Robert Reich: A Dystopian Nightmare, with Hegseth in Charge

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
3

Robert Reich invites readers to imagine a war fought by AI-powered robots. What could possibly go wrong? Bill Gates warned a few days ago that AI could go rogue and kill one billion people..give or take a few thousand. Imagine this cyber war controlled by men who are not celebrated for their humanity, but for their yearning to amass power.

Get out and vote.

Reich warns:

Imagine four of the most frighteningly irresponsible people in America deciding how AI will be put to use in the most frighteningly irresponsible way. 

Pete Hegseth is one of them. Trump is another. The other two are Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich. 

Hegseth says he’s tasking Musk and Gingrich with laying the groundwork for a new “Autonomous Warfare Command,” or AutoWarCom — a new Pentagon command operation for autonomous warfare. It would feature unmanned drones, autonomous sensors, unmanned boats, and other autonomous systems. Hegseth is proposing to triple spending on autonomous warfare to $74 billion. 

Hegseth has also named as an adviser Palmer Luckey, a major Trump donor who designed the Oculus Rift, a virtually reality headset credited with reviving the virtual reality industry, and co-founded of Anduril Industires, a military tech company focused on autonomous drones and sensors. 

The specter of autonomous lethal weapons — weapons that kill without human beings first deciding who, how, or when — is the nightmare of many who deal with AI. Autonomous AI weapons are fraught with unpredictability. And what happens when AI weapons escape their controls and go rogue, as recently occurred at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google? 

Bad enough that Hegseth and Trump are pouring money into this. Worse that they’re setting up a separate military command for it. Worse still that they’re depending on Musk, Gingrich, and a virtual-reality game designer to tell them how. 

I keep thinking I’ll wake up from this nightmare into a sane world.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Evil, Extremism, Insane, Trump

Peter Greene: New Regulations for Federal Voucher Program Tie the Hands of Local Officials

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Starting on January 1, 2027, the federal government will sponsor its own voucher program. In this post, Peter Greene explains how the new program will work. You can be sure that every dollar spent on charter schools and vouchers will be taken away from public schools.

Peter Greene writes:

Since Congress passed President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with its federal school voucher, questions have abounded about the exact form that the tax credit program would take. Today the Treasury Department released proposed rules for the voucher program, and some of those questions are being answered

One of the persistent questions has been how much flexibility will states have in how the program is administered. The answer that came today is “Not very much.”

The basic structure of the tax credit voucher program works like this: a taxpayer redirects $1,700 to a scholarship granting organization (SGO) and receives a dollar-for-dollar tax credit. The SGO uses that money (minus an up-to-10% administrative fee) to grant scholarships to students, who may then use the money for educational expenses. 

While the state must require SGOs to meet the state’s requirements for charitable organizations, the state may not put restrictions on how the SGO operates “such as by limiting the type of school that scholarship recipients may attend or the types of qualified elementary or secondary education expenses for which scholarship funds may be used.” 

This restriction on restrictions dovetails with the voucher movement’s push to render legal the use of redirected taxpayer dollars to fund religious schools without setting limits on how those schools can discriminate.

The rules appear to solidify the idea that an SGO cannot be removed by the state for reasons other than failure to comply with the law’s SGO requirements. These requirements simply require an SGHO to serve at least ten eligible students and spend the appropriate amount of money on the vouchers. Nothing in the law requires SGOs to monitor or assess the educational quality of the vendors who receive the money.

The rules issued do indicate that an SGO can choose to limit its scholarships “to specific subject matter” or to students whose household income is less than 80% of the area median gross income, but it appears that those limits would be placed at the SGO’s discretion and not the state’s.

The federal voucher program caps eligibility at 300% of area median gross income, a generous cap that would make the vast majority of American families eligible for the voucher. 

The rules published today show that if a state wanted to, for instance, add restrictions that directed vouchers only to low-income students or students in particular communities, they could not do so. Nor could they impose any restrictions that would keep the voucher dollars from going to religious schools. 

In short, any governors who expected to use these redirected taxpayer dollars in ways that aligned with their own policy goals may need to reconsider. If they opt in, their hands are tied.

There are other details to be dug out and discussed, but one rule guarantees that these discussions may go on forever. While some “stakeholders” recommended restricting state’s ability to opt out after opting in, the rules indicate that a governor will opt in for just one year at a time.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Funding, Privatization, School Choice, Separation of church and state, Trump, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

The Five Biggest Charter School Grifts

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker taught for many years at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He now teaches education policy at the University of Miami. He will have many opportunities to observe and document edu-grifting in Florida.

In this post, he identities the five biggest charter scandals and explains how they worked. Much of what you will read was called “legal graft” by past pundits. In other words, the charter operators collect millions in public funds while providing a dubious education, and they get away scot-free.

In other words, take the money and run. No consequences.

He writes:

Five cases, four mechanisms, one ranking: this post lines up the biggest fraud prosecutions, the biggest company-store combination, and the biggest sweeps contract in the charter sector’s history against the single largest real-estate deal any operator has ever built, and asks which one moved the most money. The answer isn’t the one with an indictment attached.

In The Grift Model I group the ways charter operators route public money into private hands into four repeating types: enrollment inflation (getting paid for students who aren’t really being educated — phantom seats, unverifiable attendance, ghost enrollees); related-party transactions (a school’s own board or executives sitting on both sides of a contract); the company store (a captive vendor a school is required to buy from — curriculum, credentials, back-office services — that happens to be owned by the people running the school); and real estate (buying, or arranging for a related party to buy, the very buildings public dollars already financed, then leasing them back at a markup).

What I hadn’t done before is put the five biggest documented cases — regardless of category — on the same page and rank them by dollar figure. A caveat before I do: these numbers come from different kinds of documents (a criminal restitution order isn’t the same instrument as a municipal bond prospectus), cover different time spans, and in a couple of cases reflect an auditor’s or a prosecutor’s counting choice as much as anyone’s. I’m ranking them anyway, because the comparison itself is the point — and because the single largest number on this list isn’t attached to anyone’s indictment.

