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Jan Resseger: Reviving NCLB WILL NOT Improve Schools

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2026 //
7

Jan Resseger, social justice warrior, strongly dissents from those who want to bring back the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

She writes:

Defining schools by their achievement test scores is reductive. Of course we want our children to learn to read, to enjoy and understand literature, to master math, and to study history and the sciences, but a fixation on comparing school districts’ test scores blinds us to the human relations that constitute a classroom, to the social formation of children that happens at school, and to myriad other ways of thinking about what students are accomplishing at school. The temptation then is to define schoolteachers as producers of test scores and forget about all the other ways they help our children learn and grow.

Because test scores provide a simple, universal measure, we grab onto it and give it more weight than all the other factors we can’t so easily measure. Kevin Welner, a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado and director of the National Education Policy Center identifies family income, a factor entirely outside of school, as the most significant variable affecting a school district’s aggregate test scores: “Those of us who work in or with schools never question the enormous impact that a teacher or school can have on a student. But this essential truth coexists with another truth: that differences between schools account for a relatively small portion of measured outcome differences. That is, opportunity gaps in the U.S arise primarily outside of schools. This should not be a surprise. Poverty, concentrated poverty, and racialized poverty are pervasive features of America.  School improvement efforts cannot directly help children and their families overcome decades of policies that perpetuate systemic racism and economical inequality.”

Last week, the NY Times’ Claire Cain Miller, Frencesca Paris and Sarah Mervosh reported on a major new demographic study documenting a widespread decline over the past decade in U.S. students’ standardized test scores: “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago… A report on the new data describes a decade-long ‘learning recession.’… Education experts say there is no single reason for the declines. But the timing provides some clues. Students’ test scores had been increasing since 1990—then abruptly stopped in the mid-2010s. That coincided with two events: an easing of federal school accountability under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which was replaced in 2015, and the rise of smartphones, social media and personalized school laptops. The pandemic then accelerated learning declines, especially for the poorest students. Some pandemic effects have lingered. Student absenteeism, for example, remains higher than pre-pandemic… Test scores in low-income districts fell furthest, but affluent districts—the types of places families move to for the schools—also lost ground.”

The reporters do acknowledge a number of factors that may correlate with dropping scores, but they seem to lean toward blaming a lot of the problem on the end of No Child Left Behind. They are mistaken when they declare that the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESEA), NCLB’s replacement, ended test-based school accountability. In fact that 2015 law just made the states, not the federal government, agree to impose sanctions on the schools that had been unable significantly to raise test scores.  The reporters quote Brian A. Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan, who believes NCLB’s fading influence has been one cause of test score decline: “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement… There’s evidence that school accountability does change behaviors of teachers and administrators and probably parents and students.”

A prominent retired professor of education, Diane Ravitch pushed back immediately on what she understood as the bias of the recent NY Times article: “I reject the claim that scores have stagnated because of the easing of  No Child Left Behind-Race to the Top pressures. Sure, they increased the pressure on students, teachers, and principals, but their negative effects undermined the quality of education. Picking the right bubble on a standardized test became the goal of education.  Campbell’s Law says that when a measure becomes the goal, it loses its value as a measure. Social scientist Donald Campbell wrote that ‘the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.’ “

Ravitch names a number of experts who have evaluated the damage wrought by the No Child Left Behind Act’s strategy: to punish schools and teachers who, supposedly, weren’t working hard enough to make all students reach test-score proficiency by 2014.  The most prominent is Daniel Koretz, the Harvard University expert on standardized testing, who, in 2017, published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better. Koretz not only explains Campbell’s Law, but he shows how the pressure of test-based accountability corrupted what happened public schools across the country when the federal government threatened mandatory closure, or mandatory privatization or charterization of so-called “failing schools.”

Koretz reminds us that in places where test scores did rise under No Child Left Behind, it may not have reflected students’ academic growth. Test score gains were in many places artificially produced through test prep, the narrowing of the school curriculum, and even cheating: “Cheating—by teachers and administrators, not by students—is one of the simplest ways to inflate scores, and if you aren’t caught, it’s the most dependable.” (The Testing Charade, p. 73)  His book covers the tragic Atlanta cheating scandal, and other examples when teachers read the tests in advance and prepared students to answer specific questions. Koretz describes various kinds of test prep coaching and drilling that were widespread in the NCLB era.  And, “(Teachers) reported that they reduced—sometimes very substantially—the amount of time devoted to teaching science, which was not tested, in order to make additional time for prepping kids in math and reading.” (The Testing Charade, pp. 95-96)

Last week’s NY Times report on the possible causes of an overall drop in test scores over the recent decade also names two other possible causes.  First, a decade ago, as schools began to provide laptops or electronic tablets to their students for online learning, students’ widespread dependence on their smartphones also became epidemic: “Something happened globally around the same time: the proliferation of devices, at home and in school.  Nearly half of American teenagers now say they are online ‘almost constantly,’ compared with just under a quarter who said that a decade ago, according to Pew Research Center.”  Due to the proliferation of devices, our classrooms operate differently, and our children are doing less reading of books for study and enjoyment.

Second, the reporters, explain, there was massive and well documented learning loss during the COVID pandemic: “Immediately after the pandemic, there was hope that students would recover quickly.  The new data shows that scores inched upwards in reading last year, and have climbed more steadily in math since 2022. But it has been nowhere near enough to make up for lost ground…. The biggest losses have been among the lowest-achieving students.”

I have never heard anyone who has been able to trace the extent of long term damage during COVID, when students’ schools were closed and many children were left while their parents were at work to learn remotely on computers. Chronic absence has been a greater problem since COVID, and something schools have struggled to overcome.  No one has been able to assess how long COVID will keep affecting children who were preschoolers and young elementary students back in 2019.

