Archives for category: Accountability

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

Gallup: Satisfaction With K-12 Education Hits New Low The primary source for the 32% satisfaction figure and the 11-point drop over two years. 🔗 https://news.gallup.com/poll/714017/satisfaction-education-hits-new-low.aspx
AP News: School Satisfaction Is at a Low Point — Gallup Poll Independent reporting on the Gallup/https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/share-widget?w=poi&o=t&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fsearch%3Fved%3D1t%3A260882%26q%3DWalton%2BFamily%2BFoundation%2Beducation%26bbid%3D4984465999757231831%26bpid%3D64929726419391013Walton Family Foundation findings. 🔗 https://apnews.com/article/education-poll-public-school-gallup-2e2826f7508e7b13fb62690e8f4ec71f
The Hill: Satisfaction with K-12 Education Drops to New Low Coverage of the Walton Family Foundation/Gallup poll breakdown by ideological lines. 🔗 https://thehill.com/homenews/education/6077272-education-poll-satisfaction-record-low-gallup/
The Independent: US Public School Approval Drops to Historic Low International perspective on the Gallup findings and parent satisfaction data. 🔗 https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/gallup-survey-trump-education-satisfaction-b3046505.html

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

Education Research Report: U.S. Students Above OECD Average in Science, Reading, and Computational Problem Solving (2025 PISA) NCES release of 2025 PISA results for U.S. 15-year-olds. 🔗 http://educationresearchreport.blogspot.com/2026/09/us-students-above-oecd-average-in.html

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

Big Education Ape: School Funding Is No Fun — But Is It Fair? Deep analysis of how chronic underfunding, voucher expansion, and ESA diversion systematically defund public schools. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/school-funding-is-no-fun-but-is-it-fair.html
Big Education Ape: If You’re Struggling to Read This, You Have Some Very Rich Friends to Thank Connects billionaire-funded reform networks to reading score declines and social media cognitive disruption. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/if-youre-struggling-to-read-this-you-have.html
The Education Report: Federal Vouchers Mean Federal Control Peter Greene’s analysis of how federal voucher programs create federal control over private and religious schools. 🔗 https://theeducationreport.substack.com/p/federal-vouchers-mean-federal-control

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

Big Education Ape: Show Me the Money-Back Guarantee — The Science of Reading’s $1.8 Billion Snake Oil Problem Critical examination of the $1.8B Science of Reading industry, its vendor ecosystem, and lack of accountability. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/show-me-money-back-guarantee-science-of.html
Curmudgucation: Five Great Questions For “Evidence-Based” Programs Skeptical interrogation of “evidence-based” curriculum mandates, including the Science of Math and Reading. 🔗 https://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2026/09/five-great-questions-for-evidence-based.html

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

Big Education Ape: The No Kings Coalition Is Back — And This Time, No Kings. No Excuses. Vote Early. Overview of the No Kings Coalition’s Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 ahead of the November 3, 2026 midterms. 🔗 https://bigeducationape.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-no-kings-coalition-is-back-and-this.html
Cloaking Inequity: Trump’s Latest — The State of New Mexico or New America? Contextualizes the broader political environment of executive overreach affecting education policy. 🔗 https://cloakinginequity.com/2026/09/08/trumps-latest-the-state-of-new-mexico-or-new-america/

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Heather Cox Richardson: Houthis Seize Key Port, Prices Will Rise

By dianeravitch

September 11, 2026 //

Heather Cox Richardson writes about an important and devastating turn in Trump’s disastrous war on Iran. The Houthis have captured a key port that enables them to target the transit of oil from the Red Sea. This could drive the cost of oil even higher than it is today, which inflates the cost of most other products.

Think about it: Trump is unqualified to lead the nation into war. He never served, and he has no relevant knowledge or experience. He doesn’t trust American intelligence services, and he has fired top advisors. Pete Hegseth is totally unqualified for his position. He served, but his head is full of nonsense about “manliness” and “the warrior ethic.” He has fired the military’s top generals and admirals.

These two incompetents have dragged us into a war without end.

Heather Cox Richardson describes an ominous development:

We woke up today to news that Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militants have taken control of the city and seaport of Mocha and much of the shoreline of the Red Sea near the Bab el-Mandeb strait, another chokepoint for world trade including trade in oil. With the Strait of Hormuz largely closed, Saudi Arabia has relied for seagoing transport on the Red Sea route that empties into the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean.

As Diana Roy of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote in July, the Red Sea is one of the most important routes for global shipping. It carries twelve to fifteen percent of the global maritime trade every year, worth about $1 trillion. The waterway extends about 1,400 miles from the Suez Canal—which connects it to the Mediterranean Sea—at the northern end to the Bab El-Mandeb strait in the south.

The Iran-backed Houthis are in a struggle against the Saudi Arabia–backed Yemeni government. A fragile truce has been in place since 2022, but clashes between the two forces have escalated for weeks, and on Tuesday, September 8, Houthi attacks on Saudi targets started fires at oil facilities and wounded more than 70 people.

The Yemeni government told Reuters that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have guided the Houthi advance, and according to Zachary Cohen, Katie Bo Lillis, and Kylie Atwood of CNN, U.S. officials think that hundreds of IRGC officers are currently in Yemen working with the Houthis to shut down the Bab el-Mandeb. The journalists note that CNN has previously reported that in case U.S. negotiations were unsuccessful, Iran had planned an economic “nuclear option”: closing the Bab el-Mandeb.

Cohen, Lillis, and Atwood reported this afternoon that more than 100 U.S. military advisors are in Saudi Arabia as part of a new joint forces command, providing the Saudis with intelligence and helping them find Houthi targets.

The sources who told the journalists about the joint effort emphasized that the U.S. routinely shares intelligence with the Saudis and that it is neither participating directly in the strikes nor providing operational support. Still, U.S. airstrikes on the Houthis in 2025 killed 153 civilians and wounded 243 others in Yemen in 2025.

The price of oil jumped to $109 a barrel, and U.S. gasoline rose to an average of about $4.28 a gallon. GasBuddy said the national average price of diesel had hit $6.00 for the first time in history. Just a year ago, the national average was about $3.70.

GasBuddy issued a statement, saying: “While gasoline gets the headlines, diesel is the fuel that moves the economy, powering the freight trucks, trains, agricultural equipment, and construction machinery behind nearly everything Americans buy. That means its impact reaches far beyond the transportation sector. As diesel climbs, higher supply chain costs work their way into the price of groceries, household goods, deliveries, and countless other products families rely on every day, even for households that never fuel a diesel vehicle.”

GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis, Patrick De Haan, said the new record “will be a particularly painful one for the economy” and is “likely to reignite inflation up and down the supply chain.” He continued: “I suggest Americans anticipate a costlier holiday season, as it appears diesel prices could continue climbing as geopolitical tensions continue to remain a main factor.”

While all this was going on, tonight President Trump attended the second day of his Dallas rally to fire up his base before the midterm elections. There, a video from the Republican National Committee intoned: “And on June 14th, 1946, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a caretaker,’ so God gave us Trump.”

