The New York Times described the various ways that Elon Musk is helping himself and his business empire as he reorganizes the federal government. It was clear from the start that Musk has multiple conflicts of interest in his relationship to the government. He has taken control of several agencies that are investigating his business practices. He presently receives billions of dollars of federal subsidies for his SpaceX project and other businesses. It’s impossible to imagine any other President allowing a person with so many financial conflicts to make consequential decisions.
Eric Lipton and Kirsten Grind of The New York Times wrote:
President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.
Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies, leaving more sympathetic Republican appointees overseeing those lawsuits.
At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by those moves have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions into Mr. Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.
Trump firings hit agencies with oversight of Musk’s companies
Staffing changes, including the firing of several top officials, have affected agencies with federal investigations into or regulatory battles with Elon Musk’s companies.
The events of the past few weeks have thrown into question the progress and outcomes of many of those pending investigations into his companies.
The inquiries include the Federal Aviation Administration’s fines of Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, for safety violations and a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit pressing Mr. Musk to pay the federal government perhaps as much as $150 million, accusing him of having violated federal securities law.
On its own, the National Labor Relations Board, an independent watchdog agency for workers’ rights, has 24 investigations into Mr. Musk’s companies, according to the review by The Times.
Since January, Mr. Trump has fired three officials at that agency, including a board member, effectively stalling the board’s ability to rule on cases. Until Mr. Trump nominates new members, cases that need a ruling by the board cannot move forward, according to the agency.
Over at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a public database shows hundreds of complaints about the electric car company Tesla, mostly concerning debt collection or loan problems. The agency has now effectively been put out of commission, at least temporarily, by the Trump administration, which has ordered its staff to put a hold on all investigations. The bureau also is an agency that would have regulated Mr. Musk’s new efforts to bring a payments service to X.
“CFPB RIP,” Mr. Musk wrote in a social media post last week as the Trump administration moved to close down the bureau…
Traditional federal conflict of interest rules seem almost antiquated, if Mr. Musk is determined to be involved in specific decisions about agencies his companies do business with.
That is why Mr. Musk’s role is so concerning to former White House ethics lawyers in Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
No kidding! Elon Musk has the power to close down agencies that are investigating his businesses. That’s not normal.
He also has the personal data of every person, from their tax filings and Social Security. That’s a treasure trove, worth a lot of money.
Trump wants to close the U.S. Department of Education. He thinks the Department of Education has been indoctrinating Americans to accept DEI and “radical gender ideology.” He’s wrong.
Trump’s education goals were laid out in Project 2025. During the campaign, Trump pretended he knew nothing about Project 2025, but he was lying. Of course. The organizer of Project 2025, Russell Vought, was recently confirmed as Trump’s Budget Director (Office of Management and Budget).
Trump and his Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon think that the Department of Education is a hotbed of DEI and that it is imposing “woke” policies on the nation’s schools.
As someone who served in the Department of Education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, I can state without qualification that they are wrong.
The career civil servants at the Department of Education are not educators, although there might be a few exceptions. They review and process grants and contracts. They organize peer reviews. They supervise authorized activities. They have multiple responsibilities, but writing curriculum is not one of them.
The Department of Education does not tell schools what to teach. It is illegal for any officer of the government to attempt to influence the curriculum of the nation’s schools. It has been illegal to do so since 1970.
The law states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, employee, of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials.“
The law is P.L. 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, section 438.
The ideas of diversity, equity, and inclusion are generally and broadly accepted by the public. They were not hatched by the Department of Education. They are baked into our American ideals of fairness and justice and opportunity for all.
The fact is that our nation is diverse. Banning the word doesn’t change the reality. We are a nation whose population includes people of every race, religion, and ethnicity. We are a nation of men and women, as well as people who are LGBT. Yes, we do have transgender men and women, and not even Trump can erase them.
Equity is a necessity if we are serious about reducing the vast economic and social gaps in our society. Here is one definition of equity, as compared to equality, as offered by the Annie E. Casey Foundation:
Well-meaning people often use the terms “equity” and “equality” interchangeably when discussing matters related to race and social justice. While both terms have to do with “fairness,” there are key differences as the application of one over the other may lead to drastically different outcomes. Equality requires that everyone receives the same resources and opportunities, regardless of circumstances and despite any inherent advantages or disadvantages that apply to certain groups. Equity, on the other hand, considers the specific needs or circumstances of a person or group and provides the types of resources needed to be successful.
Equality assumes that everybody is operating at the same starting point and will face the same circumstances and challenges. Equity recognizes the shortcomings of this “one-size-fits-all” approach and understands that different levels of support must be provided to achieve fairness in outcomes.
A highly circulated image seeks to provide a visual illustration of the differences between equality and equity. The image depicts three people standing behind a fence, watching a baseball game. The three individuals are all different heights, with the tallest of the three being able to see over the fence without any help. The other two are not tall enough to see over. Equality provides each of these people with identical boxes to stand on to peer over the fence. The tallest person, who didn’t need the box in the first place, now stands even higher, continuing to enjoy a perfect view of the game. The second person can now see over the fence, and the third person, even with the help of the box, is still too short to see over.