Finally there is one other big factor that could also be related to falling test scores over time: states have been perpetually reducing funding for public schools. According to the most recent research from the Albert Shanker Institute: “There are 42 states (including the District of Columbia) that devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 schools than they did before the 2007-2009 recession. This seems to be a permanent disinvestment in public education.” “(U)nequal opportunity is (also) universal in the U.S. In all states, higher-poverty districts are funded less adequately than lower-poverty districts… We find that 37 percent of white students attend districts with negative adequacy gaps, compared with 75 percent of African American students and 62 percent of Hispanic students. In other words, African American students are about twice as likely as their white peers to attend school in a district with below-adequate funding, while Hispanic students are almost 70 percent more likely to do so, and Native American… students are 50 percent more likely. Similarly, African American students are over 3 times more likely than white students to attend chronically underfunded districts….” These economic factors are likely to have affected students’ learning over time.

Our society will not be able to address our economic, social, and educational injustices through No Child Left Behind-style, test-based public school accountability.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Education Industry, Extremism, Failure, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Rick Wilson: Trump’s Trades Don’t Look Good or Smell Good

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
3

Rick Wilson is a never-Trumper, a former Republican operative who was a founder of The Lincoln Project. He write a popular blog, “Against All Enemies,” where he follows the actions of Trump 47.

He wrote:

Let’s start with a number, because the number is the whole story and the rest is just decoration.

3,700. 

Between January and March of this year, three months, ninety-odd days, one fiscal quarter of a man who is supposed to be running the country, Donald Trump’s required ethics filings disclosed 3,700 stock trades worth somewhere between $220 million and three-quarters of a billiondollars.

Microsoft. Meta. Oracle. Broadcom. Bank of America. Goldman Sachs. Nvidia. Apple. An S&P 500 index fund, because even a degenerate gambler likes a hedge. Municipal bonds, for flavor.

That’s not a portfolio. That’s a casino floor. And the President of the United States is standing in the middle of it, counting cards at the table while the pit boss looks the other way, and the cameras, conveniently, are off.

You are supposed to find this normal now. You are supposed to scroll past it. That’s the entire design. 

So let’s not.

.

Here is the part where I am legally and intellectually obligated to be precise, so pay attention. Precision is the enemy of this whole operation, and they are counting on you being too tired for it.

Insider trading is not “rich guy buys stock.”

Insider trading, as a federal crime, has elements: actual, legally defined moving parts a prosecutor has to bolt together. You need material, non-public information. You need a trade made on the basis of it. You need a breach of a duty of trust. And you need the thing lawyers call scienter, which is a fancy Latin way of saying the person knew exactly what they were doing. (Insider trading rabbit holes are shockingly amusing. I’ve been in one for two days.)

The rabbit hole led me to the Supreme Court last night, because of course it did. SCOTUS, over time, blessed two flavors of this in United States v. O’Hagan, the “classical” theory and the “misappropriation” theory, and federal prosecutors get to reach for the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Rule 10b-5, and the heavy artillery of 18 U.S.C. § 1348, the criminal securities-fraud statute that carries up to twenty-five years in a federal prison. I don’t understand it all, either, but it strikes me that Trump’s legal team will need to be up on these, quite soon.

Now hold that definition in your hand like a ruler, and lay it next to the reporting.

According to the Washington Post‘s reading of these filings, Trump bought Nvidia on February 10. Days later, Nvidia announced a major deal with Meta, and the stock jumped roughly 2.5 percent. He sold Microsoft and Amazon in February, then bought millions more in March, shortly before the Pentagon announced it would put its technology into classified computer networks.

Let me say the quiet part at conversational volume: I am not telling you that is a proven crime. I am telling you that if you fed those two paragraphs to a hundred securities lawyers with no name attached, every one of them would say the same two words before their coffee got cold: “Lawyer up.”

The President of the United States sits atop the single largest pile of non-public material intelligence and information on planet Earth. He knows what the Pentagon is buying before the Pentagon’s vendors do. He knows the tariff rate before the market does, because he is the source of the tariff. Markets are always defined by information asymmetry. For him, the asymmetry isn’t a loophole. It’s the strategy. It’s the job.

A normal person who traded a defense contractor’s stock the week before a classified Pentagon contract would be explaining himself to men in windbreakers with “FBI” on the back. Trump gets a $200 fine. Twice. We’ll come back to the two hundred dollars, because the two hundred dollars is the funniest and darkest detail in the entire file.

Here is the thing that turns this from a scandal into a regime: there is functionally no one on the beat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the agency whose entire reason to exist is to walk this exact crime scene, has been hollowed out with the precision of me working a Thanksgiving turkey. Since the administration took over, the SEC has shed the order of 18% of its workforce, dropping from roughly 5,000 employees to around 4,200, the bulk of them walking out the door clutching $50,000 buyout checks dangled by the same government they were supposed to police.

The Enforcement Division and the Office of the General Counsel, the cops and the lawyers, in other words, took the deepest cuts. DOGE set up shop inside the SEC headquarters, occupying actual rooms; nothing good was ever going to come of that. The Philadelphia and Los Angeles field offices were slated to go dark. Enforcement actions against public companies are down roughly thirty percent. The new chairman publicly mused that it’s “good every once in a while to have a house cleaning.” Uh huh.

You do not need a decoder ring. When the man at the top is running a quarter-billion-dollar trading book off privileged information, and the watchdog has been defunded, depopulated, and told to think of mass attrition as spring cleaning, that is not two unrelated news stories. That is one strategy with two press releases.

This is the part that should raise the hair on your neck, regardless of your party. The genius of the grift is not that it’s hidden. It’s that it’s legal-adjacent by demolition. You don’t have to break the law if you can fire the people who enforce it and starve out the ones who remain. The cop didn’t miss the robbery. The cop took the buyout, and the robber signed the check.

Fine. You want to know how this plays as an actual case. Put on the prosecutor’s jacket for a second, because the honest answer is more damning than the cartoon.