—

Notes:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/10/houthis-seize-key-port-mocha-yemen-red-sea-coast-iran-saudi-arabia-us

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/10/politics/us-military-support-saudi-arabia-houthi-iran-yemen

https://www.npr.org/2026/09/08/g-s1-142296/houthi-attacks-saudi-arabia

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-says-iran-war-end-after-us-midterm-elections-threatens-attack-pickaxe-2026-09-10/

Statement on Diesel Reaching $6 Per Gallon for the First Time in History

https://www.cfr.org/articles/another-hormuz-the-red-seas-threat-to-the-global-economy

Bluesky:

atrupar.com/post/3mv7ckybguq23

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economy, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Trump

TC in LA: A Week of Looney Tunes

By dianeravitch

September 10, 2026 //

One of the best bloggers is TC in LA. In this post, he or she eviscerated the madness of our political scene.

This is one you should read. Consider subscribing.

There are 56 days to the midterms.

My apologies for the late delivery. “Life” got in the way.

Monday morning, as if Sunday’s scheduled daylong Adderall overdose posting memes that could only come from a raving lunatic – one of which resulted in Iceland summoning the U.S. ambassador on Monday after Sundowning Gramps shared a doctored map of the American flag covering Iceland as well as Greenland, Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean in which Iceland’s foreign minister, Thorgerdur Gunnarsdottir, said she demanded answers from Ambassador Billy Long over Trump’s “completely inappropriate” post – wasn’t enough, Doddering Dilbert had his sweet little Natalie post a Lie Anti-Social in which he claimed: “Oil prices will drop precipitously, like everything else is dropping (but more!), when we WIN the war with Iran. Three Dollars a gallon, but ultimately, below Two Dollars a gallon. It will all happen quickly, and Iran will never have a Nuclear Weapon. MAGA!” Interestingly, the shitpost revealed he knows he hasn’t won any part of his war with Iran.

As part of his celebration of Labor Day, Delusional Doddering Dilbert went on Lies Anti-Social to attack a months-old report by the Center for American Progress that found his costly National Guard deployments did not curb crime, going so far as to threaten a lawsuit. He wrote, “The report is just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics.” He went on to name George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, NBCUniversal, the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, and even the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates as fellow perpetraors of the CAP’s “lie,” continuing, “The Dumocrats love it, and are against anything ‘TRUMP.’ These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. I am also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization.”

After posting 24 other equally-demented posts between 0950-1045 Monday, he concluded with his official Labor Day message: “Happy Labor Day to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics, Communists, and Dumocrats who will do anything possible to destroy our Country. These Deranged People, after fighting for 10 years, should finally acknowledge that your Favorite President (ME!), knows how to WIN! They should be exhausted by now but, sadly, they’re not. They’re going to give it one last shot at ruining America, but we’re not going to let that happen. We’re going to win the Midterms, BIG, and SAVE AMERICA!”

Yes – He. Is. Delusional.

Among the delusional droppings on Lies Anti-Social yesterday was one in which Doddering Cilbert unveiled a mockup of proposed Space Force uniforms, which he acknowledged are based on ones worn by fictional fascists, saying that the gray and black look was “inspired by the discipline of the Starship Trooper uniform,” while being “modernized for the guardians of the space domain.” Starship Troopers, the 1997 science fiction film, was intended to undermine what Dutch director Paul Verhoeven interpreted as fascist themes in the 1959 novel of the same name by Robert A. Heinlein. Verhoeven told the Guardian in 2018, “I decided to make a movie about fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.” Nazi-inspired iconography is prevalent throughout the film. Even Jonah Goldberg had a reaction: “I liked the movie, which was very different from the book. My concern is whether these guys understand the point Verhoeven intended in Starship Troopers. The thing is I don’t know what would be worse: whether they got it or didn’t.” Menswear writer Derek Guy added: “this is the kind of design costume designers make to tell you who are the bad guys in a space movie.” Another user responded: “If the costume designer on Star Wars had suggested this for the Empire uniforms George Lucas would have told them to dial back the Nazi.”

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs against the U.S. went into effect at midnight last night, affecting hundreds of goods, including steel and aluminum, appliances and electronics and wood, pulp and paper products. There are no reports of any negotiations. Maladministration II levied 50 percent tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods two weeks ago, raising tensions between the neighboring countries.On Monday, Trump threatened Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier, posting on Lies Anti-Social that it must start building in the U.S. to access the American market, otherwise he demanded that Bombardier be barred from doing business in the United States altogether, claiming the company’s products “aren’t good enough.” He seemed to have forgotten (assuming he ever knew) that the company has a U.S. headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, where it employs more than 1,000 people. In the meantime, the Canadian Energy Minister said he’s ready to cut off all Canadian electical suply to the U.S. if Doddering Dilbert keeps pushing his crazy trade war.

Bastet

Republican Senator Jerry Moran has represented Kansas since 2011. Trump’s threat to eliminate over 1,000 jobs in the “Air Capital of the World” sent Moran and his team scrambling. He posted to his official social media account that he’d already reached out to the White House to make sure the president understands how significant Bombardier is to Kansas’ economy. In his X post, Moran noted the company’s local workforce includes more than a thousand of his constituents whose skills help the country’s aerospace and defense capabilities. He also promised he’d not only keep working to make sure Bombardier stays in Kansas, but that its presence continues to expand. In its own statement, Bombardier praised its American workers not only in Kansas, but in more than 20 states including Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and Texas. Delusional Dilbert’s dumbassed trade war is threatening American jobs, to the point a loyal Republican senator is begging him to call off his attack.

Back in 1911, Canada and the United States had a free trade deal on the table until House Speaker Champ Clark boasted that he hoped to see the American flag flying over every square foot of British North America. Canadian voters heard that, threw out the government that negotiated the deal, and killed reciprocity for decades, which is the lesson Dilbert apparently never learned about telling your neighbor you plan to swallow them whole.

Sunday, the Alternative fur Deutschland Party (AfD) won 43.8% of the vote, falling three seats short of the majority necessary to form a government by itself. AfD, a party whose regional branch in Saxony-Anhalt is considered a right-wing extremist group by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, finished well ahead of the other parties in the regional election. It would need partners from other parties to form a governing coalition. That would normally be difficult, as Germany’s mainstream parties have refused to work with AfD as part of a so-called “firewall” to prevent the party from gaining power. But AfD may reach out to the far-left BSW party. The two parties are on opposing sides of the political spectrum, but AfD and BSW both share anti-immigration and Russia-friendly sentiments. Ulrich Siegmund, AfD’s candidate in the race for governor, responded to Elon Musk’s X post in which the Afrikaner Nazi wrote “Gut gemacht,” which translates to “good job” in English, posting: “Thank you, @elonmusk, for your support and for your clear and highly important perspective on the political developments of our time – including here in Germany.”

Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City who is the son of a Mafia “button man,” and later worked as Trump’s personal lawyer, publicly criticized current Mayor Zohran Mamdani for planning to attend a 9/11 commemoration ceremony at Ground Zero on Friday. In an interview with Newsmax on Sunday, Giuliani – whose decision to locate the city’s emergency responce HQ in the World Trade Center so he could use the bedroom in the facility for his “nooners” – said: “Frankly, whatever he’d like to say, he doesn’t agree that Sept. 11 was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America. Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he’s coming.” Mamdani has said nothing like that. Most New Yorkers would appreciate it if Giuliani dropped off the face of the earth.