Here they are, five to one.

5. White Hat Management, Ohio: about $100 million over a decade

White Hat’s “sweeps” contracts with ten Hope Academy and Life Skills Center campuses in Cleveland and Akron routed roughly 95 percent of each school’s state funding to the management company, which then handled teacher salaries, facilities, and operations with minimal board oversight — company-store logic applied to an entire school’s back office rather than one vendor line. Over a decade that added up to something like $100 million. When several of the nonprofit boards tried to switch management companies, White Hat argued the computers, furniture, and classroom equipment it had bought with that money belonged to White Hat, not the schools — meaning the boards would have to buy back the property their own public funding had already paid for once.

In 2015, a divided Ohio Supreme Court sided with White Hat, 4–3, upholding the buy-back scheme as an enforceable contract term. Justice Paul Pfeifer’s dissent put it about as plainly as a judicial opinion gets: “the contracts require that after the public pays to buy those materials for a public use, the public must then pay the companies if it wants to retain ownership of the materials.” Justice William O’Neill called it, in a dissent The Progressive covered in full, “a fraudulent conversion of public funds into personal profit.” Neither dissent changed the outcome. Nobody broke a law here — a state’s highest court looked at the arithmetic and, on the merits, said it was fine. (Court News Ohio’s case summary has the full procedural history.)

4. ECOT, Ohio: $117 million ordered repaid

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was, at its peak, Ohio’s largest online charter school. Ohio funds schools on a formula built around enrollment and documented hours of learning activity — a formula that works fine when “attendance” means a body in a classroom, and considerably less well when it means a login timestamp nobody is verifying. A state audit covering fiscal years 2016 through 2018 found ECOT couldn’t substantiate the participation hours behind a large share of the funding it had claimed. The Ohio Auditor of State’s officeultimately found the school owed $106.6 million to the Ohio Department of Education, plus additional findings against ECOT-affiliated management entities, for a combined total just over $117 million. ECOT shut down in January 2018 rather than pay it back; Ideastream’s coverage of the final audit and the Dayton Daily News both note the state has spent the years since trying to collect. A related judgment against affiliated entities separately reached $161.6 million. It remains the largest attendance-fraud clawback in the sector’s history: virtual schools, virtual kids, real dollars.

3. Chester Community Charter School / CSMI, Pennsylvania: roughly $122 million combined

This is the case I use to show what happens when the company store, related-party real estate, and plain self-dealing all show up in a single school under a single owner. Chester Community Charter, Pennsylvania’s largest brick-and-mortar charter, is managed by CSMI, a company controlled by Vahan Gureghian. A 2009 Philadelphia Inquirer public-records fightestablished that CSMI had been paid roughly $60.6 million in management fees since 1999. In 2010, Gureghian sold the school’s buildings — which he owned personally — to a newly created nonprofit, for the specific and sole purpose of leasing them back to the school, for $50.7 million, financed through municipal bonds and requiring roughly $4 million a year in lease payments; Pennsylvania’s Auditor General found the school had also improperly claimed $1.27 million in state lease reimbursements on buildings the program’s own rules made ineligible, because the “related parties” on both sides of the lease were, functionally, the same person before and after the sale. Then, in 2016, a federal Office of Inspector General audit found that the school’s CEO — Gureghian himself — had written checks to himself totaling $11 million without board approval. Add the pieces up and you get a single owner, across roughly fifteen years, sitting on every side of upward of $122 million in transactions with the school he ran. No criminal charges resulted from any of it.

2. The A3 charter network, California: $400 million generated, about $80 million allegedly diverted

Between 2015 and 2019, Sean McManus and Jason Schrock used a network of 19 online charter schools, partnerships with struggling private schools, and summer athletic programs to enroll thousands of students who, per prosecutors, never took a class. The scheme generated roughly $400 million in California public education funding; investigators alleged about $80 million of it was funneled into companies the two men controlled. Voice of San Diego’s account calls it, by the state’s own description, one of the largest charter-school fraud cases in the country’s history — and yet neither man served a day in prison. McManus, an Australian citizen, was sentenced to four years but served it under house arrest with an ankle monitor in Australia; Schrock’s ankle-monitor time was credited against his sentence. Nine other defendants pleaded to reduced or misdemeanor charges. Both men paid roughly $19 million each in fines and restitution, and the California State Controller’s office says the state has recovered more than $240 million overall — real money back, on a fraud whose architects never spent a night in a cell.

1. National Heritage Academies, Michigan and six other states: $853.6 million

In 2021, National Heritage Academies — the country’s third-largest for-profit charter operator, with more than 90 schools — arranged to sell 69 of its campuses across seven states to Campus Partners 1, a nonprofit newly created for the transaction, with no operating history and, at the time reporters looked, no registration on file with Michigan’s attorney general. NHA’s owner, J.C. Huizenga, controls both the seller’s side (through Charter Development Co., which retained the facility-maintenance and ground-lease contracts) and, through his general counsel installed as the new nonprofit’s president, effectively the buyer’s side as well. The purchase was financed through $853.6 million in tax-exempt municipal bonds, issued by an industrial development authority in La Paz County, Arizona — a jurisdiction with no obvious relationship to any of the seven states where the schools actually sit. The schools then signed 30-year leases back to the very entities that had just “sold” them. Network for Public Education’s account and NCSPE’s coverage at Teachers College, Columbia University both flag the same detail: nothing about this required hiding anything, and no one has been indicted. Local commissions in Michigan raised transparency objections and briefly slowed a few approvals, but the deal closed.

It is, by a wide margin, the largest single dollar figure on this list — more than double the other four cases combined — and it’s the cleanest illustration in the sector of this project’s core argument: the extraction that scales isn’t the kind that needs a prosecutor. It’s the kind a bond market is happy to underwrite.