The image also depicts what equity would look like in this same scenario. In the equity version, the tallest person does not receive a box and is still able to enjoy the game. The second person is given one box to stand on, and the third person is given two boxes to stand on. Now, all three can enjoy the same view of the game.
The most classic definition of equity in my lifetime was contained in a speech that President Lyndon B. Johnson gave at Howard University in 1965.
He said:
Freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.
You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.
Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities–physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness.
To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in–by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.
The speech was written by LBJ’s White House aide, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A brilliant Harvard professor, he later was Ambassador to the UN and elected to the US Senate in New York.
As for “inclusion,” it’s a word that means nothing more nor less than all. We commonly speak of equal opportunity for all, not for some. The Pledge of Allegiance refers to “liberty and justice for all,” not for some. All means all. All means inclusion.
Pete Hegseth recently said, “Diversity is not our strength.” What a stupid thing for the Secretary of Defense to say in light of the diversity of our military. Does he want to oust everyone from the military except white nen?
When the U.S. team walks into the Olympic Stadium, it is the most diverse team in the world. I feel proud when I see them.
The fact is, my friends, we are led by a team of idiots. They are simpletons who want to turn the clock back many decades, at least to the 1950s, when the country was run by straight white men. Many barriers have fallen, allowing the rise of people who are not straight white men. (Trump actually has an out gay man in his Cabinet, the Secretary of the Treasury, but he is most certainly an outlier). Trump wants to restore the barriers that kept women and nonwhites out of leadership roles.
We have to push back every day. Don’t let Trump’s seething hatred and bigotry become normalized. Don’t let him wipe out 60 years of civil rights legislation.
At a reader’s suggestion, here is an even better graphic to define “equity.”
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, describes the Republican infighting in Oklahoma. Meanwhile School Superintendent Ryan Walters continues his crusade to Christianize the state’s public schools.
In Oklahoma, where rightwing MAGAs, led by Governor Kevin Stitt, State Superintendent Ryan Walters, and our most extreme state legislators, continue to double down on irrational and, above all, cruel agendas, it remains unclear whether Democrats and adult Republicans will be successful in pushing back. But there are still reasons for hope.
Over the last couple of weeks, we received new hope that the Oklahoma MAGAs are forming a circular firing squad. And that encourages me to believe that the same thing could undermine the Donald Trump/Elon Musk agenda.
I also wrote:
Although Walters remains the best known voice for absurdity, I still believe that Gov. Stitt’s agenda would be the most destructive – if he could get it done.
The best news in February is that Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, hoping the replace the term-limited Kevin Stitt, and to defeat his most dangerous opponent, Ryan Walters, is not the only Republican who is pushing back on both of them.
As the Oklahoman reported, A.G. Drummond, a member of the Board of Equalization, recently “issued a news release saying he doesn’t trust the numbers” presented by Stitt when calling for a tax cut for the rich when “the Oklahoma Tax Commission is reporting that expected revenue will drop by $408 million.” It reported, “Drummond said Stitt has taken what should be a serious, thoughtful and collaborative gathering of constitutional officers and ‘turned it in to a scripted event that is mostly for show.’”
Then, the blockbuster news was the removal of three Board of Education members who Stitt appointed and “who would later be described as a ‘rubber stamp’ for Walters.” Now, Stitt condemns Walters for creating “needless political drama.” Stitt now “says he will not approve Walters’ proposed immigration status rule, accusing Walters and the board of ‘picking on kids.’”
****
As the Oklahoman also reported, Walters replied, “Governor Stitt has joined the swampy political establishment that President Trump is fighting against.” Then he “announced the creation of a ‘Trump Advisory Team’ within the state Department of Education — to be led by two of the now-former board members.”
This is occurring at a time, I’m told, when veteran Republicans may be making progress in teaching a number of new Republican legislators about the complexity of the budget process and the causes of the economic crisis Oklahoma faced in 2017.
Moreover, both the Senate and the House have new leaders who seem to be listening to the reasons why both Stitt and Walters are undermining the state’s economy. For instance, Senate Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton “aired concerns that the public squabbling would damage Oklahoma and its endeavors to attract new business investment from out of state.” Paxton said, “’If I could say something to all three of them’ (Walters, Drummond and Stitt), ‘I would say it’s not just Oklahomans watching what’s going on. It’s the entire nation.’” Paxton added, “I always say, ‘If you’re going to have an argument in this building, have it behind closed doors and try to work it out without making a big public spectacle about everything.”
And, “Republican Labor Commissioner Leslie Osborn (who has a long history of smart, honest, pro-union, and humane advocacy) points to Stitt’s failed effort to persuade Panasonic to build a $4 billion battery plant in Oklahoma as an example of the damage culture-war politics used by Walters and others [which] can kill billion-dollar deals.” She explained that it was the rightwing attacks on the LGBT community that likely persuaded the company to reject the Oklahoma offer.