It would be hard.

Not because the conduct smells clean. It reeks. 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

WSJ: Trump Made Over 3,700 Stock Trades in First Quarter of 2026

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
4

The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump made thousands of stock transactions in the first quarter of 2026. In many instances, actions he took as president directly affected the price of the shares he bought or sold.

Previous Presidents put their assets into a blind trust or invested only in bonds.

Before he entered the White House, President Trump was a real-estate developer and speculator. Lately, his fortune has been wagered on some Big Tech stocks.

Money managers for the president made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, including million-dollar purchases of Nvidia, Dell and other Big Tech stocks. Trump’s managers pared his holdings in Microsoft and Amazon with sizable sales in the quarter. 

Canny investors should read Trump’s account on his social media site “Truth Social.” If he praises a company, it’s likely that he just bought the stock and is encouraging others to join him.

Bloomberg reported that experienced traders were stunned by the sheer number of trades on behalf of Trump.

President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosures show that he or his investment advisers made more than 3,700 trades in the first quarter, a flurry totaling tens of millions of dollars and involving major companies that have dealings with his administration.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the US Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value. But the volume of trading — more than 40 per day over a three-month period — stands out as much as the potential dollar value.

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account…

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House. Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests. Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer. His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy.

At the same time, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner helps manage billions in investments for Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while simultaneously serving as a “volunteer” envoy for the president on issues affecting the war in Iran and the Middle East in general…

The president’s disclosures spurred questions from some on Wall Street who expressed surprise at the trading volume.

“I’m baffled,” said Eric Diton, president and managing director at The Wealth Alliance. “In the 40-plus years of my time on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.”

The billionaire president’s stock trades were no doubt made to protect the best interests of the American people.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, For-Profit, Trump

John Thompson: Let NCLB Die, It’s Done Enough Damage

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2026 //
7

This week, a report by the Education Scorecard, led by Sean Reardon at the Stanford group; Thomas Kane at the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard; and Douglas Staiger at Dartmouth proclaimed that we are in a decade-long “learning recession.” It found that 83% of state reading scores declined from 2015 to 2025. 

While I respect the Scorecard’s skills in compiling test score patterns, due to my time as an academic historian, an education researcher, and an inner city teacher, who witnessed the extreme harm done to students by the No Child Left Act of 2001 and the 2010 Race to the Top, I must challenge many of the conclusions that are being drawn from the test score patterns that Reardon, Kane, Staiger, and their partners present.

For instance, Thomas Kane told NPR that around 2013, “‘school districts learned that nobody was looking over their shoulders in terms of student achievement.’” When I read this statement, my response was that Kane must be living in a different world.So many districts are still looking over their shoulders prioritizing accountability metrics, not real learning.

Kane then claimed that accountability-driven mandates due to the NCLB and the RttT produced gains that “‘may be one of the most important social policy successes of the last half-century that nobody knows about.’” That statement has been refuted by numerous studies including RAND’s research which concluded that the failure of attempts to improve learning through high-stakes testing added to the proof,  “that one does not fatten a hog by weighing it.”I believe the test-driven teacher evaluations that Kane pushed were the most destructive education policy that I’ve ever heard of, and were a major factor in undermining teaching background information and reading for comprehension.Their test results patterns, I argue, actually support the opposite of the defense of NCLB and the RttT; it was the full implementation of high stakes testing, not the rejection of those failed policies, that was one of the top two causes of the sharp decline in literacy.

On the other hand, I agree that a main reason for the decline is the failure to manage social media, and that chronic absenteeism is a major factor.

But, first, I want to explain the political reasons why reading outcomes in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS), and the Oklahoma City Public School System (OKCPS) fell so far. Secondly, I want to help defuse the “blame game,” and push back against the ramping up of unfair criticism of urban schools that is likely to get worse.  

Reardon previously led the research by the Equal Opportunity Project which found that the TPS’s 3rd through 8th grade growth rates were the 7th lowest in the nation from 2009 to 2015.

TPS students had gained only 3.8 years of learning over five years. Moreover, the OKCPS students only gained 4.4 years.

The TPS had had better schools than Oklahoma City, and we repeatedly visited Tulsa to learn from them. But, in 2010 they received a Gates Foundation grant for evaluating teachers, that Kane and Staiger helped create. Then, I frequently visited Tulsa and listened to both teachers and frustrated consultants as they complained about the damage being done to teaching and learning. Not surprisingly, it became much harder to recruit or retain teachers.

Now, the TPS, when compared with around 10,000 schools with similar demographics, “ranked higher than 1% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” 

Also, data from American Enterprise Institute’s Nat Malkus showed that the TPS’s chronic absenteeism rate was 48.2%, compared to the nation’s 31.9% chronic absenteeism rate for similar schools.

Similarly, the Scorecard said, “Oklahoma City ranked higher than 0% of districts nationwide in average reading performance during the 2022-25 school years.” Its students performed 3.93 grade levels below the 2019 national average. Moreover, chronic absenteeism was 42.8% compared to the national rate of 33% for similar districts. 

But, before Oklahoma City’s educators in high-challenge schools are blamed, the extreme segregation they face must be taken into account. Oklahoma County has 14 school districts.  along with magnet, charter, and private schools. School choice resulted in neighborhood schools with intense concentrations of students from extreme, generational poverty, who have endured multiple traumas (known as ACEs), thus driving down the OKCPS’s test scores. 

Consequently, in 2015, suburban and exurban schools Edmond, Mustang, Moore, and Yukon were ranked higher than the national average by 1.6; .6; 1; and .8 years. By 2024, their scores declined by the same or by lower rates as similar national schools. So, it’s hard to make the case that the lack of teacher accountability, as opposed to segregation by choice, drove those drops in reading. 