Back in 2023, Ron DeSantis’ short-lived presidential campaign employed Nate Hochman, who was fired that year after posting a video that included the Sonnenrad, a symbol used by neo- Nazis and white supremacists. Before joining the DeSantis campaign, Hochmann worked at the National Review and the Claremont Institute. He eventually lost a journalism fellowship after publicly praising white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Now, the New York Times is reporting Hochman has been hired as deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning office. According to Hochman’s email signature, he’s also serving as Rubio’s chief speechwriter. The policy planning office is a big deal, as it directly advises the Secretary of State on broad strategic priorities. The State Department both confirmed and defended hiring Hochmann, calling him a trusted staffer who has helped advocate for Maladministration II’s foreign policy agenda. It’s amazing how people with a documented history of racist and extreme rhetoric keep getting hired and/or promoted into influential roles in Maladministration II.

Israeli newspaper Haaretz is reporting In the days leading up to Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – in which, let us remember, 1,200 people were killed – United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan warned Netanyahu that Hamas’ leader in Gaza was planning the deadly attack. According to Haaretz, Netanyahu failed to inform Israeli security agencies of the impending attack. Netanyahu’s office called the report an “absolute lie” and denied speaking to the UAE. Of course he would – what’s 1,200 of his own dead? It was the perfect excuse to start his long-planned genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza. Israeli opposition leaders demanded Netanyahu’s removal from office. Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a candidate in the upcoming vote, said Netanyahu “bears personal and direct responsibility” for the deaths on Oct. 7 and “cannot continue to serve in his position for even one more minute.”

Maladministration II administration must hand over the names of the people who devised the structure of the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund that was of the bogus settlement of President Trump lawsuit against the IRS, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in a case challenging the slush fund.

Brian Jose Morales Garcia was born in Denver, Colorado. Thispast spring he was installing air conditioners in Texas. On April 3, his boss got pulled over near Fredericksburg over the car’s window tint. Brian was in the passenger seat. Troopers called in local police to translate, because he speaks Spanish. Then they called ICE. Brian’s birth certificate was sitting at his house. His family drove it over, but agents wouldn’t even look at it. Agents told him he’d go to prison if he kept insisting he was American. He signed their papers rather than disappear for months. On April 7 – four days after the traffic stop – they deported him to Mexico. Then Brian hired lawyers who got him a hearing on Judge Robert Pitman’s calendar. Days before that, the government agreed he could walk back in if he presented his birth certificate and a photo ID at the border. The same birth certificate the government refused to look at in April. On August 30, he walked back across the border into Texas. Nobody had to look at his citizenship until a federal judge was about to make them explain. His damages case is ongoing.

Republicans suffered yet another blow in their legal war against mail-in voting, this time in Delaware. A Delaware court has once again upheld the state’s 16-year-old permanent absentee voting law, dealing a fresh defeat to Republican state Sen. Gerald Hocker in his years-long crusade against the program. Hocker, who is running for re-election, as well as fellow Senate candidate Steven Washington, argued Delaware’s Permanent-Absentee Statute unconstitutionally lets voters receive absentee ballots indefinitely, without reaffirming their eligibility each election, violating the state constitution’s specific list of qualifying reasons for absentee voting. Vice Chancellor David disagreed, ruling the law does no such thing. The court found the law only allows a narrower slice of voters, those with qualifying illnesses, disabilities, military service, or caregiving duties, to skip reapplying every cycle, while still requiring them to notify the state the moment their situation changes. If a voter’s reason for needing absentee status stops applying, the state must cancel it immediately. “’Permanent’ is therefore a misnomer,” the court wrote, explaining the label doesn’t mean what plaintiffs claimed.

Missouri’s redistricting war has spiraled into chaos, and observers say the state’s own emergency filing to the U.S. Supreme Court hints that county officials could defy the courts to keep the Republican map alive. In a reply brief to the justices, Attorney General Catherine Hanaway argued that the Missouri Supreme Court “derailed an imminent federal congressional election” when it threw out the GOP’s “Missouri First” map for November. Buried in that same filing is a line that political reporter Mark Maxwell warned should worry anyone who cares about orderly elections. Now, her brief concedes, “local election officials in counties are now left to make individual decisions” on whether to follow the order or stick with the map used in the primary while they wait on a federal court. Maxwell warned that the filing signals officials could defy the state Supreme Court and keep the Republican map anyway, “which would be absolute chaos. The state court explicitly forbade this.” People Not Politicians attorney Chuck Hatfield has called the state’s position “open defiance of the court.” Meanwhile, candidates don’t know which district they are running in, and lawsuits are piling up.

The Talarico campaign in Texas just rolled out one of its most eye-catching endorsements yet .

The huge development, which comes as Talarico’s Democratic campaign seeks to be the first to win Texas in over 30 years, was revealed in a brief political ad on Tuesday. The ad said: “This is Ken Paxton, and this is Ken Paxton firing an honest Texas Ranger. David Maxwell spent five decades in law enforcement and was inducted into the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. The best of the best. Let’s just say he knows a bad guy when he sees one. So when he saw his boss, Ken Paxton, trading favors with a convicted felon, he had to speak up. He reported Ken Paxton to the FBI and Ken Paxton fired him for it. Ranger Maxwell testified in Ken Paxton’s impeachment trial. Ken Paxton was impeached by his own party. But Ranger Maxwell isn’t done speaking up against bad guys.” Ranger Maxwell concludes the commercial:”My name is David Maxwell. Ken Paxton ended my five-decade career because I blew the whistle on his corruption. I am supporting James Talarico for the U.S. Senate … He’s one of the good guys.”

Don’t worry, there will be far more presidential looney toonies to come this week.

Remember, you are not the crazy ones, and we were made for these times. Regardless of what you may feel right now, act as if you believe that and redouble your efforts.

“Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty, as we understand it.” – Abraham Lincoln

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Trump

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

By dianeravitch

September 4, 2026 //

In Florida, a couple were arrested and charged for keeping their four grandchildren confined in a truck for six years and allowing them to be sexually abused during their long confinement.

The good news (sarcasm) is that they homeschooled the children by enrolling them in Khan Academy online classes.

Did the couple know they were eligible for $32,000 in voucher payments to pay for all their educational expenses from the state of Florida? Maybe they did and were collecting. Why pay for the Khan Academy classes when the state will pick up the bill?

The New York Times reported:

A grandmother and her fiancé are accused of trapping four children for six years inside a semi truck’s cab, where the children endured sexual abuse, malnutrition and neglect, prosecutors in Florida said on Tuesday.

Starting in 2019, the victims, two girls and two boys who now range in age from 11 to 15, slept on a top bunk without all fitting on the mattress, the authorities said in an arrest warrant. They urinated in a plastic cup and defecated in a grocery bag, the warrant said.

One child scarred her hand permanently when hot noodles burned her, and she was not taken to the hospital, the warrant said. One girl contracted a sexually transmitted infection, the warrant said.

“This is just straight evil, and a scourge on our society,” Mark Glass, the commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, said during a news conference held on Tuesday.