Osborn explained:
“It was National Pride Week, and Panasonic had on their website, because they are international, that they were celebrating the diversity of their clientele and their employees and that they were appreciative of the LGBT community,” But, “More than a dozen Republican lawmakers chose the week that Stitt had landed Oklahoma as one of three finalists for the plant to release a statement, on state House letterhead, condemning Panasonic.” … “two days later Panasonic picked Kansas.”
Most importantly, politically, is the pushback by business leaders against Walters. The Oklahoman reported that the CEO of Gardner Tanenbaum Holdings, who played a key role in “developing a 30-acre Oklahoma City campus where Boeing has added hundreds of engineering jobs over the past dozen years,” said the problem is, “Education, education, education — we are dead in the water without the workforce.”
Tanenbaum told the crowd of 250 of the city’s most prominent developers and business executives:
“So wherever you can, get involved: The school district and the school boards, colleges, whatever — we’ve got to get rid of this guy. What was his name again?”
The crowd laughed as a member of the audience yelled out “Walters!”
“Walters!” Tanenbaum confirmed. “We’ve got to get rid of him!”
I have a history of being too optimistic, but Walters is facing four legal challenges in the next few months, and Stitt recently praised one of the educators (with a long history as a leader, Rob Miller, of the fight against corporate school reform) who is suing Walters.
Reporters are investigating what triggered the “feud” between Stitt and Walters. The Oklahomanreported that Walters showed up at a rally against wind energy. This happened when Stitt was bragging about a corporation from Denmark “which could eventually lead to the development of a green methanol power production facility in the state.”
Walters said:
“I’m here to support Oklahoma and Oklahoma families, … Oklahoma families have spoken loudly and clearly they want their income taxes cut, they want to have support here in the state. We don’t want to give subsidies to woke energy companies. We have been fighting a cultural war here in the state to keep Oklahoma values intact. What we’re seeing is the opening up of a woke value system in the state that undermines all the good people here today, so we’re always going to fight for Oklahoma families and for the state as a whole.”
A Republican former-legislator, Mark McBride, with a long history of defending schools being attacked by Walters, said that Walters is “speaking and acting like he’s the governor, and he’s not.”
Which leads to the question whether there could be a similar conflict on the federal level prompted by a billionaire acting like a president when he is not.
At any rate, neither Stitt nor Walters are succeeding in their goals of turning Oklahoma into a successful pilot program for implementing Trump’s and Musk’s agendas. There’s reason to hope that they could be previewing a similar rightwing civil war between the Republicans who are now supporting the Project 2025 agenda.
Yes, I acknowledge that the best short-term scenario in Oklahoma is to lessen the damage that the right-wingers are doing. And as is the case on a national level, where the Republicans are still supporting Trump/Musk attacks on our democracy, it remains uncertain whether their attacks on government will first unravel their autocratic coalition or America’s public institutions. But recent Oklahoma history could preview a national unravelling of their assault on American democracy.
James Fallows is a veteran journalist, one of the best. He predicts disaster ahead because of the ignorance of the DOGE team slashing the federal workforce.
Screenshot from CNN, credited to John Nelson, of Delta regional jet flight 4819 upside-down after landing at Pearson Airport in Toronto, after crash landing today.
He writes:
This post is about today’s crash-landing of a commuter jet, en route from Minneapolis to Toronto, which for still-unexplained reasons flipped over and landed on its back without killing any passengers.
Good news for all those aboard.
It coincides with cautionary news about anyone flying on US-based airlines. Let’s go through the de-brief:
The big questions.
Was today’s crash-landing in Toronto directly traceable to this past weekend’s Musk-Trump mass layoffs of FAA officials in the US?
—Almost certainly not.
Will future crashes be directly traceable to this move?
—Almost certainly so.
Any future-history of US airline disasters in 2026 or beyond will probably start its narrative in this past holiday weekend of 2025. That is when the Musk tech-bro team known as DOGE, instructed by Russel Vought and empowered by Trump, began its mass layoffs of air-safety officials whose employment status showed “probationary.” (Even if they had been on the job for decades, and were classified as “probationary” only because they had recently received a promotion.)
After any aviation disaster, the careful investigators of the NTSB try to reconstruct the “accident chain.” We’re beginning the accident chain for future disaster, right now.
Let’s take this step-by-step.
What happened in Toronto.
As with almost any aviation accident, it will take time to be sure. What is known as the time I write is this:
The airplane was a Bombardier regional jet. By coincidence, this was the the same make, though a slightly different model, as the regional jet involved in the large-casualty collision near National Airport in DC this month.
Many of the passengers have been taken to the hospital. But as of the time I write, all appear to have survived.
The weather was challenging, and the winds were very strong and gusty, when the plane touched down at Toronto/Pearson and then apparently flipped over onto its back. Did the gusty crosswinds cause the plane to lose its balance and flip? At this moment no one can be sure. The weather and winds appear to have been bad but not unmanageable.¹ We’ll see what further data might reveal.