At the risk of sounding too nerdy, the historian in me needs to recall the chronologies for test score gains and decreases. I argue that the most meaningful reading metric is the 8th grade NAEP, which had been improving incrementally from 255 in 1971, to 263 in 2012, before it fell to 260 in 2020, and to 256 in 2023. 

Both my experiences in the classroom, and the reading of the data, support the narrative that it took a while for the destructive policies of both interconnected reforms to be put in place, but when that happened, both laws drove meaningful learning down.    

On the other hand, some claim that the reversal of the most punitive parts of RttT caused that decline. But those changes didn’t occur until 2015, after 8th grade reading scores were already in decline. Even so, in Oklahoma, the conservative Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs (OCPA) blamed State Superintendent Joy Hofmeister for the drop in state reading scores because she ended the practice that made us second in the nation in retentions. 

Getting back to today’s national discussion about literacy, one data-driven scholar, Brian Jacobs, was cited for supporting NCLB despite its problematic features. He said, “It was not a cure-all, but I think it really did improve student achievement.” 

But, if you follow the link to his research, it concludes, “Our results suggest that NCLB had no impact on reading achievement for 4th or 8th graders.” And it gives virtually no evidence that it didn’t undermine learning about science, history, arts, and music.    

Reading the news coverage of the Education Scorecard brings me back to three sets of memories. During the early 1990’s, our school superintendent bragged about implementing the Reagan administration’s A Nation at Risk. So many of my students who grew up in that era would thank me for teaching in a meaningful manner, and then complain that they had previously been “robbed of an education” by its testing.

Secondly, at the turn of the century, I repeatedly talked with smart, sincere data experts about methodological problems when using their metrics for real world policies, as opposed to economic theory. I repeatedly heard the reply that their job was to show that data-driven accountability can improve teaching. If I’m right, they would say, they would run some more controls (presumably after the policies were in place). But it wasn’t their job to predict what will happen if those policies are adopted.    

Thirdly, as the RttT was implemented, my students from the poorest elementary and middle schools would repeatedly thank me for showing them respect by teaching them in a meaningful manner. And, they kept volunteering that they had been “robbed of an education.”

It is also important to remember that the majority of OKCPS students are Hispanic, and remember that the OKCPS probably would have collapsed if it had not been for immigration. Now, when ICE is terrorizing immigrants, we must come together in support of our threatened students in order to reduce its contribution to chronic absenteeism. 

And Oklahoma has long ranked near the nation’s top for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), and near the bottom for children’s wellness.

Moreover, I don’t recall talking to a parent who doesn’t see the need to help young people control, and not be controlled, by their digital devices.

And I almost never talk to a parent, a student, or an educator who doesn’t want to cut back on high-stakes testing and test prep.

So, I agree we need to take the Education Scorecard seriously, but we should use it as a diagnostic tool to help us come together for the team efforts required for bringing back the joy of reading.   

For instance, I agree with Elaine Allensworth, the executive director of the Chicago Consortium on School Research, who responded to the Scorecard saying we should not panic, but “We need to really start asking questions about what we can do to support students so they feel engaged in school.”

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Oklahoma, Race to the Top, Standardized Testing

Why Trump Wanted Immunity from Audits

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
4

The New York Times explained why Trump wanted immunity from audits by the IRS. Before his first presidency, Trump appears to have had a tax liability of nearly $80 million. The IRS claimed that he used the same business failure twice to decrease his tax debt.

The new exemption from audits that he gave himself saves him what he owed, which would now be nearly $100 million. It’s not clear whether he will ever again be audited by the IRS.

The Times reported:

A tax audit that President Trump has been fighting since his peak earning days as a television celebrity was most likely wiped away in this week’s settlement with the Justice and Treasury Departments.

The agreement, part of a resolution to an unusual lawsuit that Mr. Trump and his sons filed against the Internal Revenue Service, frees the president from a potential adverse ruling that could have cost him more than $100 million, according to an analysis of his tax returns in 2020 by The New York Times.

Two years ago, Mr. Trump’s middle son, Eric Trump, acknowledged to The Times that the audit remained active. During his father’s first term in office, the matter was put on hold, records obtained by The Times showed.

It is unclear whether the matter was placed on hold again during the president’s current term or was resolved. If it was still pending until this week, the increased interest and penalties would have grown significantly.

Mr. Trump has always argued that he did nothing wrong in the way he filed his tax returns.

The audit dated back to a $72.9 million tax refund that Mr. Trump claimed, and received, starting in about 2010. The total reflected all the federal income tax he had paid, plus interest, for 2005 through 2008, his greatest earning years as the star of his reality show, “The Apprentice.”

Mr. Trump justified the refund claim by declaring huge business losses — a total of $1.4 billion from his core businesses for 2008 and 2009 — that tax laws had prevented him from using in prior years, The Times previously reported.

Records obtained by The Times did not itemize the business losses. But two of the largest-scale projects of Mr. Trump’s career — his long-failing casinos and his money-losing tower in Chicago — appeared to be behind the biggest numbers. In both cases, Mr. Trump made the argument that his interest in those projects met the tax code definition of worthlessness.

In 2008, with sales on his new Chicago condo-hotel tower lagging far behind projections, Mr. Trump claimed that he had so much debt on the project that he would never see a profit. That move resulted in Mr. Trump reporting losses as high as $651 million for the year, The Times and ProPublica found.

The I.R.S. has argued that he, in effect, tried to write off the same losses on the Chicago tower twice.

During his first campaign, Trump contended that it was “smart” to avoid taxes. He may be the first billionaire to skip them altogether.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Trump

Jamelle Bouie: The Voting Rights Act Was a High Point of Our Democracy

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
0

Jamelle Bouie, columnist for The New York Times, wrote several columns (see here) about the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in its Callais decision. This one is titled “The Law They Hate Was a High Point of Our History.” The high court majority, six hard-right Republicans, decided that partisan redistricting is just fine, but redistricting that takes account of race is not. Thus, a state legislature dominated by one party can justly produce a voting map that gives every seat to its own party, but it may not permit districts created to encourage representation of racial minorities.