The victims are the biological grandchildren of Keysha Monique Epps, 51, of Atlanta, according to Jae Williams, a spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, which filed charges against the suspects.

The ordeal began when Ms. Epps and her fiancé, Tamra Marshon Stewart, 37, of Jacksonville, Fla., traveled with the children from Atlanta to Miami, James Uthmeier, the state’s attorney general, said during the news conference. Ms. Epps was a licensed semi truck driver, Mr. Williams said.

The couple served as primary caregivers for the children, and they all lived inside the truck’s cab.

The cab included two seats for a driver and a passenger, a bunk bed, a refrigerator, a microwave and a space for storage all packed into tight quarters, the authorities said in the arrest warrant.

“This was a prison, a rolling prison,” Mr. Uthmeier said.

One of the girls, who is now 12, said Mr. Stewart had touched her inappropriately every day for two years, the authorities said. She said her grandmother knew what was happening to her, and in one instance pretended to be asleep, according to the arrest warrant.

Mr. Stewart furnished the other girl, now 11, with candy and money after sexual encounters in an effort to keep her quiet, according to the arrest warrant. The victim “said it didn’t work,” the warrant said.

A 15-year-old boy confronted Mr. Stewart, calling him a pedophile and a child molester, according to the arrest warrant from the state’s attorney general office. Mr. Stewart punched the victims after the dispute, according to an arrest warrant filed by the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.

The children did not attend school while with Ms. Epps and Mr. Stewart and instead used Khan Academy, a website with educational videos that is not accredited, the authorities said.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Ethics, Evil, Florida, Home Schooling, Vouchers

ProPublica: Idaho Permits “Faith Healers” to Substitute for Medical Care for Children

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2026 //

Should states permit parents to trust “faith healers” for their children’s medical care? Should the state do so when the child is seriously ill? Should the state stand by idly when children tested by “faith healers” die?

That is what happens in Idaho. Under the protection of freedom of religion, parents may trust their sick children to “faith healers,” even at the cost of their lives.

Audrey Dutton writes about this quirk in the law, which was once widespread, but is now legal only in Idaho.

With the growth and political clout of old-time religions, this dangerous practice may spread to other states. When does freedom of religion become deadly?

Dutton writes:

In Idaho, parents who say their faith prohibits lifesaving medical care for their children can’t be charged with child neglect or manslaughter. Supporters of this protection over the years have included lawmakers who voiced support for “traditional” Idaho values.

But from at least the 1880s through the early 1970s, it was illegal for parents in Idaho to choose prayer over medical care when a child’s life was at stake, newspaper archives and historical documents show.

“Every parent of any child who willfully omits, without lawful excuse, to furnish necessary food, clothing, shelter, or medical attendance for such child, is guilty of a misdemeanor,” reads the 1887 edition of Idaho territory statutes, published before statehood.

The statutes included no mention of spiritual belief as a “lawful excuse.” Three years later, the state constitution explicitly put limits on Idaho’s freedom of religion. It would not excuse “acts of licentiousness,” polygamy or other practices “inconsistent with morality or the peace or safety of the state.”

It wasn’t long before the law came down on members of the Followers of Christ, a faith-healing sect that arrived in Idaho in 1899 and remains active in the state. From 2015 to 2025, the sect’s congregations in Idaho experienced 15 preventable deaths of children, according to ProPublica’s reporting.

Pearl Annis was a 13-year-old girl whose parents had moved from Oklahoma to Idaho’s Magic Valley in the spring of 1915 with at least one other Followers family. The Annises and their 13 children shared “a two-room shack,” a local newspaper reported. An officer and a doctor visited the home after neighbors voiced concern. They found Pearl in bed, fully dressed and on the cusp of death.

Her father, Lurid P. “Lewis” Annis, was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of refusing to provide medical attention. Pearl was taken to the hospital, according to the news story, and died there with what today would be described as septic shock from a bowel blockage. The newspaper, which didn’t appear to follow up on Annis’ criminal charge, called the Followers church “a religious cult” and Pearl’s death a consequence of “religious mania.”

News archives and historic records don’t say how many times Idaho acted on similar cases in the decades after.

But one legal battle over lifesaving care drew attention in the 1960s, as sickness made its way through a Followers family in a Boise suburb. The mother died in December 1965. Her 4-year-old daughter died the following June.

Days after the girl’s death, a judge ordered the state to take custody of her 10-year-old brother under Idaho’s child protection law. The boy was admitted to a local hospital with pneumonia, a complication of the measles. He spent days in critical condition but survived. The judge told the father that to regain custody, he would have to be willing to give the boy medical care as the law required.

A doctor testified that without the hospitalization, the child “almost certainly would have died,” a newspaper report said.

The father’s lawyer told the judge that his sect was rooted in “faith that God will heal the sick.” The law in the 1960s was clear, though: a parent had a duty to protect their child’s health, no exceptions. The judge told Samuel’s father: “The law governs conduct. Religion governs opinion.”

But the legal landscape was about to shift. It came with little public attention.

During a full-on rewrite of Idaho’s criminal code in 1971, the Legislature added a section that said the state could not bring endangerment charges against someone “who chooses for his child treatment by prayer or spiritual means alone.” Legislative records don’t make clear how the wording originated. The passage of another law one year later, affirming the “spiritual means” language and applying it to other crimes, has been credited to the Christian Science church, another Christian denomination with Idaho members.

(The Christian Science website says the church’s practice of “healing in the way Christ Jesus taught” is not “faith healing” and that members are free to choose any form of healthcare. The church also supported Oregon’s full removal of its faith-healing exemption in 2011.)

Faith-healing exemptions soon became widespread nationally. The trigger was the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act of 1974, which set out to standardize the nation’s child welfare system by giving states grants to more effectively investigate reports of child abuse.

The Department of Health, Education and Welfare interpreted the law as requiring states to have a faith-healing exemption to qualify for the grants — an interpretation that records from the time don’t explain.

Open the link and keep reading to learn how federal law changed to deal with “faith healing.”

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Ethics, Extremism, Health, Religion, Safety, Separation of church and state

Freddy DeBoer: Whatever Happened to Raj Chetty and His Claims about Teachers?

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2026 //

Back in 2011, Harvard Professor Raj Chetty and two esteemed colleagues (John Friedman at Brown University and Jonah Rockoff at Columbia University) published a dazzling study of teachers, asserting that the best teachers are those whose students get improved scores. Those students have a higher income ($250,000 over their lifetimes), and enjoy a multitude of benefits, all because of that one teacher who induced them to have higher scores. President Obama cited Chetty’s research in his 2012 State of the Union address to show how important it was to find the “best” teachers and fire the “worst’ teachers.

Chetty’s work supported the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top plan to encourage evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. States that evaluated teachers by their students’ scores were eligible to apply for a share of RTTT funding. Those who did not were not eligible.

Most states, eager for a share of the $5 billion prize, agreed to adopt what was called “value-added modeling” or “value-added measurement.” (VAM)

I posted dozens of times about the flaws of VAM, first of all, because the American Statistical Association said that teachers account for only 1-14% of score changes; most changes were attributable to home life and school system issues. Secondly, because the VAM concept is very unstable and is highly affected by student demographics. Only teachers of reading and math in grades 4-9 could even be assessed by the annual tests, which are mandated only in grades 3-8. Schools started attributing scores to teachers not in those subjects and not in those grades, tied to the work of other teachers in the school.