Open the link to see his comparisons of these five top educators-grifts.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Cheating, Corruption, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Funding, Hoax, Ohio, Privatization, Vouchers

Come to Hear a Brilliant Analysis of Trump’s War on DEI!

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2026 //
5

Come to Wellesley College to hear Dr. Yohuru Williams dissect and eviscerate the Trump administration’s attack on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

Such policies are meant to broaden opportunity. They take us closer to our professed goals of liberty and justice for all. Yet the Trump administration wants to abolish them. Civil rights protections have already been reversed, so that any effort to help students of color is treated as a violation of this administration’s hostility to DEI.

Yohuru Williams is a leading scholar and public intellectual who has often appeared on public television to expound on African American history. He is Distinguished University Chair and Professor of History and Founding Director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a wonderful speaker.

Join me on October 6 at Wellesley College.

Open to all. Free.

Yohuru Williams is speaking as part of the annual lecture series that I established several years ago.

The event will be live-streamed and available later online.

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Bigotry, Censorship, Democracy, Education Reform, Ethics, Extremism, Freedom to Learn, Freedom to Read, Racism, Trump

What Will the New Federal Voucher Program Mean for Public Schools?

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2026 //
0

In January 2027, the federal government will launch a new voucher program. It’s available to states if the Governor opted to participate. The program was part of what Trump called his “One Big Beautiful Bill,” but which critics called “One Big Ugly Bill,” because it locked in big tax cuts for the wealthiest while cutting benefits for middle-class and poor Americans.

At the recent conference of the Network for Public Education, our board met to discuss whether we would support resistance or collaboration. Although we understand that some schools want to capture any money they can to support their students, we decided to stand strongly for the principle: PUBLIC DOLLARS FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS. AND ONLY PUBLIC SCHOOLS. we concluded that if public schools accept vouchers, it will normalize the ideas embedded in the program, that is, that education is a consumer good. We believe it is a civic responsibility.

Leigh Dingerson’s description of this new program was published by In the Public Interest, which reports about the privatization of everything.

Public schools may participate in the program, but only for programs and activities that they do not already provide, like after-school tutoring, transportation, and field trips.

Leigh Dingerson wrote:

The idea that government has an inherent interest in providing a free, public education for every child used to be sacrosanct, except among a small set of radical reformers like Milton Friedman. But a 40-year campaign for “school choice” has quietly gathered steam. Proponents of privatization are now openly acknowledging that their sights are set on eliminating public schools. They want to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education (founded to ensure the civil rights of children in schools) and offer no-strings-attached public dollars to private and religious schools. And now, a lawsuit filed in Nebraska just this month argues that the U.S. system of public schools violates the First Amendment and asks the state to declare public schools unconstitutional.

The first nationwide, federally funded school voucher program is set to begin in January, but it has already become a political football in both red and blue states. Governors are being pressured to allow vouchers to be handed out in their states, and deep-pocketed special interests like the Heritage Foundation and large faith-based networks are spending tens of millions of dollars to build the infrastructure to funnel federal funds into private and religious schools.

There is much we don’t yet know about the program, including the mechanism to collect and dole out the money via Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). Regulations are being developed by the Department of the Treasury and are expected within weeks. But we do know this: States are not obligated to participate in this program. In fact, governors or other designated agencies must decide annually whether to allow federally funded vouchers to be handed out in their states.  

What Can Be Done?

The implications of almost-universal private school vouchers are enormous. The federal tax credit voucher program signals a massive shift towards a privatized, market-based system with few if any guardrails to serve our most vulnerable students, ensure equity, rein in discrimination, or address educational quality.

What can state advocates and policymakers do?

Encourage your governor to opt out of the program.

  • The governors of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Oregon have publicly announced their intention to decline to participate in the voucher program. Remember that the decision to participate or opt out of participation in the program must be made Governors may simply wait a year to see how the program plays out.

Consider legislation to narrow or guide your state’s participation.

  • Vermont has enacted a law that establishes criteria under which the state will participate in the program. It includes that SGOs have a “core mission of providing educational opportunities to economically underprivileged students” and that neither the SGO nor any school that receives funding under the program may “discriminate against any student” in a variety of categories. It also requires each SGO to report annually to the House and Senate Committees on Education, including data on the use of the voucher funds and the individuals receiving them.
  • In Rhode Island, the legislature has passed legislation which requires that both the legislature and the governor must jointly approve any decision to opt in to the program.

Watch for efforts to commit state funding to corporate entities vying to help administer the program.

  • A number of corporate entities have been created to “facilitate” and profit from the implementation of this program. For example, in Florida the legislature recently earmarked $2 million in its budget, apparently to contract with LearningSpring, a Denver-based start-up affiliated with the Koch network, to offer an online platform to help administer the federal voucher program.

Understand where your state might have authority to protect public education and ensure the integrity of taxpayer spending in the private market.

  • Familiarize yourself with your state’s private school (and homeschool) regulations and consider legislative language to strengthen them, and understand any state requirements for registered nonprofit organizations and whether they place any restrictions on, or allow oversight of, Scholarship Granting Organizations.

 What’s the matter with vouchers? The research is clear.

School vouchers are not new. We have half-a-century of experience with vouchers. Education Law Center’s Public Funds for Public Schools Project documents the many additional and important down-sides to vouchers. Among them:

 As students return to schools this fall, some have noted that this may be “the last normal year” for American schools.  It’s important for advocates of public education to make sure this critical institution doesn’t crumble.