In the wake of the Callais decision, some states of the Confederacy quickly carved up districts to eliminate seats held by Democrats and by Blacks. Some of these states will have only white Republicans in Congress.

Bouie wrote:

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 wasn’t the top-down dictate of a rogue, liberal Supreme Court — if such a thing has ever existed.

It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington, nor was it some kind of martial settlement imposed on the states of the former Confederacy.

It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The Voting Rights Act revitalized American democracy and stands as one of its great achievements.

This, somehow, has been lost in the discourse around the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais. The court’s clear hostility to the law, as well as the glee with which conservative Republicans have dismantled the South’s majority-minority congressional districts in its wake, makes it seem as if the V.R.A. was a handcuff placed on American politics by some outside force.

The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy. And it was, itself, the product of an explosion of democratic energy.

The V.R.A. was forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grass roots activists in the Civil Rights Movement, who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans. It was signed into law by a president who had won election in one of the largest landslides in American history. It was subsequently reauthorized by Congress, after Congress, after Congress, after Congress.

The most recent reauthorization in 2006 was nearly unanimous, and there was broad support from the public — so much that to justify the Supreme Court’s attack on the law in Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts had to fabricate a constitutional doctrine about the “equal sovereignty” of states, and Justice Antonin Scalia had to characterize the reauthorization as an unfair “racial entitlement” that politicians would never remove for fear of backlash.

If there is any single law that you could plausibly say represents the general will of the American people, it might be one that was reaffirmed nearly every decade for 40 years by the people’s representatives.

This isn’t just a historical point or a piece of idle trivia. It is essential. And it gets to what is so egregious about the court’s campaign against the law.

The Voting Rights Act was an attempt by the people of the United States, affirmed across two generations of voters and lawmakers, to make good the 15th Amendment to the Constitution — itself the hard fought product of war and reconstruction. It was an attempt to wield the authority of the federal government to secure the fundamental right to vote as well as the fundamental right to representation. It stood for substantive equal protection — the chance to make democracy real.

The V.R.A. was not, contra John Roberts and the rest, an expression of colorblindness, indifferent to the social realities of the United States. It did not pretend to treat supposed neutrality as truly neutral, nor did it place racial inequality outside the remit of the Constitution. And it was not, as this court would have it, the bland expression of a bloodless commitment to anti-discrimination. In fact, it was the most significant attempt in this country’s history to realize the promise of political equality.

The Voting Rights Act has more — much more — democratic legitimacy than this Supreme Court has ever enjoyed. After all, most of this court’s conservative majority was appointed by presidents who entered office as winners of the Electoral College but not the popular vote.

It is that relative difference in democratic legitimacy that makes this court’s voting rights jurisprudence so offensive.

Those voting rights rulings, from Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 to Callais in 2026, come from a court that has placed itself above the people at large. It is a court that will, according to its whims, ignore the clear commands, directions and intent of Congress. It is a court that treats voters and legislators as errant children to be corralled and disciplined by wise jurists. It is a court that doesn’t answer hard constitutional questions as they arise as much as it imposes constitutional meaning based on its narrow interests and ideological preoccupations.

It is a court that is trying to shape the political system to its liking, despite the claims of the chief justice, with no limits other than its partisan preferences. It is a court, in other words, that is wielding a cramped and parochial vision of the Constitution against American democracy, rather than treating the Constitution as a tool for realizing our democratic aspirations.

There have been many frustrating decisions from this Supreme Court. Louisiana v. Callais may not even be its worst decision — that prize might still go to Trump v. United States, where the chief justice conjured, out of thin air, an anti-constitutional doctrine of criminal immunity for the president.

Callais, however, might be the most emblematic of this court’s decisions: a flashing warning that our democracy is being crushed underneath the imperial authority of an arrogant and reactionary juristocracy. We can either discipline that court — and put it in its place — or accept our fate as its subjects.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Ethics, Injustice, Racism

Dan Froomkin: The Court’s Voting Rights Decision Was Intended to Disenfranchise Black Voters

By dianeravitch
May 20, 2026 //
2

Dan Froomkin writes “Press Watch,” a blog that covers the media. In this post, he criticizes the mainstream media for treating the U.S. Supreme Court’s Callais decision as a partisan issue. It is that, but it is at bottom a decision that destroys Black political power. It allows states to divvy up districts in ways that eliminates Black representation. And former Confederate states wasted no time in breaking up districts that elect Blacks to Congress.

He writes:

States across the South are redrawing election maps to eliminate majority-Black congressional districts.

Much of the major-media coverage is casting this in purely political terms – as just another part of the partisan battle for the House in November.

So for example, a May 9 Associated Press article headlined “What to know about the latest wave of changes to congressional districts,” started off this way:

The remaking of the U.S. political map accelerated this week in courts and legislatures, all of it in this round expected to boost Republicans in their attempt to keep control of Congress in November’s elections.

A May 13 New York Times article started off like this:

Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia on Wednesday called lawmakers back to the capital next month to redraw the state’s legislative districts for the 2028 election cycle, and to work on changes to the state’s voting system.

The call for a special session, which will begin on June 17, comes as Southern lawmakers have been rushing to reconfigure congressional maps to be more favorable to Republicans for this year’s midterms in response to the recent Supreme Court decision that weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But in the South, the significance of redistricting goes far beyond any partisan issue.

So let me rewrite that for you:

In a stunning display of racism, white Republican leaders throughout the South are stripping Black people of their franchise in order to retain political power.

The catalyst was a 6-3 Supreme Court decision on April 29 that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, landmark legislation that gave Black people the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Six right-wing justices insisted that intentional voting discrimination is a thing of the past. Southern legislators immediately responded by redrawing election boundaries to dilute the Black vote, in many cases making it virtually impossible for Black people to be elected to Congress.