Was this in any way related to the large-scale layoffs of air traffic control professionals by the new Musk-Trump-Doge regime? There’s no reason yet to think so. The recording of Air Traffic Control guidance from the Toronto tower, which you can listen to here², seems entirely routine until the moment the regional jet has a bad touch down.³
But will it be related to crashes in the future? That seems to me inevitable.
—You lay off much of the fire-fighting force, you’re inviting a destructive fire.
—You lay off teachers, you’re inviting ignorance.
—And if you lay off the people who have made air-travel safe, you are inviting unsafe air travel.
Which is Trump, Musk, and their ninjas seem to be doing now.
But don’t ask me. Ask someone who has devoted his life to air-traffic safety.
What will happen in our skies.
Someone I have been in touch with for many years, and whose airspace I once flew through during his time as a controller and mine as a pilot in that part of the country, sends a message today that I thought worth quoting in full. This correspondent writes:
They fired a bunch of probationery employees last night. Basically everyone other than controllers or safety inspectors, apparently.
It’s one of those things that has a slow but corrosive effect on safety. For example: Our team is bracing for cuts. One of the biggest things we do is environmental review and community engagement for proposed actions in airspace or procedures.
So if someone needs a new or amended approach [JF note: like those over the Potomac, in light of recent problems], the flight procedure team—currently staffed at 13, should be 17—designs it and gives it to us.
Our environmental specialists do the NEPA [environmental policy] review; myself and other ATC subject matter experts assist them by checking the procedures, explaining what’s going on, and checking it for any variety of things in how it fits in with everything else in the area. We also do community engagement stuff if it is called for.
[On our team] all the ‘probationary’ people got fired.
Will it lead to disaster? Not immediately. But fewer people trying to do the same amount of work will lead to stuff getting missed….
We prioritize and do the most safety-critical stuff first. But a lot will fall aside.
‘Boys throw stones at frogs in fun…’
Let’s return to the theme of a preceding dispatch: Elon Musk and his acolytes are having fun, and perhaps preparing for a privatization of the FAA, but in the process they are putting all of the rest of us in danger.
—I submit that I know more about air safety, and about FAA procedures, than Elon Musk does, or any of the members of his zealot/ignoramus team.
—And I know at least a thousand people who are vastly more experienced and knowledgeable than I am.
The Musk/Trump people are empowering the know-nothings. Who tear things down because they have no idea of who built them up.
Conceivably this will be the barrier—the risk that constituents might die in airplane crahses—that stops them? When GOP politicians flying out of DCA think that Musk-ite shortcuts might kill them? When even Musk’s private jets have to deal with over-stressed air traffic controllers?
We don’t know. But the powers that be are pushing the limits.
—As a pilot, I trust air traffic controllers. As a passenger, I trust the multi-layer safety network that decades’ worth of relentless self-examination has built up.
—As a citizen, I do not trust the standards that the clown-corrupt Trump/Musk regime has introduced.
‘Defund the police’ became a right-wing campaign slogan. ‘Defund Air Traffic Control’ will get us killed.
Julie Creswell of The New York Timesreported that The Washington Post killed an ad calling on Trump to fire his best buddy Elon Musk. The story was first reported in The Hill. Who could have given such an order?
Creswell writes:
An advertisement that was set to run in some editions of The Washington Post on Tuesday calling for Elon Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to one of the advocacy groups that had ordered the ad.
Common Cause said it was told by the newspaper on Friday that the ad was being pulled. The full-page ad, known as a wraparound, would have covered the front and back pages of editions delivered to the White House, the Pentagon and Congress, and was planned in collaboration with the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund.
A separate, full-page ad with the same themes would have been allowed to run inside the newspaper, but the two groups chose to cancel the internal ad as well. Both ads would have cost the groups $115,000.
“We asked why they wouldn’t run the wrap when we clearly met the guidelines if they were allowing the internal ad,” said Virginia Kase Solomón, the president and chief executive of Common Cause. “They said they were not at liberty to give us a reason.”
News of The Washington Post canceling the ad was earlier reported by The Hill.
Although it is unclear who made the decision to pull the ad or why, the move comes amid growing concern about the changing mission of the Washington Post newsroom under the ownership of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. The newspaper’s decision last fall to end its longstanding tradition of presidential endorsements and Mr. Bezos’ front-row seat at Mr. Trump’s inauguration have led some to wonder whether the news organization has been accommodating a Trump administration.
Last month, more than 400 employees sent a letter to Mr. Bezos requesting a meeting to discuss leadership decisions that they said “led readers to question the integrity of this institution.”
Mrs. Kase Solomón said that all the content for the ad — art and text — had been sent to The Post’s advertisement department last Tuesday and that “no alarm bells were rung” by anyone from the newspaper at that time. She said she did not know who inside the organization made the decision to pull the wrap.
The ad featured an image of Mr. Musk laughing over a picture of the White House with text that reads: “Who’s Running This Country: Donald Trump or Elon Musk?” The ad called for readers to contact their senators and tell them it’s time for Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Musk…
Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who controls six companies, including Tesla, SpaceX and the social media platform X, has been given far-reaching power by the president, who has allowed Mr. Musk to dismantle federal agencies and freeze funding for various grants and programs.