Leigh Dingerson
Senior Research Fellow

Additional Resources

The following organizations offer additional resources on vouchers and the federal voucher program:

Education Law Center
Public Funds for Public Schools project.
The National Coalition for Public Education
The Network for Public Education

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Funding, Privatization, Religion, Resistance, U.S. Department of Education, Vouchers

Reverend Benjamin R. Cremer: “When Did Jesus Say, ‘Let the Little Ones Defend Themselves in Court'”

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2026 //
11

The Reverend Benjamin R. Cremer has an unusual personal history. He grew up in a strict evangelical family in Idaho. He was home-schooled. He became a pastor, following in the path of his faith.

But somewhere along the way, he had an epiphany. He began to change his views. He became tolerant of those who did not share his faith. He began questioning his beliefs. He accepted LGBT people. His views and his life changed. He somehow developed a democratic disposition, an understanding that people of different races, religions, and ethnic groups can live in peace together, solving problems by discussion, collaboration, and mutual respect.

In this post, he deplores the extreme cruelty of Trump’s zeal to deport immigrants. Children are going to court to plead their case–without a lawyer.

This is wrong. When I first read about children under five in court, without a lawyer, I was shocked. Is this still America? Maybe we should call ourselves “Trumplandia” until we once again have national leaders who know and respect the Constitution and who have a heart, a brain, and a soul.

Rev. Cremer writes:

More and more migrant children all over the nation, some as young as two years old, are having to represent themselves in immigration court.

On Monday, September 28th, 25 children sat in an immigration court in Harlingen, Texas awaiting their hearing before a judge. A caseworker sat and quietly explained to the children who everyone was in the room, from the interpreter to the judge behind the bench.

According to a reporter present, among the first to appear before the judge was a 13-year-old Honduran boy named Angel. He didn’t have an attorney.

Asked whether there was a reason he couldn’t return to Honduras, Angel told the judge, “My mom and almost my entire family are here. It’s too dangerous to go back.”

But that wasn’t enough for the judge, who told the boy he did not qualify for asylum. “Would you like to request voluntary departure, or should I issue a removal order?” The judge asked.

“I don’t know,” Angel replied before bursting into tears. He stared ahead stoically and continued to cry, eventually saying: “I have no one. I have nothing.”

“I understand, but based on your answers, US immigration laws are very strict,” the judge concluded, and gave Angel until the end of the month to appeal his deportation order.

Hundreds of unaccompanied migrant children who were detained trying to cross the southern border or whose families were picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are being held in shelters operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is tasked with the care of unaccompanied migrant children, the reporter said.

In March 2025, the Trump administration terminated most of the federal Legal Services for Unaccompanied Children Program, which funded organizations providing legal representation and legal orientation to unaccompanied migrant children. The American Bar Association says that action put representation for roughly 26,000 children at risk. 

More recently, the situation became even more serious. In November 2025, according to the Senate Finance Committee and immigrant-rights organizations, the administration began withholding payments to organizations representing unaccompanied children. By July 2026, the Senate committee said more than $65 million was being withheld for legal services already provided, and the federal contract supporting the network expired July 31.

The government had a federally funded system specifically designed to provide these children legal representation, and the Trump administration substantially disrupted and ultimately replaced that system.

All while claiming to “uphold Christianity” and “uphold family values.”

Our country is treating children this way. In the name of Christianity. In the name of patriotism. It is inhumane, cruel, and has absolutely nothing to do with human dignity let alone Jesus, who said “whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.

Whenever I write on this subject, I will always have a few callous comments that come up, so I want to address them here.

The first I’ll hear is, “Blame the parents, not our government! They never should have brought them here!”

A toddler didn’t decide to cross a border or choose the circumstances that brought them here. Yet children can end up in immigration proceedings where they are expected to understand an extraordinarily complicated legal system.

The Department of Justice explicitly says that immigration judges cannot appoint an attorney or guardian ad litem for an unaccompanied child. The child can therefore be left to obtain representation through private or pro bono resources or proceed without a lawyer.

Making a child bear the consequences of a situation they had no control over and forced to navigate a complex legal system is inhumane. It is callous to blame people you don’t know for circumstances you can’t even fathom.

The second comment I’ll receive often is, “If they just self deport they wouldn’t have to go through the legal system and get deported.”

That heartless logic just skips over the fact that these are children who can’t simply decide where they will live and arrange their own return.

An immigration removal proceeding is a legal proceeding against the individual child. Where is a child supposed to go when the country of citizenship may be a place they barely remember, where they may have no parent, guardian, home, meaningful support network, or be incredibly unsafe and violent?

The United States can have immigration laws. It can enforce its borders. It can also retain human dignity and recognize that a two-year-old should not have to advocate for themselves in a complex removal proceeding in unfamiliar circumstances they are already experiencing.

For me, it isn’t just that our government is treating children this way. It is that those who claim to follow Jesus continue to support the government treating children this way and even cheer them on as they do, treating all immigrants as if they are subhuman creatures that need to be eradicated from our society.

It’s not just the callus cruelty of our government, it’s the callous cruelty of the hearts that continue to cheer it on.

If we can’t even unite around the issue of children never deserving to be treated this way, then I’m at a loss of how we will ever find common ground.

This isn’t a matter of a “political opinion.” This is just inhumane.

For those who are seeking to help these children, you can find out how through Kids In Need Of Defense: https://supportkind.org/get-involved

“Woe to those who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees, to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the orphan.” -Isaiah 10:1-2

Read more here: https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/28/politics/texas-immigration-court-minors

Categories Cruelty, Immigration, Religion

Robert Hubbell: Republicans Are Out of Touch with the Past and the Future

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2026 //
10

Robert Hubbell is a steady and wise blogger who has a knack for interpreting events as they happen. While Heather Cox Richardson looks at the day’s events from a historical perspective; Hubbell has a keen perspective honed by age and experience.

At a time when the public is skeptical, even fearful, of artificial intelligence, Trump has embraced this powerful technology with fervor, reassuring the tech titans that the federal government won’t regulate them but will trust them to regulate themselves. Simultaneously, Bill Gates was worrying in public that AI had the potential to wipe out a billion people. This is a “don’t worry, be happy” moment for Trump and his circle. They Pooh-pooh the growing number of people who worry about what big data centers will do to their water supply, their electricity bills, their jobs, their lives. Trump doesn’t get it.

Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans have chosen to use the weeks before the mid-term elections rehashing the investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn his electoral loss in 2024. They have chosen this moment to prosecute Jack Smith, who led the investigation of Trump. In their attempt to prove that Trump was unjustly targeted, they are successfully rekindling bad memories of January 6, 2021, when Trump summoned a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. Five years later, is this a winning hand for them. Hubbell thinks not.

He wrote about yesterday’s events;

Tuesday was a wild news day, but the throughline is this: Republicans are missing this moment in America, only five weeks before the midterms. They are clutching to the transitory retrograde spasm that propelled Trump to the presidency for all it is worth. They have no platform, no values, no principles, and no vision, so they cling tightly to the culture wars they exploited for a decade. But Americans have moved on to new issues, including the threat of uncontrolled artificial intelligence, the growing economic chasm between the haves and have-nots, the crushing burden of medical debt, the unaffordability of higher education, and the imploding economy for those who work for a living.

As the electorate recoils in disgust and fear over the coming onslaught at the hands of AI, Trump posed with nineteen AI oligarchs at the White House (eighteen of whom are men). At that meeting, Trump surrendered control of AI’s future to the handful of billionaires who will most benefit from the reckless development of a technology that will put millions of Americans out of work while polluting their communities and driving up electricity costs. Talk about a lack of self-awareness. See CNN Politics, Trump’s blasé attitude toward AI risks backfiring politically.

Per CNN,

Trump’s answer to voters who worry that AI will take their jobs, or who look askance at data centers’ enormous strains on electrical grids and water supplies, is an optimistic promise that such installations are “going to be very popular” and will make everyone rich.

He’s causing himself an immediate political problem. Some 75% of Americans view the growth of AI with fear and concern, according to a CNN/SSRS poll last week, and 71% want the federal government to do more to regulate it. Higher electricity bills attributed to the immense proliferation of data centers are deepening affordability frustrations among voters — a top midterm election issue.

So, at a time when more than 70% of Americans fear AI and want the government to regulate it,Trump entered into a deal that handed control of AI to the men most likely to profit from its unregulated development. See NBC News, After summit with tech titans, Trump calls for ‘self-regulation’ by AI companies.

When in the history of the world has “self-regulation” by monopolists ever inured to the benefit of the people—as opposed to the generational wealth of the monopolists?

At the luncheon, Trump and the AI oligarchs signed a “White House Accord on Super Intelligence,” Trump’s rebranding of “artificial intelligence.” The term “super intelligence” is insulting to humans. “Artificial intelligence” correctly signals that the technology is a probabilistic prediction model about which words follow other words. Calling it “super intelligence” signals that it is superior to human intelligence—which it is not and never will be. But Trump sees a profit opportunity in convincing people that they are inferior to AI, so he chose the moment five weeks before the midterms to align himself with the AI oligarchs and their dangerous vision of the future.

The “Accord on Super Intelligence” (which has not been made public—another worrisome sign) allegedly commits the AI tech companies to “building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review.” See The Guardian, Trump announces vague ‘morally binding’ AI deal among tech CEOs for ‘tremendous self-policing’.

You have got to be kidding, right?

If the AI tech companies are not already “building robust controls” and “detecting issues with the technology” and submitting it to “multiple layers of auditing and risk review,” then those tech companies should be shut down immediately. And if they are already employing those practices, then Trump got nothing in exchange for his agreement to let the AI oligarchs regulate themselves.

But the larger point is that hosting an AI oligarchs’ lovefest at the White House was Trump’s strategy for stopping his freefall in the polls. It was a monumentally stupid idea that was improbably exceeded in its stupidity by Senate Republicans who thought that the best way to distract from inflation, the Iran war, and existential fear of AI was to remind voters that Trump mounted an insurrection in 2021. They did so by bringing former special counsel Jack Smith to the Senate for a hearing.

For the third time, Jack Smith gave a commanding performance, reminding congressional Republicans that he had developed evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump conspired to obstruct the congressional count of electoral votes and unlawfully took national defense documents when he left office. See PBS, WATCH: Jack Smith says he would prosecute Trump again for ‘serious crimes against our nation’.

Apart from the gross error of believing the American people are focused on Jack Smith’s investigation of Trump’s crimes instead of the war, inflation, and the AI threat, GOP Senator Eric Schmitt’s questioning of Jack Smith turned into a debacle for the ages. Senator Schmitt believed he could prove that Jack Smith attended an NBA Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024 to surreptitiously conspire with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

After Jack Smith said he did not attend the game, Senator Schmitt smirked and accused Smith of perjury. Senator Schmitt concluded by calling Jack Smith a “dirt bag.”

When Jack Smith was handed a copy of the texts that allegedly placed him at a men’s professional basketball game featuring the NBA Atlanta Hawks, he said he could explain.

Instead of being at the Atlanta Hawks men’s professional basketball game, Jack Smith was at a women’s college basketball game between Maryland and Iowa. The University of Iowa’s sports teams are known as “the Hawkeyes” (not the Hawks). See C-SPAN, Sen. Schmitt confuses Hawks and Hawkeyes While Accusing Jack Smith of Perjury. The C-SPAN clip is 7 minutes long and contains the gist of the exchange.

Right-wing media was prepared for Senator Schmitt’s planned perjury trap—which failed in a spectacular fashion when it turned out that Senator Schmitt did not know the difference between the NBA Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball team. 