What has happened in a matter of days amounts to a wrenching reversal of 60 years of racial progress — a revival of the Jim Crow era when Black people had no political power, no matter their number.

On a personal level, Black voters in the South are struggling with the repercussions of having one of their essential rights being brutally ripped away from them.

In states like Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, where they make up more than 30 percent of the population, Black Americans will have little to no say in who is elected to Congress. And as the effects of the court decision trickle down to the local level, they may get shut out of some of those elections as well.

Meanwhile, the leaders of the white nationalist movement known as MAGA are celebrating. In some cases, their racism is expressed openly. “For too long, Tennessee politics has been dominated by cosmopolitan communists and race hustlers imposing their corrupt will on a deeply rural and conservative state,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee posted on social media.

For the authoritarian leaders of MAGA, the dilution and nullification of Black votes is a crucial step in their quest to remain in power — even as most voters have turned against them.

MAGA’s future depends on suppressing the votes of groups that don’t support its white-male dominated Christian nationalist ideology. Reducing minority representation, to them, is essential to destroying majority rule. Destroying Majority rule is how they win.

Gerrymandering that leads to Southern states being almost entirely represented by white, right-wing elected officials dramatically improves MAGA’s political calculus. In the short run, it improves the odds of retaining Congress in November. MAGA’ strategy to keep the White House in 2028 includes yet more Black disenfranchisement, through voter intimidation, deception and disruption.

So far, MAGA’s plan is working, raising the prospect that Trump and his successors may remain in power for the foreseeable future.

But another way to characterize the current drive to disenfranchise Black voters is that it is the desperate – and maybe final — act of a white nationalist party that is being rejected by increasing number of voters.

For American journalists, this ought to be epic, tectonic stuff, worth aggressive and ongoing coverage.

And keep in mind that in the mid- to late-20th century, the struggle for civil rights was the dominant story in American politics, the subject of vast amount of journalism, some of it heroic. Ultimately it was journalism that brought the civil rights marchers into the American public’s breakfast nooks and living rooms, forcing the country to reckon with a brutal and sordid history of racism, and, eventually, try to move beyond it.

But today, as in the early days of the civil rights movement, too much of the media is averting its eyes from the experience of Black people. Too much coverage treats this extraordinary and consequential display of racism and societal regression as if it were just an ordinary political battle.

Some Reporters Get It

Some mainstream journalists have recognized the racial element of redistricting, and their work provides models of better, more appropriate coverage.

As evidence that you can address both the racial and political nature of the Republican moves in a news article, consider Emily Cochrane’s reporting in the Times about a new Tennessee map “that slices up Memphis to scatter Black voters into neighboring districts, a move intended to eliminate the state’s last Democratic House seat.” After several paragraphs of partisan framing, she wrote:

Democrats, noting that about two-thirds of Memphis voters are Black, said it was a blatant attack on hard-won gains for fair representation in a state shaped by slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement.

She described the scene in the state capitol in Nashville during the special session to pass the new map:

Black lawmakers delivered emotional speeches about family members, friends and colleagues who endured segregation or struggled with barriers to voting in the 1960s. State Senator Charlane Oliver of Nashville, a Democrat, stood on her desk right before the vote, holding a banner reading “No Jim Crow 2.”

And she quoted an attendee:

“My race is who I am and it informs my politics,” said Danyelle Norment, 30, who woke up early to drive in from Memphis. “It’s not something that’s separate or can be left behind.”

She added, “it’s really, really important to have folks who can understand our lived experience.”

In the Washington Post, Justin Jouvenal profiled Press Robinson, an 88-year-old civil rights pioneer. “That law passed in 1965 was the bedrock of improvement of life in America for people of color,” Robinson told Jouvenal.

Now, Robinson fears a wipeout of Black political power, much like the one that occurred after Reconstruction.

“History is now repeating itself,” he said.

On PBS Newshour, Liz Landers covered the story as part of the network’s “Race Matters” series, bringing us the voice of Leona Tate, a civil rights activist:

So now we move backwards with the Supreme Court decision that will go down as one of the most racist rulings in our nation’s history.

Tate was 6 years old when she became one of the first students to desegregate a New Orleans school, Landers noted. Then Tate continued:

I had no idea what racism was at that time, but I knew by third grade that it was the color of my skin that made a difference. I just can’t believe that it’s still happening 66 years later. It’s cheating, to me. That’s how I feel. It’s really cheating. And it’s really illegal.

It does bring back that feeling from a long time ago, and it’s not a good feeling.

Read the Black Press

As in the 1950s and 60s, the Black press is revealing what the white press is slow to acknowledge.

Brandon Tensley, writing for Capital B, explained “How One Supreme Court Ruling Is Rewriting 60 Years of Voting Protections.” “Most Black Americans reside in the South,” he wrote. Lawmakers in former slaveholding states dismantling majority-Black districts “could change the balance of power and the complexion of leadership in this country.”

Gerren Keith Gaynor, writing for TheGrio, headlined the fact that “Black legislators lead the resistance as Republicans rush to redraw maps after gutting of Voting Rights Act.” “It’s disturbing and disgusting to see how this administration and the white leadership here are trying to codify white supremacy and dilute Black political voting power because that’s what’s happening,” Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson told Gaynor. “I think none of us should make any mistake about what is going on. The attempt to remove Black representation and our ability to elect representatives of our choice is one of the most significant attacks on Black voter participation and Black voter representation since the end of Reconstruction.”

TheRoot published a viral video of Louisiana resident Marshan Camese delivering a powerful speech at a state Senate hearing over redistricting. “I believe the country as a whole is rebuking your party. Y’all are in a death spiral,” he said. “That’s why y’all have to redistrict. That’s why y’all have to cheat.” MAGA, he said, “is the last breath of the Confederacy.”