Margaret Huang, president and chief executive of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said the disappearance of critical programs and grants would have a direct and negative effect mostly on lower-income individuals and people of color.
Remember the claim that vouchers would “save poor kids from failing public schools”? As we see in state after state, it’s not true. Josh Cowen wrote in his new book The Privateers that voucher researchers have known for years that vouchers don’t help poor kids; in reality, vouchers actually hurt poor kids. The poor kids don’t go to elite private schools; they mostly go to religious schools with uncertified teachers. The greatest benefit of vouchers goes to wealthy kids, who use the money to subsidize their private school tuition. In every state with universal vouchers, the majority are used by students who are already attending private schools.
If you have read Josh Cowen’s new book about the failure of vouchers, called The Privateers, this story would not surprise you.
Louisiana ‘s academic results for poor kids has been consistently dismal. The state plans to increase the voucher program and weaken or remove regulations. That’s a way to help failing voucher schools evade accountability.
School vouchers were supposed to be an academic lifeline for Louisiana’s neediest children.
Under a 2012 law, the state would pay for poor students in struggling public schools to attend private or parochial schools where, it was promised, they would receive a better education.
But more than a decade since the statewide voucher program began, after Louisiana has spent half a billion taxpayer dollars to send thousands of students to private schools, data show the state’s lofty promise has not panned out.
On average, voucher students at private schools fare worse on state tests than their public-school peers, according to scores examined by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. In 2023, just 14% of voucher students in grades 3-8 met state achievement targets, compared with 24% of low-income students at public schools.
“If the goal was to improve achievement, then the program is not succeeding,” said Doug Harris, an economist at Tulane University who has written about Louisiana’s voucher program.
Even voucher proponents acknowledge the lackluster results
“Louisiana is kind of famous for having one of the weakest, or maybe the weakest, private scholarship program in the country,” said Ginny Gentles, a school-choice advocate and former U.S. Department of Education official, while interviewing Louisiana Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley on a podcast last year. Brumley agreed that “it’s called the worst (voucher) program in the country” and “has its limitations.”
The private schools that get about $6,800 per voucher student face scant oversight. Unlike public schools, most don’t receive state ratings because they enroll too few voucher students. But 30 private schools were graded last year, and nearly 80% earned Ds or Fs.
State regulations forbid F-rated private schools from enrolling new voucher students. Brumley waived that rule in recent years, allowing even the worst-performing schools to take in more students and tax dollars.
“These kids, there’s no price we won’t pay to make sure they get a good quality education,” Gov. Jeff Landry said while promoting the program at a Catholic school in Metairie last year.
While the scholarship program will replace vouchers, many of the same private schools already have signed up — including over 20 with D or F ratings.
“It makes absolutely no sense,” said Ashana Bigard, a New Orleans public school parent and advocate. The voucher schools struggled academically, “so we’re going to give them more kids?”
But proponents insist the scholarship program, which includes fewer regulations, will attract stronger schools and achieve better results than vouchers.
“I think what we learned is that a private-school choice program is only as good as the quality of the private schools that are enticed to participate,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas who studied Louisiana’s vouchers.
In that program, he added, the “quality level appears to have been quite low.”
Early results disappoint
Louisiana first offered vouchers in the 1960s to parents fleeing school desegregation, before resurrecting them decades later as a refuge from struggling public schools.
“Parents and kids should not be trapped in a failing school,” then-Gov. Bobby Jindal said when the statewide voucher program launched in 2012, adding that all children deserve “an excellent education.”
One of several Republican-led states to adopt vouchers, Louisiana targeted its program to families with incomes at or below 250% of the poverty line with children in public schools rated C or lower. Participating private schools had to admit all applicants, charge no more than the voucher amount and administer the state’s annual LEAP test to voucher recipients.
“We’re talking about some of the worst results we’ve ever seen in the history of education research,” said Josh Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who opposes vouchers.
The low scores persisted for several years, especially in math. It was a far cry from Jindal’s assertion that vouchers would give students access to an excellent education. (Jindal did not respond to a request for comment.)
Voucher proponents posited that the private schools’ curriculums could be misaligned with the state tests or the program’s rules could have deterred higher-performing schools from joining. Less than a third of the state’s roughly 400 private schools participated in 2012, and those that did tended to be Catholic, have declining enrollment and charge low tuition.
“It was a very heavily regulated program and it tended to attract schools that were more desperate for the money,” said Michael McShane, director of national research at EdChoice, a pro-voucher group.
Advocates point to surveys showing many parents who receive vouchers are happy with their children’s schools. They also say public schools improve when forced to compete with private schools for students.
Last school year, nearly 6,000 students received vouchers, costing taxpayers $45 million. More than 75% of those students attended private schools where fewer than 1 in 4 voucher students achieved “mastery” on the state tests, meaning they’re ready for the next grade level, according to an analysis of state data by The Times-Picayune and The Advocate. At least 26% went to schools where fewer than 1 in 10 voucher students achieved mastery.