The Los Angeles Times engaged researchers to calculate VAM scores for the district’s teachers, and the newspaper published them alongside the names of teachers. It was humiliating for teachers, but Arne Duncan thought this disclosure was wonderful.

I happened to be in Los Angeles on the day that a fifth grade teacher committed suicide after he received a poor VAM score. No one knows if that was the reason for his suicide, but it may have been. By all accounts, he was a good teacher in a tough school.

The New York Post did the same for New York City teachers. It listed names and scores. The teacher identified by the newspaper as the city’s “worst” teacher was hounded by Post reporters seeking an interview. It turned out that she taught classes of new immigrants, who moved in and then out of her class as they learned enough English to join regular classes. Her students in September were not the same students by June. The VAM scores for her were meaningless, as they were for other teachers. Teachers of the gifted saw few if any gains because their students were at the top year after year. Expert math teacher Gary Rubinstein noticed that some teachers had high scores in one subject, but not in the other. Should half the teacher get a bonus while the other half was fired?

Freddie deBoer, an independent writer who earned a doctorate in English and education assessment, re-evaluated Raj Chetty’s famous study.

It’s a long review, and I won’t post it all. Please open the link and read it.

He begins:

For a long time I’ve been getting some version of the comment, “What about Chetty!” in response to my perspective on education, as in Raj Chetty, the economist who for the past decade has made a lot of waves asserting that our education problems are straightforwardly the product of bad teachers and that replacing them will have implausibly large economic effects. I tend to try and work from a broader perspective than “this is why I think this guy is wrong,” but I get this request so often, here you go. This is why I think Raj Chetty is wrong.

Few empirical claims in modern education policy have traveled farther than Chetty et al’s findings on teacher “value-added.” In his famous 2014 American Economic Review papers, he and his coauthors reported that students assigned to better (excuse me, higher value-added) teachers were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, save for retirement, and avoid teen pregnancy, and that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent of the distribution with an average teacher would raise the present value of a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by roughly $250,000. Chetty’s research findings in this domain had been floating around for awhile at the time of publication, and President Obama cited the figure in his 2012 State of the Union address, and the judge who decided Vergara v. California leaned on it to strike down California’s teacher tenure laws. Take that, teachers! The findings are arresting, the dataset is impressive – 2.5 million children, linked to IRS tax records! – and the policy implications are clean: identify and remove bad (pardon me, low “value-added”) teachers, watch outcomes improve. It’s exactlythe kind of story our neoliberal policy establishment is desperate to tell, and was clearly catnip to the Obama administration, which was doggedly attached to a simplistic vision of delivery through better education, where the gutting of the uneducated labor market was ameliorated by turning every last child in the United States into a genius, scaling up the Stanford-to-Google pipeline until every American could pass through it.

Unfortunately, the Chetty story is ultimately another neoliberal just-so story, that is to say, a fable, a legend, a myth. The closer you look at what the “value-added” construct actually measures, how stable those measurements are, and how the Chetty results have fared under replication, the more reason there is to doubt both the magnitude of the claimed effects and, more fundamentally, whether “teacher quality” as the literature operationalizes it is a coherent, measurable attribute at all. (Spoiler: it is not.) Let us count the problems.

The construct itself puts the thumb on the scale. The first problem is conceptual. In the Chetty et al. studies, a teacher’s “value-added” is the residual variation in a student’s standardized test scores that remains after controlling for prior achievement and some demographic covariates. It’s not a measure of pedagogical skill, content knowledge, classroom climate, the cultivation of curiosity, or any other property normally meant by “good teaching.” It’s a statistical residual on a narrow set of assessments, usually math and reading tests in grades three through eight. That residual is then defined as quality. I want to be clear about this: any portion of variability in student outcomes that Chetty et al cannot or will not identify otherwise is assumed to be a product of teacher inputs. Since Chetty’s whole project is to argue that educational outcomes are the result of teacher quality, this is what we used to call begging the question – that is, he’s assuming the point he wants to prove, asserting the desired conclusion as a premise, by acting as though any uncaptured variation is necessary evidence of teaching quality. And it gets worse in the telling. When advocates and journalists and politicians summarize his work, the construct expands silently from “the part of test-score gains Chetty cannot otherwise explain” to “good teachers,” and the slippage is rarely flagged. But that’s the whole game, you guys.

Open the link and enjoy!

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Research, Teacher Evaluations, Teachers and Teaching, VAM (value-added modeling)

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

By dianeravitch

September 3, 2026 //

Jeff Bryant, prolific education journalist, writes in The Progressive about the efforts by educators to fight back against the failed and punitive policies of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It’s a valuable summary of the past 15 years. Teachers rallied. Teachers sounded alarms about the bipartisan attack is on teachers, teaching and public schools.

Did it make a difference?

Now, 15 years later, there are thousands of charters, and they are no better than the public schools, contrary to their promises. Now, most states have vouchers, and the public is funding religious schools, which was unthinkable in 2011.

But we can’t give up! At last, there are candidates running to fight for public schools. Gina Hinojosa is the most prominent of them. If she defeats Greg Abbott in Texas, expect major changes.

Jeff writes:

It was a sunny July day in Washington, D.C., the temperature was forecasted to hit 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and when I arrived at the Ellipse on the National Mall for the Save Our Schools march I realized I would need a hat. Among the vendors that lined Constitution Avenue, the least expensive hat I could find was a gaudy, red-white-and-blue affair with an embossed rendering of fireworks going off over the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument. “Some hat,” Anne Thompson, my videographer for the day, said when she arrived…

At the time, I was working on a project, partnered with the National Education Association, called “Starving America’s Schools: How Budget Cuts and Policy Mandates Are Hurting Our Nation’s Students.” The project documented how state governments, following the Great Recession, cut funding for schools and rolled out efforts to privatize them with charter schools and voucher programs.

I had read multiple analyses by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) that found at least thirty-seven states responded to the economic downturn that started in 2007 and extended into 2009 by slashing their education budgets back to pre-recession levels. My Starving America’s Schools project would examine how the cuts caused districts to fire teachers, cancel art and music programs, close libraries and science labs, and cut extracurriculars like athletic programs, field trips, and drama performances.

Teachers turned out to denounce high-stakes testing, NCLB, Race to the Top, budget cuts, privatization, and the attacks on their profession, funded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other billionaires.

….The estimated crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 roared in approval at an array of speakers that included the actor Matt Damon (whose mother is a professor of education), Ravitch, best-selling author Jonathan Kozol, renowned educator Deborah Meier, and policy experts Linda Darling-Hammond and Pedro Noguera. When the speeches were over and we marched to the White House, the line of people stretched for blocks and blocks…

The range of themes the speakers addressed included lack of pay and respect for teachers; the harms caused by poverty and privatization; the continuing racial discrimination and segregation in schools and glaring inequities in their funding; the unbearable class sizes teachers endure, and the injustices that result from using test scores to sanction schools and evaluate teachers.