Several right-wing podcasters and commentators released canned statements saying that Schmitt had trapped Jack Smith in perjury but they later deleted those statements when they realized that Senator Schmitt had committed a face-plant for the ages. See Rolling Stone, Eric Schmitt Gaffe in Jack Smith Hearing Covered as Win by MAGA Media. (“Johnson deleted his post later on Tuesday, after it had been up for hours with a community correction. Sean Hannity also picked up and ran with Schmitt’s story, but deleted his post highlighting the moment soon after.”)

But the more significant point is that Senator Schmitt’s planned perjury trap for Jack Smith was intended as his stealth launch as a vice-presidential candidate in JD Vance’s 2028 presidential campaign. Hours before the Senate hearing, someone planted a story with the ever-obliging Axios that there was “buzz” that Senator Schmitt might be JD Vance’s running mate. See Axios, Sen. Eric Schmitt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.

Axios reporter Jim VandeHei wrote, “We hear the VP views Schmitt, 51, as trustworthy, intelligent, articulate, and a deft political operator.”

The Axios story was obviously planted by JD Vance or Eric Schmitt. It aged badly in four hours.

More to the point, if JD Vance thinks Eric Schmitt is a good VP candidate, it confirms that Republicans are more out of touch than imagined. Vance exudes arrogance and creepiness— “anti-charisma.” Eric Schmitt would add sneering smugness with a dollop of white nationalism to the ticket. 

The fact that anyone thought to float a trial balloon of Eric Schmitt as a VP candidate shows that the next generation of Republican leaders are missing the moment and failing to anticipate the future direction of the American electorate.

Other examples abound. The backlash against the implementation of Trump’s mass deportation policy has been severe. Rather than deporting the “worst of the worst,” Trump has effectively kidnapped law-abiding, productive members of American society and deported them to troubled countries with which the deportees have no connection. So, for example, the US has agreements to deport people seized in the US to (among others) Liberia, Ghana, Cameroon, Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, South Sudan, the DRC, and the Central African Republic. See Refugees International, Banished by Bargain: Third Country Deportation Watch (2026)

In the face of the backlash, the Trump administration is doubling down on its policy of renditions to third-party countries. On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue its policy of deporting immigrants to third-party countries, at least for now. See Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration’s Third-Country Deportations, for Now.

Even if deportations are warranted and lawful, sending deportees to third countries with which they have no connection (and are often violence-prone) is cruel and inhumane. Trump and Stephen Miller appear to derive perverse pleasure from inflicting suffering on immigrants seeking asylum in the US.

And in a development that seems designed to ensure Ken Paxton’s defeat in his senatorial race against James Talarico, federal prosecutors in Texas have charged the Venezuelan DoorDash driver shot in the back by ICE agents with assault. See Man Shot by ICE Agent in Austin Is Charged With Assault – The New York Times

A similar story is playing out in education. On Monday, the Department of Education announced that it was officially removing a Biden administration rule that added LGBTQ protections to Title IX. See Education Week, Ed. Dept. Officially Kills Biden Rule That Added LGBTQ+ Protections to Title IX.

The Trump administration exhibits animus toward LGBTQ+ people in general, and toward transgender people in particular. Although the administration often justifies that animus on the grounds of preventing transgender people from participating in women’s sports, the repeal of the Biden-era rule is an attack on women who are victims of sexual assault on college campuses. As explained in the Education Week article,

The 2020 rules [imposed by Trump] notably had added more due-process protections for students accused of sexual harassment, an issue especially salient at the college level. . . . [¶]

The National Women’s Law Center warned the department’s move “significantly weakens protections against sexual harassment in education.” It pointed to a case of alleged sexual assault of a woman by fraternity members at Cornell University that has been in the news. A state prosecutor has reopened the investigation of the 2024 incident, which Cornell said in a statement that it supports notwithstanding its own Title IX investigation that resulted in a range of sanctions for the accused students.

In other words, at the very moment of national outrage over Cornell’s investigation and punishment of male students accused of a gang rape in 2022, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for victims of sexual assault to hold their attackers accountable. See Human Rights Campaign, You Get No Say: Trump Administration Abandons Rule Protecting LGBTQ+ Kids and Survivors of Sexual Assault in School Settings, Denying Public Any Chance to Weigh In.

As I said in the introduction, Republicans simply do not understand the cross-currents of change that are sweeping the country. Instead, they are running a playbook that ignores the fact that their standard-bearer has become everything that he ran against in 2016.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Deregulation, Disruption, Elections, Ethics, Extremism, Politics, Technology, Trump

Kansas: Republican Senator Was a Doctor. He Sued Hundreds of His Patients Who Didn’t Pay Their Bills

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2026 //
5

Republican Senator Roger Marshall is in a close race with Democrat Rev. Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Senator Marshall used to be an obstetrician. Sarah Kliff of The New York Times went through state records and discovered that he has an ugly history. Of course, patients should pay their bills. But is it really necessary to have them arrested?

The Times reported:

It was Easter weekend in 2007 when a police car pulled up to Joe Vasquez’s home in rural Kansas.

A doctor had filed a lawsuit against him and his wife over an unpaid $4,561 bill from her emergency hysterectomy three years earlier. They had missed a court date, and the doctor’s lawyers asked the court to issue an arrest warrant.

The police took the couple into custody as their grandchildren prepared for an egg hunt, Mr. Vasquez said. They spent two days in jail before their son could borrow the money to post bond.

“We had no money to pay,” said Mr. Vasquez, now 68. At the time, his wife was working at a manufacturing plant and he was on disability, he said. 

The doctor who sued the couple was Roger Marshall, now a senator from Kansas. Mr. Marshall, a Republican who is seeking re-election this fall, filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist, according to a New York Times analysis of Kansas court records.

Patients were arrested in 81 of those cases for missing court dates, the records show. In an additional 13 lawsuits, Mr. Marshall’s lawyers sought warrants but it is unclear whether an arrest occurred.

They also garnished patients’ paychecks and bank accounts. They routinely charged patients an 18 percent annual interest rate.