The raw scores don’t show where students started academically and whether the voucher schools helped them grow. But the state’s rating system tracks students’ academic progress, giving schools credit for boosting student achievement even if their scores remain low.
Even by that measure, 11 of the 30 voucher schools that received ratings last year earned Fs, 12 got Ds and five earned Cs. Just two earned Bs.
Lakeside Christian Academy in Slidell posted some of the worst results last year: Fewer than 5% of its voucher students achieved mastery. The school, which enrolled 79 voucher students, earned Fs three years in a row.
Principal Buffie Singletary said voucher students typically arrive at the school far behind, with limited reading skills, making it difficult to catch them up.
“It’s just really hard,” she said.
Under state regulations, F-rated private schools can keep their current voucher students but may not enroll more. But Brumley used his authority as state education chief to pause that rule, saying in memos that he sought to promote stability and parental choice.
The move has been a boon for schools like Redemptorist St. Gerard, a Catholic school in Baton Rouge. It earned an F in 2023, then enrolled nearly 40 new voucher students the following year, for a total of 134. In 2024, just 8% of those students achieved mastery.
School leaders did not respond to a request for comment.
Jackson Parish Schools Superintendent David Claxton said if the state is going to give private schools tax dollars, they should be held to the same standards as public schools.
“You still want parents to have choice,” he said, “but let’s make it a fair playing field.”
At first, lower-income families will be eligible for the tax-funded scholarships, which will replace vouchers, but eventually, all will be eligible. Offering private school subsidies to all families, regardless of financial need, is a priority for Trump.
“With President Trump, we will continue working towards education freedom for all!” Landry posted on X last month.
Unlike with vouchers, private schools that participate in the scholarship program can decide which students to admit and how much to charge them. Rather than use the state test, they can choose which assessment to give students. And the schools will no longer be rated by the state.
“LA GATOR has fewer of the regulations that typically scare away high-quality schools,” Wolf said.
But critics are doubtful that the top-performing private schools will enroll students with the greatest academic needs. Instead, those students will likely land at less-selective private schools with more open seats, which tend to be lower performing.
“The fact that you’re getting rid of the regulations doesn’t solve that problem,” said Harris, the Tulane researcher.
As Landry and others set high expectations for the new scholarship program, the voucher results loom large.
Last year, as the Legislature considered a bill to establish the scholarship program, state board of education member Conrad Appel expressed misgivings to a state education official, according to an email obtained through a public records request. (In a recent interview, Appel emphasized that LA GATOR was designed to avoid the voucher program’s mistakes.)
With vouchers, “we ended up taking kids from bad public schools and basically encouraging them to go to even worse private schools,” he wrote. “I am afraid that the push to allow parental choice may mean a repeat of history.”
Editor’s note: This story was corrected to reflect that 24% of low-income public school students in grades 3-8 achieved mastery or above on the state tests in 2023, not 23%.
Sara Stevenson is a retired school librarian and Catholic school English teacher. She is a fearless advocate for public schools. Her article was published in The Austin American-Statesman. At this very time, the Texas Legislature is debating voucher legislation. It has already passed the State Senate. It is now being considered in the House.
She writes:
Many years ago at a school financing conference, I approached an East Texas House member from a rural district. I asked him, “Do y’all even have private schools for vouchers in your district?” He answered, “Hell, no. Private school vouchers are a tax break for families that already send their kids to private schools.” I thanked him for clearing that up.
Now most of those rural House Republicans opposing private school vouchers are gone. Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania billionaire investor in TikTok, gave Governor Greg Abbott $10 million to primary them out of office.
Texas has been trying to pass a school voucher or (ESA: Educational Savings Account) bill since 1995, but the bills keep failing session after session. In their earlier forms, these bills called for ESAs (using public tax dollars to pay for private school tuition) as a way to help poor children or those with disabilities trapped in Texas’s “failing public schools.”
Sidenote: If Texas schools are failing, the Republican party is responsible since it has dominated the Legislature for more than two decades and has controlled the governor’s office since 1994.
But over time, the proposed bills kept demanding more, not only in the amount of tuition money offered, but in the expanding pool of students qualified to receive them.
With this year’s version, Senate Bill 2, which passed the Senate, the GOP is saying the quiet part out loud. No longer are the ESAs solely for the families who can’t afford private school tuition or those with disabilities; now a family of four, making as much as $161,000 a year, five times the federal poverty level, can still receive up to $10,000 toward private school tuition or $11,500 for students with disabilities.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick then reassures us that 80% of the vouchers will go to special needs or “low-income” children. Since eligibility is universal, 20% will go to families making more than $161,000 per year.
I remember in 1976 when Ronald Reagan talked about people who abused the welfare system by getting government handouts they didn’t need. He called them “welfare queens.” In those days the GOP praised the working poor for their dignity in refusing a government handout.
