have any arrangement.”

Guilfoyle added, “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship.”

It is reassuring to know that she was acting with “dedication and integrity,” serving the best interests of the American people.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Trump
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