What also animated the crowd, Anthony Cody tells The Progressive in a text message, was a sense of betrayal on education by the Democratic Party’s leadership. Cody, a fulltime classroom teacher at the time—he’s now retired—was one of the principal organizers of the march. “The great majority of teachers supported the election of Barack Obama in 2008,” he says. “[But] RTTT reinforced the worst elements of NCLB by encouraging states to link teacher pay and evaluations to standardized test scores.”

“A theme that ran through the rally was ‘how could a Democratic administration be so hostile to public schools?’ ” says Ravitch in an email to The Progressive.

“The speakers, me included, hated RTTT and saw it for what it was: encouragement for charters, high-stakes standardized testing, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, and other dreadful policies,” Ravitch continues. “We predicted [the policies] would fail, and they did.”

A particular target for invective at the rally was Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, Ravitch recalls. “He regularly assailed public schools as failing. He attacked public school teachers. He constantly praised charter schools, and whenever national test scores came out, he gleefully pointed to results and made them sound worse than they were.”

“Duncan could have fit in a Republican cabinet,” Ravitch adds.

Fifteen years later, did that outpouring in July 2011 matter?…

The sad truth is that the grievances that motivated people to board buses and gather on the Mall on a hot July day in 2011 continue to dominate the K-12 school landscape today.

For instance, one of NPE’s reports that Cody references, published in 2026, found that states that have been the most aggressive about redirecting public funds for schools to private education operators have been the most neglectful of funding and supporting their public schools.

Although No Child Left Behind was repealed in 2015, it was replaced that year by the Every Student Succeeds Act that still enforces standardized testing. And the legacy of the funding cuts enacted during the Great Recession continues to harm schools.

“In the decade following the Great Recession, students across the United States lost nearly $600 billion from the states’ disinvestment in their public schools,” an analysis by the Education Law Center reported in 2021. Calling the time, from 2008 to 2018, a “lost decade,” the organization noted that while states’ economic activity as measured by gross domestic product increased by 17 percent, state and local revenues for public schools lagged, increasing by only 6 percent.

A 2025 Education Law Center report, “Making the Grade,” assessed states on how they fund public schools and found that not a single state earned an A grade on three crucial measures of funding: whether state and local revenues are adequate, whether funding is fairly distributed, and whether funding lags a state’s economic capacity.

In the meantime, the charter school industry continues to expand, with thirty-nine out of forty-three states experiencing growth in charters in 2025, according to charter industry data. And voucher programs also continue to grow, as fifteen states now operate twenty-three programs, and the Trump Administration is set to roll out a nationwide federal voucher program in 2027. As the right wing’s “long game” to end public education continues apace, prominent centrist Democrats call for a return to the education policies of the Bush and Obama years.

“Democrats [have] walked away from standards and accountability [for schools], and our kids are falling through the cracks,” former Chicago mayor and Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is telling anyone who will listen. And Arne Duncan is back in the media spotlight, encouraging Democratic governors to embrace the Trump Administration’s voucher program. That the politics of education in 2026 seem so similar to those of 2011 is evidence that a left-right binary over education policy doesn’t really exist.

As I observed all those years ago on the cusp of the march in D.C., there was no middle ground in education debates. Factions on the right wanted to get rid of public schools. Business interests represented by testing companies, charter schools, and tech firms wanted to make money off schools. And a “reform” community led by wealthy foundations and technocrats wanted to mold public schools to their ideological, and often political, agendas.

As I wrote at the time, “Faced with this array of antagonists toward public education, where does the ‘middle ground’ lie? When people openly admit they want to get rid of you, where should the bargaining start? When people have shown you they are more apt to use you for their own profit, and then walk away when the ‘market changes,’ why should you trust them? And when people say they are willing to align with your cause but only when you say and do things how they want you to do them—even when your ideals inform you to do otherwise—why should you simply bend to their will?”

Those questions are still relevant today. They will remain so until a progressive left faction adopts a robust message on education and articulates it repeatedly in advocacy documents and political stump speeches.

“Our battle for public schools is steeper now than it was when the Save Our Schools rally was held,” Ravitch says. “It will be a battle for many years to come.”

But in 2011, for at least a day, it seemed that public school advocates had the power to, as Ravitch put it in her email, “push back and give people a modicum of hope.”

The battle continues, and it’s not over. America needs a strong public school system, not a hodge-podge of pop-up schools.

We need well-prepared teachers who can knowledgeably teach history, science, mathematics, literature, and foreign languages. We need well-funded schools and respected, well-paid professionals. We need equality of opportunity for all children, and we need excellence.

We need the strong public schools that built the Aunited States into a great nation. We need education for democracy, where children are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

We need an education system that produces engineers, scientists, artists, musicians, athletes, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, teachers, social workers, idealists, scholars, young people eager to use their hands, their brains, and their hearts to make our society better for everyone.

We are now in a period of disruption and dissolution. That way lies disaster. It is the road to elitism, segregation, indoctrination, and decay.

We need to raise our sights and build better public schools that offer a goood education for all children.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Cruelty, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Extremism, Failure, Funding, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Supporting public schools, Teacher Evaluations, Teacher Pay, U.S. Department of Education, VAM (value-added modeling)

Scott Dworkin: Drag Queen Beats Texas and Gov. Abbott

By dianeravitch

September 1, 2026 //

Scott Dworkin has a terrific blog on Substack, where he often has news that you can’t find anywhere else. The following is one of those wonderful stories:

The Drag Queen Who Beat the Texas Government

The state of Texas spent three years trying to turn drag performer Brigitte Bandit into a criminal. Senate Bill 12 threatened any bar that booked performers like Bandit with a $10,000 fine, with performers possibly facing a year in jail.

In March of 2023 Bandit testified against that bill inside the state’s Capitol, wearing a dress that listed names of children killed in the Uvalde mass shooting. Lawmakers were arguing about drag queens, she said later, while kids were being killed in Texas schools.

After her testimony, Bandit sued—along with other Pride groups and businesses—Ken Paxton, three cities, and three district attorneys. A few months later, the whole thing went to trial in a Houston federal courtroom. For three years, Texas had said this law was about protecting children. Now it had to prove a child had been harmed.

It couldn’t. Attorney General Ken Paxton called an expert witness, a doctor brought in to talk about what explicit material does to kids. Under oath, that doctor said he had never seen anyone seriously hurt by a drag show. Not one of the seven government offices that were sued over this law offered any other evidence.

That December, Bandit was sent a package from Nashville, Tennessee—a gift from the one and only Dolly Parton. It was a custom guitar covered in rhinestones, signed by Dolly to Brigitte.

Texas appealed and won, and this spring the ban came back to life. Bandit was right back where she started.

But on Tuesday, Judge David Hittner struck the law down again and barred Paxton from enforcing it. A judge put on the bench by Ronald Reagan.

This Saturday night in Austin, Bandit brings out the guitar.

This story appeared last week, so Brigitte Bandit has already performed.

A few words about Reagan-appointed Judge David Hittner, as reported by The Texas Tribune.

In his ruling striking down the 2023 law for the second time, Judge Hittner said that the ban was overly broad and clearly unconstitutional:

The ruling described SB 12 as overly broad in its definitions of performance and nudity, stating that provocative cosplay at conventions, swimming athletes or Dolly Parton and Elvis impersonators could potentially be penalized under the law.