Fast forward to 2025. Now families making over $161,000 per year are entitled to your tax dollars to send their children to private schools with little to no accountability. In fact, Sen. José Menendez’s Amendment 36, requiring the state to collect data to determine if the program is even successful, failed.
In earlier iterations, the student had to be enrolled in a failing public school before receiving a voucher. Now children already enrolled in private schools are eligible. Promoters argue this is only fair because private school families pay thousands each year in property taxes to schools their children don’t attend. Well, if they deserve a taxpayer refund, what about all the Texas property taxpayers, including seniors, who have NO children currently attending Texas schools?
No, because contributing to public education is a common good; an educated citizenry benefits all Texans and the Texas economy.
And speaking of children with disabilities, this bill clearly states that these students receiving vouchers must waive any rights for accommodations guaranteed by IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act).
Although SB 2 boosters contend the bill promotes school choice for parents, the bill really means “schools’ choice” for private schools. While public schools must accept every child, private schools, including those receiving vouchers, are free to turn away or expel any child for any reason. For instance, they can continue to prefer legacies and the siblings of current students.
SB 2 earmarks $1 billion for this program in order to give vouchers to just 100,000 students. In contrast, 5.4 million Texas students currently attend public school, 10% of all U.S. school children.
Let’s first pass Senate Bill 1, the budget bill, and include increasing the basic student allotment to fully fund our public schools. Since Texas ranks 44th among the states in per pupil spending, let’s first invest in the school system we already have rather than spend a billion dollars to fund another one.
Karen Attiah is Global Opinions Editor of The Washington Post and a columnist. She says in this column exactly what I have been thinking. The attack on DEI is intended to restore the days when women, Blacks, Latinos, and people with disabilities had little or no chance to rise in their field.
It’s ironic to hear Trump talk about the importance of merit when he has stocked his cabinet mostly with people who lack experience, knowledge, wisdom, or any genuine qualification for the position. His cabinet was not chosen based on merit. In what world would Pete Hegseth–no administrative experience, serial philander with an alcohol problem–be considered qualified to be Secretary of Defense? Or RFK Jr. qualified to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, having spent years fighting vaccines and having zero medical expertise? Or Tulsi Gabbard, Putin apologist, qualified to be Director of National Intelligence?
Attiah writes:
Across the United States, in government agencies and private corporations, leaders are scrambling to eliminate DEI programs. President Donald Trump is not only destroying any trace of diversity work within the government: He has ordered a review of federal contracts to identify any companies, nonprofits and foundations that do business with the government and keep their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he has warned that they could be the target of investigations.
Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation. I don’t mean resegregation in the sense of separate water fountains. I mean it in the sense that a Black woman would never even be considered for a federal job or a management position at a big company — the way it was in, say, the 1960s. It is not “inclusion” the Republicans want to get rid of, it’s integration.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just look at a post made by Darren Beattie, who was just named an acting undersecretary of state: “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he wrote on X — not 10 years ago but in October.
Trump’s GOP is also threatening private companies that are trying to level the playing fields for Black people, women and other groups. After Costco’s shareholders voted to keep its diversity programs in place, 19 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco asking it to explain why it was maintaining a policy of “unlawful discrimination.”
A number of other corporations have begun their cowardly capitulations. In a memo, Kiera Fernandez, chief equity officer for Target, said the company would be ending its diversity, equity and inclusion goals “in step with the evolving external landscape.” Amazon, Meta and Walmart have also announced rollbacks.
For anyone wondering why “inclusion” is still needed: Since the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in 2023, first-year Black enrollment at top universities has dropped by 17 percent. That’s the sharpest drop of any major racial group. (For comparison, White enrollment has fallen by 5 percent.)
Or look at the business world: Black people represent 13.7 percent of the population but Black-owned businesses generally get less than 2 percent of venture capital funding. Despite a smattering of promises from venture capital companies to do better after the murder of George Floyd, funding to Black companies dropped from $4.9 billion in 2021 to $705 million in 2023 — an astonishing 86 percent drop. Sounds like a segregated market to me.
These facts, taken together, point to the removal of Black people from academic, corporate and government spaces: resegregation. People are vowing to push back with their wallets — to shop at Costco and boycott Target, for example. But I believe the fight starts with language. Journalists have a role and an obligation to be precise in naming what we are facing.
Frankly, I wish the media would stop using “DEI” and “diversity hiring” altogether. Any official, including the president, who chooses to blame everything from plane crashes to wildfires on non-White, non-male people should be asked whether they believe that desegregation is to blame. Whether they believe resegregation is the answer. We need to bring back the language that describes what is actually happening.
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison said. “It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do.” Black people have spent nearly 70 years “proving” ourselves. And in a flash, with a new administration, the gains of those decades are being washed away.
While Attiah focuses on the expansion of opportunity for Black people, the biggest beneficiaries of DEI policies–that is, efforts to diversify student bodies, the workforce, and corporate leadership–have been white women.
Thanks to DEI, white women now serve on corporate boards, as corporate leaders, and in positions that would have been closed to them in the past.