Civil rights leaders are headed to Alabama tomorrow for a rally they’re calling “All Roads Lead to the South.” As I wrote in my Heads Up News newsletter this week, this could be the birth of a movement that combines the battle for voting rights with the battle for democracy.

“Black folks from across the country are gonna be busing in, flying in, to show up and to really begin organizing to turn out in the November election,” Wisdom Cole, the Senior National Director of Advocacy for the NAACP, told TheRoot. “This is such an important moment to activate all of us.”

Note: the rally in Alabama was held last Saturday.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Civil Rights, Democracy, Elections, Freedom, Inequity, Injustice, Media, Racism

Trump Deal with Justice Department Prevents Auditing His Taxes

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2026 //
2

Trump made a real sweetheart deal with the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department. In return for him dropping his lawsuit demanding $10 billion, which may well have been dismissed by the federal judge hearing it, Trump won an incredible exemption for himself and his family.

Remember, when he first ran for president in 2015, he promised to release his tax returns after the IRS finished auditing them. Apparently, eleven years later, the Trump returns are still under audit. When his returns were leaked by an independent contractor who got a 5-year jail sentence, we learned that Trump didn’t pay any taxes some years, and in one year, paid only $750.

But part of the $1.776 billion deal relieves him of all worries about his tax returns.

Politico reported:

The Justice Department on Tuesday expanded the just-announced settlement of President Donald Trump’s lawsuit over the leaking of his tax returns to include a pledge that the IRS will no longer pursue any claims it may have against Trump, his family members and his companies over unpaid taxes.

The nine-page settlement agreement DOJ released Monday, setting up a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate victims of alleged weaponization of law enforcement, did not mention any resolution of disputes over Trump’s tax returns, which he has repeatedly claimed were under protracted audits by the IRS.

However, a one-page document posted on the DOJ website early Tuesday includes a sweeping release under which the IRS is “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing “examinations” of Trump, “related or affiliated individuals,” and related trusts and businesses.

The waiver specifically encompasses “tax returns filed before the effective date” of the settlement, which was Monday.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed the addendum, dated Tuesday. It does not bear the signature of any representative of the IRS or any current Trump lawyers. Metadata attached to the document indicates it was prepared or scanned at 7:50 a.m. Tuesday.

Blanche did not sign the original settlement agreement, which was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, IRS CEO Frank Bisignano and Trump attorney Daniel Epstein.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on why the waiver wasn’t included in the agreement released Monday and why it isn’t signed by the same people.

John Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said the expanded settlement set a “terrible precedent” that could effectively generate a windfall for Trump.“It makes you wonder what the President has to hide in those tax returns. He’s apparently been actively trading in the stock market and, since he knows a lot more about situations than the average investor, he’s probably generated significant taxable earnings,” he said in an emailed statement. “Not auditing his returns is the same as giving him an easy way to, in effect, receive money from the government.”

Danny Werfel, the former IRS commissioner from 2023 to 2025, said he was “unaware of a single precedent where the IRS has agreed in advance to permanently forgo examination of previously filed tax returns for a specific person or business.”

Press reports in advance of the settlement indicated that a potential deal might include an agreement by the government to drop all audits of Trump-related returns and perhaps even to refrain from future audits.

What a deal! No more audits!

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Ethics, Extremism, Trump

The Sordid Details of Trump’s $1.776 Billion Slush Fund

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2026 //
7

Trump just pulled of his biggest heist of taxpayer money by settling a bogus lawsuit. He had sued the Treasury Department/IRS for the unauthorized release of his tax return, then agreed to settle if the Department of Justice created a fund to compensate anyone who had been injured by the “weaponization” of the law under President Biden.

Trump was projecting. Biden did not “weaponize” the Department of Justice. Trump did, directing his Attorney General to prosecute his political enemies, like Leticia James, James Comey, and John Brennan.

If anything, Merrick Garland was too timid in prosecuting the insurrectionists who tried to overturn the 2020 election and far too slow to appoint Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, whose investigation ran out of time.

Andrew Egger of The Bulwark describes the details of Trump’s political slush fund.

Basically, he has full control of the money. And he dies not have to disclose the recipients.

Egger wrote:

When I wrote Friday about the news that Donald Trump was about to drop his $10 billion IRS lawsuit in exchange for the creation of a $1.776 billion taxpayer-cash slush fund for his allies who claim the Biden administration “weaponized” the law against them, I noted that nothing was yet set in stone. At that moment, it still seemed possible that this obscene settlement—Trump’s biggest, most lawless, most brazen theft of taxpayer cash yet—might yet give them cold feet.

But no: Yesterday, they made the thing official. In fact, it’s somehow even worse than advertised.

It’s impossible to overstate this basic fact: Everything about the settlement fund, from the circumstances of its creation to the claims it makes about its own enforcement, is deliberately structured to short-circuit all outside accountability, government oversight, or judicial review. As I wrote Friday, there was a reason Trump’s guys (who happened to be both the plaintiffs and the defendants in the case) were hustling to reach the settlement quickly: The judge in the IRS case had been signaling her suspicion that Trump and his government were not actually on opposite sides of the claim, suggesting she was considering throwing out the case altogether. If they wanted to carry out the heist, time was of the essence.

The Justice Department’s enforcement order, released yesterday, and the settlement terms released last night carry on in this dubious fashion. According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the United States loses custody and control of the $1.776 billion the minute it hits the settlement account created for the purpose: “Once the funds are deposited into the Designated Account,” he wrote in the order, “the United States has no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

Meanwhile, the terms of the settlement fund make clear that the money’s disbursement—which, again, Trump’s United States government is trying to wash its hands of any liability for—will be a complete black box. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund shall have the power to determine its own procedures for submitting, receiving, processing, and granting or denying claims,” the settlement reads. “The Anti-Weaponization Fund may make those procedures public in whole or in part, at its discretion.”