The unpaid bills ranged from several thousand dollars to as little as $101. About half the lawsuits were filed under Mr. Marshall’s name and the rest by Heartland Regional OBGYN, the medical practice he solely owned from 1998 to 2012 and then co-owned with another doctor from 2013 to 2019.

Some facing lawsuits were new mothers with outstanding bills from their deliveries. Most lived in Barton County, a rural area with above-average uninsured and poverty rates. Some patients The Times spoke with lacked insurance; others had health coverage but were responsible for part of their bill.

“I had every intention to pay, I was just struggling,” said Kellie Clutts, whom Mr. Marshall sued in 2015 over a $129 bill. Ms. Clutts said the charge was from a postpartum visit shortly after her daughter’s birth.

Mr. Marshall sued Ms. Clutts when her baby was 9 months old and eventually garnished her bank account.

“I was recently divorced, trying to do everything on my own,” said Ms. Clutts, 45. “I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once….”

Doctors have wide discretion in how to handle unpaid bills. They can decide when to involve a debt collector, file lawsuits or drop the debt entirely if a patient seems unable to pay.

“There is a lot of variation,” said Barak Richman, the co-director of the health law program at George Washington University who has studied medical debt litigation In three states. “There are a lot that do bring lawsuits but also a whole lot that don’t. It’s not because they’re in a different position, they’ve just decided they’re not going to do it.”

Some hospitals and doctors have increasingly relied on litigation as insurance deductibles have risen, leaving patients responsible for a great share of their bills.

Even so, wage garnishments and arrests of patients are “definitely on the extreme side,” Mr. Richman said.

Neale Mahoney, an economist at Stanford University, has conducted research in one state finding that lawsuits against patients are relatively rare, with about 1.7 percent of hospital stays resulting in litigation.

“It’s not surprising there are outliers but this does seem to be an extreme case,” in terms of how far a doctor went to pursue debt, Mr. Mahoney said.

Categories Cruelty, Elections, Ethics, Kansas, Medicine

Bruce Baker: Trying to Understand Margaret Roza’s Cures for Underfunded Schools

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2026 //
4

Bruce Baker is one of the stellar scholars in the field of economics of education. He is currently at the University of Miami. He is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning in Miami’s School of Education and Human Development.

In this post, he takes issue with the economic prescriptions of Margaret Roza. Her work has been embraced by the privatizers.

Baker begins:

My critiques of Marguerite Roza, the Edunomics Lab, and Education Resource Strategies — with receipts. Every quotation is verbatim from the linked post or article.

24 blog entries, Aug 2009 – Aug 2026 (and counting)

21 taking on Roza, from CRPE to Gates to Georgetown

4 taking on ERS or Karen Hawley Miles

3 on Edunomics graphs, so far

The short version

I’ve spent an embarrassing share of my career, seventeen years and counting, cleaning up after Marguerite Roza. It has come in two waves. The first ran from 2009 to 2014, when she was at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and then advising the Gates Foundation, and her work was all over the federal policy conversation. The second started in 2025, when the Edunomics Lab she now runs at Georgetown began handing state policymakers graphs so bad I made a video about them. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) comes up less often, but it keeps turning up in the same places. Its founder, Karen Hawley Miles, co-wrote the Houston/Cincinnati weighted student funding (WSF) “success story” with Roza. Stephen Frank presented ERS slides alongside Roza’s fabricated graph at the 2011 Regents symposium. And ERS graded Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding against Baltimore’s own formula.

It comes down to the same four problems, over and over:

  • Blame the districts. The claim goes like this: states have fixed between-district inequity, so the problem left is within districts, and weighted student funding fixes that. The evidence for that sweeping national claim turns out to be “one or a handful of deeply flawed analyses,” mostly Roza’s Texas Weighted Student Index study. That study checks schools against the district’s own spending priorities, not against what kids actually need.
  • Productivity without the arithmetic. Stretching the School Dollar, Curing Baumol’s Disease, and the USDOE productivity page that showcased them offer spending cuts relabeled as “cost savings,” without a single cost-effectiveness analysis. Hank Levin laid out how to do one back in 1983. It isn’t a secret.
  • Evidence that was simply made up. Roza’s 2011 “productivity curve” had no data, no definitions and no connection to anything real. Researchers in the room said the claims were “simply made up.” ERS’s contribution at the same event: all teacher pay above the starting salary is waste.
  • Money-doesn’t-matter graphics. Edunomics’ long-term trend graphs start the clock in 2013, the one year that all but guarantees spending up and scores down, then skip the cost adjustment and stretch the axes. Their scatterplots throw every school onto one chart with no cost adjustment and call the resulting cloud a finding.

Yes, my tone has changed. In 2011 I called this work “methodologically flimsy” and “hack research.” By 2025 I was calling it “intentionally deceitful,” and I stand by that. Once you’ve been told, repeatedly and in public, exactly why a graph misleads, and you keep putting it in front of legislators anyway, “sloppy” stops being the right word. As I put it on Bluesky: “for anyone still using this kind of garbage, you’ve been on notice for years.”

The peer-reviewed version is politer, but it says the same thing. I’ve never said within-district inequity isn’t real. It is. What I have said, with data (EPAA, 2009), is that the WSF showcase districts were no more responsive to student need than districts without WSF. WSF was sold on advocacy research that “identifies the politically motivated solution then seeks to prove that it works.” And you can’t fix a district its state has starved by rearranging what’s left inside it. My 2013 NEPC review gave ERS’s Baltimore analysis the same treatment: grading a formula against itself isn’t an equity analysis. It’s a tautology.

Please open the link and read the rest of Bsker’s analysis. This post analyzes what happens when economic analysis becomes untethered from the needs of students.

Categories Data, Economics, Research

Did Netanyahu Know about the October 7 Attack Before It Happened?