“The vast majority of the law’s numerous applications violate the First Amendment because all the performances that it has an actual impact on are constitutionally protected and are targeted for prohibition based on content and viewpoint,” Hittner wrote…

“Finally, for those who find such activities as described in this case offensive, the solution is relatively simple … just don’t go,” he wrote.

It’s reassuring to know that Texas has some rational Republican justices. Hurrah for Judge David Hittner!

SB 12 as adopted in law contains no language explicitly referencing drag performances, however a previous version while in the Legislature specifically included references to drag. Hittner noted in today’s ruling that opponents of drag performances are not obligated to attend them.

If you don’t like drag shows, just don’t go.

If you don’t like certain books, don’t read them.

If you object to abortions, don’t have one.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Evil, Extremism, Texas

Corey DeAngelis: Are Public Schools Unconstitutional?

By dianeravitch

September 1, 2026 //

Corey DeAngelis hates public schools. He has spent his professional life attacking and demeaning them. I tried to identify the source of his contempt for these great engines of democracy, but was unsuccessful.

Corey graduated from the University of Texas at San Antonio, then received a Ph.D. in education policy at the University of Arkansas’ Department of Educational Reform. This is a program funded by the Walton Foundation, dedicated to the proposition that public schools are illegitimate and the government should give every family vouchers to escape them. Gene Glass, one of the giants of education research, described this program as one of the strangest in academia, because of its decided slant towards school choice.

Corey attended public schools in San Antonio. When he started high school, he applied and was accepted to a public magnet school on the campus of his zoned high school.

DeAngelis attended Communications Arts High School (CommArts), a magnet school operated by Northside ISD. It was founded in 1995 and was located inside the William Howard Taft High School campus. CommArts had high admissions standards, small classes, and an enrollment of about 500. Taft accepted all students and enrolled about 2,800 students.

Having enjoyed the privileges and perks of an elite public school, Corey must have been contemptuous of the large public school he avoided.

Taft was not a failing school. It accepted everyone, so of course its student body included all kinds of youth, including students who were low-performing, students with disabilities, students who were rebellious. The magnet school Corey attended screened out students who did not have high test scores or high grades and were not highly motivated. 100% of its students graduated from high school.

His life experience might have made him a supporter of public school choice, but he somehow evolved into a far-right hater of public schools who is certain that students would be better off if they received a voucher for religious schools, private schools, homeschooling, or anything else.

Corey doesn’t care that some religious schools teach racism, have no certified teachers, and are unaccountable for meeting any state standards. He doesn’t care that some homeschoolers are poorly educated. He doesn’t care that a sizable number of students attend for-profit charters that care more about profits than learning.

In this article, which appeared in The Washington Post, he argues that public schools are unconstitutional, despite having been treasured by most Americans for two centuries, and despite the Founding Fathers having included provision for them in the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 (also called the Land Ordinance of 1785), which set aside land specifically for a public school in every town in the newly created states.

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785 established the federal township survey system: each township was divided into 36 one-square-mile sections, and Section 16 (640 acres) was reserved “for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.”

The specific provision of land for public schools should end any doubt about their constitutionality, unless you think that today’s far-right zealots know more about the Constitution than the men who wrote it.

As a graduate of Houston public schools, none of them selective, I strongly reject the claim that public schools are inherently evil. Unlike Corey, I will always be grateful to the public schools that educated me: Montrose Elementary School (six years, including kindergarten); Sutton Elementary School (one year); Albert Sidney Johnson Junior High School (three years); and San Jacinto High School (4 years). They gave me a solid foundation in every subject; i became friends with a wide variety of students; I had some spectacular teachers; and I was able to gain admission to an elite women’s college.

Think about it. Ninety percent of Americans went to public schools, and most graduated from public schools. These are the very people who turned the United States into a successful nation. If you spit on public schools, you are spitting on the engine of American success. That’s crazy.

DeAngelis writes:

In 2021, Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger argued that the U.S. public school system violates the First Amendment. “Education,” he wrote, “consists mostly in speech, and parents have a right under the First Amendment to exercise authority over what their children hear.” Forcing families to accept government messaging — or pay a steep price to escape it — amounts to unconstitutional pressure.

A lawsuit filed in Nebraska on Aug. 13 brings that argument into court — and could open a path toward universal school choice.

Justin Jacobsen and Timothy and Joanna Menter, parents in the Lincoln Public Schools district, are suing state and local officials in Lancaster County District Court. Represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, they are challenging Nebraska’s combination of compulsory education and public-school-only funding.

Nebraska law requires parents to enroll children in a “public, private, denominational or parochial school” or to home-school them. Noncompliance is a Class 3 misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail and a $500 fine.

Yet the state offers educational benefits — roughly $19,000 per student statewide in 2024-25, and about $17,400 in Lincoln — only to families that enroll their children in public schools, thus accepting the government’s preferred viewpoints. Nebraska ranks near the bottom nationally on school-choice indexes and provides no scholarships, tax credits or charter schools. (Gov. Jim Pillen has opted Nebraska into the new federal tax credit scholarship program, effective Jan. 1, 2027).

Families that opt out of the public system shoulder the full cost of their children’s education themselves. Average private school tuition in Nebraska runs about $7,800 a year. The resulting penalty, over a K-12 career, exceeds $100,000.

The Menters now home-school their school-age children after pulling the two oldest out of Lincoln Public Schools. The Jacobsen family home-schools one child, sends the two youngest to a private religious school and has another trying public high school. It would send all four to private schools if it could direct its tax dollars to the education providers of its choice.

Both families withdrew most of their children because remaining in public schools meant adopting educational speech they reject. The Menters’ elementary school displayed a classroom door sticker promoting alternative sexuality and transgender ideologies and pressed climate-change views the parents found fear-based. The Jacobsens’ school taught transgender ideology; the children were also exposed to divisive narratives suggesting certain races were victims and others were oppressors because of their skin color.

The parents’ complaint rests on three theories. First, the combination of a criminal education mandate and funding limited to government viewpoints directly abridges parents’ free-speech rights under the First Amendment. Education is inherently speech, and parents hold the primary right to speak or to choose who speaks on their behalf. Second, the same facts violate the Nebraska Constitution’s free speech clause, which state courts treat as mirroring the federal guarantee. Third, the arrangement creates an unconstitutional condition: that is, the state may not condition a valuable public benefit on the surrender of a constitutional right.

This combination of a compulsory mandate and exclusive public school funding is viewpoint discrimination, not a neutral funding decision. Nebraska mandates educational speech, then funds only the government’s perspective and withholds support from any other. That arrangement fails strict scrutiny. The state has no compelling interest in government-run education specifically, as opposed to education generally, and less-restrictive alternatives exist. The government could still fund education with taxpayer dollars, for example, while allowing the money to follow the child to the school or program that aligns with the family’s values.