Not only can the fund’s members keep secret how they’re making disbursement decisions, they can also keep a lid on who’s getting paid. The requirements for this are astonishingly open-ended: “To be eligible for relief,” the settlement states, a claimant must merely “assert at least one legal claim stating that the claimant was a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization.” Meanwhile, the only person the fund’s administrations will be required to brief on who got how much money is the attorney general—in a “confidential written report,” and even then only quarterly.

The cherry on top of this shit settlement sundae is this claim: “Because the claims process is voluntary, there shall be no appeal, arbitration, or judicial review of claims, offers, or other determinations made by the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which is stated to be “enforceable and challengeable solely by Plaintiffs, Defendants, and the United States”—in other words, by Trump, Trump, and Trump.

The first opportunity to head off this disaster seems already to have passed. Nearly a hundred Democratic lawmakers signed an amicus brief filed in court Monday urging the judge not to dismiss the case as the parties requested, but to insist on weighing in on the terms of the settlement. But Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in a brief order yesterday that she lacked the power to do this—the settlement agreement was never docketed in the case, she said, so she had no authority to adjudicate it.

Once again, then, Trump’s aptitude for unprecedented shamelessness seems to have exposed yet another piece of our government that ultimately runs on the honor system: If a corrupt president wants to dip into the Treasury for literally any purpose whatsoever, all he has to do is sue the government, then settle with himself outside of court to create a payout fund for whatever purpose he might desire.

“It is Congress who appropriates money and it is the executive who spends it,” Matt Platkin, the former attorney general of New Jersey who is representing the Democratic lawmakers in the suit, told The Bulwark yesterday. “Put aside all of the potential corruption with this case—if the president can just sue himself and then settle with himself . . . and then spend huge amounts of money outside of that appropriations process, why would any president ever go to Congress for money ever again?”

It’s a great point—and one that reminds us that, ultimately, the responsibility for reining in this rampaging president falls not with the courts, but with Congress. It is not just the courts but Congress as well that Trump is cutting out of the loop with his obscene and indefensible settlement. Even here, Trump requires at least the legislature’s tacit permission to spend this money: They could pass a bill today to block a penny of that money from going out the door. Because of the funhouse-mirror world we live in and the villainous, power-hungry president we have, that bill would need to have the supermajority support required to overcome a presidential veto, but they do still have the power, if only they were to choose to exercise it.

But that funhouse-mirror reality is enough to prove on its own that just blocking the money wouldn’t go far enough. Trump is not merely asserting the power to jailbreak $1.8 billion from the Treasury to parcel out to his fans and allies. He is trying to create an upside-down new status quo where his single say-so is enough to overturn the will of two thirds of Congress minus one on all spending matters that really, really matter to him. It’s utterly un-American. It’s emperor stuff. If they had a shred of dignity left, they’d impeach the son of a bitch today.

Categories Accountability, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fraud, Trump

Peter Greene: A New Definition of “School Choice” in Ohio

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2026 //
5

Peter Greene describes the hypocrisy at the center of school choice. Its partisans talk about giving parents the power to choose the school they want. The truth is that the school they want doesn’t have to admit them. Schools choose the students they want. “School choice” literally means schools choose. That may explain why every state that offers universal vouchers is paying the tuition of kids who were already enrolled in private schools.

Greene writes:

Around 200 school districts in Ohio sued the state over its voucher program, a program that funnels a billion dollars (give or take a few million) to private schools (most of them religious). Last summer, the Franklin County Judge Jaiza Page, ruled that EdChoice is mostly unconstituttional. That, of course, triggered an appeal (and some special legislator crankiness) and that appeal seems to have triggered a whole new definition of school choice.

The Institute for Justice, one more education privatization law shop, has been working on the state’s case, and after the Franklin County decision they were pointing at Simmons-Harris v. Goff, an old case that supported a different version of choice. They also mentioned the argument that the parental right to direct a child’s education requires a school choice system. And the state has also been claiming that having two separately operated but equally swell school systems is totally okay. Because “separate but equal” has always been a winning argument in education.

The Ohio 10th District Appellate Court panel of judges heard arguments from the parties (the school district count is now up to 330) and seemed to notice a problem with that whole “parental rights” argument. 

Parents don’t actually get to choose.

Judge David Leland posited hypothetical gay parents of a student living in a rural area with just one private school. The school could reject that student, and then parental choice available would be… what?

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“All the parents do is apply to private schools,” Leland said. “The schools are the ones who make the choice. They’re the ones who decide. Unlike a public school … the public schools have to take everybody. That’s the requirement in public education so that everybody in society would have an equal opportunity to get a good education and grow to the extent of their ability.”

That’s when the state floated its new definition of school choice:

Stephen Carney, an appellate lawyer with the Ohio Attorney General’s office, argued that parents nonetheless have a choice in applying. That’s why it’s considered school choice, he said.

Got it? Parents have a choice of where to apply, and that’s school choice. 

First, that’s silly. I have a choice to apply for a mortgage for a multi-million dollar house. That’s not the same as being able to choose that house. 

Second, if that’s what school choice means, then everyone in the state already had school choice before any voucher program was ever started! Every parent in the state always had the ability to apply for their child’s admission to any private school. 

This is not what anyone ever thought school choice promised, though it is an accurate definition of what it delivers. 

It’s one more reminder that the voucher crowd is not actually interested in school choice, because they consistently avoid addressing the actual obstacles to parents who want to choose a private school– tuition cost and discriminatory policies. EdChoice is not about providing actual school choice; it’s just about finding ways to funnel public tax dollars to private mostly-religious schools. 

If the 10th District panel upholds the ruling against, that will simply grease the wheels carrying the case up to the state (mostly-GOP) supreme court. Can’t wait to see what arguments the state uses there, but I’m betting they’ll keep the wheels on those goalposts.

Categories Accountability, Bigotry, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers
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