By dianeravitch
September 29, 2026 //
34

For as long as I can remember, I have been a strong supporter of Israel. I was ten years old when the state was created as a refuge for the Jewish people, for those who survived the European genocide and for those who were fleeing persecution in Muslim countries across the Middle East. 

In Sunday School every week, we children brought pennies, nickels, and dimes to fill up little blue tin cans marked “For Palestine.” 

We celebrated the creation of the state of Israel and its triumph when it was attacked by all the neighboring Arab states. And we celebrated every other attempt to extinguish the only Jewish state in the world, the only safe haven for Jews. 

But my unwavering faith in Israel has been shattered by Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruthless response to the horrific events of October 7, 2023. 

His brutal campaign of violence in Gaza has not only killed tens of thousands of civilians but has made Gaza an uninhabitable wasteland. 

Almost as awful is his refusal to stop the violent attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians living on the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces have failed to intervene as rabid settlers torch the homes of Palestinians and murder them. 

Netanyahu is directly responsible for murder, aggression, and brutality. Instead of seeking peace, he is continuing the inhumane treatment of Palestinians and indulging the extremist settlers who want to seize more and more of the West Bank. 

Netanyahu justifies whatever he does or condones because of the Hamas attack on October 7. 

But there is a disturbing picture emerging about that day, stongly suggesting that Netanyahu was warned about October 7 and failed to take action. Did he decide not to protect the people who lived near the border with Gaza? If he did, he is an accessory to their deaths.

Like many other people, I was appalled by the savagery of October 7. I was obsessed by the accounts of the attacks on young people dancing until dawn at “the Rave.” They were hunted down and slaughtered like animals. They were killed as they hid, as they attempted to flee. Families in the Kibbutzim near the border were mercilessly murdered, even the children. Some 251 hostages were brutally kidnapped and taken to Gaza.  

Immediately after that day’s horrifying events, I subscribed to the English-language version of Ha’aretz to learn what was happening from an Israeli perspective. Ha’aretz is a a liberal, anti-Netanyahu publication. Soon after the October 7 massacre, a disturbing story appeared. The story said that trained observers at a military monitoring post called Nahal Oz, near the Gaza-Israeli border, had repeatedly informed their superiors about what they saw every day on the other side of the fence in Gaza. To them, it appeared that Hamas was preparing for an incursion. 

The monitors were identified as Combat Intelligence Collection Unit 414. Unit 414 consisted of 25 unarmed young women, trained to watch the border for signs of trouble.

They saw men conducting military exercises, studying maps and the terrain, practicing attacks near the fence, digging positions. All of it looked ominous to them but Israeli intelligence decided that these activities were not hostile. They were nothing more than training exercises. 

Unit 414’s many warnings were ignored. On October 7, Unit 414 was defenseless. At least 15 of the young women were murdered, and seven were taken hostage. 

Since that fateful day, we have learned that other nations warned Israel that Hamas was planning an attack. 

CNN reported that Netanyahu was warned that Hamas was planning an attack, but did not pinpoint the date it would happen. 

Two days after the massacre, The Times of Israel reported that Egyptian intelligence warned Israel that Hamas was planning a major attack. “Mounting questions over Israel’s massive intelligence failure to anticipate and prepare for a surprise Hamas assault were compounded Monday when an Egyptian intelligence official said that Jerusalem had ignored repeated warnings that the Gaza-based terror group was planning “something big” — which included an apparent direct notice from Cairo’s intelligence minister to the prime minister.” 

The story appeared recently in The Atlantic magazine, which reported that the chief of Egyptian intelligence flew to Israel on September 26, 2023, to warn Netanyahu of Hamas’ plans.

In September 2026, the Associated Press reported that Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates that an attack was imminent.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was directly warned by the president of the United Arab Emirates that Hamas was planning a major offensive just days before the militant group attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, according to an Israeli newspaper report.

UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed spoke with Netanyahu 10 days before the attack and said Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza at the time, was planning an operation, the Haaretz daily said. 

Bin Zayed said it would lead to bloodshed and could destabilize the region and undermine the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab and Muslim-majority nations, the newspaper reported.

But Netanyahu “reacted with relative calm,” according to Haaretz, which said he assured bin Zayed that Israel was prepared for any scenario and a possible attack was more likely to come from the occupied West Bank.

Netanyahu denied the story. He denied all the stories. He knew nothing. Yet the border of Gaza was not reinforced. Netanyahu shifted troops to the West Bank. Did he really know nothing? 

Put the pieces together. Netanyahu had multiple warnings about a major attack. He did not bolster the military presence. He did not tell the organizers of “the Rave” to move their dance to a safer location. He did not warn the settlers to evacuate. 

He continues to use his narrative about October 7 to bomb and destroy what’s left of Gaza and to allow West Bank settlers to harass and attack Palestinians in their homes and to steal their property.. 

The Israeli elections will be held on October 27. Netanyahu must be ousted.  There should be a thorough public investigation of what he knew and when he knew it. In addition to the deaths that he is directly responsible for, he has made Israel a pariah nation. He should be held accountable for his crimes. Israel has a heavy burden to bear for the crimes he committed in Israel’s name. The good people, the generous people, the open-hearted Israelis must act to restore the Israel that so many of us once revered. 

PS: As Americans, we should be able to sympathize with Israel’s dilemma. We have an authoritarian President who ignores the Constitution, norms, and laws to show his power. He has killed countless Iranians in a pointless war. He has murdered scores of men on the high seas, claiming they were carrying drugs but offering no evidence. He shut down USAID, which supplies food and medicine to the neediest in the world; this caused the deaths of many thousands of children in sub-Saharan Africa. He repeatedly tells the world that our elections–the centerpiece of our democracy–are rigged (is that a confession?) He has unleashed ICE to terrorize immigrants, some of whom have papers, and to kill people who committed no crime.

Will we ever reclaim our reputation as a nation of laws? Will Israel?

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Extremism, International
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