The lawsuit does not ask the court to invent a new system or order the legislature to adopt any particular program. It seeks only a declaration that the current structure is unconstitutional as applied to these plaintiffs, an injunction against continuing the unconstitutional conditions, and prospective damages from the city of Lincoln and Lancaster County equal to the per-pupil value of local benefits directed to Lincoln Public Schools, continuing until the violation ends or each child graduates from high school, earns a GED or turns 19. The plaintiffs do not challenge the content of any specific curriculum — the claim is structural, concerning funding and compulsion.

Universal school choice resolves the constitutional problem while preserving public support for education. Nebraska can keep its compulsory-education laws and continue to provide education with taxpayer funding. The difference is that families, not the state, would direct that money to the schools or programs that best align with their values — public, private, religious or home-based. Funding would follow the child rather than force every family to be indoctrinated in a single government viewpoint.

This approach respects free speech. Parents who prefer the public system’s messaging can remain there. Parents who do not can exit without financial penalty. Every child still receives an education funded by the public, and no family is compelled to underwrite or accept speech it rejects for its own children. Force gives way to freedom.

The Nebraska case makes plain that the status quo cannot stand. Universal school choice is the path that honors both education and the Constitution.

Corey DeAngelis is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a senior fellow at Americans for Fair Treatment. He also worked for Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children. He is known as an evangelist for vouchers.

Categories Accountability, Florida, Privatization, School Choice

Quickwrit: Thanks to Trump and Hegseth, Our National Defense is in Crisis

By dianeravitch

August 27, 2026 //

I wish I knew the identity of the commenter Quickwrit. He/she contributes remarkable insights. This blog is dedicated to education and democracy. But our leaders are so arrogant and irresponsible that they endanger education, democracy, and our survival.

Here is the latest from Quickwrit:

IT’S NOT JUST the USS Abraham Lincoln: MOST of the U.S. ships on patrol in the Iran war are in sad-to-dire condition. Recall that the USS Benfold, a key guided-missile ship, drifted without propulsion and internal power for four days, during which time it was a sitting duck for Iranian missiles. Inside the ship, the lack of internal power meant that the crew had no working toilets (most U.S. ships don’t have flush toilets and rely on vacuum power to suck waste away), no air conditioning in the cramped quarters below deck, and no way to prepare food for the crew.

And among all the ships on Iran patrol that are in need of repair, the one that’s most likely to fail next is also the most critical in the blockade: The USS Boxer. Boxer is far overdue for a two-year complete overhaul. It was supposed to be in dry dock in San Diego through October of this year, but was instead deployed in March to Iran.

Dry dock overhauls aren’t just like going in for an oil change — the ships are virtually gutted and rebuilt from the inside out because of the tremendous wear and tear on the machinery during deployment at sea. USS Boxer is in sad shape right now and the current photos of the rust all over her hull only hint at that band aids being applied to the equipment inside to keep her somewhat combat ready. Her crew had expected to be on leave with their families during the dry dock period; instead, they just turned around and went to Iran. They and their families are justifiably furious.

Many other U.S. ships and crews are near the breaking point, mechanically and psychologically.

The food situation for the entire fleet in Iranian waters is critical because of TRUMP’S RETREAT that has had nearly zero coverage by U.S. media —

TRUMP RETREATS — The U.S. has been forced by Iran to move resupply operations from Bahrain to Diego Garcia, a U.S. base more than 2,000 miles away in the Indian Ocean, making it more difficult and dangerous to resupply U.S. ships and bases. Some supply lines are even longer than that now.

THE REASON FOR THE RETREAT, just at a time when the difficulties of resupplying U.S. carriers and other ships has made headlines, is because China has armed Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can easily penetrate U.S. defenses, and because of the critical shortage of U.S. defensive missiles.

CHINA has declared that “China is A STRONG STRATEGIC PARTNER” of Iran, and “China STRONGLY SUPPORTS IRAN on safeguarding its sovereignty, security, and national dignity.”

So, during the cease-fire, China has supplied Iran with a new generation of missiles and drones that can evade U.S. missiles and electronic countermeasures

Iran’s new missiles from China operate with China’s own “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A global positioning system (GPS) to guide missiles accurately to hit U.S. and Israeli targets.

The Chinese BDS-3 military-tier B3A system makes U.S. targeting and electronic countermeasures basically useless because “BeiDou” BDS-3/B3A is based on highly-complex frequency-hopping technology and incorporates Navigation Message Authentication (NMA) that prevents “spoofing”.

Before Iran switched to Chinese BDS-3/B3A technology, when Iran fired missiles or sent drones at U.S. bases and ships or at Israel and other nations, the Iranian missiles and drones could be electronically jammed or “spoofed” with false target coordinates.

But, now the U.S. and Israel must rely on old-fashioned radar and fire volleys of large numbers of defensive missiles in the hopes of hitting an incoming Iranian target. THAT’S WHY the U.S. and Israel are depleting their stocks of defensive missiles.

All this information about Iran’s DBS-3/D3A missiles/drone guidance system was available in the Pentagon before Trump’s Iran war, but He-Man Hegseth fired any general who tried to tell him this and tell him that it was a bad idea to launch a war against Iran.

MEANWHILE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan have just signed a mutual defense agreement that LEAVES OUT THE U.S. because Saudi Arabia and Turkey have come to recognize that America’s military can’t defend them and so they have joined with Pakistan, which is a nuclear power and is no friend of America. That spells a BIG LOSS of influence for the United States.

AND NOW desperate Trump is flailing around and attacking U.S. allies — he told Fox News host Trey Yingst that “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the sh*t out of them!” Oman has been trying to negotiate a settlement with Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, acting on America’s behalf at Trump’s request. The Middle East nations are now all asking who Trump will abandon and target next in his desperation.

PLUS — China has been watching and counting as Hegseth has been stripping defensive missiles from U.S. bases and ships in Asia, to the point that the U.S. Asian bases and ships have barely enough missiles left to defend themselves, let alone challenge China when it invades Taiwan.

AND NOW, Trump has announced that he is withdrawing America’s last supercarrier from Asia and sending it to the Iran war. China must be very pleased.

When China invades Taiwan soon, the entire U.S. economy will crash because U.S. industry — as well as the U.S. defense industry — depends on computer chips made in Taiwan.

This is a disaster that has been caused by Trump thinking that by winning a quick war against Iran, he could distract American voters from his continuing withholding of the Epstein papers.

(Share this strategic information because the public isn’t receiving it from the media.)

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Evil, Failure, Trump

How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

The Bottom Line

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

Heather Cox Richardson: Houthis Seize Key Port, Prices Will Rise

TC in LA: A Week of Looney Tunes

Florida Couple Homeschooled Their Grandchildren While Confining Them to a Truck and Sexually Abusing Them

ProPublica: Idaho Permits “Faith Healers” to Substitute for Medical Care for Children

Freddy DeBoer: Whatever Happened to Raj Chetty and His Claims about Teachers?

Jeff Bryant: Did the Big Teachers’ Protest Rally in 2011 Make a Difference?

Scott Dworkin: Drag Queen Beats Texas and Gov. Abbott

Corey DeAngelis: Are Public Schools Unconstitutional?

Quickwrit: Thanks to Trump and Hegseth, Our National Defense is in Crisis

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I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

The Bottom Line

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

Search All Posts

Previous posts

Recent posts

Blog Topics

Top posts

Follow blog via email

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