Do you have 10-15 minutes to read a very important article? It contains a lot of alarming details about the 19-year-old computer whiz on Elon Musk’s DOGE team.
Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter, writes a blog about Internet security called Krebs on Security. In this awesome post, he describes the links of Edward Coristine to known cyber criminals.
Krebs is an expert on cybercrime.
He writes:
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so. As today’s story explores, the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration, Musk’s DOGE team has gained access to a truly staggering amount of personal and sensitive data on American citizens, moving quickly to seize control over databases at the U.S. Treasury, the Office of Personnel Management, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Resources, among others.
Wired first reported on Feb. 2 that one of the technologists on Musk’s crew is a 19-year-old high school graduate named Edward Coristine, who reportedly goes by the nickname “Big Balls” online. One of the companies Coristine founded, Tesla.Sexy LLC, was set up in 2021, when he would have been around 16 years old.
“Tesla.Sexy LLC controls dozens of web domains, including at least two Russian-registered domains,” Wired reported. “One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Helfie, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. While the operation of a Russian website would not violate US sanctions preventing Americans doing business with Russian companies, it could potentially be a factor in a security clearance review.”
Mr. Coristine has not responded to requests for comment. In a follow-up story this week, Wired found that someone using a Telegram handle tied to Coristine solicited a DDoS-for-hire service in 2022, and that he worked for a short time at a company that specializes in protecting customers from DDoS attacks.
DDoS is “denial of service, meaning that one’s access to the internet has been cut off. So, I learned that there are companies that can be paid to implement a DDoS and companies that can be paid to protect against DDoS. Presumably, a clever cyber criminal could be on both sides, sort of like the early 20th century mobsters who demanded protection money from small-time merchants so that no one would break their windows.
Krebs’ writing about cybercriminals got personal when they retaliated:
The founder of Path is a young man named Marshal Webb. I wrote about Webb back in 2016, in a story about a DDoS defense company he co-founded called BackConnect Security LLC. On September 20, 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published data showing that the company had a history of hijacking Internet address space that belonged to others.
The other founder of BackConnect Security LLC was Tucker Preston, a Georgia man who pleaded guilty in 2020 to paying a DDoS-for-hire service to launch attacks against others.
The aforementioned Path employee Eric Taylor pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges including an attack on our home in 2013. Taylor was among several men involved in making a false report to my local police department about a supposed hostage situation at our residence in Virginia. In response, a heavily-armed police force surrounded my home and put me in handcuffs at gunpoint before the police realized it was all a dangerous hoax known as “swatting.”
Woven throughout this story is the career trajectory of Edward Coristine, a core member of DOGE’s elite team. He possibly has a thumb drive with all of your and my personal data on it.
Krebs wonders whether and how Coristine got a top security clearance, given his history.
Given the speed with which Musk’s DOGE team was allowed access to such critical government databases, it strains credulity that Coristine could have been properly cleared beforehand. After all, he’d recently been dismissed from a job for allegedly leaking internal company information to outsiders.
According to the national security adjudication guidelines (PDF) released by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), eligibility determinations take into account a person’s stability, trustworthiness, reliability, discretion, character, honesty, judgment, and ability to protect classified information.
The DNI policy further states that “eligibility for covered individuals shall be granted only when facts and circumstances indicate that eligibility is clearly consistent with the national security interests of the United States, and any doubt shall be resolved in favor of national security.”
Now that Tulsi Gabbard is DNI, maybe she’ll give young Edward the clearance he needs.
Please read it and let me know if you were as horrified as I.
Haley Bull of Scripps News reported yesterday that Trump sent out an order to all 50 states warning that the federal government would cut off funding to any school that teaches about “diversity, equity or inclusion.”
She wrote:
The Department of Education is warning state education agencies they may lose federal funding if they do not remove DEI policies and programs to comply with the department’s interpretation of federal law.
A letter from the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights was sent to the departments of education in all 50 states, according to the Department of Government Efficiency.
“Institutions that fail to comply with federal civil rights law may, consistent with applicable law, face potential loss of federal funding,” acting assistant secretary for civil rights Craig Trainor writes in the letter. The message warns that “the department will vigorously enforce the law” to schools and state educational agencies receiving funding and that it will start taking measures “to assess compliance” in no more than 14 days.
The letter argues that a Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which found that affirmative action in the university’s admission process violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, should apply more broadly.
“The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent,” the letter states.
This letter fails to mention that since 1970, the U.S. Department of Education has been subject to a law that states clearly that no officer of the federal government may interfere with what schools teaching.
The law states: “No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, employee, of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, [or] administration…of any educational institution…or over the selection of library resources, textbooks, or other printed or published instructional materials.“
The law is P.L. 103-33, General Education Provisions Act, section 432.
These zealots are trying to turn teaching about civil rights, about Black history, and about LGBT people into a criminal act.
They are wrong. Reality exists no matter what they ban and censor.
They are violating the law, and they must be stopped.
They must be sued by the ACLU, the NAACP, and every other legal organization that defends the rule of law.
Diane Ravitch's blog 